The announcement of Utah going D1 got us thinking about geography in lacrosse. Geography is important to Utah because they will become the western-most program in the U.S. That means they become the closest program to the fastest growing lacrosse regions in the country. But they are also the farthest away from the traditional east […]
Utah’s announcement that their program will go D1 in 2019 is huge news. Lots of people have written about how this changes (or doesn’t change) the landscape of lacrosse in the United States. My focus is going to be a bit less grandiose: how does the current geographic distribution of talent help or hurt Utah’s […]
Way back in March, we looked at the expected goals value of each lacrosse play, broken down by quarter. It was a follow on analysis to another post, which examined how the sequence of plays in a game can be used to estimate the number of goals that would be scored by both teams over […]
If you read our stuff this year, you’ll remember that about half-way through the season, we introduced Lax-ELO. It was an attempt to apply an ELO-based model to lacrosse as a way to compare the relative strength of two teams. Once it was created, we used it to help provide context for individual statistical performances […]
The Denver vs Notre Dame quarterfinal game got us thinking about shot clock data. And I’d be lying if I said that a certain Notre Dame fan didn’t help stoke our curiosity: @laxreference @DU_MLAX @NDlacrosse That’s why the officials need to remember they’re allowed to say 2 words “Timer On” — Eamon McAnaney (@emacSNY) May […]
Those that have followed Lacrosse Reference for a while know that a lot of our inspiration for creating this site came from FiveThirtyEight. Those that follow FiveThirtyEight will be familiar with their reliance on the ELO rating system which underpins many of their sports-related models. We’ve always planned on implementing ELO for college lacrosse, and […]
LacrosseReference really got started during the 2016 NCAA tournament. During the Maryland vs Syracuse quarterfinal game, Maryland scored with 11 minutes remaining in the 4th quarter to increase their lead to 10-6. We started thinking, what are the odds that Syracuse comes back in this game? I remember seeing win probabilities during ESPN.com’s coverage of […]
Welcome to LacrosseReference.com. Our goal with this site is to bring together two worlds that, best we can tell, haven’t overlapped very much: the statheads and the lacrosse junkies. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, even soccer have all experienced a renaissance of enthusiasts seeking to increase the collective understanding of their games. Given our joint backgrounds […]