Oregon Ducks Women’s Basketball: Championship Statistical Modeling

Last week I looked at a snapshot of performance statistics for men’s basketball. This week I wanted to do the same exercise for the women. It’s no secret that in the past six seasons Oregon has gone from near the pinnacle of NCAAW competition to near the bottom. This past season was certainly an improvement over the disaster of 2023-2024, but how much improvement did the team make in performance measures beyond the win column?

All of the numbers I use in this article come courtesy of sports-reference.com’s data portal Stathead to compile advanced statistics for players on these teams.

I’ll go over the summary descriptions for the metrics I chose to use, each of which is a rather involved formula. All of these definitions come courtesy of sports-reference.com.

Ortg — Offensive Rating; an estimate of points scored per 100 possessions.

Drtg — Defensive Rating; an estimate of points allowed per 100 possessions.

WS/40 — Win Shares Per 40 Minutes; an estimate of the number of wins contributed by a player per 40 minutes (average is approximately .100).

OBPM — Offensive Box Plus/Minus; A box score estimate of the offensive points per 100 possessions a player contributed above a league-average player, translated to an average team.

DBPM — Defensive Box Plus/Minus; A box score estimate of the defensive points per 100 possessions a player contributed above a league-average player, translated to an average team.

BPM — Box Plus/Minus; A box score estimate of the points per 100 possessions a player contributed above a league-average player, translated to an average team.

PER — Player Efficiency Rating; a measure of a player’s per-minute contribution adjusted so that the league average is 15.

Each roster was censored so that any player who appeared in fewer than 20 games in a season would not influence the results. After this, a mean for the various advanced stat categories was computed for each team that reached the round of eight in from 2021 through 2025. While the season that ended in 2021 was a bit wonky due to the trailing end of the pandemic, the post-season tournament was successfully held. Having computed these means for each individual team, I found the median and standard deviation of the resulting data set. The results are shown in the table below.

It is notable that the median average team PER and the standard deviation are noticeably greater for women’s teams than they are for men’s teams. This would seem to indicate that there is a greater concentration of talent in fewer truly elite teams in the women’s game, while there is more parity among the top eight for the men.

How do the means for Oregon’s last five women’s basketball teams compare to these elite team averages? Rather than display the means for the Duck squads in consideration and make you break out a calculator, I’ve gone ahead and computed the z-scores for the stats under consideration. Without going into “professor” mode, for each of the statistics under consideration a positive z-score means that year’s team measured above the Elite Eight mean (which is good for these metrics except for Drtg), while a negative score means the squad was below the average (which is bad in these cases except Drtg). Scores between -1 and 1 are fairly typical, while scores outside of this should be considered exceptional.

The first thing that jumps out here is that even after the pinnacle of the Ionescu and Hebard era in 2019-2020 the teams stayed solid for several years. While none of the teams that made the tournament in 2021-2023 had realistic title aspirations, based on these measures it would not have been shocking to see any of them in the Elite Eight.

All of which makes the truly stupendous collapse of the 2023-2024 season more shocking. Every single measure in the last season of Pac-12 competition is so far on the wrong side of the bell curve you could place a bowling bowl at that spot and it wouldn’t roll. While it cannot be seen directly from the numbers, ATQ documented that the issue was coach Graves’ roster construction. The 2023-2024 team only had one player on the roster who was serviceable at point guard, and lost them for the entire year due to pre-season injury. The season was essentially over before it began.

The metrics of the 2024-2025 season show that after a painful roster overhaul the Ducks not only significantly improved their record to return to the post season, the team improved their fundamentals in every measure. While the recovery is a relief, note that the program is nowhere near where it was previously. Aside from DBPM, the squad is more than a full standard deviation on the wrong side of the elite eight median.

It will be a much sterner test of the Graves’ staff to make continued improvement in these metrics next season. Getting out of the ditch of 2023-2024 was relatively simple: find a half-decent point guard and few more average shooters. Continued improvements will be less dramatic in z-score. I wouldn’t expect Oregon to be back at their previous level this coming season, even if they make good use of the transfer portal. If, when I run the numbers next summer, all the z-scores are within a range of -1 to 1 I will be confident the program is making good progress.