Every year, we see some great performances by backup goaltenders, forced to come into a game early or to make a start because the regular starter is unavailable. I have no stats on this at all (I know, that’s not like me) but it seems to me that there have been a lot of such performances this season.
Category Archives: Stats
Attendance draw: who are the most popular visiting teams?
I’ve written about attendance in the NLL a number of times over the years but one aspect that I have looked into but never written about is what I call “draw”. This has nothing to do with face-offs, we’re talking about how different teams affect attendance at the opposing arenas.
NLL Tiebreakers
One of the more confusing parts of watching the standings during the March to May is dealing with tiebreakers. If two or more teams are tied, how do we break that tie and decide on the position of each team in the standings? During the season, it doesn’t really matter much, but if teams are tied at the end of the season, it matters very much. The tiebreakers can decide everything from who a team plays to where a team plays to if a team plays.
Here’s a summary of the NLL’s tiebreakers and how they are applied.
Faceoffs don’t matter because they do
The question of whether faceoffs “matter” in the NLL has come up many times over the years. I’ve tried to answer it myself statistically a couple of times, and the result of my most recent investigation (with help from Cooper Perkins) showed that if your team is great at faceoffs or terrible at faceoffs, they matter but if you’re just OK, they kind of don’t. But not everybody believes it’s as cut-and-dried as that.
Stats Central: Elite scorer vs. committee
From 2018–2020, I wrote a weekly article for IL Indoor called Stats Central. Every week I’d look at various statistics and see what kind of insight we can get from them. All of those articles are listed here.
In 2019, I wrote the article below, where I looked into whether it’s generally better to build your team’s offense around a single superstar player, or to have a more “scoring-by-committee” approach. The conclusion was less than compelling, and so I wrote a different article for that week and shelved this one. I’ve blown the dust off of it, rewritten a bit, and updated the numbers to include the seasons since then.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the Lost Stats Central Article.
2024 NLL Week 18
Only three weeks to go before playoffs begin! Of course, the three weeks have 9, 6, and 8 games, so there’s still a lotta lacrosse left, and tons of playoff scenarios. Unless you’re a Las Vegas fan, your team still has a shot of making the playoffs, and if you’re a Toronto, Albany, or San Diego fan, your team is already in! There were only four games last week but a few awesome things happened, so let’s have a look.
Vinc vs. Rose II – the GSAA statistic and what it means
Recently, I wrote about Matt Vinc and Nick Rose and how their career stat lines are quite similar, other than the Goaltender of the Year awards they’ve won, where Vinc is ahead 8-0. My initial thesis was that their stat lines were very similar but Vinc has had more post-season success, which implies that the teams he’s been on have been better than Rose’s. So can we conclude that Rose, with similar stats on worse teams, is actually the better goalie? The conclusion, based on the GSAA (Goals Saved Above Average) stat, was that no, Vinc has been the better goalie.
But how does the GSAA stat tell us this? Specifically, if Nick Rose’s save percentage is very close to Matt Vinc’s, why is Vinc’s GSAA so much higher than Rose’s? Today, we’re going to see if we can answer that question by looking at this stat, how it’s calculated, and what it really means.
For the examples below, we’re using numbers from the 2023 NLL season. In 2023, Rose had a save percentage of 80.47% and a GSAA of 23.50. Vinc had a save percentage of 80.30% and a GSAA of 25.16. We can see that Rose’s save percentage was actually higher than Vinc’s, but he had a lower GSAA. Let’s find out why.
Vinc vs. Rose
I happened to notice a while ago that Matt Vinc and Nick Rose had very similar stats lines over their careers. Vinc’s career GAA is 10.73, Rose’s is 10.53. Vinc’s save percentage is 78.8%, Rose’s is 78.6%. Each was ahead of the other in these stats in some seasons. But Vinc has won an amazing eight Goaltender of the Year awards and is widely considered the GOAT, while Rose has been a finalist four times but hasn’t won any. Does it make sense that Vinc’s stats were that similar to Rose’s but Vinc has received far more accolades?
2024 NLL Week 4
A light week in the NLL with only three games, and yet thanks to the holidays I’m still getting this article up several days late. Apologies for my tardiness but on the upside, there are no Not Awesomes this week! I mean, there were things that weren’t awesome from this past week – for example, Colorado’s offense, but much of that was Georgia’s defense and goaltending. I didn’t think it was bad enough to warrant a whole Not Awesome section. Similarly, Panther City’s attendance was not awesome (in fact, it sucked) but that’s a dead horse I’m kinda getting tired of beating.
Famous lasts
There is a lot of emphasis placed on “firsts”. At the beginning of every season, every team talks about who scored that team’s first goal of the season, and there are frequently online predictions on who will score a team’s first goal in an upcoming game. That’s frequently something you see on betting sites too. And I talked last week about how great it is to see a player’s first NLL goal. But nobody ever talks about “lasts”.
NLL Chatter 