MLS Wants a Cracker

It's a parity - "parroty" joke. Get it?!?!!?1

Lord.

Anyway, not been updating this much since there's not been much action, but I thought I'd revisit the season by season correlation between MLS and the Premier League with a few free minutes.

I should note that this is all based on final standings, since MLS crowns our Champions sort of  weird (not better or worse, just differently) when compared to the rest of the world.

One thing I do enjoy about the way we do it here is that in any given year you may just have yourself a good home team to watch. Unless you live in Toronto. Or anywhere in Canada, really.

Conversely, Premier League teams tend to generally find a way to stay in the same position as before. You could certainly argue that that sort of league structure makes upsets that much more compelling, and watching "super clubs" a la the Big4/5/6/whatever makes for the most exciting matches, but there's really something to me about the whole "any one can win any game on any given day".

So the question is, can we quanity that?

The answer is, of course, "Yup." With pages and pages of "buts..."

But we're not gonna get into buts here. Unless that's your thing.....

I digress.

I looked at the 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 MLS seasons for MLS season-to-season correlation. That is, how well did your performance last year predict your performance for the following year. In a word? Not good. Interestingly though, the 2011 season had a very strong correlation to the 2010 season, with an R value of 0.70. The next highest was 2009 to 2008 at 0.54. The average correlation was 0.38, but average isn't a great way to do it. Instead, I lumped all the seasons together into one data set to come up with a total correlation value. That value was 0.41. That's not very good correlation. I'd note I did throw out inaguarl years for expansion teams, but that should be a given.

In contrast, the Premier League has excellent correlation. Teams generally may move up or down two or three places over the course of a year, but, in general, where you finished last season is a pretty good indicator of how you'll finish this season.

For the Premier League I looked at 2006-2007, 2007-2008, 2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2010-2011, and 2011-2012, throwing out single data points for promoted/relegated teams. Interestingly, correlation seems to be increasing since 2006-2007. The lowest R value of 0.65 occured that year, and has increased in every season since, up to a value of 0.86 for 2011-2012. Could more money be "locking in" teams as player wage wars serve to stratify the league into the Haves and Have-Nots?

Anyway, these numbers might not make much sense, so here's the plotted data sets for both leagues. It's pretty obvious that in MLS, the results are all over the place, whereas in the Premier League, things look very linear.

 MLS Correlation

Premiership Correlation



And... that's all I have to say about that...

Just keep rating... just keep rating. Rating rating rating rating.

So after some discussions on BigSoccer I wound up mocking up a new set of rankings, first as sort of a FINE, LETS SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DO IT YOUR WAY sort of thing, but then after making some raw ratings (i.e. not corrected for playing time) I realized that I could do a similar weighted rating like I did with team averages to maybe come up with something better.

So, here's a list of the top some amount of players, based on both total playing time corrected rating and raw, uncorrected rating.

Full ratings available here

Rate ALL the players... AGAIN!

So I did this at the halfway point and decided to do it again. I went through and assigned ratings to every MLS player.

Of course, it's all very arbitrary, but the easiest way to do it was to grab their fantasy poitns from the MLS fantasy game and calculate based off those. There's plenty of room to argue that poitns are weighted poorly or that playing time is too much a factor in rating a players worth, all very valid and I would agree. This was just the easiest way to dump a set of numbers in and crank out some kind of result. The formula is basically a players points (modified by playing time to assure that guys who score 2 goals in 10 minutes don't jump to the top of the list) minus the average players points divided by the standard deviation of all player points + 5 (the average player would have a rating of 5.00).

Here's the top 25 players in MLS for the 2012 regular season

Full ratings are available here

They kind of break down for players who play little or not at all. I hesitate to call any one at the bottom of the list "poor", but I guess, if you wanted to, you could look at all players with 1,000 minutes or more of playing time (the average MLS player logged 991.3 minutes this season) and pick the worst player there. If we use that criteria the worst player in MLS this year was... Shavar Thomas of Montreal! Yay Shavar!

Given that the average player logged 991.3 minutes and notched 0.047 points per minute played (roughly 46.7 points) the most average player in MLS this year was... Bryan Meredith of Seattle!

No surprise that Wondo get's top honors, his was a season for the ages.

You can argue that keepers are overrated in this system, and I would tend to agree. Given that most of them play most of the full season they tend to accumulate more standing, so there's that.

I'd also like to hand out an Ironman award. I thought Jimmy Nielsen would be the only player to play every minute of every game this year, but Drew Moor actually did the same thing, and did more than just stand between the posts to do it. Gotta say that Drew definitely worked this year. Respect.

So I guess using these ratings as criteria, MLS awards for me would look like this

MLS MVP : Chris Wondolowski (San Jose)
 - runner up : Graham Zusi (Kansas City)
MLS Defender of the Year : Matt Besler  (Kansas City)
 - runner up : Aurelien Collin (Kansas City)
MLS Comeback Player of the Year : ummm... I guess Chris Pontius (DC)? I always thought this was a weird award...
 - runner up : oh god... ummm... umm... Eddie Johnson (Seattle)! Or do they have to come back from injury and not just wandering in a European wasteland?
Goalkeeper of the Year : Andy Gruenebaum (Columbus). Weird to give it to a keeper on a non-post season team, but Columbus could have been the new Chivas were it not for him.
 - runner up : Tally Hall
Newcomer of the Year : Patrice Bernier (Montreal). This is another silly award.
 - runner up : Lee Young-Pyo (Vancouver)
Rookie of the Year : Austin Berry (Chicago)
 - runner up : Nick de Leon (DC)

Added a few extra tabs to the google doc and took a few minutes to tabulate average team ratings. I did both all players and players >1000 minutes (to avoid "bench" players dragging the rating down), but what actually correlated best with results was taking the average of the two averages (i.e. (all_players_average + players>1000_minutes_average)/2). Correlated reasonably well with season long performance (R^2 = 0.74)... New York surprisingly low and colorado surprisingly high, otherwise seems reasonable. Kansas City probably too high compared to San Jose...

