Match Breakdown: Texas v Wisconsin

Could we see a Final Four rematch this year?

Earlier this week I introduced the concept of the Triangle as a way to analyze matches. There are other lenses we’ll use to view matches, but the Triangle will be a mainstay. Today we’ll analyze a match from the spring 2020-2021 NCAA Women’s National Championship using this lens. The fall 2021 championship is coming up soon, and it’s worth taking a look back at the last 3 matches of last season to see if we gain any predictive insight for this year.

We’ll start with this semifinal, which saw Texas earn the win over Wisconsin in a close 3-set match.

The Basics

Texas won in 3 sets with the scores of: 26-24, 25-19, 25-23.

Texas scored 76 total points and Wisconsin scored 66. Let’s look at the phases of the game and how they shook out.

The Triangle Lens

It’s pretty easy to see here where Texas had the edge: in First Ball and Transition. Or, to put another way, Wisconsin had the edge in the serve-pass game, but once the rally went live, Texas had a fairly dominant advantage.

Terminal Serves

There were 18 total Terminal Serves in the match:

2 Texas Aces

8 Texas Serve Errors

3 Wisconsin Aces

5 Wisconsin Serve Errors

This means that Texas scored 7 of these 18 Terminal Serves (2 Aces + 5 Wisconsin Serve Errors) while Wisconsin scored the other 11 (3 Aces + 8 Texas Serve Errors).

A side factor we’ll see is that the ability to serve for, and prevent, aces is not perfectly correlated with the ability to knock the other team out-of-system. Wisconsin only knocked Texas out-of-system on 25% of serves, while Texas knocked Wisconsin out-of-system on 36% of their serves.

So despite Wisconsin creating a 4-point advantage in this category, Texas might not agree that they lost the serve-pass battle. Which also leads us to the next aspect of the Triangle.

First Ball

There were 60 total First Ball points in this match:

25 Texas First Ball Kills

8 Texas First Ball Stops

21 Wisconsin First Ball Kills

6 Wisconsin First Ball Stops

(We’ll see more about this in a future article, but I call a “First Ball Stop” anytime you stuff block the opponent or they make a hitting error in First Ball.)

So of the First Ball points, Texas scored 33 of 60 and Wisconsin scored the other 27. So in this phase of the game, Texas erased the 4-point advantage Wisconsin had in Terminal Serves and then some. And going a bit deeper into percentages:

40% Texas Kill

12% Texas Stop

31% Wisconsin Kill

10% Wisconsin Stop

It wasn’t that Texas was necessarily blocking Wisconsin off the court in First Ball or that Wisconsin made a ton of errors. Both teams stopped each other a similar amount. But Texas was significantly more terminal in First Ball. The first thing I look at when I see a disparity like this is how many attempts and how effective the middle attackers were. The Transition game tends to be won and lost at the pins, particularly the left side, so getting production out of your middle in first ball can give your team a nice boost.

17 Texas Middle Attempts (11 in front, 6 slides)

13 Texas Middle Kills (9 in front, 4 slides)

19 Wisconsin Middle Attempts (9 in front, 10 slides)

8 Wisconsin Middle Kills (5 in front, 3 slides)

Texas middles were dominant in First Ball, with a 76% Kill. They killed 4 out of 6 slides:

And an even more impressive 9 of 11 attempts from in front of the setter.

Wisconsin’s middle production wasn’t nearly as effective: 42% Kill in First Ball and just 30% on the slide, which had been their go-to all year. Credit for Texas for slowing down Dana Rettke on the slide, something almost no other team in the country did consistently.

Transition

The third aspect of the Triangle framework is Transition. There were 64 total Transition points in this match, with Texas earning 36 of them and Wisconsin earning 28 of them.

29 Texas Kills (35%)

7 Texas Stops (11%)

19 Wisconsin Kills (31%)

9 Wisconsin Stops (11%)

The raw numbers and the percentages are both useful to look at. On a % basis, things were almost a wash. Texas was a bit more terminal at killing the ball, but not to the same disparity as in First Ball. The real disparity was in total transition opportunities.

Wisconsin generated 61 transition attacks and Texas generated 82. So Wisconsin would have had to be truly dominant in Transition in order to have any kind of edge.

It’s All Connected

This is why I use the image of the Triangle to show these three aspects of the game. They are distinct elements, but they connect to each other. A team that serves well will often make it easier on themselves to stop the other team in First Ball and create more opportunities in Transition. In this case, the Terminal Serves number was deceptive because Texas knocked Wisconsin out-of-system more, despite not generating aces.

Texas’s ability to terminate the ball in First Ball situations was also key to their edge in Transition. They simply didn’t give Wisconsin the opportunity to transition. The fact that 21 of their 54 kills came on block tools amplified this; they simply didn’t give the outstanding Wisconsin defense a chance to generate those Transition opportunities.

Next week, we’ll look at the other NCAA Semifinal: Kentucky vs Washington.