Pride Opponents Reducing Barbra Banda’s Available Space in 2025

A few years ago, I heard a basketball analyst talking on a podcast about Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors and how his shooting prowess completely changed the geometry of how his opponents were trying to defend him. Geometry, as you all remember from high school, is the area of mathematics that is focused on understanding space and the positions of items in space.

As a mathematician, my ears perked up, since geometry is rarely referred to on NBA podcasts, and I immediately understood his point was that because Curry was such an offensive shooting threat, the opposition had to think differently about their positioning than they would with just about any other player, and they could not afford to give Curry any space on the court or else he would punish them with his proficiency at shooting the basketball.

Basketball is a much different game than soccer, in particular because hoops shots from behind the arc are worth three points while shots from inside the arc are worth two. Defenses have to consider the talents of their opponents at shooting three-pointers and adjust accordingly. Curry is the only player in NBA history with more than 4,000 made three-pointers made during the regular season (4,058), and is nearly 1,000 ahead of the next player on that list, James Harden, who has made 3,175. It can be argued that the only person to make better use of an arc than Curry was Noah, but that is for another article.

What does any of this have to do with Barbra Banda? Well, nothing and everything. I have no idea what kind of basketball player Banda is, but I know that just as defenses in basketball have had to dramatically change their normal styles to defend Curry, so too have they changed in how they defend Banda. If we take a look at some of Banda’s style-of-play statistics from the 2024 regular season and compare them to 2025, we can see the evidence of how defenses are clearly making changes to their positioning and to the space they are allowing Banda to operate in on the field (all data is from fbref.com, all metrics are on a per-90-minute basis except shot distance and expected goals, which are per shot taken):

I called these her style-of-play statistics because I think these describe what she is doing on the field and where she is doing it, or in this case, not doing it as much as she was doing it in 2024.

Let’s start with the top two: passes received and progressive passes received per 90 minutes. The Pride are completing nearly the same number of passes per 90 minutes in 2025 (357.3) as they did in 2024 (364.4), but Banda is receiving 31% fewer passes this season than she did last season. She is also receiving 11% fewer progressive passes, which are passes of 10 yards or more that move the ball closer to the goal in the attacking area of the field. Banda is healthy and still in her athletic prime, so it is not that she has lost a step and is unable to run as she did in 2024, but it is clear that opponents are making concerted efforts to track her more closely and deny her the ball all over the field.

Receiving the ball less often certainly contributes to taking fewer shots, and, unsurprisingly, Banda is taking approximately 1.1 fewer shots per 90 minutes thus far this season. In addition, she is, on average, taking her shots from 7% farther (not further, thank you, Finding Forrester) away from the goal and from areas of the field which historically have produced fewer goals, as evidenced by the decrease in expected goals per shot. I did not include her conversion rates on her shots in this table, because that is not about style of play and rather about her proficiency. It is interesting, however, to note that her proficiency is nearly exactly the same: shots on target percentage of 44.6% in 2024 and 44.8% in 2025 and a slight increase in goals per shot from 13% in 2024 to 14% in 2025. It is not that Banda’s skill has diminished, it is how her opponents are changing the geometry of their defense.

The biggest drops from year to year tie right into this, which are Banda’s 36% decrease in progressive carries per 90 minutes (progressive carries are the dribbling equivalent of progressive passes received, when a player dribbles the ball for 10 or more yards towards the goal in the attacking area of the field) and 40% decrease in attempted take-ons. Teams are simply not allowing her to get a head of steam and get into space like they did last season, to the tune of two fewer progressive carries per 90 minutes and two fewer attempted take-ons PER MATCH. Banda has actually been slightly more successful in her take-ons in 2025 (50% success vs 47.5% success in 2024), but as teams are working to have her receive the ball in less dangerous places she is choosing not to try to take on a defender as often and is less often able to receive the ball and turn on the burners towards the goal.

With fewer passes received and fewer progressive carries she is also not touching the ball as often in the opponents’ attacking third and 18-yard box, which ties back to the reduction in shots taken, and also the final metric, shot-creating actions. Banda was fourth in the NWSL last season with nearly five shot-creating actions per game, and she has dropped to 16th this season with only 3.58 thus far. Being in the top 20 is still excellent, but goals generally come from shots, and Banda’s shot creation is down through seven games. The eye test does not reveal a player who is tentative or shying away from trying to create. I think she is just being defended differently, and as yet she has not unlocked a good counter.

Even with all of this said, it is not like Banda is having a bad year or is in any danger of losing her starting role. She has dropped in shot-creating actions, but she is making use of the ones she does create, ranking fourth in goal-creating actions by averaging 0.72 per 90 minutes. She is also fifth in goals scored per 90 minutes and third in goals scored. Her goal output is also lower in 2025 than it was in 2024, but as I noted, it is still better than most of the league’s offensive players.

Increasing her output is partly on her and partly on her teammates, as they need to work together to counteract how Banda is being defended by making some changes of their own. The losses of Adriana to a new team and Julie Doyle and Summer Yates to injury have hurt the offense, as the attack cannot build on all the cohesion that those players built with Banda last season, and Ally Watt and Angelina have not contributed as much as was expected, at least not yet. As The Mane Land’s Dave Rohe said on this week’s SkoPurp Soccer podcast though, all of this is true and the team is still tied for first place and tied for the league lead in goals scored.

The Pride have two tough games coming up — on the road at North Carolina, always a tough opponent, and then at home against Kansas City, the team currently tied with Orlando at the top of the table. Winning both games will be an acute challenge, but if the Pride can do that they will create a degree of space at the top of the table, though it would be more of an algebraic than a geometric sequence, since they would be adding three points and then another three points.

Whether algebraic or geometric, the Pride will continue to work to calculus, sorry…calculate, how best to sequence their offense to unlock Banda and improve an offense that, excluding own goals, has scored only six times in their last six games. They will surely be considering all the angles in practice this week, but let’s hope that in the end the angle they choose to go with for their offensive strategy is right.