Monday, August 27, 2012

44 skulls buried in the ground

I'm not really gonna try to be too witty or clever about this. Mostly I wanna curl up in bed, finish reading Y - The Last Man (awesome comic, you gotta check it out if you haven't) and watch some ESPN before an early sleep.

But it was another game of the same SKC that has me a little nervous. If we're gonna win a title this year i's gonna be on the back of our defence (which I honestly think is the way to do it), because our offence just can't get it done in the final third, despite numerous chances...

Anyways, here's the ratings.

New York Red Bulls

Bill Gaudette
5.07
Markus Holgersson
5.07
Heath Pearce
5.07
Jan Gunnar Solli
4.71
Roy Miller
4.36
Conor Lade
5.07
Wilman Conde
5.07
Dax McCarty
4.36
Joel Lindpere
4.36
Tim Cahill
4.71
Teemu Taino
5.43
Kenny Cooper
4.71
Sebastian le Toux
4.71
Team Average
4.82




Sporting Kansas City

Jimmy Nilesen
4.71
Aurelien Collin
5.07
Matt Besler
5.43
Seth Sinovic
5.07
Chance Myers
5.43
Graham Zusi
5.79
Roger Espinoza
5.07
Julio Cesar
5.07
Paolo Nagamura
4.71
Kei Kamara
5.79
CJ Sapong
4.71
Teal Bunbury
5.43
Team Average
5.19


Man of the match to Kei Kamara, because he scored twice. Hey, wait a minute....



Honorable mention to Graham Zusi, who keeps getting done what needs to get done, even if I feel he's lost a bit of the edge he had earlier in the season...

I wear newspapers for pants

So not a lot to tell really, except that I'm once more iterating power rankings. And I think I'm gonna do it graphically this week, since copy and pasting into blogger has been sort of a hassle... Let's see if this works out.

First, as always, the actual rankings.


Next up we've got the SHFR trend charts. Click to embiggen.


Then, this week, I'm trying something new. People always seem to think my rankigns aren't changing fast enough, or TEAM XXXX HAS PLAYED SO GOOD WTF, so here's the same ranking system applied to the last 5 games only. i.e. if the season started five games ago, here's how the rankings would look for each team.


Annnnnd.... that's a about it really. Yay! And yay San Jose!



Sunday, August 19, 2012

Graph it up!

And because it's easy now that it's setup, here's the updated SHFR graph. Pretty telling, yes? No. Maybe...

From now on power rankings will just be called prankings.

Prankings seems accurate, because everytime I put these together I agree with 95% of it but then there's one odd one. Lately it's been DC.

After watching the cluster that was DC it's hard to say they idn't deserve a win, but they've not been playing like a #2 team lately. But #2 they remain! Because of math. So shut up. Don't argue with math.

Again, I'm sure there's some argument to be made by every team out there, but by and large I think these are looking pretty good. RSL is finally about where theybelong and Monreal has started to make up some ground.

Very tight in the top 3, with DC, KC and New York all within a sneeze of each other. And what more can you say about Toronto. Or Portland.

Also, San Jose's lost dropped them a lot of points and proved that they're mortal... will we see some one else on top by the end of the season? My money is on "maybe".

Team
Rank
Weekly Δ
SHFR
Weekly Δ
San Jose
1
NC
140,541
-9,459
DC
2
NC
119,816
-3,261
Kansas City
3
+1
118,721
+3,337
New York
4
-1
117,117
-1,109
Houston
5
NC
113,537
+3,948
Chicago
6
+1
109,244
+4,896
Seattle
7
+1
105,263
+4,845
Salt Lake City
8
-2
102,767
-4,376
Vancouver
9
NC
92,527
-5,834
LA
10
NC
91,549
-758
Columbus
11
NC
90,909
-1,045
Chivas
12
NC
82,019
+1,751
Montreal
13
+2
80,997
+5,287
Colorado
14
NC
79,027
+1,105
Dallas
15
+1
78,313
+3,078
Philadelphia
16
-3
77,612
-1,858
New England
17
NC
71,233
-3,071
Portland
18
NC
65,163
-1,689
Toronto
19
NC
61,905
-758

So there you go. San Jose stays on top and the world keeps spinning.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

SKC v TFC

Allright, it's been awhile since I've done player ratings.

Since, again, I've been lazy. So... so lazy. I actually have some free time right now though, so here we go...

