Is Lilly King Swimming the Skins Events Wrong?

Over the weekend, the SwimSwam staff (along with others) were having a debate about what constitutes “winning” the ‘skins’ events in the International Swimming League.

On two occasions this season (Abbey Weitzeil of the LA Current in Match #3 and Ilya Shymanovich of Energy Standard in Match #7), the swimmer who won the final round of the 3-round skins event has not scored the most skins points. Weitzeil out-scored her teammate Beryl Gastaldello 28-27 earlier this season, and Shymanovych outscored Iron’s Emre Sakci 33-30 last weekend.

Early results of a Twitter poll indicate that most people see the winner of the final round as the event winner (71%-29%), but that’s not the most interesting bit that came out of this discussion.

Instead, along with SwimSwam stat guru Barry Revzin, we identified a flaw in many swimmers’ approaches to the huge-points and huge money event that ends every ISL meet.

Because of changes to the skins format for season 2 of the ISL, this incongruity has been made possible. Among other changes, like the winner of the medley relay choosing the stroke for the skins events, the two big ones that allowed this to happen are scoring-by-round, and Jackpot points.

The fundamental format of the skins event this year is the same. In the opening round, each team enters 2 swimmers, for 8 total in the heat. The top 4 advance to the 2nd round, and the top 2 advance to a head-to-head final.

Last year, it was clear because of scoring who won: athletes were given points based on their overall order of finish in skins, not based on their scoring within each round. Whoever won the final round scored the most points last year.

This year, however, points are given out in each round. And, what’s more, points can be stolen in each round if the winner finishes far enough ahead of other competitors.

This actually sets up a potential, not unrealistic, scenario where a swimmer could score the most points in skins and not even qualify for the final.

An example of this:

Swimmer A wins Round 1 and Jackpots 3rd-8th places, which we’ve seen happen this season in other events. That means they’d earn 30 points in Round 1 alone. Then, Swimmer A places 3rd in Round 2, misses the final, but doesn’t get Jackpotted. This would give Swimmer A 36 points overall in the skins.

Then let’s say Swimmer B finishes 2nd in the opening round, is the only swimmer who doesn’t get Jackpotted, and then wins rounds 2 and 3 but doesn’t Jackpot anybody. Swimmer B would score 30 points. In this scenario, Swimmer B won the final round of the competition, which the average viewer probably expects to be the ‘winner’ of the skins, and but is outscored by 6 points by Swimmer A, who didn’t make the final.

And this is the loophole.

Generally we’ve seen the top swimmers approach this year’s skins events in a similar way to last year: manage energy output, and try to get to the final with enough left to win it.

As it turns out, this is entirely the wrong approach in many cases.

One example is breaststroker Lilly King of the Cali Condors, who is the single most dominant swimmer in league history, having never lost a race in 30 starts, including relays.

If we take King’s last meet, where she won the skins race and Cali won the meet so it didn’t matter, she split 29.72, 29.94, and 29.04 across the 3 rounds. The 29.04 was her top split of the weekend, including faster than she went in the single round individual event.

That was exciting for everyone, right? To see her win the first 2 rounds and then still make it into the final and go a best time?

But if she had not conserved her energy in the earlier rounds, she actually could have scored more points, even if it meant losing the final.

For example, if she had swum her rounds 29.72 – 29.04 – 29.94 instead, swapping the times of the last 2 rounds. All else equal, this would have led to King Jackpotting (1.15 seconds) the points of Annie Lazor and Reona Aoki in round 2. That’s +11 for Cali, -6 for London, -5 for Tokyo in the 2nd round. King actually would have been close to taking points from Alia Atkinson in that round as well, beating her by 1.13 seconds.

Even if that meant King losing to Atkinson in round 3, which is no guarantee but a possibility in that scenario, she would have scored more points using that tactic. The net of King Jackpotting round 2 swims and losing the final would be +4 for Cali and +1 for London, which is a net +3 advantage for Cali.

King is a unique example in her dominance, and this strategy wouldn’t necessarily work for every potential skins winner, but in her case, it seems like an approach that would usually net her out more points.

So far, no meets have been decided by few enough points for this to come into play, though it could impact MVP scoring. In the finals, these kinds of nuances could become signficant.

It’s likely that the coaches of Energy Standard, who have shown that they are constantly ahead of the curve in maximizing points in the unique ISL format, had this in mind going into the men’s breaststroke skins last week when they chose the event in spite of Sakci being so good this season.

It’s possible that the scoring will be re-worked for these skins events next season so that this can’t happen, so that the winner of the event comes out as the swimmer with the most points, even if the deltas vary, but for now, there’s a loophole here that teams, if it’s really all about the points, should be exploiting.