Real Salt Lake by the numbers
May 20, 2009 by f4denz.
Well my laptop had some issue when I was doing my match recap and I will try to recover it, but tonight I will look at the numbers and what they show about the team and future of Real Salt Lake. The record is 3-5-1 and strangely enough only 3 teams have more than 3 matches (Chivas 7, Seattle 4, KC 4) interestingly all of them have a win over RSL. On the downside there are only 3 teams with as many or more losses than RSL (FC Dallas 6, New York 5, San Jose 5) and there are a number of team with fewer wins than RSL; New England and New York each have 2 wins, and San Jose, FC Dallas, Los Angeles, and Columbus each have only one win.
The Western Conference standings are:
Playoff Chances:
RSL is in 5th place and if the playoffs started today RSL would miss the boat, at sportsclubstats.com the 0-2 loss to KC dropped RSL down to just a 34.4% which was a drop of over 16% from the previous week. This week we are going to take a look at what RSL will have to do in order to make the playoffs according to the site. The site uses simulated seasons to see how each potential finish would impact all the other teams, the numbers are based on hundreds of thousands of simulated seasons. Knowing that this weekends match will mark the end of the first 1/3 of the season, and based on RSL’s current form it has used that formula and tried to estimate what RSL needs to do for the final 2/3 of the season. It is clear that the simulations and formula are only so good and by looking at the results it is clear they don’t really understand the power of draws, but the knowledge of how points are earned is clear and for RSL to cinch up a spot they would need 38 points to ensure a 100% chance of making the playoffs, to have a 50% chance they would need 30 points but 32 points would up RSL’s chances to over 90%. The formulas and simulations also show that anything less than 24 points out of the 63 possible would reduce RSL’s chances to under 10%.
Here is the graph of where RSL’s playoff chances are now:
Points, Goals For, and Goals Against
RSL is still sitting on 10 points after week 9 for an average of 1.11 points per game, if nothing changes RSL would end with 33 points. RSL has scored 14 goals or an average of 1.55 per match, if those number stay the same for the rest of the season it would total 47 goals scored, the goals against are sitting at 13 and the season average total would be 43. But let’s look at how these numbers lineup to the past:
So RSL if you look at points through 9 games for RSL, you can see we are traditionally a slow starting team, only the 2005 season saw RSL with more points in their first 9 matches, we are one point behind that season. Goals against RSL again is just one behind the 2005 season but that is the only year we had allowed fewer goals in our first 9 matches. Goals for is the one area where RSL is still ahead of any other year in team history, and that is with RSL going without scoring a single goal in their last 3 matches.
So What Does It Mean?
In listening to Jason on the radio last night, it was clear that he isn’t happy with the recent performance of the team and to be honest I can’t imagine anyone who is. Sure there are excuses that can be made, bad officials have made mistakes in each match. Slight mistakes by players have left opposing sides with chances and they have made us pay each time. The scoring drought has come as RSL’s number of shots have dropped from the high of 29 against New England to 7 against Colorado, 10 against Chivas, and 14 against KC, but the losses probably have to do with the fact that in each of those matches we allowed the other side to get more than 10 shots (KC 13, Chivas 17, Colorado 10), in fact in the loss to New York we allowed 11 shots, and in the loss to Seattle we allowed 12.
It means that the lack of possession and our defense allowing teams to get shots have allowed other teams to take advantage of us. In order to turn back to our winning ways, we need our defense to step up and help protect our keepers and we will need to create more offensive chances, yes that means that Yura has to fire away. When he does it forces defenders to cover him, which opens up for others, we need to mix up the attack with long balls, balls played in from the sides by Wingert and Russell, and straight up the middle attacks by Javi and Clint.
The season is far from lost, but improvements have to be made.
OFF MY SOAPBOX