Where are the SBL Talent Factories?

Hi All,

I’m back for another blog, and I expect everyone that reads to be impressed with how early in the week I have got this out.

I was sitting watching the Wolves v Senators games a few weeks ago and this is how the starting 5’s compared (from memory, wasn’t sure if Sean Gilmore was the fifth Senators men’s starter but as he played big minutes I slotted him in):

 

So of the ten possible starters across both genders the Wolves have one player who started WABL at Wolves, Stirling fair better with four. What readers might notice got my mind turning over are four Suns starters for Wolves in both teams combined. Of the twenty players there were also six internationals.

So I started tabling where the players in the league started their WABL or SBL careers. Being familiar with many of the female players for a number of years I thought I would put together a bit of a spreadsheet that looked at where all the girls started, where they are playing now and then have a think about what the results of this showed us.

Now as far as I’m aware “Junior Club” isn’t defined by Basketball WA at all. For the purpose of this article I have used the club where the player played their first season of WABL, either by the records or my knowledge. There were several players that I have seen over the years play juniors at a club that were listed as somewhere different in the guide and I have taken the liberty of re-allocating them, but there is also some that I am not familiar with and had to go by the booklet.

If you were to stick to the definition in this article you can definitely question what a lot of clubs put in the media guide. But I don’t blame any Coach or Administrator for being a little generous with themselves, when I was a coach I often claimed a player if they had spent more time at Suns than where they came from. But I wanted a cleaner and more objective system for this article, so first season on record it is.

In total this is how the league proportions between home grown players and those who are not:

 

To now sort the players individually for the entire league there were a few additional categories added; these are international, interstate and the major regional hubs of Albany, Kalgoorlie and Geraldton. In most cases the rule above made assigning players easy, but there were exceptions where I had to use my discretion. An example of this is Annika Renkema; she played WA Country and is from Denmark, came to Perth after high school and played her first D-League game for Hawks. Because of her age when she debuted for Hawks, and Denmark’s proximity to Albany, I chose to put her as an Albany player.

I have included a link below to the excel spreadsheet and if you go to the “Allocations” worksheet you can see where you have been placed, if I have got anyone in the wrong spot feel free to let me know and I’ll move your name around. Note – I have only included players that have stepped onto the court in a WSBL game this season, not contracted and unplayed.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzh1BvhqEj3JWHYwX0pEVmJqVTg/view?usp=sharing

Home Grown

When I started putting the spreadsheet together the first thing I wanted to look at was the number of “home grown” players each Club had in their line-up. The table below summarises it:

 

You can see from this that the Slammers top the list with 13 South West juniors having played minutes in 2014, with Eagles at the bottom with only four. If you consider this total number the positioning of Tigers and Wolves with only six and five players respectively surprised me.

I started looking a little deeper though and just considering the totals didn’t make sense, an example was considering the six names Flames had compared to the same number of players Hawks and Tigers had, I could very quickly see that the minutes played was going to be dramatically different. I was also very curious to see how Slammers would be impacted by the large minutes both imports played.

So I plugged the season total of minutes in for each player and as teams have played varying amounts of games I then divided the number. You can grab the results from the “2015 Average Home Grown Minutes” column in the spreadsheet but the chart below shows the spread quite well:

 

Now the maximum amount of minutes available here is 200 (5 players times 40 minutes) and Lakeside Lightning jump to top spot using an impressive 182 of them home grown. They slide ahead of Bunbury because they haven’t had two (or even one) import available the entire season. The two at the bottom have very low numbers, Flames and Eagles use 32 and 23 minutes of these on home grown. Noticeable nearly three quarters of these minutes for both teams are played by Tarsha Fletcher and Danielle Devenny.

So we can straight away dismiss any direct connection between ladder positioning and home grown talent levels. You can see Lakeside and Magic at the top end of the scale with one team in the top four and the other not in finals contention, and you can see the same with Flames and Eagles at the bottom end.

However, I believe ladder position does create a bias in the numbers. At first glance I considered the home grown minutes Tigers and Wolves have very low for such dominant junior programs, but consider this; how many of the Lightning players that are getting significant minutes would be capable of holding their spot in the rotation at either of those clubs? The only two I would suggest are Courtney Byrnes and Ashleigh Grant, and while I think they would both play their minutes would have to take a reduction.

The last thing I thought about was Slammers and Magic, and wondered if the large distance from the city worked as an advantage or disadvantage when putting together a roster. You can look at this two ways; one is that it is difficult to put a roster together because they can’t recruit from nearby clubs, or two, there isn’t the easy options for players who might be a little disgruntled to move. If their junior program is strong I say advantage, if not disadvantage.

For fun I also looked at the scoring:

 

League Wide

To alleviate some of the bias created by varying team strength I wanted to do a league wide comparison. This doesn’t solve the problem fully but it does show on a broad context where the 170 girls that have stepped on court this year come from. It also enabled me to put in “Interstate” and “International” rows so everyone is classified, and columns for the 2015 All-Stars and those that played any WNBL (to the best of my knowledge). The table below shows the totals:

So when you look at the totals the big movers up the order are the Stirling Senators, with the Joondalup Wolves and Willetton Tigers also moving up the rankings. I expected Wolves and Tigers because of their junior programs but it surprised me to see the volume of Senators players at other clubs, and given their struggles this season they could definitely use some of them.

