VBelo Scouting Report: March 14, 2023

How do we know who is the best team?

Mar 14, 2023

Did I miss anything while I was away this weekend?

Don’t worry, I know there were tons of exciting matches this weekend and that the Outrigger Invitational lived up to the hype. Congratulations to Penn State on winning the tournament! Because the top 3 teams all went 2-1, that leaves coaches, the media, and fans all attempting to answer the (not all that important) question: who is the best team?

The question can really be answered in two ways. 1) Hawai’i. 2) A team not named Hawai’i. This technically covers all options, but I understand there really is more nuance. For this conversation though, I want to just consider these two sides.

Why Hawai’i could be #1

VBelo, along with the coaches’ poll, has had Hawai’i as the number one team in the country all season.1 This is a team that returned the entirety of their core from their 2022 championship team. On paper, they have been dominant. Yes, their schedule was not front-loaded like other top teams, but that also gave them the ability to load manage their starters early. Will this strategy pay off? I don’t know. What I do know is that they have multiple players on the court that will likely be playing professionally in the next year or two. They do have one loss, but 1 match does not actually provide that much data. This is exactly what VBelo tries to measure. Instead of looking at simply wins and loss, it is comparing who won against whom and how strong each team was. So yes, they lost to Penn State, but losing a match is not the same thing as being a weaker team. Again, that is a really difficult point to tease out, but it is important. Winning and being the “better” team shouldn’t always be seen as the same thing.

Why non-Hawai’i could be #1

There are really compelling arguments for both Penn State and UCLA to be considered the best team in the country right now. For Penn State, they beat Hawai’i, on O’ahu! They ended several really impressive streaks for the Rainbow Warriors. Their only losses on the year came from UCLA and Long Beach, but Hawai’i was able to handle the Bruins. For UCLA, the argument is basically the inverse. Even though they lost to Hawai’i, their total resume (including beating Penn State twice) shows that they are the best team in the country. For UCLA, you can actually use some of the logic about choosing Hawai’i because their loss to Hawai’i does not prove that Hawai’i is the better team. It only proves that they lost to Hawai’i in a very tough match.

There is no doubt that there are some incredibly talented teams right now. We also have a lot of matches we can use to form an opinion and different people interpret that data differently. I think the most important part of sifting through the noise to find signal is a quote I heard once that has really stuck with me.

The plural of anecdote isn’t data.

Once match is… just one match. If everything we think we know about a team is thrown off by a single match, then maybe we didn’t have enough information or we interpreted that information incorrectly (or maybe both).