City Blues By The Numbers

You are here: Home / 2019 / Archives for July 2019

Archives for July 2019

Weapon Of Choice – NYCFC Weekly Update MLS Week 21 July 29, 2019

July 29, 2019 by Mark Leave a Comment

NYCFC has never had more than 4 players score 5 or more goals in a season. It managed this twice before this year, in 2016 and again in 2018. This year, with 14 games remaining, NYCFC has 4 already (Heber, Moralez, Castellanos and Mitrita), plus a fifth poised to do so once he gets healthy (Shradi). Even Ring has an reasonable chance with 3 to date.

Meanwhile, in the summer transfer window, the team added an additional player, Gerard Mackay-Stevens, who seems very capable of putting up at least 5 given a full season of work.

Two years ago in 2017 NYCFC finished with just 3 players at the rather modest 5-goal threshold (Vila, Harrison and Moralez). This did not go unnoticed, and it now seems clear that team management noticed as well, having obtained Castellanos, Heber, Mackay-Stevens, Mitrita and Shradi all since the end of the 2017 season, and the team now has one of the most (if not the single most) balanced and deep attacks in MLS.

And having used this attack to drop 3 goals on a struggling SKC defense, NYCFC again sits with the second best PPG in the league (though only 9th best by points and 4th place in the East conference due to games in hand).

The biggest gap in the East table is between Montreal at 8 and Orlando at 9. The conference is shaping up to have 8 teams vying for 7 playoff spots down the stretch. In addition, with the much smaller gaps between all of the top 8 teams, there will likely be a true competition for every spot on the table at the end, though both 538 and the Playoff Status website both give NYCFC a better than 50% chance to finish first.

With 2 straight wins after a pair of disappointing losses, NYCFC is as good or better than every team in the East after 20 games, and is poised to take the lead once it plays its additional games, as long as it does not suffer another late season slump.

The Revs have managed one of the more impressive in-season turnarounds in MLS. They now sit above the playoff line in 7th Place in the real standings, and hold 6th Place by PPG. The are undefeated at 6-0-4 in the last 10 games after starting the season a dismal 3-8-2.

The toughest part of the Revs season is coming up, with games at Home against LAFC (next) and NYC.  Away they still have Seattle, the Red Bulls, NYC, Portland and Atlanta. Their H/A adjusted Opponent’s PPG to date is 1.26 (with no real difference between when they were terrible and the undefeated streak). The upcoming adjusted Opponents’ PPG is 1.53. They do have some quality, impressive wins during the streak including San Jose at Home and the Galaxy Away, but they are facing an upcoming series of tests the likes of which they have not yet faced.

New England also has an impressive record of 6 wins against 0 losses and 2 Ties against the West, but they arguably have 3 of the toughest West games remaining.

On that note, it is worth mentioning that 4 of the 8 top teams in the East still have to play Portland in Portland: Atlanta, DC, the Revs, and Red Bulls.

On the table showing how NYC gets to various levels, we are close to dropping some of the lower possibilities.

Before closing, a word on the NYCFC defense. They have a league 4th best Goals Against per Game of 1.20 based on 24 goals conceded in 20 games. They started the season allowing 11 goals in the first 6 games, then tightened up considerably to allow just 13 in the last 14 games with 5 shutouts.  

But there still is some cause for concern, as the more medium-term results are 12 goals allowed and just 1 clean sheet in last 9 games. NYCFC seems to be in that mode where there is at least 1 mistake in each game that is not forgiven by their opponent.  In the last 4 games, a review of how they gave up those goals shows that the team defense in the regular run of play remains excellent, while concentration and/or execution in specific moments fail. With 5 goals conceded in the last 4 games, they came off of (1) in the regular run of play, (2) a PK, (3) a free kick, (4) a throw in signalled as a corner, and (5) a corner kick.

Finally, let’s note that DC United, Vancouver and Chicago now have 9 Ties each and NYCFC no longer leads the league in that oddity.

