Match Characteristics – Plus Liga

There was one question left over from my request for statistics on social media. I couldn’t do it directly through the Science Untangled Apps, but it was interesting enough for me to chase it up separately (i.e. ask Ben to work it out for me 😉 ). The question was about the likelihood to win from particular set scores. To answer this question we looked at matches over the last five seasons Plus Liga. It is not the complete set, but there are 703 matches included in the data set. Here is the summary table.

score	% matches	% won	3-0	3-1	3-2	2-3	1-3
1-0	100	77.4	42.5	23.9	11.0	10.4	12.2
1-1 : from 1-0	39.4	60.7	—	41.6	19.1	18.1	21.0
1-1 : from 0-1	39.4	39.1	—	21.0	18.1	19.1	41.6
2-0	60.6	95.1	70.2	18.1	6.3	4.9	—
2-1	57.5	80.9	—	62.9	18.1	19.1	—
2-2 : from 0-2	6.8	43.5	—	—	43.5	56.5	—
2-2 : from 2-0	6.8	56.5	—	—	56.5	43.5	—

A couple of interesting things for me:
– Winning the first set means a better than 77% chance of winning the match.
– Going from 0-1 to 1-1 does NOT become a 50/50 match. The team win the first set still wins 50% more often.
– The team that forces a fifth set from 0-2 wins less than half of those fifth sets. #smallsamplesizealert
– If you are down 1-2 and win the fourth, you have a better than 50/50 chance of winning the match. Just a tiny bit better. Probably also #smallsamplesizealert

And while we are looking at scores, have you ever wondered what the average set score is? From the same 703 match sample, the average score for each set is:

set number	losing score
1	20.5
2	20.4
3	20.4
4	20.3
5	11.8

I wonder if the ever so slight decrease in losing score over the four sets in significant. The average losing set score for the first four sets is 20.39. And the average set winning score? 25.4, of course.

Tagged Volleyball Analytics, Volleyball Statistics, Plus Liga, Science Untangled

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