Over halfway through the men's season now and it's a good time to look at which middles are sticking out for their attacking prowess.
The Big West is dominating this category, with Long Beach and Hawai'i unsurprisingly taking the top honors.
While MBs are typically expected to hit for a great clip, as they receive the ball in good situations, these middles are going above and beyond those expectations.
Some of them are hitting 200-300 points above expectation!
We've added a blocking stat to this one as well: Blocking Impact
Blocking Impact is how much the MB slows down the opposing attacker
This stat is inherently limited because it only considers block touches - and not how a blocker may have funnelled the ball to a strong defender or how the attacker tips due to a solid block.
These are things we will tackle in the future.
But for now, Blocking Impact includes all block touches: stuffs, errors, positive touches, and those which hurt the defense.
Super interesting to note the large difference between LBSU's Holdaway (our top attacker) and their other MB, Torwie, who is clearly the stronger blocker, lowering opponent eff by 0.169 points per swing.
Attack Efficiency over Expected
This again is how much better than expected these MBs hit the ball. There are some non-obvious names in CSUN's Tello and Concordia's Herold.
These players have a lower expected efficiency likely due to the worse situations they are given the ball in.
Because they attack so well, despite these tougher situations, their EFF Over Expected is similar to some of the best in the game today.