2017 MLS Goalkeeping in Review

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2017 MLS Goalkeeping in Review

It’s that time of year again. Every October excitement fills the air over fans and media answering the question “who was the best goalkeeper in MLS this year?” Let no fanbase’s optimism come into question, as just about each one thinks their team has one of the best goalkeepers in the league. But the award is a true test only the most recent meritocracy. It forgets the past and rewards the present. To put it more simply, if the MLS GOTY award had a muppet doppelganger, without question it would be the jolly Ghost of Christmas Present from the Muppet Christmas Carol. A goalkeeper could have a constant howler in 2016 but be redeemed through grit and hard work in 2017. A young goalkeeper could be thrust into the limelight and propel their career forward. An aging veteran could finally receive the recognition they've worked so hard for. There are too many fantastic narratives to come to fruition and only one can actualize.

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MLS' Imbalanced Schedule: Talkin' Bout The Revolution

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MLS' Imbalanced Schedule: Talkin' Bout The Revolution

One of the most common complaints about MLS is the lack of a balanced schedule. In many of the biggest leagues around the world, every team plays the same schedule. For a twenty-team league, a home-and-home against every team in the league yields 38 games where every team’s record can be easily compared to the rest of the league.

Given the vast geography covered by Major League Soccer, as well as the conference structure, MLS teams don’t all play the same schedule. Here’s the nitty-gritty on how this all worked for 2017: every team played 34 games. Those 34 games included one each against members of the opposite conference (unless you’re Minnesota or Atlanta – they played cross-conference matches against each other twice). Each team also plays everyone in their conference twice (once at home, once away), which makes up 20 games. Combined with the 11 out-of-conference matches we’re up to 31, leaving three additional games to be made up against some opponent (rivals often play three times) throughout the league.

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Kaka, Higuain, and the Effect of the Aging Playmaker

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Kaka, Higuain, and the Effect of the Aging Playmaker

Yesterday, Kaka announced he would not be returning to Orlando City in 2018. Though unfortunate, the move makes perfect sense. Kaka will be 36 for most of next season, and he’ll end 2017 having played the fewest minutes in his MLS career. His production is down markedly on a per-90 basis:

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Expected Goal Chains: The Link between Passing Sequences and Shots

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Expected Goal Chains: The Link between Passing Sequences and Shots

For those who are not familiar with Expected Goal Chains (xGC), the metric looks at all passing sequences that lead to a shot and credits each player involved with the xG. Instead of just looking at expected goals and expected assists, which primarily benefits strikers and attacking midfielders, xG Chains is beneficial to every player involved in a sequence. Most importantly xGC credits those defensive or two-way players who are integral to a play’s build-up but don’t necessarily serve that final key pass. To calculate xGC, I assembled every pass, shot, foul, and defensive action so far in MLS and assigned a unique ID to each passing sequence. When a sequence ended in a shot, each player is attributed with the xG from that shot. StatsBomb defines it very succinctly, so the below steps are stolen directly from them: 

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Playoff Probabilities 2017

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Playoff Probabilities 2017

Today we're happy to debut our playoff probabilities and seeding probabilities for 2017! It will also show up as an option in the upper right corner of ASA until the end of the season.

As in our 2016 iteration, playoff probabilities come from a combination of where teams are now in the tables, what their remaining schedule is, and how good our model thinks they are. The remaining games of the 2017 season were simulated 10,000 times based on win-loss-draw predictions for each game. The probabilities and averages given below are calculated from those simulations.

You'll notice that we're missing a Supporter's Shield column this year - that's because in all 10,000 of our simulations Toronto won it. To reiterate just how great Toronto's season is going, on the final weekend of the season last year we still had a 35.7% chance that Colorado would win the Shield.

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Adjusting team xGoals

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Adjusting team xGoals

By Matthias Kullowatz (@mattyanselmo)

When we produced the game-by-game expected goals results last week, we were surprised to see that Seattle had outpaced Portland 4.0 to 1.7. That didn't feel right, but it didn't take long before we noticed that Seattle recorded five shots inside the six-yard box leading up to its first goal. Those shots added up to more than 2.0 expected goals, despite the fact that soccer's rules limit scoring to one goal at a time. 

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Introducing interactive data at ASA

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Introducing interactive data at ASA

You know how you go to some sports websites and you can sort and filter their data, and there are lots of options and it looks cool and stuff? Well starting today, we’re rolling out interactive versions of our stats that also look cool.  You can find the link up at the top under "xG Interactive Tables." This first iteration focuses on shot stats and expected goals, and it gives you guys more ways to filter and explore the data.

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What the heck do pass attempts tell us, anyway?

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What the heck do pass attempts tell us, anyway?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, a sport called baseball ruled American sports universe. I was obsessed with the sport myself. Every day I sat at the kitchen table and poured over the box scores in the daily paper. They were the best way of connecting to my beloved Pirates. So today, as MLS and USMNT games role in, I check out the box scores on MLSSoccer.com and Whoscored. It's a way to get a sense of the game, to connect with a game I didn't see. But what actually are these box scores telling me? As soccer analytics gets more and more reliant on data scientists for insights, I feel like the box scores are still a bit of a mystery. For example, total passes attempted - what do they tell us about a game? One MLS game this year had just 660 passes attempted combined, while another had 1,189. What should I know about such a big swing. Does it matter? Those games probably look dramatically different and my guess is fans would want to see more passing, not less. Wanting to know more about soccer box scores I decided to find out what lies behind the statistic that is total passes.

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How the Earthquakes Can Maximize their Partnership with Second Spectrum

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How the Earthquakes Can Maximize their Partnership with Second Spectrum

Two potentially paradigm-shifting events took place in the last few weeks leading up to MLS’s All-Star Game media blitz. Tens of thousands of excellent words were written about the massive trade that sent Dom Dwyer from Kansas City to Orlando (including two pieces from our very own Harrison Crow). In light of that shift, what it means for those two teams right now is almost a secondary concern compared to what it means for the league now and in the near future.

Many fewer words were written on San Jose’s only slightly less landscape-altering announcement. The Earthquakes announced a partnership with Second Spectrum, a company that provides data and analytics built around its player tracking system. Details on the exact nature of the partnership are obviously sparse, but it looks like it will make San Jose the first (I believe) club in MLS to have access to tracking data from their games. It will potentially extend to its academy. The partnership is the latest evidence that San Jose’s new GM, Jesse Fioranelli, intends to make the Quakes one of the league’s most forward-thinking teams.

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