DC Trident Show Signs of Life in Another 4th Place Finish in Match 4

Thanks to Barry Revzin for compiling the data for this article.

For most of the top teams in the International Swimming League, the regular season is an exercise in stacking cash and perfecting lineups. Teams like the Cali Condors, Energy Standard, and even LA Current and London Roar, won’t have any problem securing a top 8 spot and their position in the playoff round of the season. So wide is the gap that a team like Energy Standard, now without their star Sarah Sjostrom for the last half of their regular season, is already basically a lock for a top 6 spot.

But there is a very interesting battle brewing among the teams vying for the 6th through 10th positions league. Specifically, four of those teams will have to go to the “play-in” match at the end of the regular season, the repêchage, if you will, to attempt to earn the final two spots in the playoff.

The final match of the season will face off four of the five most likely teams headed for this last-chance match: New York Breakers, Aqua Centurions, Iron, and Tokyo Frog Kings.

The other team in this conversation, DC Trident, will face London Roar, Toronto Titans, and Energy Standard in their final match, which probably means a 4th place finish and a spot in the play-off. Presuming they finish 4th in that last match, after 4th-place finishes in their first two matches, even if they were able to pick off a weakened Katinka-less Iron team next week, they would still be a bottom four team.

But that’s not all bad news for Kaitlin Sandeno’s squad. Because of an unfavorable schedule that misses the two teams they’re most likely to beat, the Breakers and Tokyo, the Trident are almost certainly headed for the playoff, but based on their results from Match #4 this weekend, they actually have a strong chance of advancing to the playoff anyway.

The Trident performed much better in their second outing than in their first, though it didn’t do them much good in the team standings. Swimmers were faster across the board, Aleks Shchegolev rejoined the team and made a big impact, eating up a lot of races for the Trident. Even in places where they were slower, it sometimes came out okay: Zane Grothe, for example, was 2 seconds slower in the 400 free, but a smarter approach to the checkpoint scoring meant he scored 1.5 more points.

Here’s the data:

Note: simulations exclude Skins racing, because those events are, essentially, impossible to simulate.

Iron (Week 2) vs. DC (Week 1) vs. NY (Week 2) vs. Tokyo (Week 1)

Iron (Week 2) vs. DC (Week 2) vs. NY (Week 2) vs. Tokyo (Week 1)

Above, we’ve simulated with either Iron or Aqua in the play-in match, though a season-bests simulation shows that Aqua is clearly the better of the two teams. We’d expect that whichever team wins the final match of the season will be safe, and a simulation of that meet shows Aqua with a big advantage. That could change, because there are so many big names coming and going this season, but for now, we’ll move forward with Iron in the bottom 4. We also ran the simulation with Aqua in the bottom 4, and it still came out kind of the same.

But, what’s clear is that if DC swims as well as they did in Week 2 during the play-in match, they should comfortably cruise into the playoff round. Even if they don’t, they have a pretty significant margin-for-error here.

The Breakers are a worse team than they were last year, losing Michael Andrew, Felix Auboeck, Boglarka Kapas, and Emily Escobedo, among others, and not really finding equitable replacements. Tokyo’s botched draft, along with an apparent hesitancy by Japanese swimmers to participate, has left them in a worse position – though they still have the hope of Vlad Morozov rejoining them. We don’t know if, or when, that will happen, as Tokyo has been the tighest-lipped team about sharing information this season.

The thought of Vlad Morozov training with Coley Stickels is one of the more enticing subplots of the season. But if he arrives for the play-in match, that could give Tokyo a big boost. Until he arrives, they don’t have much team (versus individual prize money) motivation to swim fast, so at this point they’d do well to pack-in the training and try to get some rest for the play-in match.

But DC is rising from below and are better than their results make them appear so far. While the play-in match does take a lot of the pressure out of the regular season, it should, at least, be a competitive and winnable match for some teams that otherwise are languished at the bottom of the rankings – important both for team morale and for team marketability. Plus, it will help those swimmers earn some good money to close the substantial pay gap between the top and the bottom teams in the league.