Parity - Week 4 Highlights

If left to the strong female players (not just handlers) to equalize the distribution, it would require them to be even more active than they probably already are. The fact that the distribution is even close is likely thanks to them. What's likely a better model to equalize the distribution is to encourage those women who aren't as strong to be more active. And I'm not even implying that it requires coaching. It might just require encouragement to go and take the cutting lanes while also telling the guys to open their eyes for once and not cut a girl off while she's busy coming in from a deep cut that would yield you a free 20 yard gain.

Regarding Alex and CK's points -

Certainly we wouldn't expect an even split of touches for every game, and while last night's games are interesting for an example I'm sure there's a lot of variation on each team from week to week.  I'm also not certain you can draw significant conclusions from specific percentage touches on a team by team basis - however as the sample size grows (i.e. one night's games, or all the games until now) it is interesting to note averages and a significant deviation from 33% would be cause for conversation.  

Unless team personnel is significantly gender skewed in terms of handler vs. cutter I think it's a reasonable team goal to hope for something in the 26-40% range for women's targets.

Mehmet

Christine Beals has you beat this week on that subject Derek - 5 goals, with her only touching the disc outside the end zone once.  It was clinical, like she said "I don't deign to cut unless it's for a point!".

Why would it be a bad thing to have the majority of your touches involving goals and assist?  There's a lot of value in being the goal scorer or thrower.

To be honest, I've seen very few instances of players playing for "salary efficiency". I think most people conduct themselves as they normally would on the field. You see each player's overriding competitiveness hit the field and the salaries just put a number to their performance.

It's interesting to see all the different ways we can measure those performances and I think in the end we'll still back to the idea that it's impossible to find a set of perfectly qualify any individuals contributions to a team. 

And it's like that for every other sport whether we realize that or not.

We don't have "targets" for defense.

The issue of how to measure defensive targets is one I've thought a lot about. For mostly selfish reasons, I'm very curious whether I have few Ds because I'm bad at baiting (or bad at getting a jump on the disc, or just bad at frisbee), or because my marks see the disc less often than other players or because my marks tend to drag me away from the action (where I'm less likely to get an unintentional poach D). Comparing my total number of defensive targets per game to that of my linemates would be a basic look; comparing how I do against Mark Donahue to how other defenders do against Mark Donahue would be a deeper look.

For all my thinking about it, though, I don't know that there's a good way to capture it with our current system. You could match up O players and D players prior to the start of the point (easy enough for non-pull points), but that misses obvious things like switches as well as more nuanced defensive decisions like intentional lane-poaching. (Are you still "targetted" as a defender if you're fulfilling Mehmet's teamwide strategy of double lane-poaching, and the handler swings the disc to "your" mark?)

All that to say, I vote in favour of radio collars.

We have +/- per point start (O or D), but we don't have +/- per O/D attempt.

This is another thing that I'd like to see. Calculating a player's (or line's) offensive or defensive efficiency just based on the start of the point and the end is pretty crude, and I think also loses a lot of important (or at least interesting) data about things like the average number of turnovers per point and the likelihood of a line surrending or scoring a goal after each turnover.

It also seems like a pretty straightforward software update/Google sheets calculation. We already record the turns, so it's just a matter of parsing the data. (I am not a software guy. Matt, you can tell me how (not) easy that is later.)

This was meant to be a reply to Keats's post a little above here, but the forums are being weird with their indentation.

Ian, I like your post too though :)

*Like*

I totally agree with all of this.

It's a great league to play in, both from a learning perspective and for the heckling.

The latter adds a little extra spice to the atmosphere and weight to each decision, knowing that you could be judged for (not) doing something but it's all in good fun,

All slagging and joking aside, there's some very good players in the league which are sharing their knowledge with the weaker players and that brings the whole level of play up a step or two.

I'm constantly asking Sina and Amos questions, (and then asking somebody who actually knows ;)) so I get a sense of how they see the game or how a given play should work, because they have the experience to have seen far more games and plays than me.

As a player looking to improve my abilities and knowledge, that kind of recurring interation with high-level players is pretty invaluble.