I ran a few more numbers for the finals again Japan and I thought I would share them
Point distribution among players wasn't as flat as I would like. Two players only played 3 points, while four players played 10+. The ramp between those two levels was pretty even, but I wish playing time was a little more even. It is a difficult ask as those sort of things tend to fall away in the finals and during a tournament when there are many ofter things going on.
Possessions per goal for each team were decent, but not excellent. USX needed (on average) 2.77 possessions to score and Japan needed 3.18. It is always true that the team with the lower number during a game wins, so there isn't much behind a comparison of these numbers. Comparing it to previous college and club teams it falls within the range of expectation for college teams (where playing 2 is elite college and 3+ isn't unheard of) and I wouldn't expect to be at the front of that number since there isn't a ton of time to gel and the competition is better. It is pretty bad for a club team, although I haven't looked at those numbers for the mixed division in particular.
The number that is most interesting to me is percentage of possessions ending in an unforced error (defense doesn't touch the disc). USX had consistent numbers in the first and second half around 43-45%, which again isn't that bad (but could really be a lot better). The impressive thing for me is that in the 2nd half Japan had a number of 21.4% That is very elite. That means 1 out of every 5 possessions ends in an unforced error (which includes hucks that go too far). If a team I am coaching has that number then we are either winning, both teams are playing lights out, or they are getting blocks. The latter was the case this time, as we were able to slightly grow a lead despite the Japanese playing relatively error free ultimate.
5 comments:
First, thanks for writing and putting these thoughts down. I really appreciate it that you have numbers behind what you're saying here.
Second, I want to quote a point you made and then offer a different perspective / ask a question:
"Two players only played 3 points, while four players played 10+. The ramp between those two levels was pretty even, but I wish playing time was a little more even."
I hear you on this, and while as a coach you want to balance that as much as you can, I have a question about it:
Is this really a bad thing? Isn't it the Finals, where you want to give your team as much of a chance as you can to win? Unless you're winning by a substantial margin (3+ points?), wouldn't you expect this to be the case that it's skewed with the even ramp you stated?
How does this compare to other games of a close margin? Have you looked at other games such as Ring vs. Revolver in Semis at Club Nationals 2017 or Molly Brown vs. Revolution in the Finals at the US Open? I'd be curious to see stats from close games as far as points played versus other games or even Finals vs. non-Finals games for teams.
Thanks.
Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you Jacob. I started looking for the film of those games, and realized I didn't have them yet. I've got them now and will try to watch them in the next day or so to more accurately answer your question regarding whether those two games (Revolver/Ring and Molly/Revolucion) have a ramp for PT.
But I can at least answer your other questions now. First, "is that really a bad thing?" regarding the difference between most and least points played. I think the answer is pretty clearly "no" at least in general. I am going to add the PT numbers of the other U24 finals when I do a deeper analysis because I think the reason for "no" is different in two cases. With club teams, having had many games and many more practices, it is pretty clear who you think your "best" players are and therefore who you want to put where. Many of the current club teams operate with a specific O line that is going to be on the field no matter what. I'm not really an O/D kind of person, but I think in these worlds settings those positions are less clear. That is mostly because we haven't had the time to really refine things and try enough combinations to figure those things out.
That being said, and the reason I want to look at the other teams, I can imagine that it might be easier for the men's/women's to get closer to those discrepancies in playing both because their players might be doing more things they are used to doing from the college season (in my opinion is is possibly easier to slot in a center handler on to a single gender team because it isn't that different from their college team, meanwhile everything is different in mixed so we take longer to figure out where people are best suited) and also because of coaching style. It is reasonable, and I'm not saying this is the case, for a coach to come into a team knowing who they want where and what is going to happen. Each cycle if you asked me who is going to be playing on double game point as a way of getting who I thought the big contributors were going to be, I would be at least 50% wrong.
So, no, I don't think it is an inherently bad thing for there to be a large gap in PT. That being said, for this team the goal was getting people on the field in a place to succeed as much as possible. While the question of giving us "as much of a chance as [we] can to win" is also reasonable, it is less clear for me on this team than I think it might be for the other teams and definitely for an established club team.
I'll come back to "how does this compare to other games of a close margin?" when I have time to look at that film.
Martin- thanks for the follow-up. I'd really like to get into more stats and how they apply to the game (not just for numbers' sake), but it's such a tedious thing to get started with it's overwhelming.
I'd also agree with you that a team (of All-Stars) with limited practice time would tend to skew more toward equal playing time, but (after coaching HS for 5.5 years myself and there being such a wide gap between my team and others both in winning sometimes and losing a lot), I think even over the course of a tournament weekend it becomes apparent which players are the ones who are going to get more or less play time in the final (if you're in the championship).
I'm no longer coaching AND there are much better skilled and more experienced ones out there, so I'm really curious to see tables / stats you've compiled and how it varies from college to club to World's play (U24/WUCC/U20/etc), so please post it when you do that (at your leisure, of course!).
Thanks again.
I struggled to get pictures in the comments. Don't judge, I'm old and using an old platform. So I had to make a new post with graphs of the Revolver, Ring and USX PTs.
great post admin
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