looking at OPR across events

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Cory

OPR is a BS metric this year. This game isn't about scoring. Pretty much every other game in FIRST has required more than one good offensive robot, so you are forced to pick the second best scoring bot at the event, as the #1 seed. Not this one.

You need three things in this game. A really good front court robot that is going to make 90%+ of the shots they take, has a good intake, and isn't afraid to play some defense, a midfielder that is able to transition from assisting to defense on the fly, and an inbounder that can quickly pass the ball to the midfielder as well as play a bit of D or throw some picks for the midfielder to get away from defense to execute the pass.

Two high scoring robots is the flashy alliance that looks great on paper but unless they can transition into those defensive roles on the fly they're not going to stand up to the above alliance. I don't think you will see examples of more brutal defense than what we saw in the CVR finals. If you can't counter that with equally effective defense of your own, or counter defense to free up your front court robot, you're in a world of hurt.

This is also exactly why OPR, or more specifically CCWM, could be a great metric this year, given an infinitely large sample size of non-changing machines. Because so much of this game relies on esoteric maneuvers and complimentary play, much of a robot's value to an alliance cannot be determined simply by recording how many times they score or assist. Some other concrete metrics, like shooting%, possessions, inbounding%, lines crossed, or time spent in contact with other robots could shed more light, but many teams don't track those reliably (or at all), and they still leave gaps in true value. Over a sufficiently large sample, a team's value to an average alliance should become clear with OPR/CCWM, though. I don't think we'll see a large enough sample to get meaningful results for most middle-tier robots, though. There's too much variably during qualification matches in terms of partner's capabilities, opponent's capabilities, strategy selected, and robot improvement. Not to mention that the value to an average alliance is often not identical to value to your particular alliance.