2024 NWSL Season Previews: San Diego Wave and Gotham FC
/We’re releasing team previews ahead of the NWSL season that kicks off on Saturday, March 16! Our final episode covers the two teams taking place in the Challenge Cup, San Diego Wave and Gotham FC. You can find all of our season previews here!
Water Pressure in the Tidal Pool
$120M. That’s apparently the cost of buying into a team with +300 odds at winning the NWSL Championship. I suppose both of those things (the impending sale of the team at a $120m valuation, more than double the next highest NWSL valuation triggered by an ownership stake sale, and the +300 betting odds) are driven by a highly successful year two for the San Diego Wave, in which they won the NWSL Shield as regular season table toppers before whimpering out in the playoffs.
But not everything is hunky dory in San Diego. The Wave made their money as a kind of boring but absolutely oppressive defensive unit with the best all-around goalkeepers in the league. A league-best non-penalty xGA (by a full three expected goals) was paired with a certifiably mid sixth-best non penalty xGF. Their attack was closer to the virtually non-participatory Chicago Red Stars of 2023 than it was to league leaders Portland Thorns. Their +5 xGD stands out as second best, but in a league where only two teams are below a -2 xGD, you are very much at the whimsy of the finishing pixie and the troll that lives under the variance bridge.
If San Diego want to build upon what is a truly terrific achievement inside two seasons, they’re going to need more in 2024.
The Alex Morgan Question
Alex Morgan is a fairly polarizing player to the analytics community: her best performances are all for the national team, she’s basically never had a top top club season, and oh yeah, she’s a total penalty merchant. Nonetheless, she has been the Wave’s top scorer two seasons in a row. The problem: she turns 35 in July. Morgan has traditionally thrived on being an excellent cross attacker and using her pace to run behind. In 2022, she clocked a g+ wheel busting +0.14 receiving g+ per 96 minutes (while also being a penalty merchant). In 2023? -0.04. Ouch. You now see some signal of her leaning into passing and connecting and linking, but that stuff just isn’t nearly as valuable as getting into the box and running into space, and even if it was, she really isn’t that good at it.
Enter Elyse Bennett. San Diego scooped up Bennett in an expansion draft trade with Utah that sent some allocation money back the other way. On the surface, it’s a fairly blah pick up: Bennett’s only got six career NWSL and Challenge Cup goals in 26 90’s -- not see a whole lot there. But at age 22 and 23, Bennett has put up a totally respectable 0.42 NPxG+xA/96 across a variety of roles and systems with the Current and the Reign with leading indicators of more. Her receiving g+ (+0.06), progressive passes received (7.7 - 86th percentile), box touches (5.08 - 56th percentile), and shots (2.95 - 56th percentile) all suggest room for growth in turning her movement into more and higher quality scoring chances. Between Bennett’s off ball movement and defensive contribution (and funnily enough, with FBRef listing Morgan as Bennett’s 4th most similar stat profile), this might be a good chance for Casey Stoney to start utilizing Morgan a little more selectively.
Sometimes Development is a Trickle, Sometimes it’s a Wave
Bennett is somebody I tagged as a potential breakout player in the Challenge Cup last season based on her early data. That didn’t really happen, but I’m glad somebody is giving her a look. On the flip side, everyone is looking at Jaedyn Shaw. Shaw is like Apple in 1993 and ASA is David Choe. We painted a mural in her stat profile, and in 10 years, when she is the de facto creative force driving the USWNT to another World Cup, our Jaedyn Shaw stock will be funding an ASA server farm the size of Greenland. The kid is dynamite, and it sort of all came at once: Shaw put up a bonkers +0.19 g+ above average/96 in tiny minutes in 2022, and in 2023 she was easily the Wave’s best attacking player with a “measly” +0.07 g+ above average/96. That might seem like a bad thing, but for an 18 (recently turned 19) year old to do that, while scaling up her usage so drastically, is frankly insane.
The bad news for Ms. Shaw is that she’s going to have to do it again. Savannah McCaskill will alleviate some of that burden as a competent passer who can play a variety of roles across the attacking band, but McCaskill isn’t her. She’s a useful tweener who can be a box-arriving-shot-getting midfielder or a connect-and-link attacker with just enough attacking output to survive there, but Shaw is the sun, the moon, and the stars. She has to do all the shot creation, her 4.33 shot creating actions was 97th percentile among forwards. She was above 70th percentile for both progressive carries and passes, while being 25th percentile for progressive passes received. This is an attacker dropping back, picking the ball up off a bunch of midfielders who can’t pass, and moving it forward herself. It’s awesome for her to do this, but it’s generally a bad thing for a team to look like that. Fingers crossed, with a little more attacking balance around her, she can start those actions higher and with more leverage.
Diabolical Defensive Doesn’t Decline
San Diego posted the best NPxGA in the league with the best goalkeeper in the league by track record -- if they want to be successful in 2024, this has to continue.. Granted, Sheridan had a merely average year last year despite having a history of being an xG destroyer, so the Wave do have a little bit of wiggle room but not much.
Kaleigh Riehl is gone after eating a ton of minutes in 2023, along with Madison Pogarch, the Wave’s de facto left back down the stretch. That’s tough. Abby Dahlkemper returns, but how much can anyone really rely on a soon-to-be 31 year old who hasn’t played 10 league 90’s in the last five years? Hanna Lundkvist, a 21 year old fullback who couldn’t quite break in at Atletico Madrid, might be interesting, as might Stanford captain Kennedy Wesley and Kaitlyn Torpey, a 23 year old fullback/winger acquired for an A-League record transfer fee. Torpey (in particular) put up comically high xG and xA for a fullback(like, half an expected goal or assist per 90) -- I suspect that won’t translate, but it’s interesting! However, beyond the obviously stellar Sheridan and centerback Naomi Girma, there’s a lot of uncertainty as to if the Wave’s defensive pieces can be as good as expected.
