AVP League: Two playoff spots at stake heading into final weekend in Frisco

Two spots in the AVP League playoffs are up for grabs in the final weekend of the regular season and all four teams competing have a shot.

But to paraphrase George Orwell from his classic “Animal Farm,” some of their chances “are more equal than others.”

Going into Week 8 of the League — which will be held indoors at the Comerica Center in Frisco, Texas, a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb — the Dallas Dream are 8-4, the Austin Aces 6-6, the San Diego Smash 5-7 and the LA Launch 4-8. Each will have two games, encompassing four matches, and who plays whom will factor heavily into who advances to the four-team postseason next weekend.

Myriad playoff permutations affect the four squads and what transpires over the opening session on Saturday night –  Smash vs. Dream and Launch vs. Aces – very well could determine the teams that will join the New York Nitro (12-4) and Miami Mayhem (10-6) in the single-elimination League semifinals.

Here’s a rundown:

• Dream: One match victory against the Smash puts the Dream into the postseason. It would give them nine wins and the most that either of the sub-.500 teams could earn is eight. Conversely, two losses to the Smash would not be catastrophic, since the Dream still could win 10 matches overall.
• Smash: A sweep against the Dream keeps the best-case scenario of a nine-win record alive. A split would not eliminate them, but from the standpoint of tiebreaker points, a three-set win and a two-set loss might prove costly, since the Smash and Aces each come in with 16 tiebreaker points.
• Launch: This one is simple. The Launch need to sweep the Aces in both matches. Those teams are first up on Saturday night, so the Smash will know the result before they play.
• Aces: Two wins over the Launch accomplishes two purposes. The Launch would be eliminated and the Aces would be better positioned than the Smash (at least one game ahead) going into Sunday afternoon’s action. A split would keep the Aces at .500 with the possibility of nine wins, thus very much in the hunt. Two losses, at best, would put the Aces at a one-point deficit in tiebreaker points with the Launch and the latter would hold the advantage in head-to-head, which is the second tiebreaking criterion.

The games in the second session at the 4,000-seat Comerica Center on Sunday afternoon are League rematches. The Smash and Launch split their matches on Week 1, and the Dream and Aces split during the second week, which complicates the head-to-head tiebreakers, if they become necessary.

At the risk of putting the cart too far in front of the horse, here are a few more bullet points about the four games this weekend:

• If the Dream lose all four of their matches, they could drop to the No. 4 seed and have to play the top-seeded Nitro in the semifinals, rather than the Mayhem, who are locked into at least the No. 3 seed.

Or the situation could be even worse (and bear with me, because it’s complicated). If the Dream drop all of their matches in two sets (getting zero tiebreaker points), the Launch run the table in sweeps (picking up 12 tiebreaker points) and the Aces thus go 2-2 overall, while losing in sweeps to the Launch on Saturday and winning both in two sets on Sunday against the Dream (earning six tiebreaker points), the Dream would be out of the playoffs.

Why? The Launch would have 27 tiebreaker points to 22 each for the Aces and Dream and all would be 8-8 overall, with the Smash having been eliminated by the losses to the Launch. Thus, the Launch would grab the No. 3 seed and the fourth spot would come down to the second tiebreaker, head-to-head results, which the Aces would have won 3-2. A farfetched plot,certainly, but not impossible.

• A more likely scenario is that the Dream should win at least one of their matches, since USA Olympians Miles Partain and Andy Benesh (6-0) are the only undefeated pair during League play in either gender. Sporting a crowd-pleasing attack that features jump-setting and “on two” options, they also are the only League duo to have both players compile a hitting percentage of better than .500 (Benesh .523, Partain .517).

However, their match against fellow USA Olympians Chase Budinger and Miles Evans (3-3) of the Smash is hardly a gimme. An explosive Week 7 elevated former NBA player Budinger’s attack percentage to a League-best .617 (76-for-115 with five errors).