Utterly meaningless in the end, of course... but who doesn't like a big block of meaningless numbers.

Probably more to come later, but for now, that's that...

Power's off!

I guess that title isn't all that funny if you live in the North East... good luck guys! If it gets real bad I might come out there to hand out some bottled water.

No, really, I actually might. That'd be neat.

Anyways, here's the last iteration of power rankings. No real change until you get to the bottom of the table, but then things got a little funky. Take a look and see what I mean.

No real playoff implications there, but interesting to see how things ended up.

Here's your last infographic of 2012. Click for bigness.

And, finally, here's you last flavor of the week numbers.

So... does this mean anything? Well, I do like to try to look at thigns pragmatically, and, if you remember, I actually broken down this same system for use in the Euro tournement and got some interesting results. Called it Spain over Germany, which was almost half right, and then called the Dutch collapse, which I actually thought was kind of impressive. Let's see how the 2012 MLS playoffs will look if we assume that the higher ranked team wins.



So, there you have it. Kansas City loses to San Jose in Buck Shaw... Bummer :(

I'll break down some more numbers later, but for now, that'll just about do it for me this year. I've got plenty of plans to tweak this during the offseason, so don't worry too much! I'll be around!

Whoa.

You know, I'd be remiss if I didn't include a link to Alan's great work putting together a completely awesome infographic detailing the history of professional soccer in America.

It's poster worthy in it's epicness and I highly highly recomend that you go check it out and waste a few minutes exploring it. Lots of great info displayed super well.

The History of Professional Soccer in the United States

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE

And now, a few days late, again, is our Week 31 MLS power rankings.

Actually very little changed in this iteration, so not much to talk about, except that I will say DCs recent form has me feeling a little vindicated that my model didn't drop them too much. I will say they're the team I least want to face in the playoffs, even without DeRo.

Here's how the table looks this week

San Jose unsurprisingly out in front, with SKC at 2, DC hanging in at 3, and New York and Chicago swapping places at 4 and 5.

Toronto is awful.

Here's the handy dandy chart for your veiwing pleasure. Click to embiggen.

And now your five week moving average flavor of the week table. Oh look, it's San Jose at #1. What a surprise...

So there you have it, your penultimate MLS Power Rankings. Next week should be a stats blast as I comb through the numbers and dig out some interesting factoids. Tune in! If you dare.... and if I remember to get everything done on time...

And the award goes to...

Okay, that wasn't too bad. Took a few minutes and tabulated year long player ratings so I could dish out some yummy digital awards. Let's just make the announcements before we hit the actual numbers, shall we?

Here's your 2012 SKC Team Award Table of Glorifying Tableness

ZUEEESSSSSS. People have been calling this his breakout year given his increased role with the USMNT, but I think most SKC fans will tell you he broke out last year, and this is his standard operating level. Which is awesome.

One of the big factors in Zusi's place at the top is that, while SKCs defense has been brillient, it's largely a team effort, with a monster back line and a great keeper. The offense, on the other hand, was hit or miss all year long, but largely relied on service from Zusi, who looks likely to end up as the MLS assists leader this year with 15. He also bagged 5 goals of his own, which isn't too shabby.

Tied on defense were the Nielsen/Besler tandem. I know Collin plays it sexy, and let's face it, he is, but Besler has been a workhorse this year and every bit as effective as Collin while logging almost 300 more minutes. And though we didn't really score on long throws towards the end of the season, his canon arms played a big part in a couple early season goals and kept defenses checking another options whenever SKC wins a throw in the attacking half.

Nielsen played a great season as well, commanding and controlling the back line which gave him a much better sense of positioning in his net, which I think is his strong suit. He doesn't have the reflexes that Hartman had, but his instincts and footwork were solid and his place at the top of the all time MLS GAA average board (4,000+ minutes) is well earned. You could even take that up to 8,000+ minutes and he'd still be #1. That's really a great accomplishment for some one who was thinking about retirement 3 years ago.

Honestly, I've been really impressed with this team as a whole. I think people were worrying about depth at the start of the season, but everytime some one has gone done due to injury, illness, or earning the wrath of the Vermes bench-hammer, some one has always been there to pop in. Even more encouraging is just how young this team is. Things have already been a success in my book for 2012, and 2013 seems like it could start off very well as well.

Of course 2012 is still unfinished. Onward until dawn for the 2012 MLS Cup. It should be thrilling.

Oh, right, I forgot about numbers.

Here's numbers! I will note that in these ratings players are ranked only against other SKC players. I'll have probably "better" numbers at the end of the season when I tabulate ratings for ALL MLS players. Won't that be fun?