PowerPlay Magazine

With handball launch yesterday many of you were wondering if you were one of the lucky ones, or one of the unlucky ones. I for one, was one of the unlucky ones (read and you'll see why). But, it will be an exciting challenge. Much like my hockey team and especially my soccer team, in handball I was gifted with a steaming pile of crap, excluding a goalie. I was curious how bad my team was compared to the average. Could my team really be that crappy? I'll give you some numbers and show some plots; this will provide you with an example to check your own numbers in case it all is jibberish. Many thanks to the people who took the time to enter their data and made this project possible.

Average Player OR

The quickest way to check how good your team is now is to look at the average OR of your players, which can be done from the players main page. In the case of my team I was looking at a whopping 135.6 average overall rating. Looking at the plot below you can see my average player OR is below the mean but still reasonable.

But, looking at the probability distribution (below) tracking where 135 on the horizontal axis (average player OR) meets the blue line (probability distribution) I get a y-axis value (percentile) of around 0.33. This means that my team's average player OR is in the 33rd percentile, or, my team's average player OR is as good or better than 33% of teams. The pessimistic way of looking at it is, 67% of teams are better than mine! <--- Let's go with that.

Average Player AQ

So I have a crappy average OR. Maybe my team's average AQ is better than most and the game engine blessed me with good potential players rather than immediate stars - ya right! Using the same technique as before, my 41.6 average AQ is well below the mean of 44.3. So, it goes without saying, I do not have a bunch of young studs in the farm waiting to break out.

It would appear the percentile would not be too kind to me either. From the figure below you can see that 41.6 AQ is around 0.3 or the 30th percentile. So, once again, I'm as good or better in the AQ-department than 30% of teams while 70% are better. Sigh. It's not looking so good for my Royal City Teslas.

Best Player OR

Crappy average OR, crappy average AQ. Perhaps I was blessed with a superstar. One single anomaly in the world gracefully placed in my team to carry me to the promised land. My top player is Eddie Friece, a 170 OR 18 6/6 94AQ (unscouted of course) singular diamond in a giant pile of donkey dung. Surely, SURELY he must be why I've sitting in the 30th percentile right now. Looking at the average best player on other teams it would appear I'm slightly ahead of the average which is 167.2.

Lastly, in terms of percentile, I'm clocking in with around 0.8 or the 80th percentile for best players. Wahoo! That's more like it! Is one player enough to make up for a lackluster team? Please tell me handball isn't a team sport and I can just ride this star to trophy after trophy... I suppose time will tell.

If you want to get an overal score, assuming average OR, average AQ and top player OR are considered equal, which is debatable, take all the percentiles you are (0.3, 0.33, 0.8) and average them. This will give you a general idea of your day 1 score. Mine so happens to be 0.47, which is pretty close to 0.5 or the 50th percentile: the dead-on average. Where do you fall on the average? Do share, it could make others feel better about their situation or maybe worse!

Thanks for reading. It's been a long day, now I'm off to bed.
-Scott