WNBA Competitive Balance

With the Seattle Storm on the verge of sweeping the Washington Mystics in tonight's WNBA finals, I thought I would update my periodic look at the WNBA's competitive balance.  So, using the Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance and grabbing the regular season league standings from the WNBA's website, I calculated competitive balance since 2003.  (Note:  league standings data only goes back to 2011 on the website).

For those interested in how to calculate this on your own, here is a step-by-step guide to calculate the Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance.  As you can see in the graph below, competitive balance has been relatively stable from 2017 to 2018, and for this time period on the whole, the average Noll-Scully is 1.789, which is about as competitive as Major League Baseball.

WNBA Competitive Balance in 2016

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.