⚽️ Newcastle's Alexander Isak is the most complete striker in the Premier League
My Week in Sport(s) ⚽️ 🏒 🏀 🏏 🏉
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: ⚽️ Alexander Isak, 🏒 Macklin Celebrini, 🏀 Napheesa Collier, 🏏 Shafali Verma and 🏉 the Fijian Drua.
⚽️ Newcastle's Alexander Isak is the most complete striker in the Premier League
What does it take to be a starting striker in the Premier League? ‘Scoring goals’ is too easy an answer. Just how frequently — and how repeatably — do you have to do it to stick around in the best men’s league in the world?
Most players who establish themselves at the position are involved in chances worth about half an expected goal per 90 minutes. (I’ve defined 'strikers' as forwards who take shots worth 3x the total xG of the shots they assist.) There are currently three strikers who operate in an even higher tier, though: in their Premier League careers so far, Man City’s Erling Haaland, Chelsea’s Nicolas Jackson and Newcastle’s Alexander Isak have all averaged more than 0.7 combined non-penalty xG and xAG per 90.
If we assess them purely on their contribution to shot creation, Haaland is really in another tier above Jackson and Isak. But that doesn’t have to be a striker’s only job on the field: while they play a less important role in their team’s ball movement than wide forwards do, most strikers still average around 7 or 8 progressive actions per 90. For Newcastle, however, Isak is asked to do much more than that. Averaging around 12 such actions, he’s more involved in build-up than anyone else at the position.
Isak’s contributions are well-balanced, too. He has more progressive carries, passes and receptions than both Haaland and Jackson; among this wider cohort, Kai Havertz — a converted midfielder — is the only player to better him in any category. To top it off, he has scored about five more goals than you’d expect based on the quality of his chances over three seasons in England — suggesting that his finishing skills are also elite. (Haaland is ahead of his xG, too, but not by as much; Jackson is 23% behind.)
It’s no surprise that many top clubs are interested in signing the 25-year-old — including Liverpool, who face Newcastle in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday. The league leaders have several versatile forwards — chiefly Mo Salah — who could win the game for them, but lack a pure ‘striker’ by this definition. Newcastle won’t have the same depth across their front line at Wembley, but in Isak they can still call on one player up top who can do almost everything — for the rest of this season, at least.
🏒 Macklin Celebrini — last year’s top NHL draft pick — is already making an impact all over the ice
A live question among close observers of hockey: is Macklin Celebrini already a more impactful NHL player than Connor Bedard? Their first head-to-head yesterday would suggest so — and public player-valuation models think it’s pretty clear-cut, too.
By ‘net rating’ — Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic’s all-in-one impact metric — the San Jose Sharks rookie is well ahead of the second-year Blackhawk. The ‘microstats’ which Corey Sznajder of
collects for a sample of NHL games — and which we used to analyse Bedard’s game last year — don’t feed into The Athletic’s model, though. They’re particularly useful for assessing players’ ability to move the puck up the ice; how do Bedard and Celebrini compare in this important facet of play?
Like Bedard, it seems like Celebrini is another great puck-mover: he averages 15 entries into the offensive zone with possession — and nine defensive-zone exits — every 60 minutes he plays at five-on-five. As Sznajder has only tracked a small chunk of the Shark’s ice time, I’d hold this particular conclusion quite lightly for now. Taking all the available data together, though, it’s hard not to conclude that Celebrini has stolen an early jump on the player he followed as the NHL’s first-overall draft pick.
What else I learned last week
🏀 Unrivaled founder Napheesa Collier is making the league her own
Napheesa Collier — one of the co-founders of Unrivaled — was among the three top two-way WNBA players I referenced in passing last week. According to some metrics, she has less impact with the ball than her peers A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart do.
Collier, however, has been the best scorer on the court in her own three-on-three league, which concludes its first season on Monday. Playing for Unrivaled’s dominant team, she has averaged 49.7 points per 36 minutes. Five players attempt field goals more frequently than Collier does, but she’s 5.1 points clear of the next-best scorer. Her stats are a good indicator of how much action there is in an Unrivaled game, too: she has taken 32.8 field-goals attempts per 36, up from 16.6 in the WNBA last year.
🏏 Shafali Verma is the best boundary-hitter in the WPL’s (brief) history
Boundary-hitting is easier than ever in the WPL. Going into yesterday’s elimination game, the tournament-wide effective boundary rate for 2025 was 21.8% — almost two percentage points higher than last year, and a touch above the 2023 season.
Saturday’s final will be at the Brabourne Stadium, which has the second-highest eB% of any ground used in the WPL’s history. Shafali Verma of the Dehli Capitals will be delighted: she is by far the best boundary-hitter the competition has seen. A return of 93 fours and 49 sixes from 523 balls faced makes her effective boundary rate 31.9%. This is 13.4 points higher than the average of other batters in her games; no one else to face more than 240 balls has outperformed expectation by more than six points.
🏉 At home, the Fijian Drua run other Super Rugby teams off the park
A few weeks into this year’s edition of Super Rugby Pacific, New Zealand’s Chiefs looked like a sure bet as the best team in the competition. That was until they travelled to Lautoka last weekend — and got turned over 28-24 by the Fijian Drua.
The Melanesian franchise’s home-away splits since their inaugural season in 2022 are extraordinary. In their first 30 games outside Fiji, they were outscored by 21 points per game; in 17 at home, they’ve beaten opponents by four points on average. While they also kick more from hand in Fiji, per Rugby.com.au data, it’s in the running game that they have a decisive advantage. In away fixtures, they carry the ball 10 fewer metres per game than their opponents; at home, they outgain them by 160m on the ground.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Friday March 28th.
