Barbra Banda Keeps Scoring But the Orlando Pride Aren’t Winning

As is often the case when writing about the Orlando Pride, we will start by writing about an Orlando player with a last name that starts with the letters b-a-n. It does not have to be that way, but with how the 2026 season is going, it pretty much does have to be that way. Thus, let us begin by looking at…Paolo Banchero.

The former Duke Blue Devil is the Orlando Magic’s best player, but basketball analysts are all over the map on his ceiling, primarily because since he joined the team he has been among the league’s worst shooters. My counter to many of the analysts is that the Magic’s offense has not been good for years, so often the team passed the ball to Banchero late in the shot clock and said “it is all on you, go get us a basket.” Unsurprisingly, this led to a lot of bad shots, as he was up against the 24-second shot clock and had to get something off, and hence his shooting percentage suffered.

That is not to say that all of his bad shots were due to this circumstance, as he is not an elite shooter by NBA standards even when wide open, but the Magic have also had really bad injury luck during the past two seasons and relied even more heavily on Banchero than they would have had starters been healthy.

Does that story sound familiar? An Orlando player who already was a focal point of the offense needing to take on an even bigger burden due to injuries? It certainly should, as the same story that I wrote about early in the season still applies now, with the other Orlando superstar with b-a-n in their name, Barbra Banda, continuing to carry the offense on her shoulders as the team just dumps the ball to her and says “it’s all on you, go get us a goal.”

And she has! Banda is averaging almost exactly one goal per 90 minutes (0.98), and leads the league with nine goals scored. She is also tied for the team lead in Opta’s “big chances created” metric with three (this also ranks tied for 12th in the league). Alas, she still does not have an assist this season, as her teammates did not convert those three big chances or the other 13 chances she created either (her 16 total chances created ranks first on the Pride and is tied for fifth in the league). In the article I referenced earlier, I showed Banda’s shots and goals as a percentage of the full team’s shots through four games, and the chart below (using data from fbref.com) shows those percentages have each slightly increased since then:

For some context, the player with the next highest percentage of their team’s shots is Trinity Rodman with 25%, and only four players have taken at least 20% of their team’s shots. For goals, the next highest player is Chicago’s Jordyn Huitema with 50% (it should be noted that the team has only scored four goals), and only four players have scored more than 40% of their team’s goals. Banda is an outlier, just as she has been ever since she joined the Pride.

Her outlier-ness (not a word, but you get it, right?) made me wonder about Banda compared to other players across women’s soccer. The aforementioned fbref.com has tracking for 16 top flight women’s leagues during the past three seasons, so I grabbed every player who had scored at least eight goals during their league’s regular season. That list contains 172 player-seasons, and if you were wondering why I chose eight as my cutoff, it is because Banda has scored at least eight goals during each of her three seasons in the NWSL.

The Zambian is one of only seven women who have reached at least eight league goals during each of the last three seasons, though that number will increase as spring-to-fall leagues like the NWSL get closer to the ends of their seasons. It will not increase dramatically, however, as only a handful of players are on two-year streaks and playing in a spring-to-fall league.

The scatterplot below shows all of the 172 seasons from the past three seasons when a player scored at least eight goals, and I included each player’s average number of shots taken per 90 minutes on the x-axis and their goals-per-shot-taken conversion percentage on the y-axis.

I then shifted the axes to reflect the median value for each, meaning that every value above the x-axis is a value that is in the top half (meaning the top 86 out of 172) of all of the goal conversion percentages, and every value that is to the right of the y-axis is a value that is in the top half of all of the shots-taken-per-90-minutes averages. Player-seasons that are in the top half of both metrics (35 seasons qualified) are in the upper right section of the chart, inside the green shaded area. Seasons that were in the top quarter of both metrics are in the smaller, darker, green rectangle, and only six player-seasons met that criteria, where the player converted a high percentage of their shots while also taking a large number of shots per 90 minutes.

Banda’s three seasons in Orlando are shown next to the arrows, and after two years of high shot volume but low conversion rate (as compared to top goal scorers), she is up into the green thus far this season. This is a testament to her incredible ability, because the 2026 team relies on Banda more than the team did in 2025 or 2024. (Marta’s 2024 season is on the chart above, as she scored nine goals that season.)

Hosts Michael Citro and Dave Rohe covered the Pride’s lack of attack on this week’s episode of our SkoPurp Soccer podcast, and in that conversation they noted how many of the Pride’s other “attackers” often never even get into the box, let alone into positions where they too could take or create threatening shots.

This brings me back to Banchero and how he was often forced to create offense out of nothing for the Magic but still was able to help the team get to the brink of upsetting the top seed in the Eastern Conference during the NBA playoffs. Banda is being asked to carry the same type of load for the Pride, and even though she has improved her conversion rate, the team is struggling more than ever because the rest of the offense has regressed. Jacquie Ovalle and Solai Washington returning from injury would certainly help stem some of that regression, but there is no timeline for either to return, and with Orlando’s lack of health thus far this season, it would not be surprising if neither player is back until after the World Cup break.

The Pride are exactly one-third of the way through their season, and with nine goals already, Banda is on pace to shatter the team’s single-season goal-scoring record with her performance through 10 games. The next four teams behind the Pride all have one or two games in hand, so the Pride are actually 13th in points earned per match.

With tough games against San Diego and Bay FC coming up, the Pride need to figure out a solution quickly, or the hill to climb to get back into the playoff spots is going to get steep like the banks of a river, and there is not going to be a banquet or a banner at the end of the season because they will have been banished from the playoff picture, even though they are getting an all-time season from Banda.

And based on what most predicted for the Pride for this season, that would be bananas.

Vamos Orlando!