Analysis: You’re not close enough: Revolver’s offence 2025 by Brummie

This year’s US Open & Pro Elite Championships featured a world-class list of teams in the men’s division and was won by San Francisco Revolver, who haven’t won Nationals since 2017. Once famous for their dominating side stack offence and athletic defence, they’ve had a few difficult years but are back with a bang with a rejuvenated offence driven by some rising stars. Back-to-back tournament wins surely makes them one of the favourites to win this year’s club championships.

I decided to write about Revolver before they won, based on some of the features of their offence. The fact that they were able to top their division shows that they are clearly a title contender, but the parity at US Open was remarkable. Revolver lost in pools to Truck Stop 13-15, later defeating them in the final. Revolver had a 15-13 win over Clapham, 15-14 in quarters against Pony, 15-13 in semis vs Dig, and 15-13 in the final. Clearly, the margins at the top of the men’s game are small, and we can expect an exciting season ahead.

Structurally, Revolver’s offence looks quite vanilla; they play some horizontal stack, some vertical, some T stack, some side stack, some dominator sets. I could easily have written at length about any of these aspects of their game. They run a few set plays from the pull and the brick, just enough to get the disc moving and to generate a few quick holds on offence. But what really caught my eye was their handler offence, and particularly both the speed of their play and the small margins they throw to. It is here that it feels like Revolver are evolving to beat help defences, i.e. defences which are predominantly based on person-to-person defence layered with poaching and switching. Help defences usually look to temporarily outnumber the offence in certain areas of the field, then recover quickly before the offence can find the players left open as a result.

Pushing the boundaries

Revolver play a great blend of traditional, proven offences with some expansive throws that push the envelope in terms of spaces they can hit. Defences look to deny certain areas of the field, but they can’t take away everything. What they can do though, is leave small gaps, or leave areas of the field undefended that they don’t think their opponent can hit reliably.

Pushing the envelope in terms of throwing range makes it harder for the defence as they have to cover a greater area of the field. Take this first example, where Dig’s switching & poaching completely shuts down the Revolver horizontal stack until Revolver hit a 20+m fast blade down the sideline, a great example of how Revolver were attacking areas of the field that defences just weren’t expecting:

A few points later, Dig were using a poaching system to deny scoring cuts towards the front cones, but a similarly shaped throw from Kyle Lew was able to exploit a gap down the sideline:

I love the simplicity of this next example; an open side “dad” backhand. What I like most about it is that the throw could have been caught at any of a range of places on the field, empowering the receiver to milk as much as possible from the pass and – crucially – allowing the receiver to hop it in for a goal. Most teams would have taken a short reset here, but Revolver are looking to maximise the potential of every throw:

Jason Vallee was a menace on offence, his size & speed make him a tough matchup & his throwing skills are excellent

Two loopy around forehands next; breaking the mark is nothing new, but Adam Rees puts enough shape on the throw that Vallee can choose to take a few extra yards and catch it in the end zone. This is particularly effective because Vallee’s cut wasn’t directly to the front cone; it’s a lateral cut across the face of the disc. This helps him to seal the lane from his defender, who is unable to get anywhere near the disc:

Read more: Sealing the Lane

The philosophy here seems to be more than just getting the disc to a team mate, and more a case of setting up a team mate with an easy continuation opportunity, or allowing them the chance to make decisions about where to catch the disc. Not to mention putting the disc into the end zone as soon as its safe to do so.

Playing in tight spaces

Revolver are also clearly comfortable playing in a noisy environment; Rhino do a great job here of crowding throwing lanes, but it doesn’t slow down Revolver’s offence who seem quite comfortable hitting the open players:

Unphased by the poaching defenders narrowing the lanes, Revolver were comfortable hitting targets in crowded spaces.

A quick throw through a crowded space. Sure, the receiver is wide open, but this throw required as much skill to execute as it required quick decision making.

Revolver carve through Dig's poach set in three passes

The throw before the assist – from #4 Walter Frankenberg to #43 Nathan Prior – isn’t one hit by most offences; at the point of release there’s already a defender stood exactly where the receiver catches the disc! For this to work requires that defender to move out of the way. Yet it does work, and we another assist down a narrow sideline channel:

Revolver seem to be doing a great job of recognising when a defender can or cannot make a play on the disc, and seem quite comfortable throwing towards defenders’ backs.

