Leo Fried — June 29, 2024

Austin Outlaws 70 – 125 League City Legends (June 22, 2024)

What is this?

Non-standard disclaimer: in the game, Austin wore white jerseys and League City wore blue. Due to not having a white font, for this article I have assigned Austin blue and League City red. Chart is here. Now, for the analysis.

What just happened?

League City looked like a hungry team that had just lost a heartbreaker of a series and was determined to right the ship. They never backed down and even when things went wrong they were hustling to every ball.

Austin, on the other hand, looked like a team without a gameplan.

On defense, this meant that even when the Austin beaters won an exchange and had an opportunity to press, the Austin chasers refused to move off their hoops and mark up, turning what should be a surefire stop and possible transition attempt into a goal for the Legends. Perhaps the most damning instance of this was League City’s second-to-last offensive possession of the game.

We pick up with one League City chaser and both League City beaters retreating to their own hoops, joined by a single Austin beater looking to make a play for control. League City has three chasers and no beaters on the right side of the restrictor line, while Austin has four chasers and armed beater.

Chris Dorsey is holding the quadball all the way on the left-side of the screen, and Cameron Castilaw has just started charging at him. Dorsey is seventeen yards away from hoops: he’s not shooting. All the four Austin chasers have to do to complete the press is to collectively mark the two remaining League City chasers.

Ahh shoot the quadball’s already in the air and nobody moved. That’s fine though: Austin has five players in frame on broom to League City’s two. Swathi Mannem is about to receive the pass, and all Austin has to do is close out and force her into a tough pass to her only available teammate, at which point any of the many available Outlaws can pick off the pass.

Okay looking good: Mannem is being pressured and is about to heave up a prayer, surely one of the Austin chasers will go mark Mallory Hughes to make sure she has no chance of receiving this pass.

Oh no…

OK but I feel like that’s kind of a dime from Mannem.

For sure, and it’s a great finish from Hughes too. But I do think this play is pretty emblematic of why the Outlaws lost this series: either because of a lack of instinct or a lack of drilling, the Austin chasers didn’t seem to be anticipating where the play was going and putting themselves in position to take advantage of that.

This was an issue on offense too: on many different plays, an Outlaw chaser would get in the lane and draw a beat, only to find that their teammates hadn’t cut and so the play just died.

Here, Jay Stewart drives the quadball into the lane at the same time that Kayse Bevers taps out the chaser defending small hoop. Stewart is about to draw the Legends’ sole dodgeball. Ella Jordan, the Outlaw chaser playing in the back-left corner of the box has to cut for Stewart there. There’s no defender there — Bevers took care of that — if Jordan makes the cut it’s a free goal!

It wasn’t just Jordan: time after time, an Austin chaser would get into the lane and nobody would move. Austin had only one halfcourt possession in which they scored without it costing them a dodgeball (of their seven goals, four were in transition, one cost them control, and one set up a no-dodgeball fastbreak the other way.) It’s the same problem that they had on defense: too much standing around, not enough anticipating where you’re going to be needed in two seconds.

Idk seems hard.

It is hard! But it’s also becoming harder and harder each year to be able to succeed by just winning your one-on-one matchups. Individual players are no longer miles better than the players that they’re matching up against, and modern defenses are designed to force you to use all six of your players in order to score. This is possible to do! But in order to be successful you have to actually do it, and Austin did not.

How about League City?

Look at this play.

Just *chef’s kiss.*

Kevin Raber beats out both Austin beaters, buying the half-second needed for Hughes to swing the ball to Nathan Wilkinson who swings it to Mannem. Meanwhile, Caleigh Duvall has been waiting at medium hoop and taps out the hoop defender giving Mannem the free shot. Just textbook.

I don’t even think the Austin defense did anything wrong here! I sort of believe that if an offense (especially one with control but honestly I kind of feel like even without) executes perfectly, they should score every time. League City executed this play perfectly.

Isn’t this article supposed to have charts?

Yeah sure whatever.

Player	Pluses	Minuses	Impact	Grade
Adams-Tracy	+4	-5	9	-1
Axtell	+6	-4	10	+2
Bevers	+4	-1	5	+3
Crowe	+0	-0	0	+0
J. Stewart	+3	-8	11	-5
Johnson	+13	-0	13	+13
Jordan	+5	-11	16	-6
Ratliff	+0	-0	0	+0
Sanchez	+7	-10	16	-3
Sialm	+2	-3	5	-1
Vega	+0	-0	0	+0
Total	+44	-42	86	+2

Player	Pluses	Minuses	Impact	Grade
Acevedo	+4	-4	8	+0
Acosta	+7	-3	10	+4
Boyes	+9	-6	15	+3
Butler	+0	-6	6	-6
Contreras	+0	-0	0	+0
Dorsey	+6	-10	16	-4
Hughes	+8	-0	8	+8
Jeanlewis	+0	-0	0	+0
Mannem	+8	-2	10	+6
Nuñez	+0	-0	0	+0
Price	+3	-1	4	+2
S. Stewart	+3	-5	8	-2
Wilkinson	+8	-1	9	+7
Total	+56	-38	94	+18

Jackson Johnson was the highest-graded chaser in the game, posting a perfect +13/-0. Given the Outlaws’ halfcourt struggles, it’s no surprise that he operated mostly in transition.

For League City, the work was distributed across the entire team. Unlike last week, which was a bit of a Haden Boyes carry job, no Legend graded out at better than a single goal. Despite that, the unit outpreformed the Austin one: players like Hughes, Wilkinson, and Mannem stepped up and did their jobs to ensure that League City came out on top.

More charts!

