The Defensive Blocking Ball

Throwing at a defender that has a ball to block your shot with obviously decreases the chances of hitting that player. How large that difference is depends on both the skill of the thrower (throwers with good aim and fast throws will be hard to block) and that of the defender (fast reaction time and strong arms to move blocking ball into position).

For each throw during the CEC2019 I’ve gathered meta-data on whether the defender had a ball in possession. Using that information one can calculate the hit percentages of both my team and our opponents, and their grand average.

Sweden is clearly better at hitting opponents with defensive balls than the opponents they face. The teams have more similar hit percentages when throwing on defenders without blocking balls.

One can also calculate this on the individual level, with hit and defence percentages for each player.

These values do not consider the number of balls thrown at each player in each attack. I have the worst defence percentage without a defensive ball. This is partly explained by the fact that I am one of the players most often attacked with more than one ball. Females are also more likely to be thrown at with several balls since they are more often left alone at the end of losing sets in the mixed division, at which point the opponents are more likely to go for synchronised attacks to prevent catches.

However, even after accounting for the number of synchronized balls, I’m likely to be at the bottom, indicating a need for improvement until the next tournament.

Clearly, there is great value in having blocking balls in defence, not only for protection against incoming throws, but also as a means of maintaining pressure on the attackers; the possibility of a pre-throw or counter-attack means the attackers cannot come as close and commit as fully to the attack, lowering their attack percentages. This is clearly seen in the next post in which I show how hit percentages differ depending on different ball possessions, where possessing 5 balls instead of 4 is much more valuable than the difference between 4 and 3.