Women's basketball PER rankings, 2007-2008

Back in October, we took a look at some of the best players of the 2008-2009 season, using Player Efficiency Rating. What follows is the same, but for the previous year.

The more astute readers may have wondered why it took seven months to produce the PER rankings for that season; these same readers will no doubt wonder why it took 22 months to produce these.

Quite simply, I forgot I had the individual game logs for the 2007-2008 season (for 2008-2009, I was just lazy), and since there's no easy way to go back and get those boxscores now, I figured I wouldn't be able to do the rankings for that year. This post, however, proves that assumption incorrect, as I found the files I needed to build the rankings. If you're wondering, the men's results aren't reported here for uninteresting technical reasons, related to how the CIS website stores boxscore data for men vs. women. But at least we can gain some more perspective on the women's game, and in a couple of months, we'll have three years of results to learn from.

(Note: The full list, for anyone playing 400 minutes or more, is here, along with the 2008-2009 results you should already be familiar with.)

So we'll get right to the top 10 in PER from 2007-2008 :

1. 39.0: Lindsay DeGroot (McMaster)
2. 37.8: Cassandra Carpenter (Laurentian)
3. 34.0: Alaine Hutton (Toronto) (No. 22 the following year)
4. 33.7: Kate Hole (SFU)
5. 32.7: Katherine Quackenbush (Memorial)
6. 32.2: Kelsey Hodgson (CBU) (No. 1)
7. 31.1: Bess Lennox (Western) (No. 9)
8. 30.4: Sharon Hollinshead (Brock)
9. 30.1: Laurelle Weigl (SFU) (No. 8)
10. 28.9: Erica McGuinness (UBC)
    

Hole and DeGroot stand out because they did not play enough to be ranked last year (in DeGroot's case, she hardly played at all before transferring to Saskatchewan). Presumably if you know Kate Hole as the alliterative blogger, you also know she's not just a role player on the stacked Simon Fraser squad.

Speaking of the Clan, their recent offensive dominance is apparent, if less extreme, in this year of data. Clan players occupy the fourth, ninth, 12th, 44th, 49th, 78th, and 85th spots in the top 100; compare that to 2008-2009, when they were eighth, 19th, 20th, 23rd, 29th, and 73rd.

Now, how about players in the top 50 both years, and who are still active this year? Well, this reads like a CIS fantasy team (and one that might beat a number of MUBL entries).

Top 50 in both years, with ranks in 07-08 / 08-09:

1. Kelsey Hodgson (Cape Breton) 6/1
2. Kayla Dykstra (Victoria) 19/2
3. Laurelle Weigl (Simon Fraser) 9/8
4. Renata Adamczyk (Laurier) 15/10
5. Victoria Thistle (Memorial) 29/11
6. Darrah Bumstead (Laurentian) 27/14
7. Marie-Michelle Genois (Laval) 47/18
8. Matteke Hutzler (Simon Fraser) 44/20
9. Kari Everett (Cape Breton) 37/25
10. Amanda Anderson (Western) 28/28
11. Ashley Hill (Calgary) 20/34
12. Caitlin Gooch (Winnipeg) 39/43
    

Okay, maybe not much of a "team," with just three guards vs. nine forwards, but there's representation from every conference and it certainly could be a list of all-stars. So the various statistical exercises that we're going through here are, at the very least, capturing the right kinds of players.

You'll notice that two CBU players are listed, which is part of the reason we were so high on them entering the year. It will be a shock if the Capers, currently 9-0, fail to make it to Hamilton for the Final 8 in March. You can also see why the phrase "the next Kelsey Hodgson" is high praise.

Finally, there's one player in the "top 50 both years" group whose name has never come up on this site: Susanne Canvin, who was 21st in '07-08 and 45th in '08-09, but doesn't seem to be playing this year. As best as I can tell, she still has eligibility remaining (those two years should be her second and third or third and fourth CIS years). If she doesn't play again, she deserves a mention here, especially when our focus on the top 10 in each sport sometimes causes us to miss out on those who excel for sub-.500 teams.