Which players made the difference in who took home the title?
September 3, 2024 by Paul Würtztack in Analysis with 0 comments
Before we get to our EDGE results from Championship Weekend, let’s talk briefly about the standout elements of the weekend—the wind. It’s not just that ultimate is affected by wind; the game is at its mercy, perhaps more so than for any sport (other than sailing). And the DC-Minnesota game, well, mercy!
For stats purposes, it’s a bit of problem. Players in the Minnesota-DC game had 3-4 times as many turnovers as they would typically have in a game; Rowan McDonnell had six throwaways, one less than the seven he had for the entire rest of the season. The +/- metric only exacerbates the problem: among the top 20 in +/- in the MIN-DC game, only two players had more than 70 throwing yards; among the bottom seven, six did. In short, the anti-thrower bias of +/- that exists in still conditions only gets worse with each mile-per-hour increase in wind.
The distortions to a player’s stats ledger is not only through the randomness of playing a in a particularly fierce wind-tunnel game, but also through the non-random effect that certain venues may be consistently windier than others. Doesn’t the Wind Chill’s own Sea Foam Stadium have a reputation for wind, which could help explain why a championship-winning team had the 5th worst completion percentage in the league this season?
EDGE of course was designed to help account for wind effects by pegging the cost of turnovers to a game’s scoring efficiency (SE). The 28-percent scoring efficiency of the Wind Chill-Breeze game was the lowest of the season, slightly lower than the 0.30 SE in the Week 7 matchup between Madison and Detroit, also wind (and rain) affected. While EDGE provides a much fairer picture of handler contributions—wind or no wind—I’m not sure that even EDGE fully compensates for impossibly windy games, given that SE tends to decline linearly with increasing wind, while turns appear to increase exponentially. It would be nice to isolate the wind effects from good defense/poor offense (similar to how baseball accounts for park effects, including playing at Coors Field), but we’ll need a lot more wind data to do that.
Better Box Score Metrics: EDGE Stats from the ‘Ship [UFA Playoff Championship Weekend, 2024] is only available to Ultiworld Subscribers
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