Women's basketball: PER rankings, 2009-2010

The women's basketball regular season is over and it's time to wake up the development team at CIS Blog Labs so we can produce the individual "offensive" rankings.

I say "offensive" because this is based on boxscore numbers, which are mostly concerned with offence (save for categories like blocks and steals). To be specific, these aren't the best players in CIS; these are the players with the best Player Efficiency Rating. But, as you'll see below, the two lists are much the same.

Explanations of past rankings are available here and the entire list of qualifying players is here. I had to make a little change this year: instead of 400 minutes played as the cutoff for qualifying players, I lowered it to 200. This actually doesn't make that big of a difference, because anyone at the top of the PER rankings probably played a lot (good players don't sit on the bench, assuming that their coach is conscious), but it was necessary because a few games played by the Clan were missing from boxscores and I didn't want to drop them from the list entirely. Cue obvious joke: It's like they've already left!

Let's check out the top 10:

Top 10 players in PER, 2009-2010
1. 39.9: Lindsay DeGroot, Saskatchewan (623 minutes played) (not ranked in 2008-2009, #1 in 2007-2008 with McMaster)
2. 38.6: Brittany Read, Regina (427 MP) (NR, NR)
3. 38.2: Amanda Sharpe, UNB (547 MP) (72, 6)
4. 37.2: Hannah Sunley-Paisley, Ottawa (602 MP) (NR, 64)
5. 35.2: Kelsey Hodgson, Cape Breton (593 MP) (6, 1)
6. 34.6: Laurie Girdwood, Dalhousie (445 MP) (NA, 3)
7. 31.2: Kayla Dykstra, Victoria (583 MP) (19, 2)
8. 31.2: Justine Colley, SMU (553 MP) (NR, NR)
9. 30.6: Alex Vieweg, UBC (455 MP) (NR, 83)
10. 30.5: Jessica Clemencon, Windsor (590 MP) (NR, NR)

Before we comment on these players, can we all pause and reflect on the excellent sustained performance of Kelsey Hodgson, a top-six player in every one of the last three years?

(Pause.)

Thank you.

What jumps out at me first is that we have two rookies on that list: Jessica Clemencon and Justine Colley, the OUA West and AUS nominees for Rookie of the Year. As Neate said about Colley, "It's like she was on the Canadian U19 team or something." Good luck, voters, in choosing between them.

And is anyone surprised to see Lindsay DeGroot top the list? Of course you aren't. I'm going to go ahead and say she's the only player to lead in PER for two different schools (does that make Eric Glavic the Lindsay DeGroot of football?). Saskatchewan is touch-and-go to make the Final 8, having to beat either SFU or the Alberta/Regina loser this weekend, but how can you not want to watch DeGroot play a national championship game at the school she left?

Also, just out of this list, and therefore not top-10 in all three years but merely in two, is SFU's Laurelle Weigl (11th this year, 8th last year, 9th the year before). It behooves us to point out where the rest of the Clan are, so: Weigl's 11th, Kate Hole is 30th, Robyn Buna is 62nd, Katie Miyazaki is 68th, and Matteke Hutzler (or, as the boxscores mangle it, "Hutzier") is 86th.