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The three-point revolution has swept all levels of basketball over the last decade-plus, but it’s not done yet. At least, not in the WNBA. The league’s trend of increased spacing has continued its growth in 2021 as players are launching threes at unprecedented rates.
Let’s dive into the data to see what that trend looks like this season.
League trends
The easiest place to start is with the leaguewide numbers. Teams across the WNBA are taking nearly 22 threes per game this season, an all-time high. While pace has generally gone up over recent years, we can’t point to that as the sole reason for the rise in threes — pace is actually slightly down so far this season (82.18 possessions per 40 minutes compared to 82.34 in 2020) and three-point rates are up as well.
Three-point rate, as defined on our website, is the percentage of shot attempts (field goal attempts plus trips to the line) that come from behind the arc. It isn’t affected by pace, so it’s a better measure of how frequently teams are taking threes as opposed to layups or jumpers. It’s risen every year since 2014. Here are the three-point rates for each season since the WNBA’s inaugural season in 1997.
Team trends
The leaguewide trends probably aren’t surprising, but things start to get interesting when we take a look at them at the team level. A third of the league — four of 12 teams — are on pace to set their franchise record for three-point rate, while six more are having one of their top four seasons in that category.
The only two teams that aren’t? The offensively futile Indiana Fever and Bill Laimbeer’s Las Vegas Aces, who still play old school three-around-two basketball and espouse the hard-nosed, pound-it-in nature of their former “Bad Boys” coach. (Laimbeer was ironically one of the first bigs to shoot threes before bigs shooting threes was cool, but you wouldn’t know it by watching his Las Vegas teams.)
The most notable cases here are New York and Washington. The current record for highest three-point rate in a season is 37.0%, held by the 2020 Liberty. The 2021 Liberty sit at 39.1%, and this year’s Mystics are not far behind at 37.1%. If the season ended today, the Mystics would finish with a higher three-point rate than any team in league history before them, yet would not have the highest this season.
Individual trends
Zooming in even further, which players have decided to take that step back this year? Several players are pulling from deep more than they ever have before, but a few stand out as having made particularly large leaps in the proportion of their shots being taken from distance. In honor of our own Adam Vachon’s weekly “three stars,” let’s crown some shooting stars: three stars who have upped their efficiency this season by taking and making more threes.
Courtney Williams
As Richard Cohen wrote in his column last week, Williams has always been entertaining to watch. Despite her tight-knit relationship with long jumpers throughout her career, even those who most ardently support analytics can’t help but enjoy her rebounding ability, athleticism, and unapologetic swag.
This season, however, even the shot selection is high-level. Williams has taken over four threes per game after previously never topping 1.8. She’s taken nearly a quarter of her shots from three, and through just 13 games she’s already hit a career-high 23 triples.
Tina Charles
Before the season, the word out of Mystics training camp was that MVP-caliber Tina Charles was back. But there was a lot of skepticism — it’d been two years since we’d seen her take the court, and even then her performance was already declining.
Cohen goes more in-depth on Charles’ resurgence in that same column, but what a large part of it boils down to is her ability to stretch the floor. She took 17 total threes in her first six seasons in the league, and while she finally began regularly shooting from range in year seven, she still never averaged three attempts per game from long range. Thus far in 2021, Charles has averaged 5.5 attempts, and it’s the biggest reason why she’s scoring over a point per scoring attempt for the first time in her career.
Candace Parker
Like Williams and Charles, Parker is playing for a different coach this year, so there may be a theme among this group. Parker isn’t actually averaging a career high in threes attempted per game — that came in 2017 when she took 3.8 — but her 3.6 is close enough that when you factor in her decrease in overall shot attempts with her new team, her three-point rate is at an all-time high. Almost a third of Parker’s shot attempts have come from distance, a figure that hadn’t surpassed 26% in any of her 13 prior seasons.
The best part? She’s making them at a higher clip as well. She’s knocking down over 40% of her threes for the first time since 2011, and despite her attempts per game not being a career high, her 1.5 makes per game would be.
Honorable mentions: Brittney Griner and DiDi Richards
The first three players are legitimate shooters who take multiple threes in any given game, but it’s worth shouting out a couple players for whom any threes at all are noteworthy. Brittney Griner has always been an excellent free throw shooter and has been capable of hitting the midrange jumper for years, so it’s felt for a while like the three ball might be something worth experimenting with. She’s done just that this year, taking a career-high five threes with over half of the season remaining.
Then there’s DiDi Richards, New York’s rookie whose only three-point attempt of her four-year college career came in her second-ever game in 2017. There’s a reason the three-point rate record is held by last year’s Liberty and could be broken by this year’s Liberty. Walt Hopkins loves threes, so much so that even Richards has taken five of them (and made one — something she never did at Baylor).
All data and stats are from Her Hoop Stats and are current as of Monday, June 28.
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. You can also buy Her Hoop Stats gear, such as laptop stickers, mugs, and shirts!
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