Eyes on Hoshoryu for Nagoya
He won last year... why not again? A profile
Yep, I’m doing some profiles of a few wrestlers as I’m waiting for the tournament to begin… why not?
Last July, Hoshoryu won in Nagoya… [spoiler, I guess]
Can he do it again?
Let’s check his trajectory over the last few years, as well as his kimarite distribution.
Hoshoryu's weight and rank since January 2022
Hoshoryu’s rank and weight (except at the very beginning of this period) have been fairly steady.
Hoshoryu did progress from Komusubi to Sekiwake to Ozeki… huzzah!
But his weight… other than the weird large jump in 2022 (not sure about that one - that’s a huge increase), he’s been stuck around 142 kg (313 lb) for a while.
Hoshoryu’s top 10 kimarite
So this is something to talk about.
First: Hoshoryu has a wide variety of kimarite in his record. He has 34 kimarite listed, some of which are very rare, like ipponzeoi and kawazugake.
I need to redo this old post on the Hellinger metric, but I think I messed up how I originally deployed the metric. With the current stats I have, the metric I have for Hoshoryu isn’t 13.5% (the metric I calculated in November 2023), but 18.1%… and looking at the table, it looks entirely wrong (Ura at only 13.5%?!) Yeah, I have to entirely recalculate for all wrestlers.
My point is this: you can even see this in the above graph.
The dark blue bar are Hoshoryu’s win percentages by kimarite, and his percentages for the top two, yorikiri and oshidashi, are lower… but then you see his percentages for throws like shitatenage and uwatenage are much higher than the average.
His sotogake percentage is much higher than the average.
He’s the master of throws for sure. Which is unsurprising given the Mongolian wrestling tradition, which is dependent on throwing.
Hoshoryu’s weakness: yoritaoshi
The interesting thing to me is how many of Hoshoryu’s losses are due to yoritaoshi.
What’s that about?
That’s frontal crush out, and if you see what that looks like, it makes sense — it’s when Hoshoryu is attempting to get a hold of the belt to throw… and then fails.
So I can see why this is the top way Hoshoryu loses.
