The pseudonymous Dummy Run over at Twitter  wrote the NYCFC Playoff Preview for ASA. Dummy is no dummy, and the article is great. It is also long. It is dense. It has a lot of charts. I mean, even by his standards, it is chart heavy. You will learn a lot. Go read it. Maybe twice. There is a lot of good stuff there.

But I have one big problem. Really big. The first chart in the article is a Vieira/Torrent comparison, covering many regular and advanced stats, and it shows that NYCFC is better under Torrent on basically all the advanced stats while behind on the regular ones. This is known as bad luck. This point frames his entire discussion, which covers so much more, including how NYCFC responds o pressure when it plays from the back, how it transitions into attack, and identifying specific style differences in play under Vieira and Torrent, all illustrate with graphs, charts, and video. The opening and closing theme of the piece is that Dome had the team playing better and it was bad luck that the results did not follow.

But. This is a big but. And I’m disappointed Dummy didn’t notice this, or actively chose to ignore it, but the frame he imposes — comparing all of Vieira’s games to all of Torrent’s games, masks the extreme seesaw nature of Torrent’s time at NYCFC.  As Dummy lays out in the chart I mentioned (it’s the ones with the photos of Vieira and Torrent) , Expected Goals For NYCFC went up from 1.57 to 1.73 when Dome took over, and Expected Goals Against went down from 1.32 to 1.17. So the team got better, right?  Here’s a simpler table with just those stats (some of my numbers are just slightly different because of different rounding algorithms I think):

Yay better. All good. But let’s compare these 2 coaches:

Coach 1 has results better than Torrent. Coach 2 is worse that Vieira. And — big reveal — they are both Dome Torrent, split between his his first 9 games (through the Toronto Away game) and his last 10 when the team was much worse. According to Expected Goals, the longer Torrent was in charge, the worse NYCFC played. The results were not bad luck. They matched the run of play. The only reason Dome’s results look better than Vieira’s is that before he changed things up so much, and brought in his guys, the team had it’s best xG run of the season. So the ASA article basically masks the correlation between advanced stats and results by treating Dome’s 19 games as a consistent run of play, which they were not. There was no bad luck. The team had good results for Dome when xG says they played well, and poor results when they did not. In Torrent’s first 9 games with an Expected Goal Differential of +1.08 the team went 6-2-1 for 2.11 PPG.  Then when the same differential dropped to +0.4 the team went 2-5-3 for 0.90 PPG.

The Home and Away splits show that the big difference was Away, though the team got worse at Home also.
First, Home. “Dome” is his record as a whole. “Dome1” represents his first 5 Home games, “Dome2” his last 5:

It is pretty consistent, but though the differences are small, the team actually performed better under Vieira, and the Expected Goals Against did increase by a meaningful amount in the final quarter of the season under Dome. In sum, Home defense got worse, according to Expected Goals.

Now Away. NYCFC played 9 games Away under Dome. The Dome1/2 split is First 4, last 5.

Holy crap on a stick. At first, NYCFC improved a lot on the road when Dome took over, and you may remember they won 2 Away games after a long dry spell. Arguably they should have done even better. The Expected Goal DIfferential for the 2 losses in this set of games was +0.88 (Chicago) and +0.99 (Seattle). But after that, Expected Goals For went down an entire goal per game from 1.89 to 0.90. That’s massive. At the same time, Expected Goals Against went up by 0.6 for a swing of 1.59 in Expected Goal Differential in the wrong direction between the first half of Torrent’s tenure and the second half playing Away.

What excuses are there for this? Schedule? Injuries? I cannot go with injuries because the first half of Torrent’s time coincides almost perfectly with Villa’s long absence, while the crap run overlaps with a missing Medina. That doesn’t really explain anything.

