Alright team, let’s break down how I tackled understanding that Aces vs Fever game through stats. No fancy jargon here, just me banging my head against numbers trying to figure stuff out.
Getting My Hands On The Raw Numbers
First thing Tuesday morning, coffee brewing strong, I dug into the official WNBA box score stats page. Felt like searching for buried treasure, but less fun. My browser had like eight tabs open because navigating those sites is always a maze. Finally found the detailed post-game stats sheet – the raw stuff about points, rebounds, assists, all that jazz for every player who stepped on court. Hit the little download button and saved the CSV file right onto my messy desktop.
Opening The Can of Worms
Double-clicked that downloaded file and boom, spreadsheet chaos. Seriously, why do these exports always look like somebody fell asleep on their keyboard?
- Weird Columns: Player names were mashed together with jersey numbers in the same cell. Like “Wilson22Aces”. Totally useless.
- Messy Time Format: Minutes played showed up as “35:22” which Excel thinks is a time of day! Had to fix that mess.
- Missing Stuff: Found gaps, especially in hustle stats like deflections for some Fever players. Annoying.
Spent probably an hour just cleaning that junk up. Split names from numbers, changed the minutes column to something sensible like “35.3” instead of pretending it was 35 minutes past 22 (seriously?), filled in blanks best I could searching game highlights.
Starting To See Patterns (Sort Of)
Once the data was actually readable, I started playing around. First, I just sorted everybody by points scored. No shocker seeing A’ja Wilson sitting right at the top – girl put up numbers. But I wanted more than the obvious.
I created this new table specifically comparing starters. Wanted to see how each team’s main crew stacked up against each other.
- Rebounding Battle: Dragged rebounds into the chart. Saw right away the Aces starters dominated the boards hard. Wilson and Stokes just owning the paint. Fever starters looked tiny in comparison on the glass.
- Guard Play Breakdown: Focused in on assists and turnovers for the point guards. Chelsea Gray, man, so efficient – almost double the assists of Clark but way fewer turnovers. That tells the story of their offense flow right there.
- Scoring Droughts: Highlighted quarters in the data and noticed the Fever went absolutely cold in the 3rd. Scored like, what, 11 points? Found the minutes breakdown and saw that’s exactly when Caitlin Clark sat for a long stretch. Oof. Connection? Looked super likely.
Spotted something funny too – Aliyah Boston took only 8 shots! Felt weirdly low for one of their top players against Wilson. Why wasn’t she getting more touches? Gotta dig into the actual game footage later for that mystery.
Putting It Together… And My Realization
After all that clicking, dragging, sorting, and cleaning… the big picture felt kinda obvious? Stats screamed “Aces controlled everything”. Their starters played heavier minutes, scored way more efficiently, rebounded like monsters, and Gray ran the show. Fever had flashes (mostly Clark early on), but got overwhelmed by the system and physicality.
Honest truth? Felt like I wasted two hours proving “water is wet”. The eye test during the live game showed exactly this dominance. But hey, doing the grunt work made it concrete. The numbers backed up the Aces’ chokehold on the game, explained why it felt so one-sided watching. Was the deep dive necessary? Probably not. Did I learn things? A bit. Mostly learned that spreadsheets are time vampires.
