How can advanced stats take us beyond just goals and assists from the Club Championships?
December 1, 2025 by Paul Würtztack in Analysis
Welcome to Better Box Score Metrics, our analytics column focused primarily on semi-pro statistics and discovering new ways to use data to explore ultimate. It is anchored by EDGE, which we can summarize as converting goals, assists, blocks, turnovers, and yards gained into one metric, while accounting for the scoring and turnover environment.
Let’s start with this question: what’s your assessment of Yina Cartagena’s stat line from Club Nationals?
| G | A | B | T | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Y. Cartagena | 3 | 21 | 2 | 17 |
Her 21 assists will impress you, but perhaps years of +/- exposure has you subtracting out the 17 turns and thinking, “Eh.” After all, her +/- average of 1.5 per game was 62nd in the division. Good, not great, right? Well…
We’ve commented often on the shortcomings and biases of +/-. Applying equal weighting to the four factors is beautifully simple, but also an inherently flawed, insensitive to differences in risk or competitive conditions. EDGE was designed to address these issues, but it leans heavily on yardage data. Because Club Nationals is the biggest competition for which we have good quality GABT data but no yardage data, this is a good time to answer a long-standing question: if GABT is all you have, how should you weight the components?
Recalibrating +/-
The BBSM approach to answer this question, naturally, is to weight the components in a way that best reproduces EDGE outcomes. After all, EDGE is an arithmetic relationship like +/-, but with the one additional factor of yards.
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