April 13, 2024

Here comes the WNBA (mocks and broadcasts)...

We're just a couple days away from the 2024 WNBA Draft, an event that annually sneaks up and leads us in to the WNBA season like a Chelsea Gray behind-the-back transition assist.

A third of the picks in this year's draft have already been traded; while that's the ninth-largest percentage in league history, it's lower than the trend we've seen over the past four years: 2022 saw 55.6% of picks traded prior to draft day.

Let's catch up on a few things before we officially transition from college basketball to the WNBA season.

ICYMI

Some new data just dropped on AcrossTheTimeline.com:

WNBA Mock Drafts

WNBA Draft season means mock drafts abound. To help break down what consensus there is — spoiler alert: there's not much! — and understand what prospects are generally being projected where, a large selection of mock drafts have been gathered in one data set: WNBA mock drafts.

• By pick: View each mock draft in order. Highlight any cell to highlight that same player in every mock draft.

• By player: View each player in order of composite ranking across all mock drafts, with a numeric indication of their placement in each mock draft. Same idea here: highlight any cell to highlight that same pick in every mock draft.

• Composite: View the ordered list of players by composite ("average"-ish) ranking, along with their best and worst placement across the mock drafts.

  

On "average," this year's mock drafts have Isobel Borlase (12th) as the first non-invitee to be drafted and Marquesha Davis (19th) as the last invitee drafted.

A smaller set of mock drafts from 2023 is also available, with the goal of understanding what mock drafts can tell us about the eventual draft. Last year the biggest first-round misses were Abby Meyers (mocked 19th on average, drafted 11th), Jordan Horston (mocked 4th on average, drafted 9th), and Lou Lopez Sénéchal (mocked 9th on average, drafted 5th).

National Broadcasts

The WNBA dropped its 2024 national broadcast schedule, and it has been added to the WNBA National Broadcast data set.

You might notice some differences between these numbers and what has been publicized: notably, the Indiana Fever have 38 games broadcast nationally, whereas the WNBA's press release says 36. The only difference is this data set counts ESPN3, whereas the WNBA and its teams seem not to.

You can filter by both network and channel/type to see more granular data. For instance, here's the same graphic for television broadcasts only.

Click/tap any number in the grid or any total on the right to see the list of corresponding games.

Some other takeaways from this data set...

Total national broadcasts is down

Just by raw numbers, the count of national television and streaming broadcasts is at its lowest since 2020, and the percentage of games nationally broadcasted (66.3%) is at its lowest since 2019. That's down from 86.7% just last season. (The 2020 season only had 132 games, 90.9% of them nationally broadcasted.)

The biggest differences: while the number of games on CBS proper did double from last year (from 4 to 8), the total number of games on CBS and CBS Sports Network was cut in half (from 40 to 20). There are no more games on Twitter/X, and several networks saw slight decreases (ESPN: 44 to 36, NBA TV: 47 to 40, ION: 45 to 43).

That said, the number of games on national television, while down from last year, is still second-most all-time.

Broadcasters are in on the Indiana Fever

After being second-to-last in total national broadcasts in 2023, the Indiana Fever lead the field in 2024 in total broadcasts (38) and television only (32).

The Fever went from just one game on ESPN television channels in 2023 (August 13 against New York, on ESPN) to eight in 2024 (tied with New York and Las Vegas for most), including two on ABC and five on ESPN.

NBA TV bought in on the Fever again: in 2023, they carried 10 Fever games; they upped that to 13 in 2024. In both years that's the most for any team.

So long, farewell, to you...

This won't be exhaustive, but as with every college offseason, several coaches have decided to step away from coaching, some of the game's most successful and influential stewards among them.

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