I went back to watch the U23 Mixed final because Jason and I watched it last night and were struck by how seldom the women on Team Canada touched the disc. We knew that going into the game, but figured once we established a defensive strategy to limit their guys that the women would touch the disc more. So I decided to track the number of touches by each gender during the game.
The number of touches by the Canadian Men were 141 while the number of touches our guys were 129. The Canadian women touched the disc 24 times while our ladies touched the disc 51 times. If you turn those into ratios (here's looking at you Sean Childers) then the ratio of male to female touches was 5.875 for Team Canada and 2.529 for USA-X (yes, yes, yes). What does that mean, I don't really know. I guess one way to look at it is the number of men that were likely to touch the disc before a lady touched the disc. In a 4:3 game actual parity of touches would be a ratio of 1.33.
We knew our strength was in our women and the match ups we could get with them. We also felt the Canadians didn't look to their women enough (#4 Truong and #44 Bussin are ballers).
This metric isn't really meant to be an explanation for wins and losses, but more an interesting way to looking at the mixed game and the way the offense worked. I think that excellent teams can play different ways in mixed and be successful. But when I interviewed for that job I said that I wanted a team where the women were an integral part of the team. Looking at that number makes me feel like I did my job.
I'll try to get back into the Film Room and see what I can find from the NexGen stuff. I've got some work to do with Chain as well, so that might slow me down. Fortunately I don't have formal work to do for another two weeks so I'll have time on my hands.
2 comments:
It would be interesting to note in what situations the players of each sex touched the disc--who was making the handler passes, who was throwing the assists, who was catching the goals. Are the assists and goals listed on the championship site?
Yeah, it would. Sean Childers and I had started some conversations about what would be interesting to track and that should certainly be added to the list. I have the numbers for assists and goals but not the "involvement" yards that Sean uses. I guess I could go track the game but that wasn't really the point of what I was looking at. I wanted to see how well we used our women in the finals compared to the Canadians. I also wanted to make it clear that I think teams can win with really high contact ratios. That just isn't how I want to win.
Post a Comment