M^3 (May Man of the Month)

I debated whether or not I wanted to do this now or after the USOC match tonight, but I think I'll drop it now and not consider the USOC match since there's generally no stats to cull from it and at this stage it might get a little lopsided. Plus lots of guys are out on international duty and such and it may not be fair.

Here's the inter-team player ratings for May. Note that this isn't baselined against other players or other teams, just how much each poayer played in May and what their contributions were (statistically speaking). So a guy rated below five wasn't neccessarily bad, just had below average contribution to team success this month.

With that said, here we go.

Ike Opara nearly steals it from Zusi, but Graham comes out on top, playing in 427 minutes and notching a goal and two assists and generally playing exceptionally well, earning an unsuurprising callup for the USMNT. Congrats, Graham. I really need to get a better photo...

Quatro de Sporting... or something

Man do I love eating tacos. Even more so when watching my team crush their opponents so thoroughly. Seriously, I had been wondering when I'd get to see a proper blowout, and here it was. Chivas looked just miserable the entire match and seem to have completely lost whatever mojo they had at the start of the season. I do feel bad for Dan Kennedy though, the auto-red for DOGSO is so harsh in my mind. He made a foul on a player in the box, that should be a yellow if it's a foul that resulted from an actual play on the ball and not something tactical or malicious.

Still, how bout that Bieler, eh? Playing like a gynecologist. Clinical in the box.

Okay, I'm done with that joke now.

Anyway, here's the player ratings for this one.

Any surprise here? Total domination by SKC, Zusi with man of the match, even after leaving the game a little early. Smart sub by PV, it's gonna be a long week, and I really, really want to lay into Seattle on Wednesday.

No Besler in the 18 was a little odd... hopefully just resting and no injury or illness. But a great performance across the board, and hopefully a goal means CJ gets a bit of his confidence and swagger back.

And Bieler is proving he was worth the money. If he keeps scoring like this he'd be arguable one of the better DP signings in the league I'd argue.

Corny March Joke.

I don't really want to think of any clever "marching" puns, or April Fool's Day jokes, but I did want to take a minute and break down the first five games and toss out a player of the month nod. If you've been paying any attention it should be pretty obvious who it is for Kansas City, but let's look anyway.

Here're the numbers.

So, despite the good effort that the defense has turned in the last three games, Zusi dominates the stats with two goals an assist and some great attacking and defensive play. All that while missing a week with the USMNT getting results in Denver and Mexico. He's had a helluva a month. If you see him out somewhere, buy him a beer or three. The man has definitely earned it.

Benny and the nets

I'll say it. That was probably the best performance I've seen a Kansas City team turn in in years. End to end, total domination. The 2-0 score line was generous and the only thing I have to say negatively about a player is Biler should have had a hat trick. But that's the Kansas City team I think we all wanted to see and Montreal was utterly swarmed and devoured. And in the player ratings this week, it actually shows.

Here's how everyone fared.

Much love for Zusi and Besler, but Benny had a monster of a game, unlocking Montreal with some great through balls and playing lights out against everyone. I think a lot of people had been skeptical of him, myself included, but if he keeps playing like that the rest of the season, he may see a lot more time with the USMNT in qualifying. I'd love to see it. What I'm not loving seeing is that moustache... eek.

Edit - and now, for some match day photos. I really need a better camera...

SKC-Union Player Ratings

So soon? So soon.

I'd say I'd add some major thoughts to this post, but I only really have three. The first is, for the first 20 minutes, SKC looked awful, unorganized, and uncommunicative. Coming out of preseason maybe I shouldn't be that worried, but Philadelphia should have had at least one or two more goals in the first thirty minutes, and that would have put the game out of reach. We came out looking like Toronto. We can't look like Toronto.

The second thought was that I was glad to see the response, especially the second half adjustments.

The third was, I thought Nagamura had a helluva game, even if it didn't show up in the stats.

That said, these are stats based player ratings, and given that, there's one clear Man of the Match. Here's how the numbers worked out. Same system as last year.

No surprise there. Man of the match to Zusi, who notched a goal and assist. Rosell also with a great game, and hard to say anything bad about LeToux. Philly fans will be thrilled to have him back.

So hats off to Mr. Zusi, who has probably sealed a spot on the USMNT roster if he can keep up putting up games like that.

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...

MASSIVEly late...

Okay, okay, I'll admit I wasn't even going to do player ratings for the Columbus game, but I had a few extra minutes this morning and the bitterness of the draw has sort of went away, so here we go.

Columbus Crew
Andy Gruenebuam	5.3
Sebastian Miranda	4.4
Josh Williams	4.4
Chad Marshall	5.8
Nemanja Vukovic	3.9
Julius James	4.8
Eddie Gaven	7.2
Milovan Mirosevic	4.4
Chris Birchall	4.4
Dilly Duka	3.9
Jairo Arrieta	3.9
Federico Higuain	4.4
Emilio Renteria	5.3
Justin Meram	4.4
Team Average	4.7
Sporting Kansas City
Jimmy Nielsen	5.3
Seth Sinovic	5.3
Matt Besler	5.8
Chance Myers	4.8
Lawrence Olum	5.8
Roger Espinoza	5.3
Graham Zusi	7.7
Julio Cesar	4.8
Paolo Nagamura	4.4
Jacob Peterson	3.9
Kei Kamara	4.4
CJ Sapong	6.7
Team Average	5.3

Once again Zusi earns man of the match honors, and I think it's safe to say he's been having the best stretch of playing time in his career over the last month or two. Well earned Zeus, let's keep it up.



