NYCFC 2017 Regular Season — Final Weekly Update

Regular Season Wrap Up. Not trying to be comprehensive. First, the last charts. I dropped 2015.

• The total points lines and PPG for 2015 and 16 look like they kiss around week 11 or 12 but they don’t. 2017 took the lead in Game 5 and never fell back afterwards.
• On the rolling 5-Game PPG, 2016 was both better and worse in the first part of the season. 2017 did better in the middle third, and then had a bad end. Even with a seesaw chart, 2016 finished better than 2017.
• After 17 games halfway through the season the Goal Differential was +11. 538 predicted a final GD of +14. I thought they were nuts, and ridiculously undervaluing NYCFC. I expect many others did also. It ended at +13.
• The GD first hit +13 on June 29 after 18 games. Over the last 16 games the subset GD was 0. After slipping to +9 after the TFC 4-0 loss on July 29, the GD climbed to its high of+14 after the win over SKC on September 9 in Game 27. Over the last 10 games of the season, the GD was either +13 or +14 every week.
• After 17 games the team had 30 points which projects cleanly to 60, and 538 predicted only 55. It ended at 57.

I tend to divide the seasons into quarters, but a discussion I had elsewhere led me to see how this year is best divided into thirds. As 34 only divides by 2 and 17, the units consist of 12 games, then 11 and 11. Here is a simple table and chart showing how Goals For per game, Goals Against per game, and PPG went in each third of the season:

• Finally, the Home Away Charts for the year. I do not know why 2 of them make it look like we played more Away games than at Home. It’s a weird Excel thing I can’t figure how to adjust.
• The odd thing here is that the team had its best results when it had the lowest average Goal Differential. Part of this is luck. In the first third NYC lost 4 games each by one goal, while its average winning margin in 6 games was better than 2. In the middle third NYC won 6 games by a total of 8 goals, while it lost only 3 games by an average differential of more than 2.
• The other story is that the GA spiked a whole lot in the middle. Then both it and Goals For went way down in the last third, as did PPG. NYC had a lot of missing players during that period, but I have seen comments indicating that fans believed NYC was less aggressive. I have to wonder if Vieira was so concerned about the sharp increase in team defense that he allowed the offense to stagnate as part of what he considered a necessary corrective.

• No surprises. We were a better Home team all year. In 2016 NYC was actually better Away for half the season. In 2017 NYC earned 5 more points at Home and 2 fewer on the Road compared to 2016.
• NYC earned 1.77 PPG in Primary Kit games (30 games). 1.33 PPG in the Hypnokit (3 Games), and 0.0 PPG in Eco Kit games (1). Sorry oceans, but that’s a bad performance, especially as it was a Home game.
• In its 2 years the HypnoKit earned 1.75 PPG in 8 regular season games.
• NYC performed mildly better against the East (1.69 PPG) than West (1.64). Last year NYC earned 2.0 PPG against the West against only 1.42 against the East. NYC had the odd extra home game against the West and one less against the East which did not apply last year with 10 teams in each conference.