Women's World Champs Triangles Pt3
Transition Game
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 Transition and how that was applied in each tournament.
Today we’re looking at the 2022 FIVB WOmen’s World Championship. Specifically, we’re looking at the Transition side. 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 Men: Terminal Serving
FIVB Men: First Ball
FIVB Men: Transition
How Common Were Transition Points?
Transition points were about 37% of points scored in the Women’s World Championship. If we break it down by Triangle phase:
16% Terminal Serves
47% First Ball Points
37% Transition Points
Very similar to the NCAA. A touch more First Ball, a touch more Terminal Serving, a touch less Transition. In most FIVB World Championship matches, there were more points scored in Transition than First Ball in 9 out of 100 matches. In the NCAA, this figure was 13 out of 63. At both levels, First Ball is a bigger chunk of the game, but the FIVB level sees a bigger disparity.
One thing that we saw on in the NCAA Transition analysis was that, despite First Ball being a slightly bigger portion of the game, Transition still had a massive impact- arguably bigger than First Ball. Let’s see if that held true for FIVB Women.
How Did Transition Effect Winning And Losing?
To start with, the winning team won Transition 84% of the time. Crazy! Almost as big as the NCAA. The average edge by the winning team was 7.8 points in Transition. Not as big as the NCAA, but still bigger than the First Ball differential. So again, we see Transition being a smaller part of the game but a bigger gap between winning and losing teams.
Another factor is that significantly more matches in the NCAA tournament were Dominant, meaning the team won all 3 sides of the Triangle.
Let’s bring up the “two sides of the Triangle” or “one side of the Triangle” numbers:
Number of Two Sides Of The Triangle Wins:
10 Terminal Serving + First Ball
8 Terminal Serving + Transition
32 First Ball + Transition
Number of One Side Of The Triangle Wins:
1 Terminal Serving Only
5 First Ball Only
8 Transition Only
We mentioned this previously, but Terminal Serving just wasn’t a huge win factor in the Women’s World Championship this year. Tough to differentiate whether First Ball or Transition was more important but clearly the combination of the two was critical.
If you’re interested in studying them, the 8 matches where teams won only Transition and still won the match were:
Turkey > Thailand
China > Argentina
Italy > Belgium
Canada > Germany
Poland > USA
China > Netherlands
Serbia > USA
Brazil > Italy
So… speaking of 2 of the last 4 matches of the tournament:
How Did Transition Impact The Top Teams?
Let’s take a look at Transition by the 4 semifinalists: Serbia, Brazil, Italy, USA.
Just as Texas dominated the Transition game en route to an NCAA Championship, Serbia dominated the Transition game en route to a World Championship. Not by quite the same margin, but a really big edge nonetheless. And Italy wasn’t too far behind in that category. Both of them relied heavily on the Transition game.
Brazil was solidly positive, with USA the only team not positive in this area.
Let’s look at the efficiencies:
And then we’ll go differential from the average transition efficiency of 0.231:
Serbia with a solid defensive performance, but dominant offensively. Italy was plus offensively but outstanding on the defensive side of the ball- as they were in First Ball. Brazil moderately positive in both areas.
USA is interesting because their offensive was solidly positive in First Ball but well below-average in Transition. Their defense was slightly above-average, but the offense lagged behind.
Transition In The Final Four
Let’s look at the 4 medal-round matchups: the semi-finals of Serbia - USA and Brazil - Italy, the finals between Serbia - Brazil, and the bronze medal match of Italy - USA.
A lot of similarities here to what we saw in the Final 4 of the NCAA; Transition absolutely dictated the end of the tournament. Italy dominated Transition for almost the whole tournament, but it wasn’t there in the semi-finals. And what’s more, it was their Transition defense that let them down: Brazil hit 0.379 in Transition in the semi-final.
And we see that happen a fair amount, don’t we? A time rides a strength until a team is good enough to beat them in that area of the game. It happens even to the best teams.
The two USA matches are interesting because, in both cases, the Transition differential was such a big component. In particular, they won both Terminal Serving and First Ball against Serbia, but the 6-point deficit in Transition was too much to overcome.
Conclusions
So there we go, that wraps up our Major Competition Analysis January for the FIVB Women’s World Championship. I’ll wrap things up on Friday with the Men’s World Championship and include some comparisons. Then we’ll rotate back to Beach Week and wrap up January with some Mailbag questions from you readers.
Things have been really numbers-heavy lately, so as we get into the spring, we’ll shift away from statistically-oriented posts to some teaching and learning concepts, including breaking down my favorite coaching books and some takeaways that might give you all new ides.
I am curious to hear from the readers. What were your takeaways now that you see all the numbers? There have been a few good comments already over the past couple months as I’ve been putting out the NCAA Tournament analysis and now this Major Competition Analysis, so keep them coming. I’ll hit all them in the mailbag at the end of the month.