The Olympics are sadly in the rear-view mirror but that means that the W is back this evening! In today’s post, I’m have the week-lookahead for interesting matchups at the very end. But first, I’ll refresh everyone’s memory on the state of the league and dive into my prediction for the remainder of the season.
The State of the W
Current Standings
Before the games start tonight, the Liberty are alone at #1, with the Sun, Lynx, Storm, and Aces all in the mix for slots two through five. Pulling up the rear is Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Washington.
Heading into the second (ish) half of the season, here are the big questions I have:
What are the bottom-feeders’ chances for this year’s draft prize, Paige Bueckers of UConn?
What’s the likely seeding for the playoffs?
What are each team’s chances to make the playoffs?
The Model
To explore these questions, I augmented my Offense vs Defense Elo Model (most recently explored in this post) to incorporate Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) for the remainder of the season. You can read more about MCS here, but the gist of it is that each remaining game is randomly simulated 1,000 times to determine the universe of possible outcomes. From this universe, we can calculate statistics about what is likely to happen. These simulations happen within the Elo framework (i.e., each game’s results move a team’s rating up or down, which influences the model’s prediction for the next game, etc.) using each team’s Elo ratings are a prior. The results from the 1,000 simulations are then aggregated to infer the likelihood of various scenarios.
Below is a table showing the outcomes of my simulation for the 2024 season, where you can see likely playoff seeding and playoff chances in the Average Rank and Chance of Making Playoffs columns, respectively. With only about 1/3 of the season remaining, my model is showing that each team’s fate for making the playoffs is largely sealed. Of course this assumes that no teams are tanking, which may not be the case for Phoenix who serious incentives to miss the playoffs as you’ll see in a minute.
The Race for Paige
To determine who’s in the best position to nab the top draft pick after the conclusion of the 2024 season, I first had to figure out how the W’s draft works. It turns out that their draft lottery is quite a bit different from the NBA’s! Below is a summary of these differences:
Non-playoff teams are ranked from worst to best record over the past two seasons (not just last season) in terms of winning percentage.
The worst 4 teams from this ranking scheme are in put into the lottery.
Lottery odds are as follows[2]:
#1 worst: 442/1000
#2 worst: 276/1000
#3 worst: 178/1000
#4 worst: 104/1000
The #1 and #2 picks are chosen by lottery but the #3 & #4 picks are each assigned from the remaining two teams in reverse order of winning percentage (i.e., they are not randomly chosen).
Given that context, we need last year’s standings in order to figure out who has the best shot at drafting Paige Bueckers[2]:
Also, here are all the first-round picks that are affected by previous trades:
Washington has the Atlanta’s 1st round pick
Phoenix has a pick swap for New York’s pick
Chicago has a pick swap for Dallas’ pick
Combining this logic and the outcomes from my simulation, below shows the likelihood of ending up with the worst record for each team. You can see that the Sparks are the overwhelming favorite to have the worst record over the past two seasons, when considering only non-playoff teams.
Taking it one step further by giving Atlanta’s pick to Washington and incorporating the lottery odds from above, here is each team’s chances to nab the #1 overall draft pick.
If we “turn off” the eligibly requirement for only non-playoff teams, we can viscerally see Phoenix’s incentives to tank. If Phoenix doesn’t make the playoffs, they have a 47% chance of having the worst two-season record and consequently a 1 in 3 chance to get the top pick in the 2025 draft! With Diana Taurasi in her 20th (!!!) season in the W, being able to seamlessly replace her with Paige Bueckers would be a tremendous incentive to throw away the rest of the season.
Week Look-Ahead
Below are the matchups in the coming week that pique my interest. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish all my model upgrades during the break so I won’t have any predictions.
Mercury @ Sky, 7p Thursday 8/15 on Prime
Angel Reese is back in action for this much-watch matchup against the Mercury.
Mercury @ Fever, 6:30p Friday 8/16
The Fever and Mercury have been a great watch throughout the season so I’ll be looking for them to do it once again.
Liberty @ Aces, 3p Saturday 8/17 on CBS
Team USA allies become foes once again in this matchup of two of the league’s best teams.
Well that’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you all next week.