Break, eject, eject, eject

Filed Under: NYCFC Misc

Ain’t No Mountain – NYCFC Weekly Update MLS Week 20 July 23, 2019

July 23, 2019 by Mark Leave a Comment

The metaphors were in alignment as NYCFC went to Colorado, almost immediately went down a goal, then spent about 75 minutes fighting an uphill battle to reach higher and attain peak goals, or something like that. In the end 3 points is 3 points no matter the altitude.

I think it is time to start thinking about playoff seeding.

A simple extrapolation says the 1st seed in the East will probably be in the 55-60 range.  I figure somebody among Philadelphia, Atlanta and NYC will go on a run and get 60 points. Maybe even the Red Bulls or DC has a super hot streak.   Sneaking a peak at the West tells us that, LAFC aside, the next best of the West (among the Galaxy, Seattle, Minnesota and San Jose), will probably be very close to that 60-point mark in one direction or another.  So if NYC can reach 60 points it probably has a very strong chance of winning the East, and should it reach the finals, will be possibly, maybe ahead of any team coming out of that conference if they’re not wearing black and gold.  So how do you get to 60 points?

It’s not on the table specifically, but 9-5-1 does it exactly with 28 points and 1.87 PPG.  That seems very attainable given NYC’s current form, but let’s also look at the schedule, starting with 4 daunting road games:

RSL 2
ATL 1
DAL 1
PHI 2
The number after each team is their number of Home losses to date.  Sure, NYC is a good Away team, but for comparison, here is the number of Home losses (excluding the one we gave them) for each of the teams NYC has beaten at their stadium:
DC    1
MTL  3
LAG   3
COL  5

Let’s be reasonably conservative, and figure NYC gets 4 points in those 4 difficult Away games just as a reference. Then they need 24 points in the other 11, of which 8 are at Home and 3 are Away.  So, win all 8 Home games. Or 7 Home and 1 of the Away; or 7 at Home and draw 3 of the remaining 4.  You can play around with it a lot, but if you’re interested in this sort of thing I think there are few enough games for you to start looking at the remaining schedule and think about how to build to whatever point total you’re interested in.  For me, the other games of concern are (1) New England Away. The Revs have 4 Home losses, but the most recent was in April and NYC has never done well in New England. The most concerning Home games for me are the Red Bulls, San Jose and Atlanta. None of those teams have great Away records this year, but all are tough outs. Beyond them, NYC has a habit of drawing against Toronto at Home, and has only beaten the Revs once since that First Historic Home Opener, in 5 subsequent visits.

I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but just noting that there is not much room for error if NYC is going to have home games beyond the first or second round of the playoffs. Here’s the current state of the East and how we got here:

And the everyone-at-19-games standings:

Finally the year-over-year graphs. 2019 is ahead of 2016, but still lags 2017 and 2018, both of which featured late season slides.  The 2018 slump began after 21 games. In fact, if this team does not win the next 2 it will fall further behind the 2018 version, at which point it will have an easy target to overcome.  The 2017 version only faltered after 25 games.

 

Move on up, and keep on wishing
Remember your dream, is your only scheme
So keep on pushing

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: 2019 Weekly Updates

Communication Breakdown – NYCFC Weekly Update MLS Week 19 July 17, 2019

July 17, 2019 by Mark Leave a Comment

Corner-gate, throw-in-gate, call it what you want. It happened and the result is that NYCFC lost 3 games in 8 days (2 in league play).  Players were missing, the schedule was tough, there was fatigue. But you take the games as they come.  Before NYCFC lost to Portland while missing half the starting lineup, NYCFC beat Seattle in a similar state.

Here is where things stand.

