Plus Liga 2020-21 – Outside Hitters

I have been writing some posts on statistics for the current Plus Liga season, blocking, more blocking, even more blocking, setting, setting standards, serving and more and even some weird stuff. Most of the time I have tried to find different ways to look at things, and also to showcase how amazing the Science Untangled apps are. Today I will look just at outside hitters and the different areas of their games. For the record, I chose the cutoff of repetitions so that 25 players made each list so that the sample size for each is reasonable. In bold in the first column are the league averages for each skill and sub skill.

RECEPTION – I have to admit that some names here surprised me a little bit, but that is why we look at statistics in the first place. Interestingly, there are two players in the top 5 for both jump serve and float serve. Two notes, Szymanski is very close to the minimum, and the list of float serve receivers contains players who primarily overhead. Also interesting, the differences are small. 1% in expected sideout percentage corresponds to 1 expected sideout every 3-4 matches for the total, and 6-10 matches for the the sub skills. That is, the differences are tiny.

REC TYPE	NAME	+ EXPECTED	SIDEOUT %
TOTAL 61.6	SZYMANSKI 64.8	SEMENIUK 64.3	SCHOTT 63.9	LIPINSKI 63.5	CEBULJ 63.1
JUMP 58.9	SEMENIUK 61.6	LIPINSKI 61.4	SCHOTT 61.2	MIKA 61.2	ZALINSKI 61.2
JUMP FLOAT 66.1	SCHOTT 70.1	SEMENIUK 68.8	ROUSSEAUX 68.5	SZALPUK 68.3	FIRSZT 68.3

SERVE – With serve I looked at two different measures, the expected breakpoint %, which includes all serves, and the opponent reception, which excludes service errors. There is less difference here than might be expected.

SERVE	NAME	+ EXPECTED	BREAKPOINT %
TOTAL 31.5	LAPSZYNSKI 35.5	SLIWKA 35.4	SEMENIUK 35.2	LOUATI 34.2	CEBULJ 33.8
SERVE	NAME	+ OPPOSITION	EXPECTED	SIDEOUT %
TOTAL 61.6	CEBULJ 51.4	SEMENIUK 53.3	LAPSZYNSKI 54.3	LOUATI 56.2	LIPINSKI 57.3

ATTACK – With attack, there are a lot of different ways of breaking things down. A couple of general notes… crunch time and pipe have generally low sample sizes which partially account for the appearances of different names. There are a lot of the same names. Lipinski is much better in transition than after reception. All of the players in the top 5 from position 2 are better from there than position 4.

ATTACK	NAME	+ RALLY WIN	RATE
TOTAL 0.651	ORCZYK 0.742	LIPINSKI 0.737	SLIWKA 0.737	ZALINSKI 0.726	SEMENIUK 0.692
TOTAL CRUNCH 0.660	SLIWKA 0.800	LOH 0.769	ZALINSKI 0.727	SZALPUK 0.724	EBADIPOUR 0.724
TOTAL RECEPTION 0.675	ORCZYK 0.745	SLIWKA 0.741	ZALINSKI 0.731	SCHOTT 0.730	SEMENIUK 0.728
OWN RECEPTION 0.675	SZYMANSKI 0.821	GROBELNY 0.811	SZALPUK 0.804	WALINSKI 0.784	SEMENIUK 0.774
TRANSITION 0.619	LIPINSKI 0.768	ORCZYK 0.739	SLIWKA 0.732	ZALINSKI 0.720	SZYMURA 0.708
FAST 0.676	ORCZYK 0.792	ZALINSKI 0.769	SLIWKA 0.765	LIPINSKI 0.754	BUCKO 0.742
HIGH 0.568	SLIWKA 0.688	ORCZYK 0.660	KWOLEK 0.658	LIPINSKI 0.642	SZALPUK 0.630
PIPE 0.742	MUAGATUTIA 0.955	MIKA 0.944	FORNAL 0.895	SZYMURA 0.842	CEBULJ 0.829
POSITION 2 0.664	KWOLEK 0.733	KWASOWSKI 0.724	WALINSKI 0.714	BUCKO 0.703	SOBANSKI 0.676

Tagged Volleyball Analytics, Volleyball Statistics, Plus Liga, Science Untangled, 2020-21 Plus Liga

---

The total of 82 practical Coaching Tips can be found here and here.

---

Read about the great new Vyacheslav Platonov coaching book here.