Men's World Champs Triangles Pt2

First Ball

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 First Ball and how that was applied in each tournament.

Today we’re looking at the 2022 FIVB Men’s World Championship. Last week, we looked at the Terminal Serving aspect. Today, we’ll look at First Ball. 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: Terminal Serving
FIVB Men: Transition

How Common Were First Ball Points?

First Ball Points were about 50% 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

That 50% is about what we see in the women’s game as well. If you look at it in terms of share of non-Terminal Serves that are killed/stopped in First Ball, the proportion is a little higher in the men’s game, because the men’s game has more missed serve. Meaning: there’s about twice as many First Ball plays as Transition plays in men’s volleyball, while in women’s volleyball, the ratio isn’t quite that high.

And of course, we saw in the juniors analysis that the First Ball share is generally less than Transition with the younger girls.

How Did First Ball Effect Winning And Losing?

The average edge of a winning team in First Ball was +5.2 and the standard deviation was 8.0. Both of these effects were bigger than Terminal Serving. The average First Ball differential was a bit smaller than the average Transition differential, but the standard deviation was higher.

The combination of (a) greater overall share of points and (b) bigger variance leads me to think that First Ball would have the greatest effect on winning. But is this what we see in the data?

The team that won First Ball won the match 75% of the time. This is comparable to other high levels of play that we’ve looked at previously. What happens if you win First Ball but lose Terminal Serving? You win the match 58% of the time.¹ This suggests that First Ball is relatively a bit more important than Terminal Serving.

How about if you win First Ball but lose Transition? You win the match 40% of the time. This suggest that First Ball is NOT as important as Transition. Big if true! First Ball is half of the men’s game! Is it possible that Transition had a bigger impact on winning?

We’ll explore this topic a bit more next week when we dive deeper into the impact of Transition. It’s also worth noting that this was one tournament and analyzing the effects of different areas of the game in one tournament is going to be skewed by the strengths and weaknesses of the particularly good teams in that tournament. But it is a worthwhile data point.

How Did First Ball Impact The Top Teams?

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