What Should the Rim Height Be in the WNBA?
If it wasn’t clear already from previous blog posts, I love sports. I’ve loved sports since I was 4 years old when I would run into my parents room at 6 AM to turn on the TV and watch Comcast SportsNet, much to their chagrin.
Recently, I got engaged to the greatest woman on the planet who I, also, love very much. She’s tall, athletic, goofy, beautiful, and essentially marches to the same beat that I do in all facets of life, except one: she doesn’t watch sports!
She asks sometimes if it bothers me at all that she doesn’t watch sports, which surprisingly it doesn’t, but there are times where I burst out about something that is going on in the sports world and she won’t have an idea what any of the jibberish I said means.
A couple weeks ago, I put ESPN on in our apartment and the Women’s College World Series was on. She took to that because, in her words, the athletes being female makes them more relatable to her and she enjoys watching them a little more.
Seeing this as an opportunity to get her into sports of any kind, I suggested that maybe we become a fan of a WNBA team (since Philly doesn’t have one) and try and start following them. We landed on the Dallas Wings because she lived in Dallas for her first two years after college (long distance dating sucks!).
I quickly set my RCN TiVo box to record any WNBA game, and then when the Dallas Wings play, we put it on whenever we have time. Sadly, the Wings have gotten off to a rough start to the season with a record of 1–5. However, while we were watching our first game together, I couldn’t help but notice how different the game was from the NBA. Women are naturally shorter than men, but the WNBA players are playing at the 10-foot NBA rim level.
Elena Delle Donne, a former WNBA MVP and a 5x All-Star, has been very active in her pursuit of having the rims lowered in the WNBA. She has received some push back from other WNBA stars like Diana Taurasi, who reacted to Delle Donne’s comments by saying, “Might as well put us in skirts and back in the kitchen”.
Regardless, Delle Donne makes a few excellent points which I think certainly strengthen her case. In other sports that both men and women play, volleyball nets are lowered by about 7 inches for women, the tee boxes in golf are moved up significantly for women, and in tennis women play fewer sets than the men do at Grand Slams. So clearly there is a precedent for having sports adjusted to account for the physiological differences in men and women.
To see if I could mathematically give any support to lower the rims in the WNBA, I decided to run a small little analysis on what the rim height should be.
I scraped the WNBA Wikipedia page to obtain all the heights of the players this season (2019) and calculate the mean height. I then used a data set from Kaggle to find the mean height of NBA players from the latest season they had available (2016–2017). The mean height for WNBA players this season is 72.57 inches (just over 6 feet) and the mean height for NBA players is 79.10 inches (or just over 6 and a half feet).
Next, I wanted to take into account each player’s vertical jump. Sadly, there are no sources I could find that could give me every player’s vertical jump, so I went with a general assumption based on a study in 2004 that said female college basketball players’ average vertical jump was about 19.0 inches, while male college basketball players’ average vertical was 28.1 inches.
Finally, I needed to consider standing reach, or the height you are when you put your arms straight up in the sky. Thank to another study done by HoopsBeast, I made an assumption that everyone’s standing reach on average is 1.33x their normal height (give it a shot yourself, it’s pretty close). My formula for calculating how high an NBA player and a WNBA player can jump with a basketball is as follows:
NBA Player = (1.33 * 79.09 in.) + 28.1 in. ≈ 133.3 inches
WNBA Player = (1.33 * 72.57 in.) + 19.0 in. ≈115.5 inches
With both rims at 10 feet (120 inches), an average NBA player more than meets the vertical jump requirement to dunk a ball (which is assumed to be the rim height plus 6 inches), whereas a WNBA player is short by about 10 inches. Neither of these calculations include what a running start would mean for the jump, but most sources I’ve seen have said it adds about 3–7 inches, which still leaves women well short.
Just to put it in perspective, let’s calculate what rim height the men would be playing at if they had to deal with the same disadvantages women do:
NBA Rim Equivalent = (133.3 in.*120) / 115.5 in. ≈138.5 in.
How many players in the NBA could dunk on an 11.5-foot rim at a full-speed game situation? My guess would be probably about 6.
Now, let see what the WNBA rim height would be if mathematically they were playing the same game as the men:
WNBA Rim Equivalent = (115.5 in.*120 in.) / 133.2 in. ≈ 104 inches
At 8 feet and 8 inches, this seems like a more feasible height for women to play a similar game to the NBA and display their athleticism. Geno Auriemma, the head coach of the UConn Women’s Basketball team that has won 11 NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball National Championships, suggested a 7.2-inch reduction just to let there be fewer missed lay-ups and the potential of plays like alley-oops.
If the rim is lowered, it makes the percent chance of scoring in the paint higher, which will then force defenses to focus more on interior defense. BECAUSE OF THAT, 3-point shooters will have a little more room to breath and have more open shots. More 3-point scoring means higher scoring games, which leads to more exciting games (OK, that’s just my opinion). Does this remind you of any other professional basketball league that is in the midst of a renaissance of crazy 3-point scoring that is having its most success ever?
What gives me confidence that my hypothesis above is correct? Some opponents of lowering the rim in the WNBA point to Stephen Curry and the success he has had recently. People watch him not because he dunks, but because of his 3-point shooting and ball handling. Kate Fagan of ESPN W actually called Curry “the ultimate WNBA highlight”.
However, statistically teams that take more 3-point attempts are also the teams that have more dunks.
The official correlation between 3-Point Attempts and Dunks Made for the 2018–2019 NBA Season is 0.37. With a p-value of 0.04, we can conclude that the statistics are significant. The outlier (no surprise) is the Houston Rockets. If you remove them from the equation, the correlation changes to 0.45 with a p-value of 0.02.
I’m not saying that the WNBA needs to have more dunks to be successful, but when there have been only 6 people to have dunked in the entire 21-year history of the WNBA, and there were over 11,000 dunks in the NBA in the 2018–2019 season alone , it’s fair to assume the games are completely different when they really shouldn’t be.
I rest my case.
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