Beach Week: World Champs Analysis Pt2

One from the men's side

This week is Beach Week at Smarter Volley. I dedicate the first three weeks of each month to indoor volleyball and the fourth week to the beach game. If you are purely here for indoor volleyball, you might want to skip this one.

Last month’s Beach Week focused on the women’s World Championship semifinal between Bukovec/Wilkerson and Muller/Tillmann.

Beach Week: World Champs Analysis

Today, we’ll look at a good one from the men’s side: the bronze medal match between the American pair of Schalk/Brunner v the Brazilians Andre/George. Let’s start with the numbers from the Triangle.

Brazil earned a 2-1 match victory and a 2-point edge in the overall point differential. If we sum up on the Triangle components:

+5 Terminal Serving
-10 First Ball
+7 Transition

As I’ve said time and time again, First Ball doesn’t matter. Waitwhat?

It’s not every day that you see a pro men’s team lose the First Ball battle by 10 points and still win the match. So what gives?

First of all, you have the Terminal Serving edge. This was a non-factor in Set 1 as neither team recorded an ace or an error.¹ But Terminal Serving made a big impact on Set 2. With a slim 19-17 lead, George strung a masterful short roller - deep line serve combination for 2 aces in a row to seal the set.

In Set 3, Brazil also gained a 2-point edge in Terminal Serving, as they had 1 ace to 0 by USA and USA missed 2 serves to Brazil’s 1.

So Brazil has a bit of an edge there, but it could have been overcome at the net by one team or the other. And Terminal Serving was a non-factor in Set 1 either way.² So let’s look at the offense/defense battle, starting with First Ball.

USA
25 First Ball Kills
9 First Ball Stops

BRA
22 First Ball Kills
2 First Ball Stops

USA had more kills and a big edge in First Ball Stops. 4 blocks to Brazil’s 1, and Brazil also made 5 unforced hitting errors in First Ball, which is a bit high for this level of play, but not unusual. With no times aced and 5 unforced errors on 46 receptions, Brazil still managed a Make Them Play rate of 89%, which is solid. USA ended up with a similar MTP; they got aced more but made fewer unforced errors.

When you just look at MTP as a combined entity, both teams were putting 9 receptions out of 10 back into the other team’s court. But within that, USA was both more terminal offensively and blocked more balls. In order to win then, Brazil needed a big advantage in Transition.

BRA
15 Transition Kills
5 Transition Stops

USA
11 Transition Kills
2 Transition Stops

And indeed, they did have a big advantage in Transition. 4 more kills and 3 more stops. I always find matches like this interesting, where one team is so much better blocking in First Ball, but the other blocks more in Transition. Sometimes it can be a single-match quirk, and I don’t know if I have a grand takeaway just based off one match, but it does make me think that we do see this phenomenon sometimes, don’t we? One team avoids the block a little more on their First Ball swings, and gives the other team a few more Transition opportunities, which leads to that team getting more confident on defense and gaining momentum into the match.

But I don’t want to read too much into psychological factors when I wasn’t there in person and I’m only watching on video.

If we look at the proportion of each phase, 58% of the match was played in First Ball. If you’re going to dominate me in the biggest aspect of the game, I need to be really strong in the other two. And that’s what happened here.

In the course of other match breakdowns, we’ve seen this pattern emerge. It’s almost where the First Ball phase is worth 1.5 phases and the other two are worth 1. So if I win First Ball and keep one of the other phases even, I’ll probably win. But if I win First Ball and lose both other phases, you’ll probably win.

Okay, so if Transition was so important for Brazil, let’s look at the situations that created Brazil’s Transition opportunities: the First Ball Attacks by USA.

I’m using the Kill - Dig - Create - Convert chain here. Quick explanations:

Kill: USA hit the ball and they uh... killed it.
Dig: BRA dug the ball, but didn't get a Transition attempt.
Create: BRA dug the ball, got a Transition attempt, but didn't score.
Convert: BRA dug the ball and scored in Transition.

I like thinking about this chain. I talked about this in the last Beach Week.

I like to visualize a defense as a chain that is equally strong. A good defensive team keeps balls off the sand, turns them into swings, and converts a lot of those swings. Different teams break down in different elements on the chain.

Some teams just don’t get enough balls up. The ball is hitting the sand on their side a lot.

Some teams dig enough balls, but they lose swings. This can be because the digs are low quality and hard to set, or because the transition setting is really bad.

Some teams get swings, but they don’t turn them into kills. This could also be because of poor dig or set quality, and it can also be due to lack of organization in transition offense.

Another thing to note is that certain balls are easier to transition than others. This is true from a global perspective (“all teams are better at transitioning ball X”) or from a micro perspective of a specific team struggling in a specific transition situation.

And when you’re evaluating your defense, you want to be mindful of this. So what do the numbers tell us about Brazil’s defense and Transition on USA’s First Ball attempts?

First, USA killed 56% of First Ball swings. That’s not bad defense by Brazil. It’s not dominant, but, even though USA had an edge in First Ball scoring, it wasn’t because Brazil was letting them score at will.³

Next, Brazil turned 84% of digs into Transition attempts. Specifically 16 out of 19. I like 90% as a long-term goal for teams. So they were fine-but-not-stellar there.

When they did get a swing, Brazil scored 38% of the time in Transition. That’s a pretty good number, but not world-beating.

If we break it down by type of attack, we see a couple of not-so-surprising things:

1. 6-of-7 USA swings that went hard and untouched by the block scored. At the FIVB Men’s level, this isn’t uncommon. Blockers need to be aggressive and touch balls, because hard swings past the block swing at a high level. The fact that Brazil was able to dig and trans one is a nice bonus for them.

2. On the flip side, half of Brazil’s 6 trans-off-FB kills came when their blocker pulled. So we see here that their serving (particularly from George) created direct points, and also created Transition opportunities. (However, USA killing 40% of the time against a pulled blocker is pretty good by them!)

3. Brazil had a bunch of Creates off block touches, but they struggled to convert. Again, this isn’t surprising. It’s hard to kill a ball on-2. But let’s look at the totals there: 6 of 19 of Brazil’s Transition opportunities⁴ came as an on-2 attempt after a block touch. That's about 1/3rd. What % of Transition Attacking do you practice as on-2 after a block touch? Is it 1/3? I doubt it! But if you're a strong men's team, you might take 1/3 of your Transition swings after a block touch. Something to think about!

But here’s what’s most interesting to me: Brazil had 15 Transition Kills, but you only see 6 here on this chart. That means they had 9 kills in “extended Transition” situations, meaning that their Transition Kill was in the 3rd opportunity of the rally- or even deeper in the rally. That’s pretty unusual. Typically, at this level, it’s more like half of your Transition Kills come in this First Ball Trans situation.

So if we take the First Ball, where we know the USA had an advantage, and the First Transition, where Brazil was good-but-not-great, Brazil is still down quite a bit.

This makes for a pretty interesting match, because Brazil had a clear advantage in serving, which is the very first touch of the rally. And then they had an advantage deep in the rallies. So Brazil was good on the really short, or really long rallies. USA dominated the in-between. And there were enough of those for Brazil to win.

Fun match to watch; check it out if you haven’t yet!

1. Another uncommon feature of this match. My guess is less than 10% of men’s pro matches contain a set with neither an ace or serving error by either team.

2. Or I suppose you might say that the fact that it was a non-factor was an advantage for the USA team.

3. It’s arguably more because Brazil was inefficient, relative to this high level of play, in First Ball themselves.

4. In this sample, and remember, we’re just looking at their Transition off USA’s FB attempts.