I gotta say, I wasn't that thrileed with the manner we scored, but we actually scored in Tortonto, which is in and of itself pretty impressive.
Toronto FC
Milos Kocic
4.87
Doneil Henry
4.29
Ashton Morgan
4.87
Logan Emery
4.29
Richard Eckersley
4.87
Darren O'Dea
4.87
Quincu Amerikwa
4.29
Terry Dunfield
4.87
Torsten Frings
4.58
Ryan Johnson
4.58
Andrew Wiederman
4.58
Eric Hassli 
4.58
Luis Silva
4.58
Team Average
4.62

Sporting Kansas City
Jimmy Nielsen
6.30
Aurelien Collin
6.02
Seth Sinovic
5.73
Chance Myers
6.02
Matt Besler
6.02
Lawrence Olum
4.29
Graham Zusi
6.02
Roger Espinzoa
5.15
Julio Cesar
5.15
Paolo Nagamura
4.87
CJ Sapong
4.29
Teal Bunbury
4.01
Kei Kamara
6.02
Team Average
5.38

Harsh rating for Teal, he had a good game, but man, you gotat bury those chances.

Man of the match to Jimmy, less for his action between the posts and more for captaining a solid defense to another clean sheet.

SHFR you say?

So it's amazing how much you can get done when you throw Sesame Street on for your daughter and give your wife the new issue of Bon Appetite.

I kid, I kid... kind of.  But I did decide to actually plot the SHFr ratings for each team instead of just their rankings, for a bit more fluid indication of how teams have performed this year.

Here's hte first attempt.


No, that's not an error with SKCs initial performance. The SHFR system goes from 1,000,000 to... Whatever 1/21*1,000,000 is. 47,619, I guess. Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty at the beginning of the season, but you can see wher eexpectations where.

In order to make more sense of how teams are playing now, here's the same chart except scaled to teams for the last few weeks.


So you can see that my system, while ranking teams 1-19, isn't just based on linear rankings. There's some underlying ratings that show DC trending down, TFC and Montreal trending up, and San Jose really playing excellent soccer for the last half of the season or so...

Not much more to say about it except these were drawn up in Excel 2003, while I usually use Excel 2007... Away from my good laptop for awhile, but I'll get the charts looking prettier for the end of the season, I promise.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

TI-83X

So because it's easy, and because I like graphs, and because I can, I whipped up a chart with the weekly power rankings for each team over the course of the season. Nothing too special really, but it's kind of a cool snapshot look at how each team's season has gone (lol Toronto).


Clink to embiggen.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Ahead of the curve

So the next month and a half is gonna be rough for me and the dear old spreadsheet. I'll be gone four of the next five weeks, though one of the weeks is Vegas with the wife and the other is gonna be in New York where I'll be able to catch the SKC-NYRB match, so not all bad. Just get the feeling that this guy isn't going to be as up to date as I'd like.

So, with that in mind, and the fact that there's a game tomorrow, I got a head start on predictions for the week. It's only based on 8 submissions right now, I usually like to have at least 10, but it doesn't look that crazy and there's not too much variability, so let's go to the board and see what we've got.

Well, first, in retrospect, another not great week for picks. We're now at 102 right out of 221 for 46.2%. The only expert close is at 100 right out of 221, so we're still slightly ahead of MLS writers picks. MLS teams are 119/221 in home games so still a lot of ground to make up before we beat that number.

Now, here's the weekly picks.


Team
Result
GD
Confidence
LA
WIN
2
80.57%
Columbus
LOSS
-2
80.57%
Toronto
WIN
2
65.85%
Portland
LOSS
-2
65.85%
Vancouver
WIN
2
100.00%
Dallas
LOSS
-2
100.00%
Seattle
WIN
2
100.00%
Vancouver
LOSS
-2
100.00%
Toronto
LOSS
-2
69.41%
Kansas City
WIN
2
69.41%
Montreal
DRAW
0
91.98%
San Jose
DRAW
0
91.98%
Chicago
WIN
2
75.96%
New England
LOSS
-2
75.96%
Salt Lake City
WIN
3
100.00%
Dallas
LOSS
-3
100.00%
Colorado
DRAW
0
52.11%
Chivas
DRAW
0
52.11%
DC
WIN
2
100.00%
Phildelphia
LOSS
-2
100.00%
New York
WIN
3
100.00%
Portland
LOSS
-3
100.00%
Houston
WIN
3
83.46%
Columbus
LOSS
-3
83.46%