Aari McDonald Is Scoring Less, But She's More Important to Arizona's Success Than Ever
The senior guard has been the top scorer in the Pac-12 the last two seasons. This year, she's showing that she can do more while putting up fewer points.
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In 2017-18, Arizona head coach Adia Barnes led her team through a season that netted just six wins all year. The Wildcats lost to Northern Arizona that year for only the sixth time in 47 years. Barnes could only think of the potential she saw in her practices and look to the future.
There was an important player in those practices who wasn’t on the floor when game time rolled around. She was sitting out as one of three players who transferred to Arizona that year. No one knew how transcendent that player would prove to be, though.
Make no doubt about it, preseason AP All-American guard Aari McDonald has proven to be a transcendent player for Arizona in every way imaginable since she stepped on the court for the Wildcats.
She is the kind of player who had McKale Center selling out a women’s basketball game for the first time in school history. The kind of player who has written her name all over the program’s record books. The kind of player who makes an impact on both ends of the floor.
In her first two seasons, McDonald got the headlines for her scoring and defense. She led the Pac-12 in both points and steals per game both years. In her debut season as a Wildcat, she ranked third in the NCAA in scoring. Last year, she was the Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year. This season, she is third in the league in scoring and once again leads in steals.
McDonald has always played an outsized role in the Arizona offense, but that has become less pronounced over her career. In her debut season in Tucson, she had a usage rate of 37.4 percent. Her win shares were 12.7. Those numbers have decreased each year as the Wildcats have added more depth and talent to the roster.
This year, her usage rate stands at 33.6 percent and her win shares have dropped to 3.6. Both of those numbers are still in the top four percent of Division I basketball, but they aren’t as indicative of an unbalanced roster.
The big numbers got her a lot of ink, but it wasn’t necessarily the best thing over the long haul for the Wildcats or for her pro aspirations. Listed at 5-foot-6, McDonald will need to be a pure point guard in the WNBA.
There were issues if she was to succeed as a true point guard. The ones most obvious from looking at a box score were assist-to-turnover ratio and 3-point shooting. There were things that didn’t show up there, though, like the intangible skill of being a vocal leader.
“It's hard to improve because when you're in the moment you kind of do what works” Barnes said. “If you have aspirations to go play pro and stuff, you have to grow your game. So in the pros, you have to be a point guard that can tell people where to go, you have to know all five positions, you have to direct traffic, and you have to know when and where to run certain plays. If you don't do that, you're not going to be successful.”
Coming back to Arizona rather than entering the WNBA Draft last season has given McDonald the opportunity to make those improvements, and she has taken advantage of it.
From behind the arc, McDonald is having her best year since her freshman season at Washington, when she was playing alongside the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer, Kelsey Plum. It’s not an eye-popping percentage, but she is now connecting on 32 percent of those shots, an improvement of almost 4 percentage points from last season.
Barnes has argued for the past two years that her point guard was a better shooter than the numbers suggested. When teammates were able to take a larger load on the offensive end, McDonald would not be forced to take so many difficult shots, her coach said. That has proven true this season, as McDonald is having to take fewer shots at the end of the shot clock or as step-back jumpers.
In McDonald’s first two years, her teammates either wouldn’t or couldn’t take the shots the Wildcats needed to have a balanced offense. Their star would often have to get a bucket with little time left.
With other players not doing as much of the scoring, it also made it easier to sag off them and focus on the heart of the Arizona offense. Clogging the paint and playing a zone were keys in the playbook for beating the Wildcats. McDonald was able to put up big scoring numbers despite this, but it came by way of volume shooting.
In 2018-19, McDonald attempted 18.6 shots per game. She had a career-high 6.2 attempts from 3-point distance but only connected on 28.1 percent of them. That was a drop of almost five percentage points from her lone season in Seattle when she attempted 3.6 per game and hit 1.2 of those.
She would take fewer threes in 2019-20 at 5.2 attempts but make a career-low 27.8 percent.
This season, despite almost exclusively facing Pac-12 teams, McDonald is approaching her career high by taking 6.1 shots per game from outside the arc. The good news for her and the Wildcats is that she’s also approaching her career-high success rate.
As her field goal attempt numbers suggest, McDonald has been and still is the primary offensive force for the Wildcats. She has never scored fewer than 10 points in her Arizona career. That’s 82 straight games--the nation’s longest active streak of scoring in double figures.
As a point guard, there’s another very important question, though: what about setting up her teammates?
McDonald is on pace to have the best assist numbers of her career this season. She is slightly over her sophomore numbers (4.6 assists per game) with 4.8 per contest. Perhaps more importantly, she has dropped her turnovers to 3.2 per game after turning the ball over 3.8 times per contest in both of the last two seasons.
While her turnovers are still higher than anyone would want, that is partially a function of the Arizona offense. McDonald still has the ball in her hands most of the time. She still spends a great deal of time driving into the lane. She still plays very fast.
The improved numbers aren’t all that McDonald has worked on. Off the court, she has become more of a student of the game.
“I've been working behind the scenes, like countless numbers of hours shooting and stuff like that,” McDonald said. “And just watching more film. As a point guard, trying to take care of the ball and, most importantly, being vocal and just being the extension of Coach Barnes on the court.”
It’s not just about learning her own role, though.
“As a point guard, you should know exactly where everyone should be,” McDonald said. “And so as a player, I do that. And so if my teammates aren't sure, I'll direct them, I'll talk to them. For instance, during the game, if somebody messes up, I'm talking them through it as I'm dribbling the ball. I'm telling them where to go.”
Being that extension of Barnes on the court hasn’t been easy. A naturally shy person who previously seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight, she has developed more confidence using her voice both on and off the court.
But the battle is ongoing.
“My parents are like, ‘You know, you're getting older. You need to start talking. You can’t be quiet forever,’” McDonald said. “And so I'm kind of like, ‘Well, yeah, I can’t be quiet anymore.’ And I just know that my teammates look for me a lot to say something. I had to get out of my comfort zone and start talking. I know I have good things to say … I mean, it's hard. Sometimes I revert back to my old self, but I got to do it for the best of the team.”
After what was likely her final game at McKale Center on Feb. 14, McDonald touched the “A” at center court before she left for the final time. There were no crowds going wild, saying goodbye to the best player in program history. But McDonald came back to school to do great things with her team, and there’s still a lot ahead of them before the final buzzer.
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, Facebook, and Instagram.