The community and I ranked this GES team 12th in the league. I personally had grievances about the defense, and the community thought this lineup wouldn't really mesh that well.
Meanwhile LBT was sort of given a middling grade by the community and myself. S9 CREAM doesn't sound as good in the current era.
We see now that Ephew moved Breesus up to A-Team, which is a solid choice. But did it work against a team that's just a blast from the past?
This matchup ended up being closer than I think any of us really expected. Three halves decided by one cap, and both games being decided by two caps, this was a nail biter from start to finish. It was also a match that was mostly decided in the "witching hour", which is what I'm calling the last two minutes of the half. I know that Scott Hanson uses it for NFL RedZone, but I'm stealing it here. Out of the 18 total caps in this game, six of them came during the witching hour, which is wild. In fact, LBT was leading 2-1 in G1H2 until GES got two quick caps after the eight minute mark, in order to take back the lead and ultimately win that game.
Stats-wise, chucky and Trituin were their team's best players, with Trit having an 89 DNISH and chucky one-upping that with a 96 DNISH. The offensive stats aren't that great, which is understandable since each team could only get nine caps each. But, out of all the offenders, EphewSeakay took the crown with a 74 ONISH and five caps. Breesus actually led the four offenders in hold with 460, so that's nice, but he could only parlay that into two caps. On the other side, Ralph Wiggum had 692 seconds of prevent, but only had 26 returns, which is 33rd in the league, even behind some offenders, which is not great.
The top table (Table A) shown here is something you've already seen, since I've just ripped it from my own team stats table. I just took those two teams in order to show a comparison between the two. We can see here that while LBT and GES were pretty similar in a majority of the categories, there were some differences that led to this split.
Looking at Table A, we can see that LBT had the better prevent defense in this match, leading in prevent by almost five total minutes and actually leading the league this week in P/HA (well, tied with MB8). But GES had the edge when it came to a return-based playstyle, leading in tags and returns. The biggest difference from Table A came in pops, with LBT having 29 more pops than GES. I looked at the pup ratio, and LBT actually got 10 TPs compared to GES's 8 TPs, so GES probably utilized their pups better. I initially thought maybe LBT had a ton of flaccids, but they actually had the second lowest F/G ratio this week, so that couldn't be it. Either way, those pops helped GES control the pace of the game, because dead balls can't do anything, so I've been told. GES had the better Score% than LBT by 2.5%, so that's another way GES had a tiny advantage.
Table B is just the "other" stats that I didn't really think were important or really contribute to wins in general. But it's always nice to see if any secondary stats had major disparities. Of course, GES had the better KD and less NDPops, because LBT liked to die a lot this game, but damn 20 NDPop difference is impressive. The next biggest difference is P/R, with LBT leading this week with 13.31, a full four seconds more than GES's 9.47. The Chain% and Spark% numbers are pretty similar, but the QR% and RIB% rates skew favorably towards LBT once again, with GES near the bottom in these numbers. Looking at these stats, it's pretty impressive that GES managed to split here.
CONCLUSION
The saving grace for GES in this game seemed to be the fact that they had the least pops in the league, while LBT had 29 more pops. That equates to 57 seconds of respawning time from just pops alone, and think about how many caps you can score if you had a full minute with the other team stuck in an eternal respawning loop. Other than that, GES needs to maybe work on their defense, because LBT's offense was getting out relatively easily, as evidenced by the low F/G ratio and GES's horrid QR% and RIB%. I'll have to give credit for GES's OD in this case then, because they seemed to prevent LBT from capping a lot if they only ended up having nine caps. For LBT, their pops were actually pretty league average, but they went up against the team with the least amount, so either they didn't use their pups effectively or had some dumb spikes. That Score% is also a little iffy, as well as their Spark%, so I think that the LBT offense still needs a little more work in terms of individual grabs and the such, but when they're working together it seems like they do pretty well for themselves.
