Lacrosse World Cup 2022

In June/July 2022, 29* countries sent teams to compete in the Women's Lacrosse World Championship. 519 players competed in 110 games, creating:

2,441 draw controls competed for
2,798 ground-balls contested, contributing to 2,385 turnovers
4,664 shots taken, resulting in:
- 2,034 goals
- 1,362 saves
- and 207 dinged pipes

All of which culminated in the USA retaining their crowns as world-champions with an 11-8 win over Canada in the final.

* Uganda were due to compete but couldn't make the championships owing to visa procurement difficulties.

I have knocked together a couple of charts that make it easier to interpret and understand the raw data. Hopefully it all makes sense, but feel free to get in touch if anything needs further clarification.

Quick links

	Tournament-level stats for each team
	Tournament-level stats for each player
	Stats for each game for a given team/player
	Stats for a single game, comapring both teams
	Correlations between various metrics on a game-by-game basis

Note that throughout this blog, most teams played 8 games. Team names with * means they only played 7 games, and ** means they only played 6 games.

Tournament Stats per Team

Use the dropdown below to select from a number of statistics to see how each team compared over the course of the championships.

Click/tap on any bar to get the individual data print out.

Tournament Stats per Player

Use the dropdowns below to see how each player compared over the course of the championships. The list is capped at max 25 players.

Click/tap on any bar to get the individual data print out.

Select Metric

Filter for Team

Multi-Game Stats

Use the dropdowns below to view any metric at either a team-level or player-level (you can even compare two players together 👀).

Select Metric

Filter for Team

Filter for Player 1

Filter for Player 2

Note: some stats only exist on a player-level e.g. Assists & points. Similarly, some stats only exist on a team-level e.g. clears. For metrics marked with * or **, the charts may not work as expected.

Note also that sometimes data does not exist for a player in a game even if they did play in it. This occurs when there were no "events" for that player in a game. Events are things like winning a draw, winning a GB, taking a shot etc.

Single Game Stats

Select a game from the dropdown to view the key stats between those two teams.

Filter for Team

Select Game

Correlations

Choose two statistics to compare and see whether they are correlated or not. All values are shown on a game-by-game basis.

X-Variable

Y-Variable

Highlight a team

Note: I was on the fence about whether or not to display this chart as some people could draw misleading conclusions from it. However, I find it really interesting, and I'm hoping others will too, so I have left it in. If you have any queries about the results, leave a comment below or message me personally at c.turner.software@gmail.com.

For me, the most interesting charts were Ground Ball % vs Goal %, Draw Control % vs Goals %, and Turnovers % vs Goals %. These charts show that the more ground balls and draw controls a team wins, the more goals they tend to score. Similarly, the more turnovers a team has, the fewer goals they tend to score.

Have you found any interesting or unexpected correlations? Leave a comment below!

The data

I have used the data from womensworldlax2022.com. Many thanks to the good folks at womensworldlax2022.com for collecting such high-quality data during the tournament.

Analysis

In the interest of reducing word-count, I have not done any heavy statistical analysis. This blog is just for looking at and getting familiar with the data. I may do a separate analysis blog some time in the future.

Data Glossary

I am well aware that there are a lot of numbers and terms being thrown around in this blog. Below is a data glossary which should help explain what each term means and how each number is calculated.

Term	Definition
Goals %	Percentage of goals scored by this team in this match e.g. if team1 scores 4 and team2 scores 1, then team1's Goals % is 80%.
Shot on target	A shot that was either saved or scored. A shot that hits the pipe is not considered on-target.
Goals:Shots Ratio	Number of goals scored dividied by total shots taken.
Goals from FP (%)	The proportion of a team's goals that came from free-positions e.g. if a team scored 10 goals, 2 of which were from free-positions, then this would be 20%.
Shots - saved	Shots taken that were saved by the opposition's goalie.
Saves	The number of saves made by this team's goalie.
Saves (%)	The % of opposition shots on-target that were saved e.g. if the opposition had 10 shots on-target and the goalie made 5 saves, then the save % would be 33.3%.
Ground Balls / Turnovers / Draw controls %	The proportion of all ground balls / turnovers / draw controls won by this team e.g. if team1 won 2 groundballs in a match while the other team won 8, then team1's GB % would be 20%.
Successful Clears %	Proportion of a team's successful clears vs failed clears e.g. if they successfully cleared 6 times and failed to clear 3 times then their Successful Clear % would be 66.7%.

Congratulations if you made it this far without your head exploding 🤯. If you have any comments or queries, please do not hesitate to get in touch at c.turner.software@gmail.com.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it!