Magic Bonus Update!

Magic bonus update!

For awhile I've thought about making a tweak to the formula to make it a little more sensitive to short term performance. I've sort of tried to account for that with the Flavor of the Week rankings, but today I thought I'd try to go ahead and combine the two and see how the average looks. i.e. the "mashup" system would be equally weighted between season long performance as well as last five game performance. I don't know if I like it more or less but I'll track it for a few weeks and see how it looks.

Edit - 

Huh. You know, after comparing the mashup numbers, I think I might like them more. They compare really well with what ESPN and MLS have while still maintaining some numerical defensibility and still identifying teams where the other rankings seem to be too knee jerk.

I think I'm gonna keep the mashup numbers and start including that weekly.

Goat Parade

So how bout them Chivasesessss huh? Pretty crazy stuff. I think, so far, they've got to be the surprise performance of the season, more so even than the poor start for San Jose. I love it.

Anyway, we've just about achieved normalacy as far as getting everyone to five games goes. Anything you still can't cope with is your own problem.. Next week things should start to look normal.

LA ties and brings them down to earths somewhat. LA has actually been riding that first game four goal pasting to keep their #1 spot, so once that drops off they should start to settle down, unless they manage to do it again... Will they be better with Donovan? Who knows. Chicago hasn't budged from the cellar. Kansas City some how manages to put in a dominant performance and drop a spot (it makes sense mathamatically, just trust me) and Vancouver is starting to drop off after a hot start. Here's the full table.

I think we're just about at the point in the season where we can start making some general statements about teams. I generally think that 5 games is a trend and 10 games is a good enough sample to give you a good idea of what a team is capable of performance wise.

Oh, right, I owe you a graph too, don't I? Here it is.

Week 0 Power Rankings

We're baaaaaaack.

Technically, we were never gone. But still.

So, to do the most meaningless of meaningless things, I opted to do one final spreadshet iteration before retiring the 2012 version and starting up a new 2013 one. I ran the power ranking system through the playoffs to determine a final final set of power rankings to use as the starting point for this season. Well, that's not entirely true, this season will actually start with everyone at 0, since I think there's enough parity in MLS to dictate that past season results are no indicator of next season performance. I've even posted about it! But that's under the bridge.

Here's how the numbers worked out :

San Jose	1
Kansas City	2
DC	3
New York	4
LA	5
Houston	6
Seattle	7
Chicago	8
Salt Lake City	9
Columbus	10
Colorado	11
Vancouver	12
Dallas	13
Montreal	14
New England	15
Philadelphia	16
Chivas	17
Portland	18
Toronto	19

Maybe it's blasphemy to not put LA at #1 and Houston at #2 due to their postseason performance, but I simply weighted each post season game as another match. Perhaps I should have given more weighting to each round, but this seemed like the best way to do it. I think I'll be making a few tweeks to the system this year, but otherwise, it should be more or less the same. Stay tuned!

A link a day...

I just thought this was a pretty interesting analysis. Basically plots of average player position and passing networks for the LA game.

Central Winger: New way of visualizing the beautiful game

The thing that really jumped out at me was this - "Perhaps a byproduct of Sporting's high-pressure defense, covered in Monday's OPTA Spotlight, Chance Meyers (No. 7) and Seth Sinovic (No. 16) both played higher up the field than their holding midfielder Júlio César (No. 55)."

Of course I think we SKC fans know that our backs really get forward in the attack (leaving us a bit open to the counter, as well, as LAs only good chances demonstrated), but it's cool to see it plotted graphically.

Some lazy player ratings

This is really the lazy, non-thinking way to do it, and looking at it now, I can already see some people who are too high and a few who are too low. These are essentially just the MLS fantasy game's assigned points, broken out into points per minute, and then referenced against each other by standard deviations away from a 5.0 (i.e. average) game. So, basically, derived ratings from arbitrary results, instead of simply using arbitrary results.

It's obviously an unfair way to do it for players who play less than 90 minutes, but just work with me on this, mmmk?

*edit, okay, I figured out a slightly better way to do it by adjusting the points earned by the actual number of minutes played compared to the avergae number of minutes played. So it balances things out a bit more and looks a little more right. It also might help to think of the ratings less of a measure of how well did player X perform individually on a scale of 1-10 and think of it more as 'how much did player X being on the field help his team win'. So a higher rating indicates that the player was more instrumental in that team getting a good result. This way subs will generally be ranked lower, though it doesn't neccessarily mean they played poorly...