 

Here is how things stood on that mythical day when every East team played exactly 18 games:

With 2 straight losses, NYC drops into a tie for third, three full points behind Philadelphia. The good news is that looking ahead/behind Philly earned/will get just 4 points in the next 4 games, DC got/will get 2 in the next 3, and Atlanta 1 in the next 2 that happened/will happen.  Re Philly, it is worth pointing out that they just finished (in actual real time) a tough 5-game stretch with only 1 home game, earning just 5 points out of 15. This brought their H/A split to even after 22 games. Looking forward their schedule is kind of average, but one should not expect their current slump to continue as bad as it has been.

NYCFC’s future schedule is, on average easier, but splits into 3 phases. First, the Pigeons face 2 Away games against teams earning 2.0 PPG at home or better in the next 5 games for an average opponents H/A PPG of 1.42. Then comes a 7 game stretch of which 5 are at home, with a opposing PPG of 0.98. Then the finish sees 3 of the final 4 Away, with 2 hosts getting 1.9 PPG or better, and an average of 1.55.  That middle stretch roughly coincides with NYC’s second half slumps in 2017 and 2018, so they are set up to avoid repeating that in 2019.

More immediately, by PPG, Colorado is one of the team’s 3 easiest remaining Away games.

Additional future info in the “how do we get where” table.

Finally, Zeppelin took the post title but Katy Perry gets the last word on Alan Kelly:

“You change your mind like a girl changes clothes
* * *
You’re hot then you’re cold
You’re yes then you’re no
You’re in then you’re out
You’re up then you’re down
You’re wrong when it’s right”

 

Filed Under: 2019 Weekly Updates

MLS Interconference Play 2019 – June

July 9, 2019 by Mark Leave a Comment

June – 14 Games
East Record 6-5-3
At Home 4-2-3 (9)
On Road 2-3-0 (5)
Goal Differential -5
East Points 21
West Points 18

Season to Date
East Record 30-36-16
At Home 22-11-9 (42)
On Road 8-25-7 (40)
Goal Differential -18
East Points 106
West Points 124

A winning record for the East in June, but that’s deceptive because the H/A advantage should have yielded more wins.
One bright spot for the East is that Cincinnati played 9 of its 12 interconference games through June. Take the Cincinnati games out of the totals above and the East record is 29-29-15. I’m not saying the Cincinnati games should not count but with most of them out of the way, it might be reasonable to expect that the East record improves going forward. Going into July CFC had only 3 IC games left, and they won the first of those last week already. So they only have 2 IC games left, Home to Vancouver and Away to Dallas.
NYCFC has 7 IC games left, and the five they played (record 2-1-2) were against the top 4 teams in the West table, plus a Portland team whose record is misleading due to a ridiculous imbalance between Home and Away games to date. It is not inconceivable for NYC to feast on the bottom half of the West for the rest of the year.

Filed Under: 2019 Interconference Play

Only The Lonely Can Play – NYCFC Weekly Update MLS Week 18 July 9, 2019

July 9, 2019 by Mark Leave a Comment

This town, is coming like a ghost town.

Where did everybody go?

Portland has played 3 games at Yankee Stadium. Portland has won all 3.  They won all 3 games by a score of 1-0. But there is something else those games have in common.

  • April 19, 2015.  Villa was injured and did not play. Same for Mix.
  • September 9, 2017. Villa was injured after Spanish national team duty and did not play.
  • July 7, 2019. Six starters: Heber, Mitrita, Tajouri-Shradi, Sands, Callens, and Johnson (plus a few potential subs) were unavailable for either injury or international duty.

It is a wonder that NYCFC controlled play for most of the game and almost got a result.  It was a shame to end the unbeaten streak with a loss under such circumstances, with more than half of a starting 11 unavailable, including almost the entire front line, and the remaining players reeling in the middle of a 5-games-in-16-days- stretch, but that is how things go.

It should surprise nobody that the 12 game unbeaten streak was the longest in club history. The previous best straddled the last game of 2017 and the first 7 of 2018 for 8 games unbeaten.The longest single season streak was the same first games of 2018.

Brad Stuver just played 6 games in the USOC and league play, most of them without Callens, Sands and Matarrita in the back on defense, and gave up 6 goals. I might have gladly taken 7 or even 8 in advance.

