New WNBA Records Are Fun, but They Need Context

With more games to play, today's WNBA stars have more chances to write their names on the all-time lists.

It’s a record-breaking time to be a WNBA player.

During the final games of the 2023 WNBA season, multiple records came crashing down. Sharpshooting New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu set a league record with her 128th 3-pointer of the 2023 season, toppling Diana Taurasi's previous mark of 121 from 2006. Seattle guard Jewell Loyd and former teammate Breanna Stewart tousled over the single-season points record, with Loyd's 939 points ultimately topping the charts. And Alyssa Thomas of the Connecticut Sun broke Courtney Vandersloot's 2019 record for single-season assists.

All told, new all-time marks were set for points, assists, field goals, 2-pointers, 3-pointers and — since I’m a stat wonk — Win Shares, too.

So what gives? Are today’s players just that much better than those from the past?

Well, maybe to some degree. (It’s tough to argue the game has ever had more talent than it does now, particularly considering how fierce the competition is for WNBA roster spots.) But there’s another big reason why records fell left and right: The league never played this many games in a season.

After nearly two decades of a 34-game slate, the WNBA bounced back from the pandemic-shortened schedules of 2020 (22 games per team) and 2021 (32 games) to lengthen the season to 36 games last year and then again to a record 40 games per team in 2023. With more games to work in, it’s easier to rack up impressive counting stats.

Of course, it would be one thing if some of these new records were broken in the same number of games (or fewer) than the original record-holders took to set them. But in the case of each stat listed above, the new mark came in a game the previous leader wouldn’t have been able to play based on the schedule of that season. So in that sense, the 40-game schedule is helping reshape the WNBA record books as much as the talent of this generation of stars.

To put everyone on an even playing surface, then, let’s look at each of the aforementioned stats with a new single-season leader, and give previous players the benefit of more games by pro-rating everyone’s stats to a per-40 team game basis. This isn’t a perfect method — we don’t know if earlier players would have produced at the same pace over the extra few games they’re getting here — but it helps contextualize where these records might sit if a 40-game schedule was the historical norm.

Along with 3-pointers made, scoring is the category where the all-time best seasons are most populated by players from 2023. Led by Loyd's record tally — and former teammate Stewart right behind her — four of the top five and five of the top 10 single-season point performances came this season. It makes sense; not only does the longer schedule help, but leaguewide points per game this season (82.7 PPG) is just a shade below 2020’s all-time record of 83.1. If we account for differences in schedule length, however, two Taurasi seasons (2006 and 2008) plus Maya Moore in 2014 were on pace for a better 40-game total than Loyd in 2023. In fact, instead of Loyd, Stewart and A'ja Wilson becoming the first 900-point players in WNBA history, Taurasi would long ago have become the league’s only member of the 1,000-point club in a single season.

When it comes to assists, Vandersloot and Thomas threw down an epic dime-dropping battle, with Thomas emerging victorious. That wouldn’t be the case, however, in a world where the WNBA always played 40 games, because the record would’ve been set too high for either player to reach in 2023. According to that hypothetical scenario, Vandersloot would likely own each of the top three assist campaigns in league history for her work in 2019, 2020 and 2021, with neither Thomas nor the 2023 edition of Vandersloot coming close to the pro-rated record. 

Taurasi getting robbed of some truly eye-popping records is a recurring theme in this exercise. Here, she goes from just barely missing out on the 300-field goals club that Stewart and Wilson founded in 2023 to hypothetically starting a new group of her own: the 350 buckets brigade. Wilson ultimately recorded 335 buckets in 2023, which is mighty impressive, but still far behind what Taurasi might have done in a 40-game season in 2006.

Stewart, for her part, called out this unfairness after she became the first player to break Taurasi’s single-season points record. 

“I have this back-and-forth feeling with the scoring record, because any time I’m in the same limelight as D, it’s amazing, just because of what she’s done in her career and what she continues to do,” Stewart said. 

“But obviously, it’s more games. More games is more points. As we have 40-game seasons, and we continue to build off that, there’s going to be a lot of records that are broken.”

This is the record that came closest to being broken without the benefit of the 40-game schedule. Chasing down Seimone Augustus’ record of 270 2-pointers from 2007 (set in 34 games), Wilson had made 267 baskets from inside the arc through her Las Vegas Aces’ 34th game of the 2023 season, barely falling short of the existing high-water mark in the same number of games. In the final four regular season games, Wilson narrowed — and then passed — Augustus’ pro-rated lead to claim both the actual and pro-rated records in this category.

It’s fitting to see Ionescu, whose performance at the All-Star 3-point contest was the stuff of legend, also grab the single-season record for shots made from downtown. But with the league as a whole playing extra games and making 7.7 threes per game (tying last year’s all-time record) at a 34.7% clip, it’s also not a surprise to see this leaderboard dominated by current performances. 

But this stat is more complicated than just adjusting for the historical schedule differences. If we do that, Taurasi again comes out at No. 1 for her 2006 season, when she shot at a pace that would have cleared Ionescu by 14 threes over a full 40 games. But it’s worth noting that the three-pointers Taurasi shot in 2006 were from the WNBA’s old three-point line, which was about a foot-and-a-half closer to the net. 

This final category is admittedly a bit more esoteric than the traditional counting stats above, but Win Shares is a good metric for adding up a player’s all-around contribution to her team’s success. (It works by using individual offensive and defensive efficiency ratings to divvy up all the wins on a team to its players.) And by that standard, you could argue that Wilson had the most statistically valuable season in the history of the WNBA, with Stewart coming up right behind her. But their performances look a little less impressive when we contextualize how few games their historical rivals produced their numbers in.

For instance, Cynthia Cooper — a player I’ve argued is the greatest in WNBA history — got to 9.4 WS in just a 28-game schedule in 1997, and became the only member of the double-digit WS club (until Wilson and Stewart this season) when she had 30 games to work with in 1998. Cooper’s teammate, Sheryl Swoopes, was also one of the WNBA’s best-ever players, and she nearly joined that 10-WS club in 2000’s 32-game slate. All of those seasons, plus other recent stellar campaigns like Nneka Ogwumike in 2016, were better on a per-team-game basis than Stewart in 2023.

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None of this should take away the special feeling a player gets when they etch their name into their sport’s all-time record books. When people look back on the 2023 WNBA season, they’ll probably forget about the leap forward in schedule length — in fact, if the league plays even more games in future seasons, maybe Wilson, Stewart and company will experience things from the other side, with someone else breaking their records in a longer schedule. But mainly, this is a reminder that yesterday’s record-breakers — from Cooper to Taurasi, and beyond — were also plenty awesome, even if they didn’t get as many chances to shine as today’s players do.

Alex Azzi contributed editing.

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Filed under: WNBA