Pertain and Benesh handily swept the Aces’ veteran duo of Billy Allen and Paul Lotman in the opening weekend, but Allen and Lotman came into Week 8 with a 3-3 mark, and just knocked off the Nitro’s Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander (6-2).

“Big weekend for us and the other teams,” was how Allen summed it up. “It’s exciting that it’s coming down to the last event. (The Aces) need to play great volleyball and put together some wins.”

• The Aces would benefit greatly if USA Olympians Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss again become the dominant TKN who won the Manhattan Beach Open.

Kloth and Nuss started the League season with three victories, but have fallen into an uncharacteristic three-loss funk, dropping all in two sets and being outscored 94-67. They are widely considered one of the world’s elite pairs, as illustrated by their No. 2 seeding this summer in the Paris Olympics, so a rapid reversal of form is a strong possibility.

Looking at their Week 8 matchups, TKN hold a 4-2 advantage in the all-time series with the Launch’s Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles (3-3), but they needed three sets to put them away in their last meeting, the title match of the prestigious MBO. Kloth and Nuss handled Aces up-and-comers Hailey Harward and Kylie Deberg in Week 2, although both sets were decided in overtime.

• Left-hander Tim Bromgren and effervescent Troy Field of the Launch own the most misleading record in the League. They have lost five of their six matches, but four of the losses have come in three sets with two of the tiebreakers settled by two points (15-13 against the Palm Beach Passion’s Phil Dalhausser and Avery Drost and 16-14 against Budinger and Evans). In their lone two-set setback, Bomgren-Field pushed Partain and Evans to 15-13, 16-14 scores. Ten of the 18 sets played by the hard-luck Launch duo have been decided by two points. If there’s a team that’s “due” among those competing in Week 8, it’s Tim and Troy.

The weekend streaming/TV schedule will see the two games on Saturday night and the first game on Sunday afternoon streamed live on the free Bally Live app and ballylive.com. Those six matches will be archived on the AVP’s free YouTube channel shortly after completion.

The second game on Sunday will air exclusively on the CBSSN cable channel via tape delay from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern. A replay will be shown at 11 a.m. Eastern. Those two matches from Sunday will go up on the AVP’s YouTube channel 10 days after the live telecast, in accordance with the AVP’s media-rights agreement with CBS Sports.

Here are the lineups at the Comerica Center in Frisco for the last of eight regular-season AVP League weekends:

Saturday 

LA Launch (4-8) vs. Austin Aces (6-6) 

Women (6 p.m. Central): Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles  (Launch, 3-3) vs. Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss (Aces, 3-3).
Men (7 p.m.): Tim Bomgren and Troy Field (Launch, 1-5) vs. Paul Lotman and Billy Allen (Aces, 3-3).

San Diego Smash (5-7) vs. Dallas Dream (8-4)

Women (8 p.m.): Geena Urango and Toni Rodriguez (Smash, 2-4) vs. Hailey Harward and Kylie Deberg (Dream, 2-4).
Men (9 p.m.): Chase Budinger and Miles Evans (Smash, 3-3) vs. Miles Partain and Andy Benesh (Dream, 6-0).

Sunday

LA Launch vs. San Diego Smash

Women (1 p.m. Central): Flint-Scoles (Launch) vs. Urango-Rodriguez (Smash).
Men (2 p.m.): Bomgren-Field (Launch) vs. Budinger–Evans (Smash).

Austin Aces vs. Dallas Dream

Women (3 p.m.): vs. Kloth-Nuss (Aces) vs. Harward-Deberg (Dream) in a rematch from Week 1.
Men (4 p.m.): Lotman-Allen (Aces) vs. Pertain-Benesh (Dream) in a rematch from Week 2.

The results from each match will go toward determining the four qualifiers for the bracket-style championship rounds on Nov. 9 and 10 at the Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California. The first criterion for advancing to the playoffs is team winning percentage. The second is tiebreaker points, awarded on a scale of three for a two-set sweep, two for a three-set victory and one for a three-set defeat.

Larry Hamel