Just over a month ago I posted a thought experiment around using statistics, and most notably this site’s player attribution metric, to simulate a Dally M voting system and see who would come out on top as player of the year. I tried a few methods, but most of them came out with similar results on top, and other than the distribution of forwards there weren’t any real glaring issues. You can catch up on it here, but I’m going to use one method from that post to check out the player and team of the year. With the NRL’s...
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Final NRLW efficiency update – the inevitability of a Roosters/Knights grand final
The NRLW regular season has wrapped up and with finals starting this weekend we can look back at the season as a whole and see if there’s any takeaways from the Eye Test’s efficiency analysis for the whole 2023 season. If you’re new to the site, to examine team efficiency in attack and defense we look at how each club has performed under the site’s expected point model (ETxP), and compare those expected outcomes to their actual on field performances. Teams that score more points than their field position would typically yield are deemed more efficient, and those that give...
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NRLW 2023 Bootwatch – I hope you like Asics
As I noted after NRLW Round 1 I’ve been planning to introduce as much parity as possible between my NRLM and NRLW content this season. Sadly real life got in the way last week and I had to skip a week of NRLW content, and I’d like to apologise for that. But I’m back this week with one of the most requested NRLW analysis yet to appear on the site. That’s right, the immensely important and popular Bootwatch is now looking at the women’s game. For some reason Sockwatch was more requested but I don’t have as much of an...
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The Eye Test’s advanced statistic leaders for NRL season 2023
The long 27 round slog that was the NRL 2023 season has finally concluded, which means we can take a look at which players topped the charts for the Eye Test’s suite of advanced statistics. If you’re a recent visitor to the Eye Test, I would recommend checking out the explainers on of them to get an idea of what type of player behaviour I’m trying to measure with these metrics. These aren’t your typical counting statistics where everyone is trying to fill up a bucket and the more things you put in your bucket the better. For these statistics...
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Can anyone keep up with the Roosters and Knights? NRLW August efficiency update
This week’s NRLW post will be an efficiency update, similar to the monthly posts I’ve been marking for NRLM. For those new to the site or only following the NRLW content, we look at actual scoring compared with each teams expected points to gauge how effectively they’re using possession, and how capably they are defending against good field position. If you want an explainer on the site’s expected points model, a lengthy one is available here. Quickly, the short version is that every start of possession is worth a certain number of points based on the probability of scoring from...
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Penrith are still dominating the NRL – August efficiency update
There’s just one round of the regular season remaining, and August is in the books, so it’s time for the final monthly NRL efficiency update for 2023. And this month we will be focusing mainly on the Panthers. Not that they have not been a large part of each of the previous updates, as it’s hard to exclude such a domineering team. But I’d been focusing on covering teams other than Penrith because they get enough coverage as it is, and there’s only so many times you can fawn over just how well they’ve been playing. It’s been three seasons...
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