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If Every MLS Team Were A Ride At Disney World

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Though I’m done posting with any sort of regularity, I can still make occasional posts as I see fit. A NYCFC Forums user named Nickp91 suggested someone should match eatch MLS team with a Walt Disney World attraction in honor of the MLS is Back Tournament draw taking place in WDW. Being a devoted fan of NYCFC, MLS, and the Magic Kingdom, I took up the task. What follows is a slightly reorganized reprint of what I posted in the forums. Let’s begin with a little something I put together in honor of NYCFC’s first official game back in 2015.

 

Now the list:

Swiss Family Treehouse
Colorado Rapids. You go up, you go down, but not much really happens and comparatively boring. Fitting for a team whose most famous player the last 5 years was a goal keeper.

Journey into Imagination with Figment
Nashville. Are we sure there’s a team in Nashville? I mean, I read reports, those reports said they were in the West, and after two supposed games they just stopped playing and now they’re in the East? I don’t think it’s real.

Carousel of Progress
New England Revolution. A history of technology as it affects a typical American family, except the history stops in the 1990s just like MLS 1.0.

Prince Charming Regal Carousel
You are in a country whose reason for existing was a revolt against monarchy, then name yourself using the Spanish word for “royal” and insist everyone pronounce it with an accent — in Utah. You get a merry-go-round with the word “regal” in it.

The Seas with Nemo & Friends
Inter Miami. You think it might be cool but in the end it’s boring with pretty colors.

Triceratop Spin
The Red Bulls. This ride is nothing more than a retread of Dumbo, rebranded with a horned animal.

Astro Orbiter
Houston Dynamo. A team that rebranded and relocated to Houston gets Elevated Dumbo: This Time in Outer Space.

Splash Mountain
Seattle Sounders. It’s a pretty lame ride with little to recommend it, you always end up wet, and a bunch of animatronic characters never shut up. Then suddenly at at the end it gets pretty spectacular.

Space Mountain
Vancouver Whitecaps. Neither roller coasters nor soccer stadiums should be indoors. Space Mountain is the least of the Magic Kingdoms’ 3 “mountain” rides, just like the third wheel in the Cascadia Cup.

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
Portland Timbers. Not the best or most exciting coaster, but solid and delivers decent thrills with a somewhat overdone bit of corny western charm.

It’s A Small World
Atlanta United. Another ride that never shuts up. But no matter how much you want to ignore it, and get that song out of your head, you can’t.

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
LA Galaxy. A world-class pedigree, but no longer top dog and falls apart without the right person at the helm.

Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance
LAFC. Fashionably of the moment but limitations mean a lot of people end up disappointed.

Star Tours — The Adventure Continues
San Jose Earthquakes. Hey! Remember me!?!? I’m Star Wars too. How come nobody cares any more!?!?!?

Seven Dwarfs Mine Train
FC Cincinnati. New but no longer fresh, and vaguely Germanic. Draws big crowds but inevitably small.

Enchanted Tiki Room
Montreal Impact. The only attraction where anyone has a French accent, yet it’s not even the main language featured and kind of forced.

Test Track
Orlando City SC. There’s a brief portion where you go very fast, but mostly the ride is pointlessly bumpy and shaky, and seems to break down more than any other. [Note: Thanks to Michael for the comment. Calling them the Magic was unintentional but probably a subconscious link.]

Jungle Cruise
Columbus Crew. This ride made sense when Disney World opened and had no live animals. Now with Animal Kingdom it has no purpose, but the public is inexplicably fond of it and any attempt to get rid of it would surely fail.

Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover
Sporting KC. Solid. Dependable. Hardly anyone loves it or hates it, but it serves a purpose.

Spaceship Earth
Chicago Fire. Another look back through history stuck a few decades in the past, though it is currently in the process of getting a makeover.

The Magic Carpets of Aladdin
Toronto FC. It’s foreign, but only sort of, and Americans play the most important roles.

Frozen Ever After
Minnesota United. Vaguely Nordic, but not as much as it used to be when it was Maelstrom.

The Haunted Mansion
FC Dallas. There’s no good reason why the Haunted Mansion is in Liberty Square just like there’s no reason FC Dallas (or the US Soccer HOF) is in Frisco.

Hall of Presidents
Philadelphia Union. Devoted to history but no matter who is in charge many are disappointed.

Hollywood Tower of Terror
DC United. Classic and was once a main attraction, but though still fun its glory days are in the past.

Expedition Everest
New York City FC. Starts like a typical roller coaster, has some great moments, then goes backwards for a while, rights itself towards the end but always ends up in the same place and some broken track means it never reaches the summit.

Reasons To Be Cheerful – Playoff Line Edition

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  1. Reasons To Be Cheerful
    As noted before, the playoff line jumped up quite a bit at the end of last season.
    I tried to figure out what happened and found that it was at least in part a result of things that I think are unlikely to repeat. But let’s start with the slightly not-so-good news.
    Interconference Games
    The East usually loses points when it plays the West and this suppresses the playoff line for the East. The MLS schedule lowers the number of interconference games in the last 2 months of the season. Last year there were 15 IC games in September and October, representing 15 of IC games during the last 20.5% of the season. This year there are only 11 IC games in the same period. This would actually cause the playoff line to go up compared to last year if form holds, but I’m not too concerned about that because f the next factor.
    Interconference Results
    Last year the West outperformed the East earning 142 points in IC games to only 97 in the East during March through August. Then, for some reason, the East went on a tear winning 27 points the last 2 months compared to 15 for the West. That, I’m sure, did more to raise the playoff line in the East than the simple number of IC games. I’ve no idea why this happened, and no reason to expect it will repeat itself. It could of course, but there seems to be no reason to predict it will. If that is in fact the case, expect the line not to rise so much late in the season.
    Frequency of Ties
    Last year there was an extremely low number of ties in the last quarter of the season. A game that ends with one team winning creates 3 points. A tie only creates 2. So ties lower the total number of points in the league and thereby lower the total number of points needed to make the playoffs. So I checked.
    I divided the season into 4 quarters of 9-8-8-9 games, and then counted how many ties came in each quarter league wide. Ideally I would do this for East Conference games alone but that was too hard and I think this is a good enough proxy. Last year only 16.7% of the total ties for the year took place in the 4th quarter of the league schedule. That’s the lowest percentage for any quarter in the last 5 years. I found no trend that the 4th quarter tends to have the lowest number of ties. I did OTOH notice that in 4 of the last 5 years the second half of the season had an unusually-seeming number of ties: 43%, 55%, 46%, 42%, 35%. The average in those 5 years was that 44% of ties came in the second half of each season.
    But then I went back to the previous 5 years and that trend disappeared and the second half tie percentages are 52%, 50%, 57%, 43%, and 51%, which yields a nice 50% average. Basically there is no pattern, but if you look for an anomaly the 4th quarter of 2015 had the third lowest percentage in MLS in the last 10 years. That is unlikely to repeat this year. Again, it could happen, but I see no reason to predict it. This would mean that again, the playoff line should not increase so much at the end of the season the way it did last year.
    Specifically in the East, here is how each team just stopped generating tie games at the end of the season in 2015:
    Chicago last draw August 29
    Columbus last draw August 19
    DC One draw after June
    Montreal no ties in last 8 games
    New England 1 draw after July
    RB last draw August 5
    NYC last draw August 19
    Orlando one draw after August 8
    Philadelphia one draw in last 9 games
    Toronto no draws after July

    The chances of this happening again are beyond my ability to calculate but it seems really unlikely. I do think the final playoff line will be higher than where it is right now, but I think it will be a few points lower than last year.