Watch enough Street League and a question starts nagging at you between heats: do we already know what's about to happen? Every stop, the same names roll up to the same rails and the commentary team calls the trick before it's thrown. That's either the sign of a sport that's figured itself out, or the sign of a sport that's stopped surprising anyone. Numbers don't get bored, so we handed them the tape instead of a hunch. Every Best Trick attempt from the last two SLS seasons, 2025 and 2026, 12 stops, 95 skaters, 1,861 tricks called. Here's what actually repeats, who's doing the repeating, and whether the judges are even rewarding it.
The Four Numbers That Set Up Everything Below
Hold those four in your head. The first one says the sport has range: 380 distinct tricks is not a small vocabulary. The next two say that vocabulary gets used very differently depending on who's skating. The last one says the judges have an opinion about repetition, whether anyone's listening to them or not.
Men's Top 10: Mostly a Crowd, One Loner
Count every Best Trick call across both seasons and this is what the men's field reaches for most. Nine of these are genuinely shared vocabulary: multiple skaters, multiple stops, the sport's actual working library. One of them is not. It's listed separately on purpose.
Laser Flip tops the men's chart by raw count, and on a leaderboard that reads as "the tour's favorite trick." It isn't. It's Dashawn Jordan's trick. He's thrown it 22 times across two seasons, and exactly one other skater has thrown it even once. Pull his name off that bar and Laser Flip isn't top 10, it's barely ranked. Everything else in this list is real, shared vocabulary: 6 to 11 different skaters each, nobody skewing the count. That's the actual finding: the men's "most popular trick" chart has one imposter in it, and the data just told us which one.
Women's Top 10: a Shorter List, and Less of It Is Shared
Same method, the women's field. Fewer total attempts to work with (414 vs. 1,447), but the shape is the real story: four of these ten "popular" tricks belong to one skater apiece.
That's not a knock on Covell, Akama, Heyn, or Nishiya. A signature trick is a real competitive asset, the thing a judge recognizes you by. But it means the women's top-10 chart is doing two different jobs at once: half of it is the field's shared vocabulary, half of it is four personal callbacks getting counted like trends. Combined with the 29.5% top-10 share from the stat row above, the honest read is that the women's circuit currently has a narrower deck of go-to moves, and a good chunk of what looks like consensus is actually four people being really good at their one thing.
The Real Offenders: Who's Actually on Repeat
Trick-level counts can hide the person behind them, like Laser Flip did above. So flip the lens: per skater, every Best Trick attempt against how many different tricks produced them. A skater who's thrown 30 tricks across 6 of them is leaning on 6 ideas hard. (Minimum 12 attempts in-window to qualify, which keeps a skater with one short stop from looking artificially repetitive.)
Jake Ilardi and Chloe Covell are the interesting exceptions on this list: both have thrown a lot of tricks (65 and 46 attempts) and still rank here, because the denominator is large too. Everyone else above them is a smaller, tighter loop: Dechesare's 4 tricks, Ribeiro's 4, Akama's 5. If "we already know what's coming" is true anywhere in this dataset, it's at the level of specific skaters, not the sport as a whole.
Do the Judges Actually Reward Repetition? No.
This is the part that should settle the "is it getting stale" question, or at least reframe it. Bucket every trick in the dataset by how many times it got thrown, and track the average landed score in each bucket.
Straight line, straight down. A trick nobody else is doing averages 8.22 when it lands. The tour's most overused tricks average 7.29. Judging panels don't seem to be giving a "comfort bonus" for a trick they've seen a hundred times. If anything it's a small tax, almost a full point off the top. So if a skater is leaning on a go-to move, it's not because it's the highest-scoring path available. It's a reliability bet, not a scoring strategy, something safe enough to land under pressure, even though the ceiling on it is lower than reaching for something nobody's seen yet.
So, Is Street League Stale?
Honestly, no, not where you'd expect. 380 different tricks across two seasons is a sport with real range, and the overall success rate sits at just 26% (21.2% for the men, 42.5% for the women), which is not the footprint of a field running out of ideas. People are still falling, still trying things that don't land, still swinging for stuff that doesn't have a name you'd recognize on the first watch.
The staleness, where it exists, isn't a sport-wide problem. It's a handful of specific loops: Dechesare's four tricks, Jordan's Laser Flip, four different signature moves propping up a third of the women's top-10 chart. And the data says those loops aren't even the smart play: the scores get worse, not better, the more a trick gets repeated. Which maybe is the real headline: it's not that SLS needs a shakeup. It's that the shakeup is already sitting there in the numbers, waiting for someone to notice that the safe trick is the one costing them a point.
Method & Sources
Trick-by-trick data for this piece, every Best Trick call, its score, its success flag, and the athlete behind it, comes from Staaty's data partner, SkateSense. Scope is the "Best Trick" portion of a heat only, across the 2025 and 2026 SLS seasons (12 stops, 95 skaters); Run attempts aren't logged by trick name in the dataset and aren't part of this analysis. 22 attempts logged only as "TBD" (tricks skaters bailed on so hard nobody could identify what they were going for) are excluded entirely, not counted toward any trick's total. A top-10 trick is flagged as a "signature move" when 2 or fewer athletes have ever thrown it in-window. The repetition-rate ranking requires a minimum of 12 Best Trick attempts in-window per athlete, so a skater with one short stop doesn't look artificially repetitive. Frequency buckets (1x / 2-4x / 5-9x / 10x+) group tricks by total attempts across the full window; "avg score" in every chart is computed on landed attempts only, since a bailed attempt's score isn't comparable to a completed one.