Miss 90s Basketball? You’re Watching the Wrong League

"Old School" Basketball is alive and well today

I watched the Las Vegas Aces play the Atlanta Dream a few days ago on TV, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how the whole game seemed sort of… familiar. It wasn’t familiar in the way that watching highlights from the 2014 Spurs is familiar; it was something else. I’d seen this style of basketball before, but I couldn’t pinpoint where. The pacing, the physicality… when had I seen this type of basketball before?

Then it hit finally me: I’m watching 90's style basketball.

It makes so much sense when you think about the timeline. The modern NBA timeline starts at the 1976 ABA-NBA merger – collective popular NBA consciousness seems to begin around here. The NBA instated the three-point line just three years after the merger, and the league added four new teams from the now defunct ABA: The Denver Nuggets, New Jersey Nets, Indiana Pacers, and San Antonio Spurs. ’76 sort of denotes the moment when the unified league was really catapulted into the American sports limelight.

By the 1990s, the modern NBA had 20 years under its belt. It had developed a real identity over the years – transitioning from the flashy-and-fast style of the late 70s and 80s to a more meticulous, grinding game in the 90's.

Fast forward to the WNBA, established in 1996 and now about 25 years into its own development. It would seem as though the modern WNBA finds themselves in an era that looks awfully similar to the 90s. Seriously.

Take pace, for example. A common (mostly twitter jackass) criticism of the WNBA is that the game is simply not fast enough to be exciting. Well, unsurprisingly, that critique seems to be completely unfounded. An average WNBA team in 2022 gets 96.8 possessions per 48 minutes. This figure is a hair smaller than the NBA’s current pace of 98.2 possessions per 48 minutes.

In fact, the only NBA season that exactly matched the WNBA’s 96.8 pace was the 1992-93 season. The second closest pace? The 1991-92 season. So my instincts were right on that front; Michael Jordan’s brand of rough and tumble 90s basketball is the most comparable NBA to the modern WNBA.

I kept digging into the differences and figured out some other stuff, too. Like the difference in statistics: The only reason we see different scoring averages from the NBA’s 90s to WNBA’s 2020s is the length of quarters. The NBA plays 12-minute quarters, whereas the WNBA plays 10-minute quarters, like international FIBA competition.

We can figure out WNBA stat lines in a 12-minute-per-quarter game pretty easily. 10/12 is 83.3%, which means that the 10-minute quarters of WNBA output is 83% of 12-minute quarters of NBA output. Just a little math (adding the 17% onto the WNBA stats) and we can see what WNBA players would be putting up in the 90's with the same pace.

The WNBA’s scoring leader at the moment is Breanna Stewart. Her adjusted stat-line would be 24.7 points per game – that’d be good for 6th in the NBA in ’93. It would put her right below 1993 NBA MVP Charles Barkley, and right above Hall of Famer Patrick Ewing. Not bad company.

It’s not just pace and statistical output though; it’s personnel too. The early 90's saw Bigs like Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, and David Robinson take turns beating teams up in the paint; the WNBA in 2022 is no different. In ESPN’s preseason top 25 players list, the top four were all 6’4 or bigger – in the WNBA that means forwards or centers. The WNBA is dominated by bruising post play, at least right now; however with young star guards like Sabrina Ionesco and Jackie Young on the rise, the pendulum may be shifting back to guard play soon.

The WNBA shares some resemblance to the 90’s aesthetically, too. Take these plays from the Aces vs. Dream game I watched the other day.

Watch how A’ja Wilson’s screen completely obliterates #17 on this play:

Yes, she may have been moving, and more importantly no, I do not care. That screen is exactly what basketball fans love to see, and it just hits on the point I’ve been hammering away at: the WNBA has a real physical streak to it that the NBA currently doesn’t. The refs let them play in a way they don’t in the NBA anymore; Chris Paul may have probably been carried out on a stretcher after that screen, but Erica Wheeler pops right back up to try to get back in the play.

Here's an example of tough physical post-play. Check out this action, where #00 Naz Hillmon gets a switch off of the dribble handoff:

Here Hillmon takes a book out of Tim Duncan’s book, sealing the post off perfectly by bodying the smaller player. After her teammates recognize the switch, they swing it around to get a good angle while Hillmon pivots her target hand perfectly. An easy entry pass later and it’s two points. The whole possession is beautiful, really – this is the sort of play high school coaches would kill to have their players execute consistently.

What I’m getting at here isn’t that the WNBA is the same as the 90's NBA. The WNBA will always look different from every era of NBA basketball. It’s just a fact – we don’t have to skirt around that reality. It’s not degrading to the WNBA to say they play a different sort of game; Instead, we need to try to understand how the game is different to appreciate it on its own terms. It’s a rougher, more team centric game. And it’s fantastic.

Maybe you’re a fan of the three-point barrages of Steph Curry, and no one’s going to blame you for that. You might love seeing Giannis crush a dunk on someone’s head twice a game – hey, join the club! It’s fun to see shootouts like we do in the NBA… But sometimes you want a change of pace. Sometimes you may feel nostalgic for an older time, a time where grit could get you wins and fundamentals reigned supreme. It’s okay if you don’t feel that way right now – you’re just a James Harden flop-fest away from thinking it. When you finally realize that you maybe, sort of, just a little bit miss 90's basketball, you know where to go.