Sabrina Ionescu has fully arrived in 2024 as one of the WNBA’s very best players. That might sound like the same thing many were saying in 2022 and 2023, though. She made the All-WNBA Second Team in each of those seasons, and in the pre-Caitlin Clark/Angel Reese WNBA — before the Las Vegas Aces had ascended to true dynasty status — Ionescu’s rep benefitted from a strong, not wholly undeserved hype machine.
That’s not what’s happening in 2024, despite Ionescu’s first appearance on the women’s basketball Olympic team and the release of the second volume of her signature shoe. Rather, compared to the first four seasons of her career, she’s flying under the radar, a mere star to the public rather than a superstar, though her impact metrics are starting to vouch for the opposite.
Ionescu currently ranks first in Positive Residual’s Estimated Contributions metric, or ‘EC,’ ahead of teammate Breanna Stewart, A’ja Wilson, and the rest of the W. For the first time in her career, she is not grading out as a stark negative on defense, while easily soaring to the highest offensive EC number in the database.
In many ways, those numbers match the tape, particularly on defense, where Ionescu has clearly improved from awful to mediocre. But while that is indeed a vital jump for the New York Liberty, that’s not what I’m here to discuss.
I’m here to expand on what I wrote in this mid-season article on Ionescu’s offensive leap for the Libs, which has been the story of their season through 25 games. Here’s the SparkNotes version: After turning in one of the all-time great 3-point seasons by any professional player, shooting 44.8% on 9.6 3PA per 75 possessions, she’s morphed into far more of an offensive initiator in 2024. This is in part out of necessity, with backcourt partners Courtney Vandersloot and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton missing significant time this season, and in part because Ionescu is just better at handling the ball.
Her 3-point percentage is down to 35.6% thanks to a mix of natural regression and a weightier offensive load featuring more off-the-dribble attempts, but her two-point percentage is up from 38.3% in 2023 to 49.7% this year. That’s a trade-off New York is willing to make, and a result of stark improvement in her ball-handling skills. She’s patiently waiting out traps, splitting and swerving through hedges, or getting her shoulder into her primary defender. Whether applied by individual defenders or as a team, physicality and pressure is not phasing Ionescu in 2024. She keeps her dribble alive, and all of that is resulting in easier offense for her in the paint, by way of two-point shooting and passing.
It’s not like the 2020 #1 overall pick is a completely different player this year. There are signs of the play-finishing god that helped make the Liberty’s offense unstoppable last season, when she would set a bunch of screens and then come off some more, only for Vandersloot to deliver her the ball for an open three. Ionescu feasted on screen-the-screener actions in 2023, and New York still utilizes those for her in 2024…
Thus, she has become a savior of the dreaded ‘combo guard’ label, often applied to players as a last resort, as a prayer rather than as a positional designation for players missing one crucial skill.
In 2024, Ionescu has clarified the power of the combo guard by toggling between on-ball and off-ball excellence, not just within a season or even a game, but a possession. She doesn’t just have the ability to thrive with or without the ball in her hands, but the ability to blend both of those skill-areas so as to make their borders indistinguishable.
For example, she is one of the most prolific handoff-receivers in the game, as the dribble-handoff is a play-type perfectly suited to her strengths and weaknesses. As an on-ball creator, Ionescu isn’t the twitchiest athlete, missing the blazing first step of some of her contemporaries. However, she overcomes that by tapping into the off-ball movement skills we’ve known she’s had for a long time, the ones that helped produce her all-time 3-point shooting season in 2023.
Here, Jonquel Jones and Ionescu are aiming to set up a flare screen, but the pass goes to Jones which creates some confusion. However, Ionescu seamlessly springs into a handoff, a great cut that leaves defender Lindsay Allen in the dust…
Ionescu has created an advantage off-the-ball, which she then capitalizes on by hesitating around the hedge and whipping a live-dribble feed to Jones on the roll. Now, those are the on-ball skills that have shined for Ionescu this season, she’s just accessing them by way of her work away from the ball. (It should also be noted that the space she created from Allen allowed Jones to slip the screen early and get behind the defense.)