It's Zusi's world

It's about that time of year again... that is to say, October. Which can mean only one thing. No, not that my birthday's coming up (though it is, yay for presents!), it's time to figure out who SKC's best player in September was.

Going into this I thought for sure it'd be Besler until Zusi had a monster of a game on Friday. It was pretty close, but when the dust settled, it was clear that Zusi had had the better month and earns top honors from... me. Which means maybe not a lot, but I've got to think he'd be touched and flattered and such.

Zusi played 449 minutes and recorded two goals and two aissts, and SKC didn't lose in the month. Hard to say our defense doesn't deserve the credit, but Graham helped spark an offense that had been sputtering and his game against Chicago couldn't have been bigger, or better.

Here's the full player ratings for September. Interesting, SKC used only 17 players, with Collin missing a bunch of games. We all know PV doesn't like subs, but he really seems to like the lineup he has on hand going into the post season, so let's hope he doesn't ride them too hard.

Hats off to Graham, let's hope he can keep the offense moving forwards as we enter crunch time.



A little late...

I started looking at the calender to see if it was time to do the September player of the month and realized I had skipped August... Stupid lousy work.

Considering that it's not that hard to do, and that I don't have to do player of the month until the week after next, here's what we missed in August.

Again, I'd note that a "poor" looking rating likely reflects player playing time and not actual performance. The system I use rewards playing time as well as good performance. "True" ratings will come at the end of the year, when I have numbers for the entire league to compare to.

For those we don't remember, in August, Zusi had a goal and two assists in four games. Not too shaby, all things considered.



New England is Revolting

Well, another good news, bad news type of game. Our defense remains really really really good. Our offense remains really really flat. Predictable. I guess the opposite of clinical would be unclinical, so unclinical in the final third. Really just sort of blah stuff, even though the chances are there.

I sort of feel like New England came out in almost a 4-6-0 and didn't put on any strikers until over an hour in, so in that sense I think their game plan worked. Keep it clogged in the middle, force us wide, and hope new legs can run at a tired defense.

I know a lot of people were upset at home much the Revs players were cramping up and going down, but really, in that heat and that kind of match, some cramping would be expected. I'm sure some of it was gamesmanship, but nothing was too outrageous for me. The ref did have three crazy non-calls on what looked to be a horrible application of the advantage rule, but all in all I thought the ref and linesmen had good games as well. No one to blame for that result except our attackers, and maybe Vermes, who kept his starting 11 so unchanged during the first eight games I think a lot of people thought he was crazy. Now that he's switching things up a lot, maybe he was on to something. I'd like to see Cesar starting more, as well as switching between CJ and Teal.

But, anyways, first, some game photos. It was really damn hot so I took a little while to walk around the stadium and snap some photos of our lovely little home. I also moved from the north stand to to east cauldron to the south stand throughout the game to get some new vantage points and, as much as I love the Cauldron, I may want to get "good" seats next year. I really enjoyed venturing out amongst the "normal" folks.

I've noticed that my photography seems to have gotten wose since I got a digital camera, but I really don't wanna drop a grand+ on a new digital SLR, so if any one know's a good camera in the $200-$200 range, let me know. Otherwise, I'm seriously thinking about going back to film...

Anyway, on to the ratings. A pretty big three way tie this week among SKC and New England. Reis, Collin, and Harrington share the honors, all coming up big defnesively, but you know what? I'm gonna give it to Mikey. He filled in on the back line really well and did a good job coming forward. For the most part his service was really good and I honestly felt like he could have been even more involved had Collin not overlooked him a few times. I think the ratings also show Kansas City had a slightly better game, which I felt was the case. Tough to not get three points at home against New England.

New England
Matt Reis	6.3
AJ Soares	5.8
Chris Tierney	6.0
Kevin Alston	5.5
Darrius Barnes	4.0
Lee Nguyen	5.0
Shalrie Jopseh	5.0
Benny Feilhauber	4.7
Kelyn Rowe	4.2
Stephen McCarthy	5.0
Fernando Cardenas	4.2
Ryan Guy	4.7
Saer Sene	4.2
Blake Brettschneider	4.2
Team Average	4.9
Sporting Kansas City
Jimmy Nielsen	6.0
Aurelien Collin	6.3
Seth Sinovic	5.8
Lawrence Olum	4.2
Matt Besler	5.8
Michael Harrington	6.3
Michael Thomas	4.2
Graham Zusi	5.3
Jacob Peterson	4.5
Paolo Nagamura	4.7
Bobby Convey	4.7
Kei Kamara	4.5
CJ Sapong	4.5
Soony Saad	4.2
Team Average	5.1

So take a bow, Mr. Harrington, I think it's excellent to have a guy like you coming off the bench when needed. A starter anywhere else in the league in my book.