The WNBA's summer vacation

We had company last night, so I've not seen any of the games played on early Thursday.  We are now officially past the halfway point of the season.  The trade deadline is August 15th.

This makes me wonder if Trader Bill Laimbeer's plan was to "pump and dump" Sammy Prahalis - give her a lot of minutes, let her score a lot of points and then trade her for someone theoretically better.  The problem with this theory is that he only gave Sammy P. a couple of minutes in that loss against San Antonio, and those were the last 2:05 of the game.

By the way?  The Liberty shot 26.7 percent.  The Silver Stars shot 31.1 percent.  That game should be buried in a lead vault.

As they would say in The Music Man, "Ye Gods!"  Psycho Sammy's stats:  one rebound, one steal, one turnover.

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I'll probably have a new WNBA Box Scores spreadsheet up for download later today.  Watch for it on the side links.

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The All-Star Game is coming up Saturday.  I don't have any real passion to watch it.  All-Star Games are leftovers from a time when a league needed to raise money for an important cause, or to provide players with significant salary bonuses.  The NFL's All-Star game, the Pro Bowl, is a joke and the WNBA's All-Star Game isn't much better.  Watching players play at 3/4 speed and setting up a lame dunk at the end isn't my idea of spending a pleasant Saturday afternoon.

The WNBA home office must be kicking itself.  Brittney Griner has a knee injury and can't play.  Elena Delle Donne has a concussion, and really shouldn't play and I don't expect her to.  Skylar Diggins wasn't good enough to be chosen an All-Star, and the coaches rightly picked Tulsa's Glory Johnson as a reserve.  Instead of "Three To See" it's "Nothing To See Here". 

Hey, they brought it on themselves.  Call some fouls once in a while, and expand the roster.  Then maybe your players will be healthy enough to take part in what's supposed to be one of your showcase events.

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Working on two little things.  I've had to put my attendance project on the back burner.  It turns out that I'm not missing the NCAA women's basketball attendance numbers from 2013, but the men's basketball numbers.  Why is it taking so freaking long for the NCAA to release those numbers?   July is almost over.

The first little thing is a project that looks at the "recruiting fingerprints" of all the major schools - what is the average (median) distance that a school recruits from?  I figured out a way to enter a lot of the latitude and longitude data mechanically, but the 400 or so glitches have to be handled on a case-by-case basis.  I'm down to the last 150 or so.  Give me a few weeks.

The second thing is running a linear regression on when NCAA women's BB coaches are likely to get fired.  It's looking promising, but I have to get the data entered.  Unfortunately, I can't run a log regression like I'd like to and have to settle for a multiple linear regression.  Statisticians will be protesting with calculator's a-blazing outside of SB Nation's front offices.