Better Box Score Metrics: Diving Into Depth

Which teams are the AUDL's deepest?

July 6, 2022 by Paul Würtztack in Analysis

As I have often mentioned, I focus on the leaderboards in this weekly wrap-up because it’s fun and tickles our fascination with individual greatness, but standout performances, even across a whole season, don’t tell us a great deal about which teams win. The Minnesota Wind Chill underscored this point by moving into first in the Central this past weekend despite having only one player among the top 50 in season-long E100 among qualifying players (minimum four games and 30 possessions).

Teams with more top 50 E100ers than Minnesota include Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Portland, and those with as many as Minnesota include Detroit, Dallas, Ottawa, and Seattle. This is despite the fact that E100 tends to favor those on good teams, since there are more “goal equivalents” to distribute among teammates. Want to know another team with just one player in the top 50? Carolina. In part because of unfortunate injuries, Carolina has turned down its star wattage even further, and is still comfortably ruling the South.

But what do we mean when we say a team has depth? One way to characterize it is to simply count the number of players on a team above a certain threshold. For my purposes, I set it at the median of the 553 qualifying players, which was an E100 of 8.0. This level allowed for enough players to provide delineation between teams, but few enough that every roster of 20 would have room for such a player.