Men's 2008 Olympic (Indoor) Pool Play

I've added a chart (on which you can click to enlarge) providing a statistical summary of the just-concluded men's indoor Olympic pool play, to go along with the one for women's pool play (entry immediately below).


Complicating matters, there was a three-way tie for first place in men's Group B. Looking at Group A, hitting and blocking appeared to be the key performance indicators. The higher a team finished in the win-loss standings, the better it tended to do in hitting and blocking (deviations from a perfect one-to-one relationship are shown in color fonts).

It should also be acknowledged that the meanings of some of the statistics are ambiguous. One example is digging. As I noted in a posting last October, the AVCA definition of a dig is "when a defensive player keeps a bona fide attack in play with a pass." Digging an opponent's spike attempt is good, but it may reflect some weakness in the defensive team's blocking, as balls would be getting through to the backcourt.