The Portland Fire are 1-2, having played 100% of their games at home and 66% of their games against the same opponent. That opponent, the New York Liberty, also shot the leather off the ball in both of those games. Almost none of their team stats should be believed at this point. Is that going to stop us from looking for kernels of truth? Not during these three days off, we’re not.

Defenses in basketball are hard to track with counting stats: rebounds, blocks, steals, and opponent shooting percent are common but shallow metrics. Luckily, more telling details are readily available in our digital age: we can track opponent shooting percent, and shooting frequency, by different distances from the basket, letting us know what kinds of shot attempts teams are giving up, and how well opponents are making different shots.

After the eye test already confirmed this, the Fire are getting cut to death. Opponents are shooting from 0-2 feet from the rim (“at the rim”) at about average rates for percent made and attempts made, but the Fire give up more assisted shots at the rim than any other team in the league so far. New York was excellent at pressuring the Fire from three-point range, which likely opened up all of the cuts to the rim that worked so well for them. I expect this number to come down to league average, but I also hope the Fire coaching staff are treating this as a problem that needs addressing.

Portland is also giving up some of the easiest three-pointers in the league, allowing the third most assisted three-pointers and having opponents shoot 41% from beyond the arc, the highest in the W. This also felt obvious in-the-moment of the two New York games, and even in the first Sky game. The team is a half (or full) step behind other teams’ offenses, which isn’t a shock for an expansion team like Portland, but it’s not great that the opportunities are coming this frequently or being cashed in this successfully.

This is a noisy stat that I actually really like as a subjective measure of a player’s impact. It calculates how many points the team scores per 100 possessions minus how many points the team gives up per 100 possessions; it does that for the minutes an individual player is on the court, and then compares it to the minutes that the same individual is on the bench. Let’s look at some:

Are you telling me that a Fire team with Carla Leite on the floor scores 44 more points per game than one without? Kinda, but not really. This stat is certainly speaking to the injury and roster status of the team, specifically at Carla’s point-guard position: they got killed in the minutes that rookie Jordan Harrison played against the Sky, and they got killed when Leite and then Kamiah Smalls were injured in the second New York game. That’s a lot of noise for the off-court numbers.

But that on-court number is totally believable: the offense has never looked better than when Leite, and the rest of the starting 5, were on the court against New York last Tuesday. There is a pretty definitive statistical case that Carla has been the Fire’s best player so far, and while the on/off comparisons will likely change, we should already be aware that Carla Leite is just a damned good basketball player.

Now here is a noisy stat: the Fire are basically the worst team to ever exist when Meg Gustafson is on the court. You can tell this isn’t true, or isn’t a Meg Gustafson specific problem, by the Fire’s last game in which Gustafson was almost the only player in her subbing group to score any points.

I think these numbers are resulting from the inexperience of the bench unit for the Fire, but also from the subbing pattern that the Fire use, which is unlike anyone else’s in the league. Gustafson, and the rest of the second unit, are subbing into the game to play against the opponent’s best players in the first and third quarters. A.K.A., they’re getting put in a tougher place than most bench groups are.

These numbers are true in their revealing of defensive issues from the bench group, but we should not be singling out Megan for this feature. Does Gustafson have improvements to make in their pick-and-roll coverages and foot speed and rotations? Sure, but so does everyone else on the team. I expect these numbers to balance out.

The Fire have the 4th best starting 5 in the league.

How does that sentence sit with you? Because it’s true (so far)!

The starting unit of Carla Leite, Bridget Carleton, Nyadiew Puoch, Emily Engstler, and Luisa Geiselsöder are +5.5 per 100 possessions when they play together. The Fire are not just a winning team with that group so far, they are a truly good one.

The only groups that are better: Atlanta’s starting five, Phoenix’s starting five, and Minnesota's starting five.

The Liberty? Nope. The Aces? Nah. Chicago? Not close.

But, let’s be fair, and cut into the reality of these numbers: these stats are from groups of five that have played more than seven minutes per-game so far, meaning any unavailability or subbing oddity eliminates inclusion. This Fire group has also played just 22 total minutes of basketball. Extrapolating from that number is farcical (but fun!!).

Let’s end on a sobering and truthful one: Portland shoots the least amount of free-throws per game in the league (18.3/game). If Carla Leite isn’t playing, this team basically never draws fouls. They have shot less free throws than their opponent in every game so far. They are fouling at the 5th most frequent rate, which is better than 1st, but is still a discrepancy that hurts the team’s ability to grind-out wins.

Portland, and coach Sarama, have talked about their “shot profile” and wanting to generate certain kinds of offense, and while this mostly means shooting three’s (PDX takes the 3rd most in the league) and shots at the rim (PDX takes the 3rd least in the league [that’s not good either]), free throws are certainly a part of the equation that they will want to balance.

What has stuck out to you so far? What numbers are you interested in crunching? What other fake news should we acknowledge, but only passingly? Let me know, in an email, in a text, in a voice memo, or in this questionnaire form that is always available:

See y’all on Monday for what is lining up as a strong contender for the Portland Fire’s second win of the season. 👀