Editor's note: Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark was a near-unanimous pick for WNBA Rookie of the Year, the league announced on Oct. 3.
The most anticipated regular season for WNBA rookies reaches its conclusion this week, with the final games taking place Thursday. Some of those rookies will be extending their seasons into the first round of the playoffs -- and possibly beyond -- while others will begin an offseason of recovering from injuries and working on their games.
Either way, it was a banner season for first-year stars, who earned 11.4% of all minutes leaguewide and produced a handful of the WNBA's top players -- on top of immediately providing arguably the league's two most popular players, Caitlin Clark of the Indiana Fever and Angel Reese of the Chicago Sky.
How better to conclude the race for the WNBA's Rookie of the Year than to compile one last set of rankings for 2024's debut crop?
As always, this list is purely based on advanced statistical measures of player value, taking a cross-section of popular metrics to provide a consensus estimate of how many wins each rookie added to their teams. The metrics being blended are Basketball-Reference's win shares (WS); estimated wins added from player efficiency rating (PER); and wins generated via estimated RAPTOR, a plus/minus-type measure that mixes a player's box score production with how she affects her team's net rating while she's in the game.
By looking at all three numbers through Sept. 16, we get an overall snapshot of what the "sabermetric" stats think of each player's performance -- if not their potential going forward (which is different). We'll also list each player's percentile ratings on a 0-100 scale relative to the league, in the following categories: scoring (based on points per 100 possessions), true shooting percentage (self-explanatory), passing (based on assist rate), rebounding (using total rebound percentage) and defensive impact (based on both RAPTOR and defensive rating).
And with all of that out of the way, here are our final rookie rankings of 2024 (among players who have played at least 10 minutes per team game this season):
1. Caitlin Clark, G, Indiana Fever
Last ranked: No. 2 | Draft pick: No. 1 (Iowa)
Win shares: 3.0 | PER wins: 5.2 | RAPTOR wins: 4.2 | Consensus: 4.1