Attacking Efficiency Part 2 Examining our attacking play

In the second part of our deep dive into measuring attacking play, we are going to cover 2nd level KPI’s that will help you assess your team’s attacking potency. In the previous blog we examined how we can measure our shooting but what about how those shooting chances come about. In doing so we are taking our insights to another level, progressing our breakdown of the play far beyond the binary outcomes like score/miss.

Questions we have to ask ourselves when examining this aspect of our game could include, do we create enough chances? Are we effective in creating chances? Do we waste possessions by not converting them into opportunities? Have you asked these questions before in team and management meetings? Have you gone through the video for examples but can find numbers to back it up? Hopefully these measures will help you.

Creativity is a word used to describe attacking play but it is often used as a broad stroke adjective. However, there are ways in which we can measure our team’s creativity and assess how could we are at creating scoring opportunities. We calculate creativity by counting the number of chances that you’re team creates for every 10 possession they have.

This is an excellent tool to measure build-up play and identify if your team are in fact creating enough opportunities in a game. We can compare this statistic with our opponent to identify who is better at creating chances. We may not need this to be as high if we are more efficient than the opposition but regardless there is an inherent advantage in any game if we find it easier to create opportunities than our opponents do.

Attacking Efficiency is a term that I have seen used to describe how effective team are in attack. While creativity looks at creating chances from all of our possessions attacking efficiency looks at what we do once we cross into opposition territory. By measuring the percentage attacks that lead to scoring opportunities we can examine how effective we are at creating chances.

To add another additional level to this KPI you could break down attacks based on how they are created. You can identify sources of attacks such as set plays, kick-outs, direct running, hand-passing, turnovers etc… and measure how efficient each of these attack sources is. In doing so you could identify your most efficient way to create chances. Such an insight would help any coach would love to get from their analysts because it can help mould their game plan.

We have looked at shooting, we have looked at creating shooting opportunities and creating scores. However, there is a way of combining these viewpoints into one full-scale measure of your team’s attacking play.

That one statistic that that is widely considered as the best measure as the best assessment of your attacking play is Productivity. Productivity is defined as the number of points scored per every 10 possessions a team has. This measure takes into account you’re total possessions and what you score to give you a comprehensive breakdown of how effective your team is as an attacking force.

In a study by Kevin McGuigan, Mike Hughes and Denise Martin, they identified that winning teams at senior, intermediate and junior club grades were always more effective than losing teams in terms of converting possession into scores. This pattern highlighted the value of productivity as a KPI as more productive teams became winning teams.

Over this and our previous blog post, we have examined how teams can assess their attacking play in a variety of ways. These KPI’s will be useful to any performance analyst involved in Gaelic games and we would suggest including them as part of your analysis as a way to create new insights for your team.