Jewell Loyd Scoring Profile Analysis
Examining changes in Jewell Loyd's scoring profile over the past few seasons
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. Did you know that Alyssa Thomas extended her WNBA record with her 13th career triple-double Thursday and her fourth against the Lynx? No other player in WNBA history has more than 4 triple-doubles in their career.
Since entering the WNBA in 2015, Jewell Loyd has cemented herself as one of the league’s most potent perimeter scorers, capable of threading the ball through the net off drives, pull-ups, and spot-ups. However, this year has been the least efficient of her career so far. Loyd is currently recording 0.91 points per possession (PPP) and 1.01 points per scoring attempt (PPSA), both the lowest of her career.1 Before an improvement in form in her last three games, a span during which she averaged 30 points per game, these values were both much lower, 0.81 PPP and 0.91 PPSA.
This is a small difference from her career standard, but it is notable that these values have decreased this season despite Loyd’s role in the offense reverting to roughly the same size as it was during the Breanna Stewart/Sue Bird era after the Storm acquired Nneka Ogwumike and Skylar Diggins-Smith. Indeed, if we look at these overall efficiency marks year-over-year, one might expect these numbers to have dropped last season, when Loyd was the team’s sole star, and rebounded this season, but so far the opposite has occurred.
Even if the last few games serve as evidence that Loyd might be back on the right track, it is worth investigating possible causes to determine if there have been any changes between the Stewart/Bird era and the current Ogwumike/Diggins-Smith era. And it is clear that Loyd’s profile takes shape differently than it has in the past once one examines Loyd’s field-goal percentages and how Loyd is getting her points.
In the past two seasons, Loyd has been relying much more on getting to the free-throw line than she had since her rookie season which predated Stewart’s WNBA tenure. Her effective field-goal percentage (eFG%), which adjusts for the value of a 3-point shot versus a 2-point shot, is also the lowest it has ever been, taking pronounced dips each of the past two seasons. Additional data can further illuminate some of the causes of this change.
There exists statistical evidence that Loyd has been forced to shoulder a greater self-creation burden than she has in the past. One of the clearest indicators of this has been her assisted shot rate, the proportion of a player’s made field goals that have an assist attached to them. Her Hoop Stats tracks assisted shot rate on the team level while Basketball Reference records it on an individual basis for seasons since 2018.
It appears that Loyd has had to do more self-creation the past two years than she had since 2018, her first championship season. For Seattle as a team, Bird’s impact becomes clear as the team’s assisted shot rate and assist-to-turnover ratio both dropped when she missed the 2019 season with an injury and again after she retired in 2023. It is worth noting that the Storm in 2019 played Jordin Canada, a pass-first floor general, as its primary point guard, while in 2023 it employed more of a point guard-by-committee system with Loyd absorbing a great deal of ball-handling responsibilities on the wing.
A natural question to ask of Loyd is whether her increased reliance on drawing fouls, both in terms of raw numbers and proportionately to her overall scoring profile, has resulted in a change in the distribution of her field-goal attempts. We have recently introduced shot location data to our site, allowing us to analyze where on the court Loyd is getting her shots.
This data demonstrates Loyd is getting fewer of her field-goal attempts from the high-efficiency spots on the floor, at the rim and beyond the 3-point arc.
Chi-squared tests help statisticians determine whether a sample of data differs from its expected distribution. We can use a chi-squared test to determine whether the locations of Loyd’s field-goal attempts in this season’s sample, with Skylar Diggins-Smith as Seattle’s main point guard, reflect the distribution Loyd established during the four seasons in our data set when she and Sue Bird were teammates. This way, we can see if there exists a contrast in Loyd’s shot diet when playing with the two different All-Star point guards. When using frequentist statistics, statisticians use an alpha level to determine whether the difference between two data sets or values is due to chance. Generally speaking, the most common alpha level is 5%, but some experts recommend using a higher alpha level for chi-squared test, advice that will be heeded here by using a 10% alpha level.
This chi-squares test returns a p-value of 0.0002, well below the designated alpha level. Given the results of this test, we can reject the null hypothesis that Loyd is getting the same types of shots now as she did when teammates with Sue Bird. Furthermore, the distribution of her attempts is tilted away from the highest-value spots at the rim and beyond the 3-point arc.
A similar chi-squared test can be run analyzing Loyd’s 2-point attempts broken down by distance from the rim, providing more granularity to the mid-range areas and clumping shots just outside the restricted area with other layups.
The p-value for this chi-squares test is 0.0012, again well below the alpha level of 10%. It therefore returns a similar conclusion that Loyd’s distribution of 2-point attempts this season differs from the one set during her time alongside Bird, with the data itself indicating that she is not shooting as often at the rim.
Of course, some of this difference might simply be a product of drawing more fouls. The highest free throw rates of Loyd’s career have been the past two seasons, with year’s value being greater than 2023’s. Unfortunately, location data on foul-drawing for free-throw trips is difficult to obtain. To compensate for this hole in the data, we can remove the 3-point field-goal attempts from Loyd’s PPSA numbers and compare the overall impact in this change in how Loyd garners her points to estimate the tangible effect of this layup/free throw tradeoff.
This data reveals the same dip in 2019 that has been mentioned elsewhere while having the dip be more pointed in 2022, while Bird was still around. Loyd’s numbers in this category do regress back upward after Bird’s retirement and indicate that the layup/free throw tradeoff has been largely worth it for the Storm. This indicates that Loyd’s personal efficiency should be in a fine spot once her 3-point shooting reverts to form.
That being said, it is worth assessing the likelihood that a career 35.4% 3-point shooter like Loyd would make 30 or fewer 3-pointers out of 104 attempts (28.8%), as she has to start this season. Using the binomial distribution, we can estimate that there is a 9.6% chance of Loyd shooting at that accuracy or worse through 104 3-point attempts. Using a standard alpha level of 5%, we fail to reject the null hypothesis and can reasonably conclude that this cold streak remains within the realm of chance rather than being the result of degraded outside shooting ability.
Overall, Loyd’s field-goal percentages are down both inside and outside the arc. However, that two-point percentage is largely the product of her increased self-creation burden and compensated for by her increased foul-drawing, while her three-point percentage is not so low as to be evidence of reduced shooting talent. Of course, this story would have been very different if it had been told last week before Loyd scored 90 points in 3 games. It remains noteworthy that Loyd’s self-creation burden remains as high as it has even with the acquisition of another premier point guard in Diggins-Smith. Ultimately, the Storm will rely upon the synthesis of the two guards and Ogwumike in the playoffs as they work to return to championship status.
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All stats for this article are through July 1 unless noted otherwise.
Great job on this Robert. I had given her the benefit of the doubt assuming that it was the poor supporting cast last year but I did wonder a bit coming into the season if it would be hard for Loyd to go back to her previous role in the Bird/Stewie years after she led the league in scoring. Seems like that's the case
Great stuff. But as far as I can tell, you analysis does not include any age-related decline. Of course different players decline at different rates, but Loyd is 30, well past the prime age of 27. So, for example, her drop in rim attempts could be due primarily to a loss of quickness rather than the absence of Sue Bird. She's got a lot of mileage, and her game, based a lot on athleticism, may be slowly fading.