What is this I dont even

Sort of a weird week this time around. Montreal just can't quite grab that #1 spot. I think it's the games in hand that's holding them back, believe it or not. Colorado my big surprise of the week, jumping up 3 places. I triple checked to make sure it wasn't an error... seems legit. This is what happens when you weight recent form more heavily, I guess. Kansas City continuuing the gradual fall, and Chivas only staying out of the basement thanks to Toronto and DC.

Table.

Graph.

I may well fall behind on this in the coming weeks, gonna have a second kid born on Wednesday(plus or minus a day or so) so who knows how much sleep I'll get... we'll see.

DC Who?

Instead of talking about that game, I'm just gonna post this image.

There. Now that that's out of the way, here's the player rankings. I actually don't really like them, as SKC dominated the stat line, but still, it could be argued that DC did enough bunkering to disrupt SKC, and got the only run of play goal (well, you know what I mean) as opposed to the unfortunate own goal. So here we are.

Kyle Porter with man of the match. Zusi as SKCs best player. Feel bad for Opara, but what can you do, I guess. Onward towards a big game with Houston.

Clever title goes here

It was a sort of odd week in MLS. I say that as a team that didn't play gained a whole lot of ground on the top spot in power rankings and actually sort of exploited what I'm just gonna call the cruise control loophole in my rating formula. Since the spreadsheet needs a value for every team every week, teams that don't play get sort of a pass. If they've been playing well, their rating goes up, poorly and it goes down as if their last resutls had carryed through the week. In DC's case, they've been playing very well lately, while the other top teams around them have been sputtering. This make it look like DC is pulling ahead of everyone. I sort of predicted this would happen so I'm not really surprised, but fixing it might be trickier than I think right now, and to maintain consistency I'm not gonna tweak it until the season is over.

The saving grace for those who don't like it is that this happens to every team equally and in a way gives extra reward to teams doing really well and extra punishment to those doing really bad. It's also very self correcting in that the teams impacted by this need to maintain their top form, and the second they stumble the fall will be a little harsher. So I'm not too terribly worried. In the end, people only really look at the ranking anyway.

So I think I gave away who the best team is. DC stays atop the rankings, followed by San Jose and Salt Lake city, who partially redeemed themselves. Again, I'll bet we see a massive swing in rankings from others who dropped RSL too much earlier on. Slow and steady wins the race here and I don't like the seismic shifts a lot of people who put out rankings seem to employ.

In other news, Dallas gets a draw which pulls them away from Toronto, who revert back to their old selves, and New York stumbles a bunch. Kansas City's draw doesn't help them and Chicago falls off the cusp while Seattle stops the bleeding and settles out still in the top 10.

Here's the full table.

Week 18
Team	Rank	Weekly Δ	SHF Rating	Weekly Δ
DC	1	NC	157,025	+5,764
San Jose	2	NC	148,438	-2,823
Salt Lake City	3	+1	125,828	+828
New York	4	NC	118,012	-7,862
Kansas City	5	NC	114,458	-3,963
Vancouver	6	+1	106,145	-364
Chicago	7	-1	104,972	-4,784
Columbus	8	NC	101,064	-1,209
Seattle	9	NC	96,939	+1,194
Houston	10	NC	94,527	-209
Colorado	11	NC	85,202	-3,498
LA	12	NC	84,071	+2,623
New England	13	+1	80,851	+3,265
Chivas	14	-1	78,189	-72
Philadelphia	15	+1	76,000	+3,711
Portland	16	-1	74,219	-1,731
Montreal	17	NC	70,370	-218
Dallas	18	NC	67,376	+2,158
Toronto	19	NC	57,057	-635

Hooray for DC. Honestly, my concern now shifts towards the Open Cup against a Philadelphia team that's finally starting to find some confidence. I really want this bad so I'm gonna be bititng my lip until Wednesday on anything else.



Columbus owe their success to the Higgs boson

(The title is a massive joke, get it?)

Again, I debated whether or not it was worth doing power rankings after midweek games but ultimately decided to do it since I wanted to introduce a new rating metric, which I'm calling the Super Happy Fun rating. It's actually basically the same rating number that I was using before, except now I take the inverse of that rating and mulitply it by a million, because it's fun to say 'Whoa, Seattle lost 3,000 points this week!' and so on and so on.

For a bit more explanation, what my model does is assign a rating each week (or each increment really as lately I've been doing midweek ratings) based on each teams form. Form is calculated half on results and half on goal differential, with the most recent game counting for 50% of the rating, the game after that 20%, the game after that 15%, the game after that 10% and the game after that 5%

The actual rating is each teams average weekly (or incrementally) form ranking. In the past, I just used that average and said lower was better (since 1 is better than 19), but now I decided to invert it and make it big. It does help with at a glance analysis and gives me a slightly better insight into what's happening. For example, I thought Kansas City's win last night would propel them higher, but it actually just evened out their form (from among the worst in the league to 8th) to their season long average, so not a whole lot of change there. In effect, we just "stopped the bleeding". Same deal with RSL and Seattle. They've both been playing poorly as of late relative to how they've played over the course of the season, so even their draw wasn't enough to stop them from dropping more points.

Here's how the table looks after the midweek games.

Team	Rank	Weekly Δ	Super Happy Fun Rating	Weekly Δ
DC	1	+1	151,261	+7,193
San Jose	2	-1	151,261	-6,147
New York	3	+1	125,874	-3,897
Salt Lake City	4	-1	125,000	-12,097
Kansas City	5	NC	118,421	+365
Chicago	6	NC	109,756	+365
Vancouver	7	NC	106,509	+2,850
Columbus	8	+1	102,273	+4,572
Seattle	9	-1	95,745	-4,255
Houston	10	NC	94,737	+292
Colorado	11	NC	88,670	-2,728
LA	12	NC	81,448	-1,479
Chivas	13	NC	78,261	-443
New England	14	NC	77,586	-39
Portland	15	NC	75,949	+2,850
Philadelphia	16	+1	72,289	+2,901
Montreal	17	-1	70,588	-2,061
Dallas	18	NC	65,217	-930
Toronto	19	NC	57,692	+1,587

As you can see, RSL dropped 12,097 points!!! Isn't that more fun than just saying they dropped a spot in the rankings?

Anyway, DC hops San Jose as the new #1 team, even though they're tied on points.