Quantifying the 2023 PLL MVP Race—Using Athletes Unlimited as Inspiration

The 2023 Premier Lacrosse League MVP race came to a thrilling finish in the final week of the PLL regular season—and there’s still uncertainty around who will ultimately receive the regular season award.

The current MVP favorites are Archers midfielder Tom Schreiber and Cannons attackman Marcus Holman. Along with the pair of former Ohio Machine teammates, Asher Nolting, Trevor Baptiste, Blaze Riorden were also nominated, though are unlikely to claim the award. Schreiber and Holman have pulled away from the pack since the midpoint of the season because of the stat sheet, the eye test, and context of their teams. There are arguments for both Schreiber, Holman and even the other nominees to each win the award.

However, determining an MVP is never easy and the criteria for winning the award can differ from year to year. There are many ways to assign value to a player. So, much like how MVP candidate Marcus Holman felt inspired by professional women’s lacrosse player Kenzie Kent while scoring one of his seven points last weekend, we’ll be looking at the current and past PLL seasons with some inspiration from Athletes Unlimited’s professional women’s lacrosse league.

The MVP race in any sport—professional or college—comes with controversy because at the end of the day the qualifications for the award are inherently subjective. The term “value” does not specify in what way a player contributes value to their team and to what degree. As such, the discussion surrounding the award throughout a given season involves a “narrative” component, which helps describe why a player deserves the award in a qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, way.

Two recent examples of this are Lyle Thompson on the 2022 Cannons LC and Jeff Teat on the 2023 New York Riptide. In both cases, the players were dominant offensive players but the fact that their teams were not performing well, which is part of the “narrative” component, worked against them. The award is typically given to offensive players who have the benefit of scoring goals, which shows exactly how valuable of a player they are. Only 10 non-offensive players have been awarded MVP or an equivalent award like the Tewaaraton in the following leagues over roughly the past 20-30 years.

The short length of this list emphatically demonstrates how difficult it is to win the award when you are not a dominant offensive player.

You may notice I’ve left out women’s professional lacrosse from the above examples. That is mainly because the recently formed Athlete’s Unlimited professional women’s lacrosse league has a unique format. Teams are drafted every week and the champion of a season is a player, or an MVP, rather than a team. They have developed a way to attribute explicit scores to assess performance and rank players.

Since a player wins the MVP award, which is also the league championship, it makes sense to remove the most subjective component of the award or the “narrative.” A major component of their scoring system was to promote parity among the different positions. In the three years of its existence, midfielder Taylor Cummings won in 2021 and goaltender Taylor Moreno won in both 2022 and 2023. 

Who Would Win MVP in the PLL Using This System?

The Athletes Unlimited point system prompts the question of what would happen if it was applied to other leagues. Quickly, there are some caveats due to format and rule differences between the PLL and AU. The scoring system used by AU does not directly apply to PLL rules. For example, AU includes yellow and red cards whereas PLL has penalties where the time can vary based on the infraction. Furthermore, draws differ greatly from faceoffs and while there are players who are able to dominate, draws are much more competitive than we’ve seen in the PLL, particularly this season. In addition, the outcomes of individual quarters and games awards points to players on entire teams. Points are also awarded to individual game MVPs which are chosen via a committee vote.

A couple of quick simplifications need to be made: only points from individual stats will be considered, all PLL penalties will be scored as yellow cards, complex occurrences like shot clock violations and defenses winning possession after shots will not be considered. If this scoring system was applied to each year in the PLL, we can see who would win MVP and what rank the actual MVP would have been under this system.

This scoring system clearly favors goalies and, to a lesser extent, faceoff athletes when applied to the PLL. In fact, under this scoring system, the top 10 every year is dominated by these two positions. The non-goalie and non-FO athletes in the top 10, and their rank, by year are presented below.

• 2019: Garrett Epple (6)
• 2020: Cade Van Raaphorst (8), Matt McMahon (9), Michael Ehrhardt (10)
• 2021: No one!
• 2022: No one!
• 2023: Ethan Rall (10)

This system is clearly not quite as balanced for the PLL where games can feature more shots, saves, goals, and faceoffs than in the AU counterpart. The scoring system clearly needs to be changed slightly to achieve more parity.

Some Changes to the Scoring System for the PLL

To increase the parity between positions for MVP consideration, I made some changes to the scoring system used by AU. Faceoff wins, or draw controls, are reduced from 2 points to 0.25 points to account for the increased number of faceoffs. Scoring penalty for turnovers are reduced from -10 to -6 points because the best offensive players, or the ones with the ball in their stick the most, generally commit the most turnovers. Caused turnovers are reduced from 14 to 11 points because this metric should not be more influential than goals which are 12 points. Finally, saves are reduced from 5 points to 2.5 points for similar reasons as discussed for faceoff wins. It is important to note that these changes were not made through systematic analysis but a manual sensitivity analysis. This means I came to these final numbers by manually changing the scoring system until the distribution of player positions improved. Using this, we can see who the Top 5 finalists by our new scoring system would be for each year, ordered by points.