Losses with half your lineup missing still count, and the home loss to Portland put just a bit of a kink into what had been NYCFC’s steady ascent up the tables the last 2 months. Fortunately, just about everyone at the top of the PPG table in the East also dropped points this week.

Philadelphia has retaken the lead on the make-believe table where we compare every team at the number of games NYCFC has played to date:

The good news is the Union (and others) did not grab all the points beyond Game 17 so NYCFC has room to recover and surpass with its games in hand.

The “how to reach” table still looks pretty good:

NYCFC is halfway through its season and I reassessed the comparables for the line charts, choosing to use all of 2016, 2017 and 2018.

The team is just behind the 2017 and 2018 version at the 17-game mark. If it can avoid the extended second half slump of those version it can certainly be the best NYCFC ever.

The remaining schedule might be an advantage, even with one more road game than home remaining.  Here are the Home/Away adjusted opponents PPG for the remaining schedules for the top 7 East Conference teams:

Red Bulls 1.51
Philadelphia 1.47
Atlanta 1.47
DC 1.45
Toronto 1.27
NYCFC 1.27
Montreal 1.19

For more detail I counted how many games each of those teams has against an opponent with a H/A adjusted PPG of 1.80 or higher with the following results: RB 3, PHI 5, ATL 4, DC 5, TFC 2, NYCFC 5, MTL 2.  That shows NYC has as many or more somewhat arbitrarily tough games remaining as anyone,* despite an average toughness that looks quite easy.  As an example, the Red Bulls remaining opponents PPG is so high largely because they still have to play both LAFC (2.78 PPG at home) and Seattle (2.56 PPG at home).  But no matter how hard those games are the Red Bulls can at worst suffer 2 losses in them, and they only have 1 other game against a team at 1.80 or higher (Portland 2.0 Home). NYCFC has 5 such games, which is arguably tougher overall even though none of them should be as tough (RB 1.90, RSL 2.25, ATL 2.10, Dallas 2.0, PHI 1.91).

* I picked 1.80 because it generated what seemed to be the right number of results. 1.90 and 2.0 left everyone with hardly any difficult games and 1.70 or lower too many.

Filed Under: 2019 Weekly Updates

Luck In My Eyes – NYCFC Weekly Update MLS Week 17 July 1, 2019

July 1, 2019 by Mark Leave a Comment

Sift through my soul to see what’s lost and found

With this week’s game against Philadelphia, NYCFC has now played every Eastern Conference team that was in the league as of 2015 at least 10 times in MLS regular season play. This shows NYCFC’s Points Per Game against each of those teams, excluding playoffs, US Open Cup, or anything else except MLS regular season.

Here are some more factlets with respect to NYCFC against those teams:

NYCFC’s Best Home Record against – Philadelphia 2.60 (next CHI 2.33)
Best Away – Montreal 2.60 (TFC 1.40)
Worst Home – New England 1.33 (MTL 1.5)
Worst Away – RB 0.67 (NER 0.80)

Odd that Montreal has the second best record at Yankee Stadium while having the worst record against NYCFC overall. The gap between NYCFC’s best Away record and second best is massive. I knew NYCFC had trouble against New England but wow.  A few more items of note with respect to this set of teams and MLS season play:

NYCFC has never lost at home against CHI, DC, PHI, TFC
NYCFC has at least one Away win against all of these teams (expanding the field NYC has yet to win at COL, FCD, LAFC, MNU, RSL & has yet to play at CIN)
NYCFC has never lost Away in Montreal (also COL, LAFC, SJ & again CIN)

Empty my pockets that were weighing me down 

Sort the MLS tables by different variables and NYCFC is all over the place, but mostly somewhere good.  The biggest factors are the games played and losses.  NYCFC is:

Last in Games Played
Tenth in Total Points
Second in Points Per Game
Fourteenth(!) in Total Wins
First for Fewest Losses
Second for Win minus Loss differential at +5. LAFC is +9
First (Tied) for Draws (with DC, SKC and Chicago one back)

Of course Games Played is a factor but NYCFC’s total amount of tied games no longer seems so ridiculous. Part of the league is is catching up.