2024 Outlook
The pressure is on for San Diego. Nobody likes a regular season champion if they don’t do it in the playoffs: sample size be damned. Nobody cares if you maybe didn’t deserve it; you have to do it again. And after being sold for $120m, you can bet the microscopes and magnifying glasses are going to be trained even more tightly on the happenings at Snapdragon. Luckily, I think this is a pretty good offseason. You lose some depth, but you get some interesting pre-peak talent to spell your aging stars and you have an ascendant superstar fresh off being the first player to ever score in her first four USA starts. No wonder people like living in San Diego.
Batman Issue #714: Gotham Becomes the Villain
Some teams win the cup and run it back with the same roster.
Others win the cup and unleash wrath previously unseen on the offseason acquisition market, apparently.
Such is the case of Gotham FC, who followed up their 2024 NWSL championship – the club’s first – with one of the wildest winters in modern league history. In the span of a few short weeks the Bats went from a fun playoff story without a ton of underlying data indicating a repeat to immediate title contenders with possibly the most stacked collection of high end talent in the league.
2024 Gotham is set to be a pretty distinctly unique team from the 2023 squad that preceded it, so this preview will be divided into two parts: a look at what went into last year’s success, and the big guns that arrived this winter.
Alexa, play We Are The Champions
The 2023 edition of Gotham FC represented one of the greatest turnaround stories in league history. The prior season NJ/NY had been truly miserable – a minus 30 goal differential, last in the league in both goals for and goals against, and, as you might imagine, a comfortable bottom of the table finish. The underlying expected stats were every bit as bad.
Then came 2023. Gotham didn’t transform into a bulldozer plowing through the league with ease, but they had a distinct identity and quickly established themselves as a team you didn’t want to see coming up on a schedule. A sixth place league finish snuck them into the last available playoff spot thanks to a tiebreaker, and the rest is history.
So what went into this one-year change of fortune? New coach Juan Carlos Amoros brought stability to a locker room that had been through three coaches, interim or otherwise, in the previous two years. Amoros’ “organized chaos” style of play allowed what figured to be a roster in transition to thrive on the pitch.
One of those roster pieces was perhaps the signing of the season, Lynn Williams. Gotham bet big on Williams, trading the coveted second overall pick in that winter’s NWSL draft to Kansas City for the forward. The move paid dividends, with Williams both adding intangible USWNT experience to the squad and also putting a charge into the club’s previously anemic production up front. Despite missing a few games due to the World Cup, Williams still led Gotham in minutes played, and her seven goals led the team by a comfortable margin.
Another key component of Gotham’s success was Midge Purce, who led the club in G+ and finished 11th across all NWSL players. Purce only started eight league games but was remarkably productive in her roughly 700 minutes of action, tallying four goals and two assists to make her one of just three players on the team to record more than two G+A in NWSL action.
With Purce and Williams providing the firepower, a backline that patched together long-tenured veterans (such as Ali Krieger, Kelley O’Hara and Kristen Edmonds) and young legs (Jenna Nighswonger and Bruninha) helped leads stand. And this wouldn’t be an ASA preview without extolling the play of Abby Smith. Smith, who had posted good shot-stopping numbers over a smaller sample size earlier in her career, got the chance to earn the full time gig in net for Gotham, a chance she ran with. She posted the best PSxG +/- split in the league (per FBref), before unfortunately being lost to a season-ending injury late in the season.
The New Kids on the Block
Crystal Dunn. Rose Lavelle. Emily Sonnett. Tierna Davidson.
No, we’re not just naming players from the USWNT’s recent Gold Cup championship squad. They’re all new members of Gotham FC, bringing a combined 384 national team caps to the table. No longer is it a rebuild in Harrison, it’s a reload.
The headliner of that already star-studded quartet is likely Crystal Dunn, on the back of yet another stalwart campaign. Dunn, a Long Island native, will now be playing close to home and brings a resume that can be matched by very few in the NWSL.
She finished last season ranked seventh in the league in G+ by ASA’s numbers, and even her ‘standard stats’ page on FBref speaks for itself.
Dunn’s versatility means Gotham can utilize her in a number of different ways to maximize the talent around her. She’s the perfect complement to a team that will need to figure out how to best utilize a bevy of unique pieces.
Health will likely be the biggest component to watch with the Lavelle signing. Editors note: lol she’s already injured for the first game. Nobody can question what the ex-Reign attacking midfielder can do when she’s on the pitch: she’s a bonafide superstar. But staying on the pitch has never been a strong suit for Lavelle, who started just four league matches last year and has a prior injury history.
Sonnett should add some bite to the midfield and, like Dunn, offers a bonus of skillset versatility that should make her an asset for Amoros as he figures out his new preferred XI. Davidson will help a backline that lost Ali Krieger to retirement get younger while still possessing big game experience.
The Outlook
I mean, this should end up as the best team in the league if all goes well, right? At least on paper, Gotham is set up about as perfectly as could be asked. They got ahead of schedule on their rebuild last year, and were aggressive in matching that accelerated timeline over the offseason. They have experience, but they’re not old. They have USWNT talent, but shouldn’t be reliant on it.
The biggest question will be in goal, as Abby Smith recovers from her August injury. Gotham currently has two ‘keepers on the roster, long-time league veteran Michelle Betos and January acquisition Cassie Miller. Who gets the nod until Smith returns? It wouldn’t be a surprise to see the job be determined via open competition, which could be a weakness for Gotham early on. But ultimately the onus is on Gotham to perform. When you go out and act the big bad bully in the free agent market, all the pressure is on you. Let’s see how they handle it.