Applying EDGE methodology to the 2025 MVP race and checking out the opening of the new PUL season.
April 16, 2026 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.
The First Two Weeks of the PUL
The PUL’s revamped stats hub and greatly improved turnaround times allow us to add the league to the regular BBSM schedule. With two — and soon three — leagues generating weekly data, BBSM will be hustling to keep up. The plan is to get the EDGE metrics out as soon as possible by limiting commentary until certain pole-markers of the season, and by updating the WUL and PUL on alternative week, which coincides with the desire to have two weekends of results anyway, given the small number of games during any one weekend.
As with last week’s WUL update, the general format is to provide leaderboards according to our inarguably correct GameRater and SeasonRater,1 as well as full EDGE metrics for all players. Since a season update is premature for the 2026 PUL season, we’ll start with a 2025 PUL wrap-up.
Table 1 shows strong alignment with the PUL’s own 2025 regular-season MVP podium of Jolie Krebs (winner), Alex Barnett, and Ashleigh Jentilet.2 Those were indeed the three highest EDGE totals of the season. However, SeasonRater (a proxy for MVP) adds a dollop of productivity and efficiency to the mix, and Kira Flores’s league-leading E100 (EDGE per standardized possession) and 3rd-highest PER moves her ahead of Jentilet for the third podium spot.
It’s not clear why Barnett would be excluded from Offensive Player of the Year consideration, given that she was clearly worthy (including a lead-leading PER), and winning OPOTY seems more distinguished than running second in any other category. Instead, the PUL bestowed OPOTY on Ella Juengst, a solid choice, although we rated the DC duo of Flores and Kat Ritzmann slightly ahead of Juengst.
The infallibility of GameRater and SeasonRater should not be questioned just because we continue to tweak the weightings. EDGE-per-team-game is now weighted as 80 percent of the total, on the basis that it most closely reflects a player’s impact on a game, including the fact that playing more comes with the risk of committing more turnovers with fatigue. The E100 and PER components, at 10 percent each, add just a dash of flavor that reflect the impact on each point played and efficiency. ↩
Typically, the advantage of excluding the post-season is that teams will have played the same number of games, but that was not true for Milwaukee and Minnesota, who each played 5 games instead of 6, so we have adjusted counting-based stats like EDGE on a per “team-game” basis. ↩
Better Box Score Metrics: PUL Weeks 1-2, and PUL’s 2025 Awards Review is only available to Ultiworld Subscribers
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