Does depth mean more than top end talent?
July 18, 2023 by Paul in Analysis with 0 comments
Week 12 Highlights
My annual public service announcement—and my penance for highlighting individual stats leaders in a camaraderie-driven, teamwork-first sport—is that depth wins games. Through 130 games this season, the highest EDGE score in a game has belonged to a player on the winning team only 58 percent of the time, basically a toss-up. But compare the EDGE scores of the ninth highest EDGE earners for each team, and the higher scorer has been on the winning team 90 percent of the time.
Ironically, the only game this week in which the “Higher 9” played for the losing team was in Salt Lake’s loss to New York. Ironic because New York has had the Higher 9 in every other one of their games this year, and despite their blinding star power, are probably more distinguished by their depth. Across the weekly and season leaderboards this week, one will find nine (nice coincidence) different Empire players, more than any other team.
In the Salt Lake game, the top end just happened to take a larger share of the action, and there could hardly be a more fitting coda to the Jagt Toss incident than him ending up as the EDGE D-Line Player of the Week by virtue of his full-game production. But the biggest chunk of production was bitten off by Ryan Osgar, who nearly had the top EDGE score of the week in the marquee matchup of the season, burnishing his repeat MVP credentials. Osgar was only bested by Garrett Martin, who has put together an impressive season in Seattle and is now, poetically, second only to Osgar in assists this season.
Dean Ramsey, Antoine Davis, and Dylan Hawkins finished in a dead-heat for EDGE-B this weekend, but only runner-up Jordan Queckboerner finds himself among the season leaders in EB100 and D-Line productivity.
For the season stats, movement tends to be marginal this late in the season, so I’ll only comment on the the CP+ leaderboard, which now includes Solomon Rueschemeyer-Bailey, following his 91-for- 92 completion weekend. SRB’s 2022 season was the inspiration for the metric itself, and he joins Matt Gouchoe-Hanas, Jacob Miller, Matt Smith, Thomas Edmonds, and Elliott Chartock as players who were in the top 50 of CP+ in 2022 and who are now in the top 10 in 2023. This small piece of anecdotal evidence suggests that a usage-weighted approach that removes Qincs may be more useful in identifying repeatable efficiency than unaltered completion percentage; based on the AUDL player stats page, of 2022’s top 50 players in completion percentage, none are in the top 10 for 2023, and only one (Paul Krenik) is currently in the top 25.
The EDGE, D-Line EDGE, and EDGE-B leaderboards from Week 12 are below.
Better Box Score Metrics: Who Can Take Down the Empire? [AUDL Week 12, 2023] is only available to Ultiworld Subscribers
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