What’s New
The most important thing that’s different for the WNBA’s 2016 season is that the league blew up their playoff system in the offseason, and balanced out the regular season schedule at the same time. Conferences have essentially been made irrelevant, as each team will now play every other team three times, plus one extra game against a local-ish opponent to get the total up to 34 as in other recent years.
The teams with the best eight records make the playoffs and will be seeded in order, regardless of ‘conference’. #5 hosts #8 and #6 hosts #7 in single-game elimination matchups in the first round. Then for the second round they re-seed and #3 hosts the lowest seed remaining, #4 hosts the other, in another pair of single-elimination games. They re-seed again, so #1 faces the lowest seed remaining, and #2 meets the other team left, in best-of-five semi-final matchups (2-2-1 format, as in recent WNBA Finals). Then the WNBA Finals will still be best-of-five, again 2-2-1.
The main impact of this is that the regular season becomes more important, because teams will fight to avoid the potential pitfalls of those single-game playoffs. It also means that if everything goes to plan, the two best teams will meet in the WNBA Finals, when easily the largest audiences are paying attention to the league. If one conference is weak, we won’t all be sitting there knowing that one of the Conference Finals is essentially deciding the title, before an ugly sweep in the showcase event. I’m not a big fan of everyone playing 34 games apiece only to have your season decided by one night, as will be the case four times in the opening couple of rounds. But it should be exciting, and the US is certainly enraptured by the NCAA tournament every year. If the WNBA can capture even a slice of that, this plan will be seen to have worked.
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There are two slight rule-tweaks for this season. Firstly the WNBA has brought in FIBA’s rule where the shot-clock will be re-set to only 14 after an offensive rebound, not all the way to 24. The only time you’re likely to notice or care is late in games, where an offensive board for the team in front has always been incredibly helpful in running down the clock. That advantage is slightly diminished now. The second change is that everything that used to be allowed in the final minute of a fourth-quarter or overtime now applies to the final two minutes. Things like being able to advance the ball with a timeout, or any foul putting your team automatically into the penalty. Expect teams and/or referees to screw that up at least a couple of times early in the season. Sadly they’ve done nothing to fix the interminable reviews and endless confusion surrounding the clear-path foul rule.
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The WNBA have changed the name of their streaming service LiveAccess to WNBA League Pass for no particular reason. But you can now buy single games, or a single-team season passes, or follow links from the WNBA’s social media accounts to watch games. That stuff’s new.
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Predictions
Most Valuable Player
It seems like a glaringly obvious choice, but I’m going with Candace Parker. It’s obvious because of the recent furore around her being left off the Team USA squad for the 2016 Olympic Games, which has led a lot of people to expect her to come out all guns blazing for the WNBA season. I lean towards her more because she’s the one superstar who’s currently scheduled to have a month of rest in the middle of the season, rather than be flying down to Rio. Maya Moore was my secondary choice, purely because she’s in her prime and could put up even better numbers this year, and because history says it’s very hard to win this award two years in a row. Combined with her chequered health history, that pushed Elena Delle Donne down my list, but if she plays something close to 34 games she’ll be right in the mix.
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