Welcome to Beyond the Basics!
My name is Zack Capozzi, and I run LacrosseReference.com, which focuses on developing and sharing new statistics and models for the sport.
The folks at USA Lacrosse Magazine offered me a chance to share some of my observations in a weekly column, and I jumped at the chance. Come back every Tuesday to go beyond the box score in both men’s and women’s lacrosse.
The differences in the rules between men’s and women’s lacrosse add a unique flavor to the sport. From an analytics perspective, there are facets of the game that require totally different approaches. Free position attempts are one such area.
If you go on the NCAA site, you get some basic stuff: free position shooting percentages for players and teams. But this is only a partial story because free position strategy is more complex than simple stats can convey. So today, I’m going to explore a few novel stats that I’ve created around free position attempts. Consider this a surface-level introduction; if you want to go deeper, my contact info is at the end of the article.
FREE POSITION UTILIZATION
The first stat we’ll look at is Free Position Utilization. This is calculated by taking the number of free position attempts in which the team actually attacks the goal divided by the number of free position attempts awarded. Don’t be fooled by those Charlotte North highlights; teams will often choose to forgo the free position opportunity and continue running their offense, but it’s not uniform. Some teams “use” their free position attempts at much higher rates than others.
Take Bucknell for example. The Bison have been awarded 41 free position attempts this season, and they’ve attacked the net on every single one. Love the aggressiveness. The rest of the top five in terms of free position utilization are Wofford, Manhattan, Saint Bonaventure and UMBC.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have High Point. Of the 42 free position attempts the Panthers have been awarded, they’ve attacked the goal on just 22 of them (52 percent). The other four teams who’ve “used” their free position attempts the least often include Georgetown, Stony Brook, Richmond and Winthrop.
And this is hugely important from a scouting perspective. If you scour the NCAA site, you can figure out how many shots a team has taken out of free position attempts, but this doesn’t give you any idea of how likely they are to attack the goal after being awarded a free position. And if you don’t know how likely a team is to “use” a free position attempt, you can’t accurately judge the risk/reward from aggressive defense.
Let’s assume that aggressive defense raises the chance of a foul and of creating a turnover equally. If you assume that your risk of allowing a goal goes up when a free position is awarded, then the trade-offs involved in committing fouls are dependent on the likelihood that the opponent will actually take advantage of the free position chance. If they are a team that uses those opportunities at a lower rate, then the risk of fouling is lower, while the chance of causing a turnover stays the same.
If I were a defensive coordinator, I’d want to know at what rate my opponent uses their free position chances.
FREE POSITION SHOOTER PERCENTAGE
You may have read the section heading as Shooting Percentage. Read it again. Free Position Shooter Percentage is less about success rates and more about trickery.
While most free position attempts result in a shot from the player who was fouled, sometimes, a team will attack the goal off a set play where the player fouled passes to another player who takes a quick shot. In the NCAA stats, this doesn’t show up as a free position attempt, but, in reality, it is. If it’s a set play off a free position being awarded, it counts in my book. It matters because the defense needs to be prepared for it in a different way than it prepares for normal offensive sets.
I think of the shot-off-one-pass sort of like a steal or bunt in baseball. It doesn’t happen often, and part of the value of the play is the element of surprise. If a pitcher/catcher knows that a team is stealing, they are going to throw the runner out 9 times out of 10 (high fastball, catcher ready to go). But the surprise factor makes it a much more effective strategy.
Coaches: feel free to contradict my bunt analogy, but that’s how I’m thinking about this stat. Knowing which teams are more likely to try and surprise you goes a long way to neutralizing the value of the strategy.
And as we did with free position utilization, we can sort through the play-by-play logs to see which teams are most likely to have the player awarded the free position actually take the shot. So far, 31 teams have not yet used the shot-off-one-pass trick. Boston College has been awarded 70 free position attempts, and of the 57 that they’ve “used,” every single one was a shot taken by the player awarded the free position. Several of those have, of course, been Charlotte North highlights.
