It's hard to believe we are in Week 4 of LOVB already. It feels like opening night was just last week. Instead, we are roughly a quarter of the way through LOVB’s second season. Before we got too deep into the season, I wanted to be sure to catch the LOVB Match of the Week between Houston and Atlanta. These teams finished at the top of the LOVB regular-season standings last season, though injuries and turnover have led to slow starts in year two. Here are my takeaways from an entertaining match that Houston won in four sets.

• One of the things I love about watching LOVB is that the points are just as fun to watch when the teams are scrambling and out of system as when they are running their offense. Both can be fun to watch, though I think my favorite is when they are struggling to just get the ball over the net by any means possible. It just feels dramatic in a way that you don’t get with a lot of other sports.

• I think LOVB and USA Network do a better job of taking us inside the team huddles than any broadcast I’ve seen. During a first-set timeout, we got to hear everything Atlanta head coach Paulo Coco was saying to his team, as well as a one-on-one conversation with Coco and one of his players. It's a far cry from the NBA (and to a lesser extent the WNBA), where you only get a few seconds of the coach in the huddle, and they rarely get captured saying anything too interesting. I actually found myself hoping for more timeouts so that I could hear more of what the coaches were telling their teams.

• I like that LOVB distinguishes between when a team is challenging a call and when the referee initiated the replay review. In both cases, I continue to be impressed at how well they explain what is being reviewed and how quickly the calls are made.

• Houston and Atlanta entered this game at the bottom of the standings, but I think that says more about the depth of the league than about how these teams played in the first three weeks of the season.

• This may be difficult to do without expanding the league, but I wish LOVB had more doubleheaders. Wednesday’s game left me wanting more, and it was a little disappointing that I have to wait 24 hours for the next game.

• One of these days, I am going to have to do a deep dive into the LOVB stats page, because I thought it was really interesting. I got a little distracted during the second set because I went to look up Jordan Thompson’s hit percentage and wound up engrossed in the entire stats page.

• I’m obviously biased because I am a pretty big stats nerd, but I highly recommend watching LOVB with Match Central on a second screen. I love the ability to follow both the team and individual stats in real time. Maybe it's just because I’m a more casual fan, but sometimes I find the action is so fast that I can’t really get a sense of the ebb and flow of the match. I feel like I have a better understanding of what I’m watching when I have the stats at hand.

• It's only a slight hyperbole to say my favorite part of watching this match was when the announcers would recommend which players were the best follows on Instagram. I still haven’t watched enough of these teams to know a whole lot about any of these players, but I look forward to learning more about them both on and off the court.

• Kalsa Alanko came into this game third in the league in setting efficiency, but second on her own team to US Olympian Micha Hancock. Hancock will almost certainly re-enter the starting lineup when healthy, but I was very impressed with Alanko’s play. Alanko raised her efficiency in this game, and I thought she did a very good job feeding Jordan Thompson consistently while also getting the ball to Amber Iglede when she got a good pass.

• I never knew they gave yellow and red cards in LOVB but I thought Houston head coach Sanja Tomašević was totally justified in earning her yellow card. I thought the replay pretty clearly showed Thompson hitting Ivonee Montaño’s hand and not the ball, though it was close enough that I didn’t mind the fact that the replay review seemed to take longer than all the other reviews combined.

• Tia Jimerson doing the Dikembe Mutombo finger wag after a huge block on Jordan Thompson is absolutely what I wanted out of this game. The game is so fast that there aren’t always a ton of opportunities for the players to show their personalities, but I loved that celebration.