The question at hand for today is how competitive is the WNBA? Since the regular season ended on Sunday night, I thought I would take a look at the leagues level of competitiveness using the Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance. Specifically, the
Noll-Scully measure captures how far a particular sport or league’s
distribution of wins deviates from the purely random outcome. For those interested in doing your own analysis, here is a step-by-step guide to calculate this on your own. So now that we have a simple measure of competitive balance, let's take a look at the WNBA and then think about some other leagues level of competitiveness using the same measure.
I grabbed the data on end of the regular season standings from the WNBA website. After calculating the Noll-Scully I found that for the 2016 season, that the league was a 1.935, which is less competitive than over the last three seasons. For more details here is a link to the analysis for a number of seasons in the WNBA.
For comparison purposes, here is the Noll-Scully for the NBA over a similar time period. Notice that the men's league is less balanced than the women's league.