FREE POSITION RATE ALLOWED
So far, we’ve focused on how teams use the free position attempts that they are awarded. Obviously, this is of interest to defensive coordinators creating a game plan. But there is another aspect of the free position game that is geared towards scouting a defense: how likely a team is to commit a foul that leads to a free position attempt.
To calculate this stat, we simply take the number of free position attempts awarded against a defense and divide by the total number of defensive possessions they’ve faced. That tells us, on a per-possession basis, how likely each defense is to commit a free-position-worthy foul.
So far, Canisius has been that team. The Griffs’ opponents have been awarded a free position attempt on 34 percent of their possessions this season. And when you dig into their stats, you can see why. So far, their defense has the seventh-highest raw turnover rate, so they’ve been ultra-aggressive on defense in trying to create turnovers and generally make the game more chaotic. The problem, at least in this case, is that the turnovers they’ve created have been offset by the free position attempts they’ve surrendered. Perhaps they already know about their opponents’ free position utilization and they’ve been willing to make that trade-off.
The rest of the top five in terms of most-likely-to-give-up-a-free-position are Dartmouth, Cincinnati, Central Connecticut and Boston University. If I’m an offensive coordinator going up against one of these teams, I’m probably going to want to spend a little extra time on free positions in the days leading up to the contest.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have some of the best defenses in Division I women’s lacrosse. The five teams that have surrendered the fewest free position attempts (on a per-possession basis) are Bucknell (No. 43 defense), North Carolina (No. 2), Vermont (No. 9), Princeton (No. 31) and Boston College (No. 4).
FREE POSITION EFFICIENCY
Ultimately, every team has to prioritize where it spends its time and energy. As we saw in the Northwestern-Syracuse game, free positions can be the facet of the game that decides victory. But at the end of the day, the decision to spend time (or not spend time) in this area is dependent on one thing: free position efficiency. This is calculated as the number of goals scored off free position attempts divided by the total number of attempts awarded. And this number includes free position goals where the shot comes off one pass.
So far this year, your top five most free-position-efficient offenses are Johns Hopkins (50 percent), Michigan (49 percent), Pittsburgh (48 percent), Louisville (46 percent) and Boston College (46 percent).
An aggressive defense that leads to a lot of free position attempts may not be the best strategy to employ against these five.
WHY, ZACK? WHY?
I think it’s important to put this stuff in context. Sometimes, you’ll see stats getting spouted about, and it’s almost like the creators publish them just because they created them, not because there is any underlying value to the stat existing. So, I always try to take a step back and think about. If I were a coach or a fan, would I be able to use this?
The answer here, like with so many of the stats, is that it’s a shortcut to understanding an opponent. Watching games is the best way to know a team — better than stats. But watching games is also a very time-intensive process. Knowing that a team only “uses” 70 percent of its free position attempts instantly allows you to know what would otherwise take hours to uncover from game film.
And there is a psychological aspect here, too. Because free position attempts are a smaller part of the game (relative to an offensive system that you can see every time down the field), the way that a team plays them isn’t top-of-mind when you go to communicate a game plan to your team. The risk is that there is a tendency that you can exploit that you overlook because it’s not something that grabs your attention when watching games.
The best use of stats like these is as a precursor to a week’s prep. See what sort of nuggets of insight the stats can give you, and then you can be more purposeful in spending your time and energy on the things that have the most bang-for-the-buck. Stats are a tool to be more efficient in your scouting. I hope these free-position analytics demonstrate that.
LACROSSE STATS RESOURCES
My goal with this column is to introduce fans to a new way to enjoy lacrosse. “Expand your fandom” is the mantra. I want you to walk away thinking about the players and stories presented here in a new light. But I also understand that some of these concepts can take some time to sink in. And part of the reason for this column is, after all, to educate.
To help this process along, I have several resources that have helped hundreds of lacrosse fans and coaches to internalize these new statistical concepts. The first is a Stats Glossary that explains each of my statistical concepts in more detail than I could fit here. The second is a Stats 101 resource, which provides context for each of my statistics. What is a good number? Who’s the current leader? That’s all there.
And last, I would love to hear from you. If you have questions or comments about the stats, feel free to reach out.