Sports Reference Blog

Basketball Reference has added awards voting data for many WNBA awards to its database. This information can be accessed via the pages for individual awards and clicking a link for full voting. For instance, our page of WNBA MVPs has a 'voting' column where you can see every player who received votes for various awards in that season. Here, for instance, are the 2022 WNBA awards votes. This information goes all the way back to the league's inaugural season in 1997.

Using this data, we are now able to calculate WNBA MVP Award Shares, as well. If a player receives 100% of the MVP vote, they receive 1.0 award share. If they received half the vote they get 0.5 shares, etc. The WNBA MVP Award Shares leaderboard is linked to from our WNBA leaders page. The all-time leader in this measure is Lisa Leslie with 5.614 MVP shares. The breakdown of how many she won in each season can be seen on her player page in the 'Appearances on Leaderboards, Awards, and Honors' section under the 'MVP Award Shares' section. As you can see there, she received MVP votes (and therefore shares) in 12 different seasons, winning the award three times and finishing in the top three five additional times. Candace Parker is the active leader in this category (3.913), though Breanna Stewart (2.790) and A'ja Wilson (2.124) may have the best shot among active players at one day catching Leslie.

We'd like to thank a pair of our interns, Tim Clay and Jordan Doyle, for working on this project.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2023 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Announcement, Awards, Basketball-Reference.com, Data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.