Ultiplanet

Thursday morning, January 20, the LA Aviators dropped the biggest roster change news to come out of The AUDL since Ben Jagt moved to New York: Pawel Janas had moved to Los Angeles and signed a six year (6 year?!) contract with his local pro ultimate team. Pawel Janas is first in AUDL assists with 396. Janas is first in throwing yards; the only player in the league with over 10,000, and first in total yards with 15,508 (suck it Ryan Osgar). Janas is first all time in completions, and has a 93% career completion rate, but a true career rate of 95.7% (the AUDL measures career average based on the average of each season, however if you take all his completions and all his throwaways, he has completed 95.7% of his throws). The kicker: he has accomplished all this in 69 games (nice!). Janas is not even in the top 100 of games played, yet leads the league in half a dozen all time statistical categories (to be fair, yardage stats weren’t kept until 2021 so he probably isn’t actually the leader there, but he very well might be!)

Pawel Janas is the most distinguished thrower of frisbees in AUDL history, statistically leagues ahead of his peers like Cam Harris, Goose Helton, or Kevin Quinlan, but accomplishing it in half the time. The only real players to come close are Jonathan Nethercutt, who’s the same age but has had a career with far more absences, and Ryan Osgar, technically older but about 20 less games then Janas and, if he keeps playing in New York, will invariably continue to have monster assist seasons with uber talented players.

Now he moves to the west coast which, and I’m trying to be nice here, has has had more of an offensive reputation then a defensive one these last few seasons. I have to move away from stats here for a moment and just talk about the eye test, but most of it seems to revolve around the west playing club style defenses and having inconsistent attendance from their star players. Double teams, the increased width of the field, increased stiffening in the intermediary parts of the field to prevent goal line situations, these are all examples of professional ultimate defense that other division seem to be slightly ahead of the West in.

This might not be true for every team, but it is true for teams like Seattle, Portland and San Jose. Salt Lake had a statistically good defense, but they were very high variance: as likely to get 15 blocks in a game as they were to give up 20 points. The Summit and the Growlers had top 10 scoring defense (5 and 9 respectively), but both were buoyed by truly abysmal performances from Portland, Oakland, and notably LA scoring less then 15 points in at least one game during the season. 15 points is really bad for pro ultimate. Detroit was the worst team in the league last year and even they managed to eclipse 15 points in at least 10 games.

Compare that to the Central, the division Pawel is leaving. 3 teams in the top 10 of scoring defense (albeit one of those is Chicago), and 2 more in Pittsburgh and Indy that allowed roughly the same number of points per game as Utah. You could say that those teams beefed up on impressive performances against Detroit, yet Portland and Seattle had just about the same number of turns per game, they just tended to score more… because the defenses in the West are easier to score on.

Now on to Pawel. Janas was responsible for 74 assists of his teams 346 scores last season, so about 21% of all Chicago scores were on the backs of a Pawel Janas throw. LA, meanwhile, was 5th worst in the league in scoring, with 224 total goals for the season (albeit on 3 less games then Chicago(side note: I really wish the AUDL delineated their states for regular and post season. They do it for player stats, they really should for team stats as well)). 21% of LA’s scores would be 47 assists, which Janas hasn’t had in a season ever. His lowest regular season total was 55 assists in 2021. Given the load that he carried on less dynamic Chicago offenses (he was 30% of the teams assists on a 2018 Chicago team that finished bottom 10 in scoring), probably both his assists and LA’s total scores will go up. If we give Janas slightly under his all time high in usage, so 27% of the teams assists, and throw him 1 more assist a game, that projects him to be at 74 assists (which he did in Chicago in 2019 in 12 games). 74 assists and 27% of the offense is roughly 274 points for the season. That would immediately bring LA from the bottom of the league all the way to 7th in total scoring, just behind DC. You read that right. Using Ultiplanet’s patented nonsense projections, and math, LA would be as offensively potent as the beautiful game DC Breeze.

I think that Janas will have an even greater impact in the West however. Jordan Kerr led the league last season with 78 regular season assists: in the western division and with half of Janas’ efficiency. I think we are poised for heretofore unseen levels of throwing nonsense from Pawel Janas. Like 7 assists per game kind of stuff. Like LA makes the playoffs over San Diego (and maybe even ahead of Utah) kinds of a throwing impact. And if frisbee players move to LA at the same rate the rest of the country does, LA is on their way to building a super team in the West to rival the Empire in the East.