Look at this pretty PPG table:

The Union’s traveling supporters were singing “We’re top of the table” Saturday night, which they are entitled to do. But part of that is a factor of games played. This chart helps show where teams are at similar schedule states:

To help further, I made a mini-table showing each team’s points as of Game 15 where NYCFC sits now:

Ties are sorted alphabetically but Atlanta had more wins at 15 than NYCFC so this is fair anyway.

I can hear a howling wind
That sweeps away the pain that’s been 

2016 and 2015 are — tentatively — no longer looking like appropriate comps for 2019.

Gonna walk away from trouble with my head held high

The top half of the potential outcomes chart is looking more attainable:

Tears don’t care who cries them

I posted about this (on Twitter and the NYCFC Forums but apparently not here) at the beginning of June after 33 games because I lacked the patience to wait 3-4 weeks for Torrent to coach his 34th game. But now we have a full season under Domé and his record is 14-8-12 for 54 points and 1.59 PPG.  Patrick Vieira’s first full season record, which corresponded exactly with the 2016 season, was 15-10-9 for 54 points and 1.59 PPG.  I don’t draw any huge conclusions from this except to note that it seemed awfully unlikely at the end of 2018 and even several games into this one. Torrent is helped considerably by his 5-1-0 start before he started tinkering much. Vieira took over a bad team and made it good. Torrent took over a strong team and after his excellent start earned just 21 points in 19 games before turning it around. But Vieira also took over between seasons while Domé had to adjust on the fly. Who knows, maybe his rough stretch will be like Tiger Woods early in his career. He had won his first major when he decided to hire a new swing coach and completely revamp his swing. He won nothing for a couple of years (roughly) but then the changes took hold and he won 7 Majors from 1999 to 2002.  I’m not predicting that much hardware for NYCFC but some success seems possible, at least.

 

 

Filed Under: 2019 Weekly Updates

About Page and My Other Blogs

About and the Rules

Privacy

My Photo Blog

My Dad’s Autograph Collection and Sketches

Other NYCFC Sites

NYCFC Forums

The Outfield

Categories

  • 2015 Weekly Updates
  • 2016 NYCFC Assorted
  • 2016 Weekly Updates NYCFC
  • 2017 Weekly Updates NYCFC
  • 2018 Weekly Updates
  • 2019 Interconference Play
  • 2019 Weekly Updates
  • Interconference 2018
  • Interconference Play 2016
  • Interconference Play 2017
  • Methodologies
  • MLS Assorted
  • NYCFC Misc

Archives

  • September 2022
  • May 2022
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • August 2015

Recent Posts

  • Goal Differential Minus xGoal Differential – Spoiler: It’s About Cushing
  • NYCFC May 30, 2022 – Odds’n’Ends, Shapes and Contrasts
  • NYCFC 2020 In Review By The Numbers
  • The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
  • NYCFC 2020 – 15 Games In – 8 To Go

Recent Comments

  • JC on NYCFC May 30, 2022 – Odds’n’Ends, Shapes and Contrasts
  • visit this link on Boys Keep Swinging — NYCFC Weekly Update MLS Week 26 September 2, 2019
  • Mark on If Every MLS Team Were A Ride At Disney World
  • Michael B Parker on If Every MLS Team Were A Ride At Disney World
  • If Every MLS Team Were A Ride At Disney World on In My Beginning Is My End – NYCFC Weekly Update October 7, 2019 MLS Week 31

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright and Disclaimers

Copyright (c) Mark Garbowski 2015-2019. All rights reserved.

I have no ads or commercial interests in connection with this blog so I need no disclaimers.

Copyright © 2023 · Agency Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in