Men's World Champs Triangles

Terminal Serving

January is all about major-competition analysis! I’m applying the Triangle analysis to three recent major competitions in indoor volleyball: the NCAA Women’s National Championshp, the FIVB Women’s World Championship, and the FIVB Men’s World Championship. This week we’re focusing on Terminal Serving and how that was applied in each tournament.

Today we’re looking at the 2022 FIVB Men’s World Championship. Specifically, we’re looking at Terminal Serving in that competition. I’ll add links to each piece of this series as I release them:

NCAA Women: Terminal Serving
NCAA Women: First Ball
NCAA Women: Transition
FIVB Women: Terminal Serving
FIVB Women: First Ball
FIVB Women: Transition
FIVB Men: First Ball
FIVB Men: Transition

How Common Were Terminal Serves?

Terminal Serves were about 25% of points scored in the World Championship. This year’s Worlds showed a neatly symmetrical pattern of play:

Distribution Of Points
25% Terminal Serves
49% First Ball
26% Transition

This 25% number is a bit more than we see in the women’s game, because the rates of service error are significantly higher. The average Serve-In rate is just over 80% at this level of men’s volleyball, far lower than most levels of women’s play. Logic then dictates that Terminal Serving might be more impactful in the men’s game than the women’s game, but let’s see if that turns out to be true.

How Did Terminal Serves Effect Winning And Losing?

The average edge of a winning team in Terminal Serving was +3.0 and the standard deviation was 5.1. The range of Terminal Serving outcomes is a bit smaller than the other two points of the game, which make sense because it’s the smallest area (in terms of total points played) of the game.

The team that won Terminal Serving won the match 67% of the time. This is almost the exact ratio that we saw in the NCAA Power 5 in 2021. It also means that 1/3 of the time the team that lost Terminal Serving won the match. It’s a bit more common to win Terminal Serving and lose the match than it is to win First Ball or Trans and lose the match. I’m a big believer in winning the Terminal Serving game, but it has a bit less correlation to winning than do First Ball or Transition.

There was only one match out of 52 at World Champs where a team won Terminal Serves, lost the other two categories, but still won the match.¹ In general, your odds of winning the match by winning one point of the Triangle while losing the other two are low, but they were lowest of all when only winning Terminal Serving.

In total, 11% of matches were won by teams who only won 1 point of the Triangle.

52% of matches were won by teams who won 2/3 points of the Triangle.

37% of matches were won by teams who won all 3 points of the Triangle.

Overall, the idea of our goal is to win 2 out of 3 points of the Triangle held. If you win at least 2 out of 3 Triangle points, you won the match nearly 90% of the time at the 2022 FIVB Men’s World Championship.

How Did Terminal Serves Impact The Top Teams?

Let’s take a look at Terminal Serving by the top 4 teams at Worlds: Italy, Poland, Brazil, and Slovenia.