Deep Dive: It’s Sabrina Ionescu’s Time
The former No. 1 overall pick has been the league's best guard in 2024.
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A highly regarded college guard who broke records but never managed to win an NCAA championship is taken first overall in the WNBA Draft. Sound familiar? No, this isn’t another Caitlin Clark article. Instead, it’s about a player whose collegiate career shared a number of similarities with Clark and who entered the league with similar expectations to help to turn around a struggling franchise: Sabrina Ionescu.
If you weren’t watching the WNBA back in 2020, you might not remember how much hype there was around Ionescu. If the 2020 NCAA Tournament hadn’t been canceled because of the pandemic, Ionescu may have had a shot to cement herself among the all-time greats in college basketball history. Even without that, she finished her career as the first player in NCAA history with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 1,000 assists and is the all-time leader in triple-doubles with 26. No NCAA Division I program besides Oregon and Iowa has more than 11 triple-doubles.
But Ionescu’s first WNBA season was cut short after just three games with an ankle injury, stalling a lot of the momentum. In her first full season, Ionescu was fine, averaging 11.7 points, 5.7 rebounds and 6.1 assists per game, but she really broke out in 2022. For the past three seasons, Ionescu has arguably been a top-10 player.
However, the narrative didn’t really catch up to that fact until this year. In 2022, Ionescu was 14th in player efficiency rating and ninth in win shares, but the Liberty were just 16-20 and the general story on Ionescu was that her defensive liabilities mattered more than what she brought offensively. Still, she won Eastern Conference Player of the Week four times that season. Ionescu felt like she was on the precipice of becoming a perennial MVP contender.
Then in 2023, she had another strong year, ranking 14th in PER again and 10th in win shares. However, the Liberty added Breanna Stewart before the season, which became the focal point when people talked about the Liberty. Ionescu was recognized for her 44.8% shooting mark from deep, a season in which she broke the record for single-season 3PM and came just shy of the record for 3PM/game, but it still didn’t feel like she was getting the attention she deserved, especially coming off the heels of a 2022 season where she ended the year with back-to-back Player of the Week awards. She was second-team All-WNBA, but she actually fell three spots in the MVP voting from eighth to 11th.
This season though, it feels like the story on Ionescu is finally catching up to the production. She was the Eastern Conference Player of the Month in June and has already been named Eastern Conference Player of the Week twice. While she isn’t necessarily expected to challenge for the MVP award this year because A’ja Wilson exists and Ionescu is still playing second fiddle on her own team to Stewart, you can make a strong argument that Ionescu is the best guard in the league right now, so let’s make that argument.
The argument for Ionescu as the league’s best guard in 2024
If the entire league was healthy, Chelsea Gray would get my vote for the WNBA’s best guard, but Gray missed enough of this season that it opens up the conversation in the short term. Ionescu ranks 10th in points per game and is behind only Arike Ogunbowale, Jewell Loyd and Jackie Young among guards. She’s also fifth overall in assists per game.
While her 3-point field goal percentage has dropped, Ionescu has improved her finishing inside the arc. Last season, Ionescu shot 38.3% from 2-point range. This year, she’s up to 49.7% and is fixing one of her biggest issues on offense. She’s shooting better from 0-5 feet than she ever has in a full season, hitting 59.3% of those shots, good for the 51st percentile. That’s obviously smack in the middle of the road, but even just becoming an average finisher near the hoop makes her so much harder to defend. An even bigger addition to her game inside the arc comes in the midrange, as Ionescu is shooting 42.9% from there, a career-best mark.
If you believe Ionescu’s 3-point dip is a fluke and that her 2-point improvement is real, then you get a player who is one of the most dangerous offensive threats in the league because of her ability to score at all three levels.
She’s also a skilled playmaker. For what seemed like years, it felt like the conversation about the league’s best passer was between Courtney Vandersloot and Chelsea Gray and that no one else was really in that conversation, but things have changed. Alyssa Thomas, as well as Clark and Ionescu, have expanded the discussion. We’re at a great time right now in the league as far as passing is concerned. Anyway, Ionescu ranks seventh in the league in assist rate and 15th in assist-to-turnover ratio. She isn’t the league’s best passer, but she's one of the better ones, and that combined with her scoring ability makes her such a weapon on that end of the floor for New York.
As far as defense goes, Ionescu’s fine. She has the second-lowest foul percentage, so she’s not sending opposing players to the line. She adds a steal per game to the ledger as well. She’s not going to make many highlight reels for her individual defense, but she’s not the sieve that people sometimes view her as. She’s a solid team defender. While that’s not necessarily a great point in the argument for her, I think she’s consistent enough at that end for it to at least not be a negative. New York’s defensive rating is only marginally worse with Ionescu on the floor (97.56) vs. with her off the floor (96.73).
Ionescu’s improvement from inside the arc, proven sharpshooting from deep, and exceptional facilitating make her stand out among WNBA guards. She’s developed into one of the league’s best players and is rightfully getting recognized as such.
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Loved this article. Very accurate and well written. Thank you Justin.