Player	Pluses	Minuses	Impact	Grade
Bevers	+7	-3	10	+4
Castilaw	+6	-2	8	+4
Gomez	+0	-5	5	-5
Himes	+2	-8	10	-6
Kenyon	+0	-0	0	+0
McCall	+0	-0	0	+0
Paskero	+0	-0	0	+0
Picasso	+0	-0	0	+0
Polzin	+10	-9	19	+1
Tracy	+5	-11	16	-6
Total	+30	-38	68	-8

Player	Pluses	Minuses	Impact	Grade
Duvall	+1	-3	4	-2
Easter	+8	-3	11	+5
Elarba	+0	-0	0	+0
Guckes	+1	-4	5	-3
Lopez	+1	-5	6	-4
Mason	+0	-0	0	+0
Nunez	+19	-18	37	+1
Raber	+9	-6	15	+3
Total	+39	-39	78	+0

Holy Baldemar Nunez impact!

Dude was willing to throw. As soon as the quadball was even plausibly no longer a concern, Baldemar Nunez immediately turned to the opposing beaters to try to make magic happen. At times, this led to massive swings for the Legends: all three of the League City transition goals came directly following a Nunez throw at an Outlaw beater that didn’t get out fast enough.

Nunez doesn’t even bother to wait for Andrew Axtell‘s shot to go in: as soon as Axtell releases, Nunez fires at Kayse Bevers, reclaiming control and setting up a no-dodgeballs transition chance.

But sometimes, especially on the offensive end, Nunez was too beater-focused, forgetting that a turnover means the Outlaws can run the other way.

Here, Nunez senses a chance to recover control as Bevers looks to pressure quadball. However Bevers and Kyzer Polzin work together beautifully to protect control, and meanwhile Nunez has spent the only League City dodgeball in the process, letting Austin score a quick transition goal the other way.

Do enough of these sorts of things and you end up with a +19/-18 grade I guess.

What happened with the flag?

Let’s watch it back first.

Ultimately, I think this is a small mistake from Taylor Tracy, the Austin beater on the midfield line, to try and engage Nunez instead of throwing at seeker (always throw at seeker!), but also this is just phenomenally unlucky for Austin. Tracy‘s grade on this play was a (-2), but it got punished by Juan Acevedo making a (+29) play on flagrunner. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes: Austin still lost the quadball game by 2 goals (and the quadball game in game two by 5 goals).

Player	Plueses	Minuses	Grade
Acevedo	+30	-1	+29

Player	Plueses	Minuses	Grade
Vega	+0	-0	+0

Any other random observations?

Louis Sanchez is the best swatter in the league.

This is legitimately very impressive stuff.

Also the cameras! Off the sideline and elevated – this is the way.

Hey dude I’ve got a chart for you.

Yeah?

Read ’em and weep!

Game	Total Impact	Total Grade	# of players w/ grade >=+10	# of players w/ grade <=-10
KC@SA Game 1	523	+32	2	2
KC@SA Game 2	488	+31	3	0
LC@NO Game 3	502	+18	2	1
AUS@LC Game 1	326	+12	1	0

Why does it feel like every player in this game graded out at basically zero? And why are impact and grades so low compared to the other games you’ve charted?

Yeah this is interesting. Honestly, I’m not super sure, but a few quick thoughts.

First, this game was a fair bit shorter than the other three. Game times for the first three games I’ve quested were 33:00, 28:48, and 36:07, respectively. This game, for contrast, wrapped up in a tidy 23:06.

But that doesn’t explain everything: looking at the impact numbers in particular, in this game we accrued about 10 points of impact per minute of game, versus an average of 15 points of impact per minute of game in the first three games. And it’s not just a tempo thing (thought this game was certainly slower paced as well): if we instead we look at per possession numbers, we get 6.7 points of impact per possession in this game versus 7.8 points of impact per possession on average across the first three.

Are we really to believe then that players in this game were just in total having less impact than players in previous games? In some ways this is a plausible theory: my primary critique of the Outlaws was that their players were not just not moving enough, perhaps this leads to less impact being accrued? On the other hand, Nunez was singlehandedly doing his best to push in the opposite direction.

A final hypothesis is that my grading standards are changing over time. This is definitely plausible: I am but a man and I wouldn’t be surprised if even things like my mood affect the grades. At the same time, I do try to make sure that similar plays in different games receive similar scores, and have gone back to reference precedents a number of times.

(Note that the math ensures that the difference between the total grades of each team is locked in by the result of the play. However the impact is not: some plays have lots of players doing lots of things and thus lots of impact is accrued, while other players are just a single player missing a shot and accrue very little impact. Perhaps I am not super consistent about which plays should be which, or perhaps this game just happened to be filled with low-impact plays.)

Ultimately, I’m not super sure what happened here, but I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on how these numbers evolve over the course of the season.

What’s your outlook on the rest of the season for both these teams?

In the long run, I think Austin will be fine: the issues discussed in the first section of the article are very fixable, and the return of a number of key absences can’t hurt either. Still, things need fixing, and if I’m on the Outlaw coaching staff I am making it very clear that you cannot be just standing around when opposing chasers need marking or cuts need making, and I’m drilling it until my players themselves get antsy if they aren’t making those plays.

As for League City, the sky’s the limit. We saw last week that Boyes is capable of almost single-handedly dragging his team to wins: adding performances like the ones posted by Hughes, Wilkinson, and Mannem to that makes this offense quite terrifying. And if Nunez can find the right balance of playing dodgeball and quadball, he has the tools to dominate. My only concern for Legends fans is on the defensive side of the ball: there are a number of holes in their 2-2, especially around hoops, that neither New Orleans last week nor Austin this week really exploited. If they want to qualify for champs (and they still might need to win a couple more games to make that happen) those need shoring up.

But for quadball fans, the South division is as chaotic and entertaining as ever.