Following Statistical Aspects of the 2008 Summer Olympic (Indoor) Volleyball Competitions

With the Summer Olympics underway in Beijing, I would like to welcome everyone to VolleyMetrics, where I'll be presenting statistical analyses of several of the volleyball matches and taking comments from interested viewers. Before starting, I would like to offer condolences to the Bachman and McCutcheon families for the tragic attack that took place earlier.

First, for results and boxscores of (indoor) volleyball, you can go to the following link (I may add in some postings on beach volleyball, I'm not sure):

http://www.nbcolympics.com/volleyball/resultsandschedules/

As some of you may have seen this morning on television in the U.S., the American women opened up with a 3-1 victory over Japan. The boxscore for this match is available here.

Two of the major topics I have emphasized on this blog are hitting percentage and defending against opponents' hitting via blocking and digging.

If you look at the boxscores provided through the NBC Olympics website, you'll see that hitting percentage, as traditionally defined by volleyball statisticians, is not provided. The raw ingredients to calculate it, however, do appear to be present.

In the U.S.-Japan boxscore, just on top of the individual-player statistics, you'll see that for the aggregate team statistics, only the countries' successful spikes ("S") or "kills," and attempts ("A") are shown, and then the ratio of the two. That, of course, leaves out hitting errors, which count negatively against a player or team in the usual hitting percentage statistics.

Once you scroll down to the individual-player statistics, however, you'll see that in addition to successes (SUCC) and attempts (ATT), you get "FLTS" (which I interpret as faults or errors) and "CONT" (which I interpret as playing continuing, without the spike attempt immediately helping or hurting the attacking team). Note that for each player, SUCC + FLTS + CONT always adds up to ATT. From this part of the boxscore, therefore, we can add up all the players' FLTS numbers and get a team error total, which can be used along with the team success and attempt numbers higher up in the boxscore.

The U.S. thus had 64 successful kills, 17 faults (errors), and 145 attempts. Hitting percentage thus equals 47 (from 64 - 17) divided by 145, which yields .324.

Japan had 49 successful kills, 21 faults (errors), and 136 attempts. We then take 49 - 21, which equals 28, then divide by 136, yielding .206.

More later...