Winning face offs seems to be one of those skills that you either have or you don’t.
Most guys don’t.
Typically the responsibility for taking draws falls to one or two players on any given team. In the 2013 NLL season, 12 players took 100 or more face offs. Half of those players had a success rate between 40 percent and 60 percent, with two below 40 percent and four above 60 percent.
A statistical analysis by Michael Mauboussin of laxpower.com suggests that teams that win 60 percent or more of their draws get about 4.4 more possessions per game than teams that win fewer than 40 percent. He further notes that this translates to about a goal per game.
While that’s definitely an edge, it means that the majority of players who fall somewhere in the middle of the pack probably aren’t helping or hurting their teams one way or the other and that only the really strong and really weak face off men have a significant impact.
So what happens when you have a couple guys who are head-and-shoulders better than the rest?
In the modern NLL, those two players are brothers—Geoff and Bob Snider, who have historically won more than 70 percent of their face offs year in and year out—and that extra goal per game has consistently helped their teams win. Between 2011-2013, Geoff’s Calgary Roughnecks and Bob’s Washington Stealth combined for 53 wins, good for a .552 winning percentage.
Add in two trips to the Champion’s Cup by the Stealth and three straight first-place finishes in the West Division for the Roughnecks during the regular season and you begin to see the impact these two players have had on their squads.
To underscore the significance of that one goal per game that winning face offs has on game results, Bob Snider’s first assignment this season was to play his former Stealth teammates after an offseason trade to the Colorado Mammoth. Snider’s Mammoth won the tilt by one goal, 13-12, with Snider winning 65.5 percent of the draws.
At the end of the day, most games will not be determined by success or failure in the face off circle. But in a close game where every possession counts, it could make all the difference in the world.
