Wednesday, September 12, 2018

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.