In all but 2019, the actual MVP winner is now in the Top 5 based on a scoring system and, in 2021, Blaze would still be granted the award if this points system was the sole determining factor. It also highlights the dominant performance of Garrett Epple in 2019 and Lyle Thompson in 2022, even though they didn’t win the award. The results for 2022 quite accurately reflect the list of 2022 candidates. Additionally, some surprising names show up. Players like Eric Law, Jordan MacIntosh, Ryan Drenner, Jay Carlson, and Liam Byrnes have not typically been in the discussion for the award but are considered finalists in this system. One potential advantage, or disadvantage depending on your perspective, is that each year has different distributions of position groups, indicating there is a level of parity when considering the league MVP. Here are the distributions of player positions in the Top 10 when using the new scoring system.

The changed scoring system still prioritizes the attack position for MVP. Ultimately, high goal and point production does matter for winning games and provides tangible value to teams. However, this scoring system does produce representation from a wider range of position groups than in years past. Three LSMs, Michael Ehrhardt in 2020, Joel White in 2021 and Ethan Rall in 2023, and one SSDM, Pat Harbeson in 2020, are in the Top 10! 

Implications for the 2023 MVP Race

As said in the introduction, the current front-runners for the MVP award are Marcus Holman and Tom Schreiber. Given the asterisk associated with the faceoff position this year, it’s clear from this analysis that Holman should be the front runner for the award. In addition to the scoring system here, Holman is one of five players in PLL history to generate more than 40 points in a season, has the most total goals in a single season in PLL history, and helped to lead a complete turnaround of a team that was 1-9 in the previous season. Holman’s seven-point performance in Week 10 all but solidified his argument for MVP and it is likely we see a father-son Coach of the Year and MVP duo in September.

Who Would Win the 2023 Position Awards?

Maybe a more tractable way to implement such a system is for awards where players only compete against others of their own position based on the same primary statistical categories and skill sets. Under this current system, through Week 9 of the 2023 season, the winners of the position specific awards would be:

• Attack: Marcus Holman
• Midfield: Tom Schreiber
• Defense: Will Bowen
• Goalie: Blaze Riorden
• Faceoff: Trevor Baptiste
• Long Stick Midfield: Ethan Rall
• Short Stick Defensive Midfielder: Bubba Fairman

These results are quite interesting. Prior to Week 10, defensive player of the year would have gone to Garrett Epple. Both Bowen and Epple are 11^th and 12^th in player points. Interestingly, in addition to winning LSM of the year based on this scoring, Rall would also win Rookie of the Year honors over the current heavy favorite, Tucker Dordevic, which has become a less ridiculous statement as the season has progressed.

Should a Scoring System be Implemented in the PLL?

The introduction of a quantitative system like this would be interesting and could make the award slightly less subjective. However, no scoring system will be perfect and it will just be another source of debate to add to the long list of debate topics for MVP and even the position-specific awards. These types of systems are difficult to calibrate and the changes made to the AU scoring system in this article can not be considered an “optimal” solution. Even AU changed their scoring system this year by lowering the points awarded for a save to prevent the system from a bias towards goalies, much like I had to do in this article.

Small changes to the scoring system can dramatically affect the results of the Top 5 candidates and rule changes in the PLL could implicitly influence the results year over year. If saves were increased from 2.5 to 3 points, the first three of the Top 5 candidates in 2021 would all be goalies: Riorden, Bernlohr and Tim Troutner. Similarly, increasing the points awarded for a faceoff win from 0.25 to 0.5 (faceoff wins were originally 2 points in AU system) results in two faceoff athletes in the Top 5 (with Mike Sisselberger ranking sixth) through Week 9 of the 2023 season.

In 2023, the changes to the shot clock result in faceoff specialists facing off against strategies designed to not win the faceoff and try to cause turnovers. Therefore, even though Baptiste, Ierlan, and Sisselberger have been particularly dominant based on this scoring system and the stat sheet, there is extra context which should affect the interpretation of this information. If you remove faceoff athletes from consideration in 2023 due to the rule changes, the players which move up to the Top 5 are Ethan Rall and Ryder Garnsey, which is definitely a surprising result.

Alternatively, should points associated with faceoff wins be further reduced because of the rule changes? This is merely a rhetorical question to exemplify how such a system can easily be criticized just as the current criterion can be called into question. Some positions will always be left behind regardless of the scores set for each statistical category, such as defensive positions or midfielders. This issue can be partially attributed to the lack of statistical categories which truly are able to quantify a player’s effectiveness on the field, or value to their team, in ways outside of points produced or caused turnovers. Lack of a suitable number of quantities with which to judge all players’ value on the field necessitates the “narrative” component of the award.

Therefore, if a scoring system was introduced, it should not be the authoritative system for determining the MVP. More context will always be needed to fully determined who has earned the award and these systems will always lack a way to capture the intangibles. The narrative component provides much-needed context and allows us to celebrate historically amazing seasons for players, even though they might not be the highest scoring player, in goals or player points. However, a tool such as this could highlight players who are overlooked, but deserve more attention in the MVP race and the position-specific awards. A primary example of where a scoring system would benefit specifically non-offensive players is Garrett Epple in 2019, who was not a finalist for MVP and not even selected for Defensive Player of the Year.

Data Availability
The raw data is available from the PLL Player Stats website. I have aggregated it into a sortable excel sheet which will be available on my Github where you can mess with the scoring system yourself and see who the MVP would be under your scoring system. I will continue to update it throughout the PLL seasons moving forward as a fun way to quantify the MVP race.