Women's 2008 Olympic (Indoor) Pool Play

With pool play now complete in the Olympic women's (indoor) volleyball competion, I've created a table (below) to let readers see how the final standings in each of the two pools (first through sixth place) track with how the teams have ranked thus far (before medal play) in six statistical performance areas. (You can click on the table to enlarge it.)


A perfect correlation is represented by all of the numerals appearing in black font, such as Group B's rankings on hitting percentage. Brazil, which finished first in its pool with a 5-0 record, also had the highest team hitting percentage in the pool; Italy (4-1), which finished second in the pool, also had the second-highest hitting percentage; the trend continued all the way down to sixth-place finisher Algeria, which was also sixth in hitting percentage.

Discrepancies are shown in color fonts (the specific colors don't really mean anything, they're just used to draw attention to the numbers). For Group A's win-loss standings and hitting percentages, the discrepancies were relatively minor. As shown in blue, the U.S. finished ahead of China in the standings (second vs. third), but the Americans had a slightly lower hitting percentage than did the host nation. Japan and Poland (in red) also exhibited a similar reversal.

Serve-reception effectiveness, in Group B, was also a perfect discriminator of placing in the standings. Other statistics ranged from pretty good -- blocking in Group A, and digging in Group B -- to a chaotic lack of association with placement in the standings.

It looks to me like China's third-place finish in the Group A standings may be somewhat of an underperformance, relative to the team's rankings in the statistical categories. It should be noted, however, that China's two losses were each in tight, five-game matches. Eight teams make the medal playoffs, so China will still have a chance to win a medal.

One final note on data quality: Though the availability of statistics seems to have improved over time, there are still serious shortcomings. For some statistics on the NBC website, a team's line of data is missing (although I was able to use other statistics to derive the missing ones). There are also plenty of apparent typos. For example, in serve-receipt, the categories of "success," "faults," and "continuation of play," do not sum to the number of attempts, for some teams.