The next logical question is how many of these girls that have moved could make an impact at other clubs and the league wide comparisons of average points and minutes helps analyse this:

 

I think from looking at these two graphs it’s safe to say the Senators could do with a few of these girls in their line-up. League wide former and current Senators players play the fourth most amount of minutes of all the clubs and incredibly put the second highest amount of points on the board per week. If I was the coach of Senators going into 2016 that would really make me think some targeted recruiting is needed, just like the Flames did bringing Tarsha Fletcher last season and the Redbacks did several years ago with Brooke Hiddlestone.

There are a couple of the additional categories worth mentioning. Firstly we have 22 international players in the league and every week they play a huge amount of minutes. This is due to the willingness of clubs to put some resources into the WSBL (well done) and an influx of New Zealand girls. But when you look at the scoring alone it really shows how much the quality of these imports has improved in the last few years.

I would also love to give a shout out to the girls from Kalgoorlie. They have six girls in the league and play and score at an even higher rate than the imports. The Slammers also remain very high, because not only do they have a high number of girls in their squad they have produced several quality players who have moved to metropolitan clubs after school while they work and study. For my money they probably do the best job developing women’s talent.

All-Star 5’s

I thought it would be interesting to get starting 5’s from each club, so I used a formula very close to my All-Time 5’s a few weeks ago. You can see there are a lot of blanks in my spreadsheet, I used my discretion with this but I wanted to include players who were “above par” WSBL players in 2015. I was stunned at how difficult it was for any club to generate a team; in fact none of the top four teams on the WSBL standings this year were able to get close.

Now before anyone gets upset that I didn’t include them or more players from their club I would like to stress that it is quite possible that I just missed someone, I was scrolling up and down several tables and trying to place players. Have a go yourself, feel free to cross out and slot in your own names or complete all the missing cells.

 

If I were seeding Clubs based on the line-ups above this would be my order:

  1. South West Slammers
  2. Mandurah Magic
  3. Willetton Tigers
  4. Joondalup Wolves
  5. Stirling Senators
  6. Perth Redbacks
  7. Kalamunda Eastern Suns
  8. Perry Lakes Hawks
  9. Lakeside Lightning
  10. Rockingham Flames
  11. Cockburn Cougars
  12. East Perth Eagles

The Big Four

The four categories players can come from are WA Metro, WA Country, Interstate and International. The numbers may not be 100% accurate as I used Magic, Slammers, Kalgoorlie, Geraldton and Albany for country and the remaining clubs metro. The chart below shows the distribution of numbers:

 

You have to rate the import team as the strongest (especially when you look at the charts prior) so I give them a win in a game against the interstate group. The interesting thing would be a Country v Metro game, if it were to happen I would be tipping the country team to get up.

My Philosophy of Coaching in SBL

One of the things I battled in my mind when I coached SBL was the development of players versus the desire to win now. When I last interviewed for a coaching position at Eastern Suns I wanted to make sure that the club held a similar view to me in this area and I presented to the club what the five priorities would be of my program, in priority order.

Winning a championship was number five on the list, now that isn’t to say that during the finals and within games we weren’t doing everything we possibly could to win because we were. But I always believed we existed as part of a broader organisation, and that while we wanted the SBL to be an entertaining product we also wanted it to prepare those with the ability for representation in other leagues and at other levels. This is a big part of why I love being involved in WA state teams.

While I hope all coaches take a broad view of what they are part of and consider a wide variety of outcomes for their program, I honestly don’t believe that they need the same philosophy as mine. There is no right and wrong and more than one way to go about things. An example of a different attitude was evident in my second letter to players. In part of that Ryan Petrik talks about his number one filter being “what gives us the best chance to win a championship” and this shapes his decision making framework.

This decision making framework is different to what mine would be but I have enormous respect for the success Flames have had in recent years. From the outside it appears his recruiting is always well balanced, to cover a weakness or provide the team with talent required to execute his game style. Not to overload or compromise team chemistry. Matt and I have discussed this on the radio show in relation to the Cougars men, but the fit of the imports and the return of Sheldon McIntyre have covered specific areas of weakness and enabled them to have success beyond expectations.

As I stated before winning wasn’t my number one filter, so there were some occasions where I didn’t feel the best answer to that question was in the best interest of Eastern Suns. Especially in the offseason if I was considering the character or demeanour of players, or early on when we were bringing players through, indoctrinating new (or younger) players and building a team culture. Of course late in the season and during the finals we were busting our ass to win. But because of this I always considered myself the coach of a program, not just a recruiter or an SBL coach in isolation.

Before the 2014 season I accepted a role on the Referee Advisory Group, as part of this in our early meetings we had the opportunity to contribute to an SBL Philosophy Statement. Basketball WA with advice from this group adopted the below.

The State Basketball League in an Association context has three main objectives of what it aims to achieve through its competitions and is prioritised in the following order:

  1. Development
    1. Suitable environment for the healthy development of our players.
    2. An environment to develop high skills levels.
    3. Creation of a positive game style.
  2. Entertainment
    1. Broad based appeal to our communities.
    2. Discouragement of unattractive / negative behaviour.
  3. Act as WA’s Elite Basketball Competition
    1. It is the highest level of basketball in our state.
    2. It is the highest level the majority of these players will play.
    3. It is the elite and in part semi-professional.

I think this provides a strong platform and good balance to the different aspects of being part of SBL and what the league should be about.

Thanks,

CM

craigmansfield@me.com

Follow me on Twitter @CMansfield34

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