Victory Lap; Postseason and Post-Season Plans; Final Power Rankings
I’m going to pat my back a bit, talk about the future of this site, and show the power rankings journey, not destination
Photo Credit: John Harrison/Colorado Mammoth
Allow me to toot my own horn for a bit.
After six months (including preseason set-up) and 135 games, I completely wrapped up the 2023-24 NLL team stats for the regular season. Yes, it’s something I did in the 2022-23 season, but I tracked more information this season than last, wrote plenty for this site and IL Indoor, traveled twice to different NLL markets, and covered 11 games in person.
If that’s not worth celebrating a little bit, then I don’t know what is.
And I’m not the only person who’s gone through the statistical ordeal that is covering the NLL and providing stats in a prompt fashion every week. Cooper Perkins of LaxMetrics.com and Graeme Perrow of NLLStats.com went through the same nonsense and delivered every week. They’re up for the Tom Borrelli Award (Media Person of the Year) along with 26 other mostly deserving names; I’m hopeful they finish within the top 5 in voting. Perkins’ play-by-play abilities are some of the best in the NLL, and his site is beyond useful for end of season voting. I used Perrow’s site for stats more than the NLL’s, and it’s not particularly close.
A colleague in Halifax politely chastised me back in March for an off-hand self-deprecating remark I made at my expense, a simple “We don’t talk about ourselves like that,” a perfunctory reminder that I need to be better about how I treat and think of myself. This intro blurb is essentially that, an exercise celebrating six months of hard work finally reaching its climax.
Good job, Ty.
Aight. Enough of that. Let’s talk about the future of this site.
Photo Credit: Kalea Vizamos/San Diego Seals
Postseason and Post-Season Plans
With a bit of a breather before the NLL quarterfinals, I wanted to talk about content plans for the postseason and post-2023-24-season.
I haven’t tracked postseason stats for the previous two seasons, but that’ll change now. I’ll keep track of advanced team stats for the 2024 NLL postseason and will share that document once it’s created ahead of the semi-finals next week. It’ll be a small sample size, so take what you’re seeing from it with a grain of salt. Playoffs are a different beast than the regular season.
The next article I write will look at which teams were the best and worst at the True statistical categories in 2024, as well as examine some of the new stats I tracked this season. I’m interested in seeing what’s consistent between this season and last. I know that teams that won the face-off game won games more often than last season, although I do have an explanation for that already.
While the postseason is going on, I plan to start doing team recaps. Starting from 15th overall and working up through the standings, I’ll look at each team’s 2023-24 NLL season, their strengths, weaknesses, best and worst games, and interesting stats that stick out.
Before or during that, I’ll probably reveal my 2024 NLL End of Season Awards ballot. I turned my votes in to IL Indoor this week, and the NLL sent out media ballots on Monday. I know of the NLL ballot distribution because media colleagues of mine informed me about it; I did not receive an email from the league directing me to vote. The NLL’s stipulation to media about not revealing their ballots before the league announces the end of season award winners or risk losing their ability to vote in the future if revealed doesn’t really carry much water for me.
That should cover content through June. If there’s anything you have questions about regarding the stats project or ideas you think would be worth exploring, feel free to hit me up in my social DMs.
After that will be some well-deserved time off and planning on the site’s future.
I’m not much of a sugarcoater: I don’t know if I’ll continue this project for the 2024-25 NLL season. This entire statistics exercise takes up a lot of my free time, devouring my weekends and weeknights, affecting my mental and physical health and relationships.
There are a lot of things I want to improve about the project, namely data visualization and integrating stats into my site. Those aren’t areas of strength for me, which would mean months of work to get those remotely close to where I want. There are parts of data integration I can automate, which would give me hours back every week, but again, that’s an area that’s not necessarily in my wheelhouse. I don’t know if there’s much more I can improve regarding the data collection part, as reviewing game footage takes time. I do know I don’t want to collect more data.
I really feel like I missed more of what goes on in an NLL game than any season before. Part of my review process is watching games at 1.5-times speed so it doesn’t take three hours per game to generate data. But doing that means certain plays I normally pick up watching games live get missed during this review. This reared its head when I felt at a loss when voting for Defender of the Year; I mean, I knew it was either Ryan Dilks or Kyle Rubisch, but I didn’t feel like I had enough evidence in my mind to back that up (see the part above about how useful Perkins’ site is). That feeling is one I’m loathe to have in future seasons.
At the end of the day, this is a passion project of mine. I do not generate revenue for this work (note, this isn’t a plead for funds or anything, just a statement of fact. I already got paid to work in sports before, and it was a pittance considering the work I did and all of the stress the job gave me — kind of like pro NLL players minus the ability to touch my toes. I don’t really want that headache back unless it’s on my terms). If it’s useful to people, that’s well and good, but shaving away at my own well-being isn’t something I’m interested in doing too much more of.
Time will tell if I keep this thing going or not. I’ll cross that bridge when it’s appropriate.
For now, thank you for reading this far. And thank you if you’ve read anything of mine this season or used my stats project at all to help better educate yourself about the NLL and its teams.
Enjoy the postseason.
Photo Credit: Christian Bender/NLL
Final Power Rankings
I quit populating weekly articles with power rankings because (a) it was so much work week in and week out and (b) power rankings are dumb. But I used a motion graph last season with the Flash to show how teams bounced around our power rankings that year, and that’s really the whole point of the exercise to me. Like the team stats project, it’s a bunch of monotonous work every week for a cool result at the very end.
So without further ado, here’s how I ranked each team from preseason to the very end of the regular season. Enjoy.