Voters have a tough call with Coach of the Year award
Cheryl Reeve has exceeded expectations while Sandy Brondello's team has been one of the best of the last decade
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The toughest award to decide in sports has to be Coach of the Year. With every other accolade, there are clear cut statistical ways to make the argument for one person or another.
Not that it’s always going to be an easy selection like A’ja Wilson for MVP this year, and not that everyone is always going to get it right (shoutout to the fourth-place Wilson voter last year!), but you can make easy sense of the cases for each candidate. Last year, Wilson and Breanna Stewart finished with the same win share total so anybody with a vote had to figure out a tie breaker.
With coaches, the numbers can’t be everything. We have to factor the circumstances in which each coach managed their accomplishments and try to weigh what they got out of their talent.
The last two Coach of the Year awards have gone to sideline bosses who inherited good teams and carried on their tradition of winning. Becky Hammon took over for Bill Laimbeer in 2022 and had a slightly lower win percentage, yet she was anointed the top coach. In Hammon’s second year, her team had an incredible .850 win percentage, yet Connecticut’s Stephanie White took home the top-coach trophy. She also had a lower win percentage than the previous year.
That’s not to say that 2022 Hammon or 2023 White weren’t deserving because their teams were fantastic. It just raises the question: How did voters come to the conclusion that they were the top coaches when their teams didn’t win more? Was there more momentum because they were new? Did they overcome more adversity? Did they change something schematically that made them an overall stronger team than the previous year despite the record? It’s really hard to pin down.
I don't think there's any formula that we can plug in to decide, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to use our objective measures to figure out the answer to this year’s Coach of the Year conundrum.
One place to begin our COTY search is with performance versus preseason expectations.
The biggest difference between the betting market’s over-under win total before the season and the actual results is with the Minnesota Lynx – by far. Their 2024 preseason win total line was 16.5 wins, which they blew past a long time ago en route to the W’s current second best record at 28-9. Cheryl Reeve has already won the award three times, so I’m not sure what the gambling community was thinking in expecting the Lynx to be below .500 but nonetheless they weren’t the only ones. ESPN’s initial power rankings had them ninth going into the season. Sports Illustrated had them sixth. USA Today expected them to finish seventh.
Incredibly, there isn’t another team that is more than 2.5 games up on its preseason line. The Sun are the next best behind the Lynx with 27 wins when 24.5 was their over-under back in May. The Liberty just cleared their high 30.5 mark. The Mystics jumped over their low 12.5 bar with their recent strong play, Seattle needs one more win, Indiana and Phoenix need two wins, and the Aces are settled on the under.
Does that mean Reeve is the clear Coach of the Year winner? Well, it’s hard to argue with that. But the Liberty’s expectations were so high already heading into the season that they would have needed to nearly run the table to exceed them. So how do we weigh the coach with the best record versus the coach that beat expectations by the most?
What other qualifications should we use?
We can’t forget about the best team in the WNBA. Sandy Brondello’s Liberty are three games better than their competition heading into Sunday’s game. Their point differential at 10.0 is 2.9 net points better than the next best team (Minnesota). Sometimes we discredit coaching because the team is stacked with talent, but an .838 win percentage is the second highest since 2014.
The Liberty and Lynx have both thrived in the areas that we generally associate with coaching. They are the top two defensive teams in terms of opponent effective field-goal percentage and they make up two of the top three teams in terms of percentage of shots that are assisted.
We can all agree that good coaching means getting the most out of players’ talent and we can say that for both team leaders in this instance. Napheesa Collier, Bridget Carleton, Kayla McBride, Alanna Smith all have their highest win share totals of their career and Courtney Williams has posted her highest win share mark since 2019. For New York, the stars have played up to their potential and role players like Leonie Fiebich, Betnijah Laney and Kayla Thornton have each been worth more than 2.0 win shares (putting them in the top 50 players in the W).
White’s Sun have also been driven by their long-proven stars like Alyssa Thomas, DeWanna Bonner and Brionna Jones but have seen some impressive progress from others like DiJonai Carrington and Ty Harris, who have both more than doubled their win shares from last year. Connecticut is also just one game behind the Lynx and still could finish second, so we can’t discount White’s candidacy. Though a repeat would be shocking since it hasn’t happened since 1999.
So far we have only looked at the best teams in the WNBA. What about the coaching jobs from the middling or fringe playoff teams?
The Fever turned things around in the second half of the year under Christie Sides, but they haven’t exceeded the preseason win total (21.5) and we can’t ignore how long it took for her club to come together or the lack of Indiana’s wins against top competition. To her credit though, there have been some impressive gains by players like the improvement of Caitlin Clark throughout the year and Lexie Hull’s big jump in 3-point shooting. Sides has them ready to be a potentially difficult matchup in the playoffs but COTY consideration seems like a stretch.
Eric Thibault deserves a ton of credit for keeping his team focused despite a brutal start to the season. Once Brittney Sykes returned from injury, the Mystics looked like they could have been a mid-pack squad if she was healthy for the entire year. Washington moves the ball well and has every player on the roster contributing lately as they battle for the final playoff spot. Similar to Sides, it’s a promising sign for the future, but there hasn’t been quite enough in the win category to get COTY nod.
Seattle and Phoenix are within a game of their preseason win totals and each team has had its moments. The Storm haven’t solved their offensive efficiency issues and the Mercury have been blown out far too many times to crown either club’s coaches.
So it seems inevitable that the decision will come down to the leader of the WNBA’s best team or the signal caller from WNBA’s most unexpected elite team. Adding up the parts that coaches seem to be able to control would give Reeve the edge, but the actual vote will depend a lot on the philosophy of the voters.
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also buy Her Hoop Stats gear, such as laptop stickers, mugs, and shirts!
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As a Liberty fan, gotta be Reeves. You can see the Lynx are a strong team that builds off the collective. With the Liberty, most of their issues are coaching related. Overplaying her players( even in blowouts), too many isos and players standing around with little off ball movement. The fact that she forces the Sabrina- Sloot backcourt when the playoffs showed its limitations and has better options with Sabrina at point, BL and Fiebich at sg plus BL, KT and Fiebich at sf. Plus Sloot off the bench could help develop Dojkic, Marquesha and Sherrod.
Simple scenario- if you put White and Reeves on the Liberty, they are better. The Sun and Lynx are worse with Sandy.