Speed of play

Pushing the envelope in terms of speed of play makes it harder for the defence as they have less time to react & reposition. Imagine that an offence had to freeze and hold the disc for 5 seconds after each catch; it would give the defence an opportunity to get into the optimal positions to prevent the next pass based on the field position of the disc and the other players*. The more time defenders have to re-position, the easier it is. Now imagine that the disc never reaches stall 3; how much harder is it going to be to get into a good position to play defence? Now imagine an offence is able to move the disc on stall 0; repositioning to an optimal position is going to be virtually impossible, and it’s going to feel like you’re chasing shadows.

Here’s a wonderful fast break where they start with a numerical advantage and manage to maintain it all the way down the field, moving the disc quicker than the Pony defenders can recover. The player who catches the goal is largely responsible for the goal, stretching the field, dragging away a defender and leaving the remaining players 3 on 1:

The speed the quickness of Revolver's offence is something to behold; note the final 'noisy' assist zipped between two defenders

It's a similar story here with this short huck

Read more: Fast Break Principles

Rhino’s defence isn’t necessarily that bad here, but some of the players are too slow to react and most are just slightly too far away from the player they’re guarding; the simple act of stopping and sitting in the undefended channel allowed #2 to get enough separation for #11 Dexter Clyburn to get the disc off the line. Once in motion, there’s no stopping Revolver who are able to score in just three passes:

Again, Revolver are able to milk a little more from the final throw, Nathan Kwon backpedalling to maximise the gain and hops the disc in for a goal

A trademark Kwon move, clearly

Revolver’s speed of release makes their give & go game hard to stop. The second & third moves in this sequence show an ability to begin cutting before releasing the disc, but crucially without travelling. This shows a fantastic development of skill and is a nightmare to guard.

The skill required to play at this speed should not be underestimated; the throwers are balanced and capable of perfectly weighting throws while working at a high tempo, with the stall never going higher than 2.

Having the quickness to get open in such small spaces makes it tough to defend, especially when the players involved are both tall & fast players with a range of release points who are just as happy going deep as handling:

Only a pre-emptive defensive layout on the goal line prevented a similar sequence from resulting in a quick goal here

*(side note: playing with a pause on offence is a great themed game you can use to improve your defenders ability to assess the field and adopt better defensive positions; see Themed Games for more ideas).

Bringing it all together

Let’s examine a few examples which bring together multiple concepts.

Take a look at Pony’s defensive positioning at the start of this clip. They look pretty tight, with a few players taking a step off here and there, probably with the intention of being able to help out a team mate (see help defence). The thing is, those small gaps between themselves and the Revolver cutters are exactly what the Revolver offence is looking for. You’re not close enough, we’re already open.

The final throw in the sequence is another example of throwing through a tight gap right next to defenders who simply can't react in time

An even more stark example against Rhino, with Revolver capable of hitting small gaps the moment they appear

This next clip has it all: an expansive opening throw, throwing to tight spaces, and unbelievable quickness. The first cut is a simple lateral move towards the break side, but the throw isn’t to the gut; instead, it leads the receiver towards the end zone where he has an immediate opportunity to throw an assist which he declines. He throws to a tiny window afforded by the fact that the person guarding the cutter is face guarding and is therefore unable to react in time, gets the disc back courtesy of Offset Lateral Cut through the The Undefended Channel, and a lightning fast assist follows to another player using the exact same concept but going in the opposite direction:

The next sequence has six passes between just three players, showcasing Revolver’s give & go offence, extensive use of dish passes, an ability to find poached players and find small gaps in defensive coverage:

3 of these passes are dishes

Read more: The Dish

I’m saving my favourite sequence until last. In their universe point win over Pony in the quarter final, Revolver opted to use a dominator offence using three handlers. Pony reacted by sending a fourth defender to clog up the space in front of the disc. We join the action as Revolver find the poached player on the far sideline; from here, it takes them five uncontested passes between four players to score in the opposite corner: three dish passes and two open side throws. The final assist is sublime from Leo Gordon, a perfectly weighted backhand towards the front corner of the end zone that allowed Raekwon Adkins to hop over the line for the win. It’s not so much the mechanics of the throw that I find impressive, its the fact that he was able to identify the opportunity and throw it perfectly while on the run in a fraction of a second.

While there are plenty of other title contenders in this year’s men’s division, it’s clear that Revolver are evolving a unique style of play which is fun to watch and effective at the top. It will be fun to see how their opponents react as the season begins, and how the addition of the USA World Games squad impacts their playing styles.