Stat of the Week is a new series this year for Lacrosse All Stars and is going to be an ongoing collaboration with our good friend Zack Capozzi over at Lacrosse Reference. If you are unfamiliar with Zack’s work, he has been building an incredible resource for lacrosse analysts over the past few years.
With his humble beginning of producing win probabilities for NCAA lacrosse games, he now has a comprehensive site covering both Men’s and Women’s DI teams. What’s even better is he goes back a few seasons to provide you with more than enough data to nerd out for awhile on some lacrosse stats.
So how are we working together? For the past several years, I have been leveraging the NCAA official stats site to pull some helpful nuggets and identify big performances from each week. While I’ll still do that to a certain extent, the ability to not only identify but also show certain performances with some visual tools that Capozzi has created should create a great experience for you, the reader and big lacrosse fan!
So what we’re doing is putting together a stat of the week to highlight a game, team, or individual from Men’s or Women’s lacrosse to focus on each week. It might be from a game the previous weekend, or it might be for an upcoming matchup. Either way, it will allow me to use some stats combined with a little bit of commentary for why I think a particular stat jumps out to me in a given week.
I’ll start in the same spot that Capozzi did when starting his journey: win probabilities. With only one game from this past week making the options a little bit easier to choose from, let’s take a look at Bellarmine versus Mercer!
What’s interesting about reading this stat line is when you compare it to the actual scoring, it doesn’t look like a game with as many runs as it had. In reality, Mercer started off with an immediate goal just 14 seconds into the game following the opening faceoff. That is at least apparent given how quickly things are on Mercer’s side of 50%. But even though Mercer would score two more goals before Bellarmine was on the board, their line is relatively steady.
What happened during the game that made the chart dip sharply in Bellarmine’s direction? That was following matching three minute penalties to start the quarter and Bellarmine would go on to score two goals in just 12 seconds. When Bellarmine scores one more goal to tie things at 3-3, that’s the point late in the second quarter that the probability actually hits 50%. However, that would be the last time as Mercer would go on to net six unanswered goals through the third quarter.
So that’s the first of what will be many Stats of the Week! Come back next week to see what else catches our eye!