About the Project

Based on the statistics of WNBA Champions from past seasons, can we predict the winner of the next WNBA Season (2021-22) using the teams stats?

The use of statistics in sports has been evolving for years. For example, in WNBA, a basic box score with minutes played, points, rebounds and a few other stats was the standard. But now we can go to WNBA.com and not only see traditional stats but with improved technology, in-depth statistics are available down to individual players on different types of plays, or even for teams on how different lineup of players have performed. Other sites such as FiveThirtyEight have created their own unique rating systems for players and teams to gauge their performance.

We know that winning a championship goes beyond the number of wins and losses a team has in the regular season. So, for our project we used data available from basketball-reference.com to look at different advance stats for WNBA teams over the past 25 years to train and test 3 different machine learning (ML) models, to see if we could predict a champion for the current season. Using our ML models, we will also be able to see what statistics had the most important, when determining a champion.