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Duke's Offense
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Stat Of The Week: Duke’s Offense

Duke’s offense takes center stage in the latest edition of our collaboration with Zack Capozzi over at Lacrosse Reference. Each week, we are putting together a stat of the week to highlight a game, team, or individual from Men’s or Women’s lacrosse to focus on.

It might be from a game the previous weekend, or it might be for an upcoming matchup. Either way, it will allow me to use some stats combined with a little bit of commentary for why I think that particular one jumps out to me in a given week. This week’s focus is on Duke’s offense from this past weekend and how different players are being used.

The key terms we’re focusing on here are player usage and play shares. The way Capozzi calculates play shares is by getting a count from the game’s official play-by-play of when a players’ name appears for carious stat categories.

He then uses some weighting to account for things like position and indexes the values so they are all going to total 100% of plays for the team. He then combines this concept with his expected goals calculation to determine a Usage-Adjusted Expected Goals Added (EGA).

If you watched the two Duke games from this past weekend, it was no secret that their win over Robert Morris was fueled by a dominant six goal game from Brennan O’Neill while the Vermont outing was headlined by Nakeie Montgomery keeping the Blue Devils afloat with their only first half goals until the rest of the team finally stepped up for the second half.

Over the two games, Dyson Williams was actually most consistent Duke player in the points column, walking away with four goals and an assist against Robert Morris followed by three goals and an assist against Vermont.

So that’s it for the raw numbers. Now let’s dig into the next level of things.

Duke's Offense

Looking at just the top six of Duke’s offense, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see that Robertson and O’Neill are the primary initiators for the offense. While the quick takeaways from this chart show that O’Neill is taking by far the most shots but not setting up others and Sean Lully is doing the opposite (feeding without the shots), the name that jumps out to me the most is Dyson Williams.

I mentioned his stat line from the weekend earlier, which totaled out to be seven goals and two assists, he actually winds up directly in the middle of the chart.

What does this tell us? More than anything, it highlights his sheer efficiency when he is involved. Despite being tied with O’Neill in overall points, and being second in goals, he’s still taking only about 12% of the team’s shots. This isn’t as surprising as the fact that he’s right in the middle for assist rate with just two assists, which is tied for fourth on the team so far.

When putting this into the context of Capozzi’s weighted play shares and then listing that in terms of the player’s EGA, Williams actually leads Duke’s offense:

PlayerEGAWeighted Play Shares
Dyson Williams3.0800.058
Nakeie Montgomery3.0800.043
Brennan O’Neill3.0320.079
Sean Lulley2.6780.043
Andrew McAdorey2.3740.043

While we’re still in the very small sample size of the season right now, it will be interesting to see how these numbers shift through the spring. On the broadcast, they mentioned how Head Coach John Danowski’s not so secret plan for the year is to get the ball to Brennan O’Neill more. They are absolutely succeeding in that, but if we were to project these two games forward, it does seem that Duke’s offense may need to continue to lean on players like Montgomery and Williams connecting on the chances they get.

So the big question will be, can those high efficiency levels hold Duke up through the year and into May?


last week’s stat of the week

STAT OF THE WEEK: NCAA WEEK 1

Stat of the Week