Posted by I have a lot of Olympic data with nowhere to go, so I have written a few posts looking at the different phases and skill areas. There was a general overview comparing the last two Olympic tournaments, a specific look at attack focusing on attack type comparing the last two Olympic tournaments, and a fun one proposing a new defensive metric. As always the analyses here were done using the Science Untangled suite of apps, which I very highly recommend. Some of the metrics used here should be standard, but are not yet. Click here for descriptions.
My initial thesis was to find out who was the best server at the 2024 Olympic Games. I figured that a good perspective was to look at two of the biggest names in the most recent history of volleyball, the former Zenit Kazan teammates Matt Anderson from the USA and Wilfredo Leon from Poland. The obvious starting point is to think of the object of serving. Everyone at home now… to the win a breakpoint. So how do the players rank in winning points when they go back to serve?
| RANK | PLAYER | BP% |
| 1 | BRUNO | 47.1 |
| 2 | BRIZARD | 43.8 |
| 3 | BIENIEK | 41.0 |
| 4 | ANDERSON | 40.6 |
| 5 | LUCARELLI | 39.7 |
| 18 | LEON | 36.0 |
| AVERAGE | 32.1 |
Well, there you go. Case closed. Leon is overrated. Although to be fair he is still above average. And setters, hey! Who would have thought. But that didn’t feel right somehow. Breakpoint percentage is really a team statistic, with the server accounting for only a part of the outcome. How can we dig down a little bit deeper to the serve itself? Everyone sees the aces, let’s have a look at that.
| RANK | PLAYER | Ace% |
| 1 | LEON | 17.4 |
| 2 | HUBER | 15.4 |
| 3 | NISHIDA | 15.3 |
| 4 | ČEBULJ | 13.6 |
| 5 | BRIZARD | 13.5 |
| 28 | LUCARELLI | 5.2 |
| 31 | BRUNO | 3.9 |
| 32 | ANDERSON | 3.8 |
| AVERAGE | 6.2 |
That tells a very different story indeed. Leon serves an ace every 6th serve, while Anderson only once every 25(ish) serves. Which turns out to be well below average. But when we think about it, aces are partially an accident especially considering the small sample size of the Olympics. Re sample size, the most number of serves by a single player was 106 (Anderson, by coincidence). I made the qualifying level 51 serves. If I had made it 52, Bruno would have been off the list. If aces accounted for only one in 25 of Anderson’s serves, what happened to the rest of them? Maybe he had a lot of positive serves. Luckily we have expBP% to find out exactly that.
| RANK | PLAYER | expBP% |
| 1 | LEON | 39.7 |
| 2 | IVOVIC | 37.7 |
| 3 | NISHIDA | 36.5 |
| 4 | BRIZARD | 36.4 |
| 5 | ČEBULJ | 36.3 |
| 12 | BRUNO | 34.6 |
| 33 | LUCARELLI | 31.1 |
| 34 | ANDERSON | 31.0 |
| AVERAGE | 32.1 |
Somehow including all of Anderson’s serves drop him even further down the list. The effectiveness of Anderson’s serve is below average while Leon’s serve is the most effective, even allowing for the fact that he ranked 6th in most service errors. Incidentally Brizard ranked 4th in errors, and Nishida 8th, showing fairly conclusively (hopefully) that service errors are not (necessarily) related to serve effectiveness. How do we explain that discrepancy between the effectiveness of Anderson and Leon’s serve with the team outcome of winning points? The hint should be in how I framed the question. Scoring breakpoints is a team activity, of which serving is just one part. If we refer back to the post on Defensive Rating, we see that USA was a very good defensive complex team. Their defensive ‘added to’ the quality of their serve. Poland on the other hand ‘lost’ point opportunities that they had gained through good serving. And if we refer back to the very first chart, showing Bruno and Lucarelli, Brazil had the best Defensive Rating.
What does all that add up to? Leon is a better server than Anderson. Anderson’s team is better at using his serve.
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