Our quantitative way to highlight the best games of a busy slate. See below for the explainer.

When we are blessed with a day in which the slate of games numbers in the dozens, it is all but impossible to really keep track of all the goings on in D1 lacrosse. So we decided to put out a daily digest of the day that was. The idea here is to use some metrics that we can calculate for each game as a way to highlight the most meaningful or interesting matchups.

To rank games, we will be using three values:

• Tension Game Score – a measure of how tight the game was. A back-and-forth match up where neither team is able to take control is going to have a lower tension score (i.e. smaller gap between the teams).
• Min. Win Probability – the lowest win probability value that our model ascribed to the eventual winner during the course of the game. A game where the winner had to make a huge comeback is probably going to have a very low win probability (think about the moment that it seemed least likely that they’d come back).
• Lax-ELO Transfer – a measure of how much an intridual game did to make us re-assess how good a certain team was. In a game where a favorite beats the underdog by as much as we thought they would, you don’t really update your priors about how good each team is. Those games would also transfer a relatively small number of Lax-ELO points.

We will present the metrics for each game, along with a star-based indicator to tell you how common or uncommon that outcome is. For example, a game in which the winning team had a win probability in the single digits is a rare occurence and would get 3 stars in that category.

We welcome your feedback, and we hope that this helps you to distill down the craziness of a full lacrosse slate into a more digestible list of highlights.