In the absence of elite burst, one of Sabrina’s notable strengths as an athlete is, well, her strength, specifically in her upper body. In 2023, she was one of the elite screen-setting guards in the WNBA, both for her willingness to get physical and her efficacy doing so. As a reward for her efforts, she got plenty of open 3-point looks, here bouncing off Emma Cannon after a bonafide collision like nothing happened:
When she isn’t handling the rock for New York in 2024, she’s still setting many of these screens. ‘Spain’ or ‘Stack’ action is a staple for the Liberty, with Ionescu often setting that back-screen on the roller and popping out to the 3-point line when the opportunity presents itself. On both of the following plays, the defense does well to shut down the initial action, but the ball finds its way into Sabrina’s hands, and guess what attribute shines when she decides to drive to the rim…
That’s right, her strength, as fellow Olympians Jewell Loyd and Kahleah Copper are each introduced to Ionescu’s right shoulder on their ride to the rim. Now, Ionescu isn’t setting hard screens there if she’s setting them at all, but her strength is undoubtedly a main reason she excels in those positions. As she flows from off-ball into on-ball action, the same attribute is creating her value.
Led by Head Coach Sandy Brondello, the New York Liberty insulate Ionescu’s skills perfectly, from general concepts like roster construction and spacing principles to giving their star guard a handful of opportunities each game to pick up easy layups off basic ‘UCLA’ cuts…
I covered this in my last Liberty piece for Swish Theory, but Jones and Breanna Stewart constitute the most skilled front-court in WNBA history possibly, from their versatility on the defensive end to their ability to screen, shoot, and pass on the offensive end. That, as you can see in the above clip, makes up for some of Ionescu’s shortcomings. She doesn’t have to roast her defender off the dribble because she can rely on Jones and Stewart to set good screens and hit her when she makes the proper cuts and relocations.
But what’s made Ionescu a top-flight offensive player in year five of her career, despite the immense talent of her ‘supporting’ cast, is her ability to access advantages, again and again and again. The last play I’ll show is the one most representative of her 2024 season to date, a clutch bucket against Connecticut Sun, the league’s second-best defense.
Connecticut takes away the simple UCLA cut for Ionescu, as the Liberty cycle through the set to get to a Sabrina-JJ handoff. Tyasha Harris does a great job sticking to Ionescu, the Liberty still have nothing. A re-set into a Ionescu-Jones pick-and-roll that doesn’t produce anything, then a seemingly innocuous handoff back to Ionescu with seven on the shot-clock. Harris relaxes for a split-second…she’s dead in the water:
Ionescu and the Liberty flow through a handful of opportunities to create an advantage with their star guard, and it’s the one that is, at the outset, the least threatening that Ionescu capitalizes on. She’s just jogging toward the sideline to retrieve the ball from Thornton, a non-threat off the dribble, but never lets Harris off her hip while waiting for the second defender to clear the area, ultimately finishing with a soft floater on the baseline.
Unlike the man she’s frequently been compared to, Steph Curry, Ionescu’s lineup constructions allow us to claim her as a combo guard. Her backcourt partners in 2024 are either Courtney Vandersloot — the Hall-of-Fame epitome of a pass-first, table-setting point guard — or Leonie Fiebich/Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, two players above six feet tall that nicely fit a ‘3-and-D’ description. That’s a different context than the one Curry has operated throughout his prime, always as the smallest player on the floor, forever a full-time point guard regardless of how often Draymond Green has the ball in his hands.
But it’s not lineup construction that should drive this discussion, it’s looking at how Ionescu creates and maintains advantages regardless of who is on the floor with her. We often discuss the merits of a player’s on-ball and off-ball value separately, but Ionescu makes that impossible. The beauty and efficacy of her offensive game isn’t just all the various things she’s good at, but how they stack on top of each other.
Despite what Positive Residual’s impact metrics say, Sabrina Ionescu probably isn’t the best player in the world right now, and that’s okay. She might just have to settle for being the best combo guard alive, and that is one hell of a player.
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