The PPE system charts those 20 different metrics and assigns a value to each result of a player’s actions: goal, assist, hockey assist, dodge to draw a slide, good pick (it has to create space for another player), ride the ball back, ground ball pressure, ground ball no pressure, missed shot, shot off pipe, draw penalty, unforced turnover, forced turnover, recovered drop or bad pass, penalty on the offensive player, 1-v-1 goalie save, traffic save, missed ground ball pressure and missed ground ball no pressure. A goal or assist nets a player plus-5. An unforced turnover, on the other hand, is a minus-4.
“You can use it to see how much of an impact a player has on their team because you see every touch they have, and you can see per touch if they’re having a positive or a negative impact, or even no impact,” said Woronoff, a midfielder for Upper Dublin. “At the end of the game, after you watch the film and mark down everything they’ve done, you divide the total value of points that they got by the number of touches they had, so if they get a positive score, it means they positively helped their team.”
Heckler and Woronoff, along with a small group of Upper Dublin players, charted every game of the five Tewaaraton Award finalists. They also scouted for the North Carolina-Virginia men’s game for GAV Lacrosse Analytics. Lehigh used the system to chart some of their early games in the midst of a 10-2 season in which it earned the No. 8 seed to the NCAA tournament, its most successful season since 2013.
“We found it to be really helpful,” Lehigh coach Kevin Cassese said. “The stats and analytics are important. My assistants dive into those pretty deeply — John Crawley on the offensive end and Will Scudder on the defensive end. They were providing basically their scouting report based on the analytics. That’s where I found the most use, reading their thoughts and the breakdown of the data they were able to produce and spelling out for you, in this game, this is how this player performed based on his statistics and using the deeper dive into the analytics. That part had been really helpful.”
Analytics are part of a growing trend in every sport. iPads are starting to become a more common site on lacrosse sidelines, and finding new ways to quantify a player’s impact are on the rise.
“It’s been really fun for us,” Denver coach Bill Tierney said. “It goes hand in hand with these, and if you watch the game, you’ll see a big difference in the sideline video usage.”
Injured defenseman Oliver Dina helped Denver evaluate analytics this season. The Pioneers focused more on team-wide statistics such as their shooting percentages from different spots and the effects of different lengths of possession, rather than on individual breakdowns.
“I think it’s useful,” Tierney said. “I think it’s interesting. I think there are people far smarter than I that will put it to great use. At the end of the day, the emotion, the psychology, being able to read young men and young women and what’s going on in their lives, no analytics guy is going to be able to read when a guy’s girlfriend broke up with him and he’s having a bad day, or he didn’t get breakfast that morning, or he has a test tomorrow.”