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Women Are Being Left Behind by the Sports Data Revolution — How We Get To Next

“Men’s sports have awesome data.” Allison McCann, a visual journalist for FiveThirtyEight, substantiates this important distinction in her response to an article by Nate Silver about how “sports has awesome data.” While the now-infamous story of Billy Beane and his use of sabermetrics (the subject of the book and movie Moneyball) introduced the world to sports analytics, there are a few other stories that need attention. For those who are now invested in the rising influx of quantitative sports stories: How many of them were on men’s sports? How many do you remember about the women playing the same sport?

Sue Bird’s The Players’ Tribune piece, “Analyze This,” tackles this disparity between the WNBA and NBA. Consider Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors. We know every single detail about them. Now, did you know that the Chicago Sky’s Elena Delle Donne made 95 percent of her free throws this season?

WAIT. WHAT!? (I know—I only looked her up because Bird’s article mentions her.) Here we have a woman basketball player shooting better from the line than most of the NBA and WNBA throughout all of history, and I had no idea.