Can the Storm win the WNBA title?

As the WNBA season flies past the midway point and heads to the All-Star game, the postseason picture starts to slide into frame. The Los Angeles Sparks, Dallas Wings and Washington Mystics don’t need to look too into that picture unless it includes the 2025 draft. For the hometown Seattle Storm, the image has changed drastically from last year. The retooled roster with Skyler Diggins-Smith and Nneka Ogwumike has succeeded in bringing a better product to Seattle in 2024. The Storm sit in 4th place overall with a 14-7 record and more wins than they secured all last season with still 15 games remaining. However, is this team good enough to bring home a championship trophy? Or is just a more entertaining team with little hope for postseason success?

The easy answer (and my initital thought) is that the Storm are better but not good enough. As Percy Allen outlines in the Seattle Times, it is hard to imagine the Storm winning a playoff series against the best teams in the WNBA. In fact, the Storm are a lowly 2-5 against top five teams in the league. Seattle is racking up wins against the middle to bottom of the league (with one loss each to the Phoenix Mercury and Chicago Sky). The other factor is that the Las Vegas Aces, Connecticut Sun and the New York Liberty simply are more talented than the Storm. The Aces alone have four players on the U.S. Olympic team. While the Minnesota Lynx may not have more talent than the Storm (although it is a good debate), they pose a terrible match up for Seattle (as evidenced by the 0-3 record). Thrown into all of this that the Storm do not shoot the ball well enough and it seems like the image at the end of the year will be a sad, slow walk off the court in the 1st or 2nd round.

However, the Storm does have something that makes this team intriguing and should make fans pause before giving up hope. Earlier in the season, I questioned the Storm’s defense and whether it was real. Well, it is. Coaches often say “defense wins championships” and the Storm may have a good enough defense to do just that.

Ok side bar here. Coaches don’t really say this. People in the media use it as coach speak.

The WNBA has access to a bunch of advanced analytics, but you can really boil down basketball into a few numbers that tell the story of a team. When I coached high school ball, we would often look at the four factors as an indicator of how we played as a team in a particular game or over the course of a season. The four factors include effective field goal percentage (essentially factoring in and giving more weight to a 3 than a 2), turnover percentage (better than raw turnovers because it accounts for pace), rebound percentage (again accounting for pace and opportunities), and free throw factor (boiled down to getting to the line or keeping opponents off it). On basketball reference, you can view the league standings sorted by any of these factors on offense or defense. While the Storm are near the bottom of the league in effective field goal percentage on offense, their defense shines. Seattle is 2nd in both defensive effective field goal percentage and turnover percentage. Could this be enough to win a championship? In 2023, the top two teams in defensive effective field goal percentage were the New York Liberty and the Las Vegas Aces. Those two teams played in the WNBA Finals. Of course, they were also first and second in offensive effective field goal percentage. So is it defense or offense that wins championships?

In 2022, the WNBA finalists (Connecticut Sun and Las Vegas Aces) were middle of the pack in defensive effective field goal percentage. The story is similiar in 2021 (Chicago Sky and Phoenix Mercury) which tells us that a team can’t rely on defense alone. In 2022, those finalists were both in the top four in offensive effective field goal percentage, matching the 2023 finalists who were top two in that category. Unfortunately Seattle is 10th out of 12 teams in offensive effective field goal percentage. It is actually more terrifying if you examine the traditional stats. Six - yes six including Jewell Loyd, Sami Whitcomb and Diggins-Smith - are shooting under 30% from beyond the arc. No suprise that the Storm are last in the league in that category. They simply don’t hit enough outside shots. And that leaves the Storm in the unfortunate position of being on the outside looking in when it comes to championship contenders.