No Rest for the Wicked: WNBA Teams Keep Winning Without Extra Downtime
An Analysis Reveals Minimal Impact of Rest Days on WNBA Team Performance
Each WNBA team will play 40 games in the 2024 season, but it is only the Indiana Fever who have played eight games in the first 15 days of play. The Fever have been put through the ringer. Since the 2024 season began on May 14, the Fever played every other day until May 24, then played a grueling game against the Las Vegas Aces the next day — a total of seven games in 11 days — before getting their first set of back-to-back rest days.
The Fever envy teams like the Atlanta Dream who have played just four games in the same amount of time. Unlike the Fever, the Dream have yet to play in back-to-back games. Actually, the Dream have yet to play on less than two days of rest.
Neither team has done particularly well with the Dream sitting at 2–2 and the Fever at 1–7, though it does raise flags about the fairness of rest across the league. This is especially prudent in a season split by the Paris Olympics that will create an extended break and squish together the rest of the games, limiting the available rest for players across the league.
Ask any basketball player, spectator, or coach about the importance of rest and they may deliver similar responses — it is incredibly important. However, the statistics tell a different story in the WNBA.
In the history of the league, teams that play two nights in a row win 46% of their games and 50% of games with a day of rest in between games. The winning then plateaus at 51% when a team has two or more days of rest. Although a trend is present, the benefits are nominal. Moving from no nights of rest to one night translates to about three more points, 0.5% better field goal shooting, and one more rebound on average. Other statistics, including free throw attempts, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, and fouls, are too small to note. Jumping from one rest day to two or more presents even smaller results.
Even looking at situations where one team comes into a game with less rest than the other shows only fractional impacts. In league history, a team playing with fewer rest days wins 48% of the time. Teams with more rest typically have about one point, one free throw attempt, and 0.5% better field goal shooting to show for it. Simply said, over the course of a 40-minute game, these additional statistics will not sway the outcome of the game in a meaningful way.
In no way does this data indicate that rest is not important or pay tribute to the injuries that can occur with a lack of rest. It also does not consider that all rest is not created equal — some teams spend their rest days travelling while others can spend them going over game tape or being with their families.
What it does seem to say is that the team who is supposed to win will win, regardless of rest days. There is a benefit to being in rhythm, similar to or maybe more powerful than any benefit a team receives from rest. Ultimately, it is a balance between the two — rhythm and rest — that both the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream want to find.
Sources:
- All data used in this article was scraped from the WNBA’s official statistics hub
- The complete dataset used for this research is available for download on Kaggle