Player	Rating
LA
Josh Saunders	5.5
Todd Dunivant	4.4
AJ Delagarza	5.2
Sean Franklin	4.8
Andrew Boyens	4.0
Tommy Meyer	4.4
Landon Donovan	4.0
Marcello Sarvas	4.0
Juniho	4.4
Mike Magee	4.0
Kyle Nakazawa	4.0
Robbie Keane	4.8
Edson Buddle	4.0
Chad Barrett	4.0
Kansas City
Jimmy Nielsen	6.3
Aurelien Collin	7.1
Matt Besler	6.3
Seth Sinovic	6.3
Chance Myers	5.9
Graham Zusi	5.9
Julio Cesar	5.2
Bobby Convey	6.3
Jacob Peterson	4.4
Kei Kamara	6.3
CJ Sapong	4.8
Teal Bunbry	3.6

Predictions that are never right

Right then, here's the second big table in my mystical magical spreadsheet. I've been tracking the bets from dred's excellent WPL game over on BigSoccer and trying to get a feel for how fans feel about how well each team should perform each week. It's not the most robust way to judge a teams expectations, but given 40 something players each weighting bets on matches, it's about as good a way as I could think to figure out who's overperofmring (or underrated) and who's been misfiring (or just isn't as good as everyone thought, LA, I'm looking at you). I look at it from both a weighted fraction of expected full points for each game as well as put together a little equation that takes peoples bets and tries to predict a winner (and the goal difference) for each match. Let's look at both.

At this point in the season, from a normalized fractional full point (FPP) (i.e. split 3 points between each team absed on weighted bets and then divide by 3), we get an expected seasonal performance that looks like this.

     Seattle - 0.846
     LA - 0.823
     Kansas City - 0.799
     Salt Lake City - 0.729
     Portland - 0.690
     Vancouver - 0.658
     Dallas - 0.655
     San Jose - 0.541
     New York - 0.537
     Tortonto - 0.466
     Chicago - 0.444
     Colorado - 0.428
     Columbus - 0.428
     Philadelphia - 0.388
     Houston - 0.309
     DC - 0.266
     Chivas - 0.131
     New England - 0.093
     Montreal - 0.057

Going into the season I actually think that might have been a good prediction, with the obvious cavet of wtf are you people thinking with houston, last year's Cup runner up!?! I guess people are thinking they'd pull a 2011 SKC and start the season on the road horrifically, but still... Anyway, that's all fine and good, but let's push it one step further and see where teams are at now compared to where we thought they'd be. And, for fun, let's try to see how well we've predicted wins, draws, and losses, using a totally made up and arbitrary excel equation. Basically, I tried to look at the weighted bets and find out who was favored for each match, and then looked at the weighting and tried to find out if there was a consensus. If 75% of the bet weight was for a team, they'd be assigned a win. If the average bet on that team was <150, they'd be assigned a 1 goal win. 150 < bet < 250 was a 2 goal win. Am average bet of more than 250 was considered a 3 goal blow out.

For the record, this model has about a 50% chance of picking the result exactly after 4 weeks. It's got a 30% "push" rate (i.e. predicted a win and got a draw, or predicted a draw and got a win). But really, I think 50% success rate is the conservative way to gauge it. So, at this point, here's how the table would look if fan betting controlled the league.

Team	Predicted Points	Actual Points	Difference
LA	9	3	6
Toronto	4	0	4
Portland	7	4	3
Seattle	9	6	3
Chicago	6	4	2
Philadelphia	2	1	1
New York	7	6	1
Dallas	5	4	1
Vancouver	8	8	0
Chivas	2	3	-1
Montreal	0	1	-1
Kansas City	10	12	-2
DC	2	4	-2
Salt Lake City	7	9	-2
Colorado	7	9	-2
Columbus	4	6	-2
San Jose	6	9	-3
Houston	1	6	-5
New England	0	6	-6

Obviously a few things jump out. LA and Toronto seem to be really underperforming expectations. I'm not sure Toronto is that big of a surprise, actually, but obviously people in LA are getting worried. Houston's overperformance I think is more a factor of them starting so many games on the road, but kudos to New England and San Jose for both stepping up. I think they might turn out to be the two surprise teams of the year.

At any rate, you've herad it here first. LA is the most overrated team in the league. You can prove it with science.

Finally, while speaking of predictions, let's make some for Week 5, shall we? We're already 2 for 2 as far as midweek games go...

Salt Lake City beats Montreal by 3 goals
Dallas beats New England by 1 goal
Montreal beats Toronto by 1 goal
Columbus and New York draw
Kansas City and LA draw
San Jose beats Vancouver by 1 goal
DC and Seattle draw
Salt Lake City beats Colorado by 1 goal
Portland beats Chivas USA by 2 goals

Like I said, 2 for 2 on results for SLC v Montreal and Dallas v New England, and even got the New England GD correct. Let's hope SKC beats the junk out of LA though...