Finally, I understand that 5 and 4 game samples are really small (although that is just the H/A breakdown).  Maybe Dome had an anomalously great short run to start, then a similar bad run. Maybe next year averages out all good. But the thesis that Dome simply improved the team and the poor results do not coincide with how he had the team playing does not hold up when you break it down. When you change the framing from (1) Vieira vs Torrent to (2)Torrent’s Good Start vs Torrent’s Bad Finish you see that Dome pretty much got the results he deserved. He won when the team played well, and lost when they deteriorated. That’s true whether you go by the eye test or xG, and bad luck doesn’t really play into it. Maybe the team deserved to win a little more over the last 10, as the xGD was barely on the positive side overall. But when play objectively worsens, I’m not very sympathetic to the complaint that results should not have been quite as bad as they were. Expected goals says NYCFC certainly did not deserve a strong record at the end of the season, and any analysis of Torrent has to consider why the team did so much worse the longer he was in charge.

I started looking into Vieira/Torrent splits and found some interesting things. Some offer obvious conclusions, but others not so much.

https://twitter.com/thedummyrun/status/1048550559089922048

Click on the images in that tweet and you will see that NYCFChas been much more active on defense under Torrent. His graph does not seem to offer a H/A split, but I think it is likely most of this activity is in Away games.

At home, every number has moved in the wrong direction. Home goals per game and xGoals per game are both down (though the latter by an insignificant amount). Also at home, opponent Goals and xGoals have gone up.

Away, however, NYC goals are down but xGoals are up by a meaningful amount. Opponents goals also are down, while their xGoals are way, way lower.
Under Vieira in 2018, NYCFC gave up an average of 1.7625 xGoals per game Away, and that is down to 1.2975 under Dome. Under Vieira, road opponents never accumulated fewer that 1.4 xG per game in 8 games. Under Torrent, they only exceeded 1.4 xG twice in 8 games.

This chart also shows that in all 4 areas: Home goals for and against, and Away goals for and against, the actual goal change has been worse for Dome than the xGoal change.

I do believe that the improvements in Away xGFor and xGAgainst are big enough that it shows real improvement, especially because Torrent has discussed his emphasis on improving road form. NYCFC’s xG differential has improved by 0.801 per game on the road. I tend to give people credit when they say “my goal is to improve X” and then X improves.

Next I focused on how NYCFC has performed relative to xGoals under Vieira and Torrent. The results are not surprising given the table above, and everything we have seen and discussed the last 2 months.

First 2 lines show the difference between actual goals per game and xGoals per game. In every instance + means the team did better than expected and – means the team did worse than expected. This is where the big dispute comes in regarding whether you think performance relative to Expected Goals is mostly luck, or not. Because again in all 4 categories the team was “luckier” under Vieira than for Torrent, and for NYCFC’s Home goals scored, the difference is massive. Can bad luck be this consistent? I honestly don’t know. Logic cuts both ways. On one hand it seems unlikely that luck would point the same way in all contexts and subdivisions, unless there was a reason outside of luck. On the other hand, there is no reason why the non-lucky explanations should correspond with each other. For example, you might explain the poor results relative to xG scored as being due to a less aggressive, vertical offense in transition. But just because that is true does not suggest a substantive reason for why the club should also underperform on defense. Whether you think it is luck, or there are substantive explanations, you might expect them to be independent.

For additional context, I note that for the entire season, only 5 MLS teams are underperforming relative to xGoals at home. That’s pretty normal. In 2017 6 teams did that, in 2016 – 5, 2015 – 8, and in 2014 – 4 teams. Simply put: Most teams outperform xGoals at Home. Further, underperforming xG at home by -0.443 per game is very unusual. Since and including 2014 through 2018 to date, only 4 teams have underperformed xG by worse than -0.3 per game over an entire season. Now, Dome’s NYCFC team has done this over just 9 Home games, not a full season. Extreme and unusual results are more likely over half seasons than over full seasons. But I still think it is fair to say this result is anomalous. Being so much worse at scoring Goals at Home than accumulating xG is just wrong and unusual.

As a bit more background, it is not unusual for a team to have a wild swing in its performance relative to xG in the middle of a season. For example, here are the GD-xGD figures for 2016 NYCFC and 2017 FCD in the first 17 games compared to the last 17 games:

NYCFC 2016 GD-xGD -0.176/0.759 Swing 0.935
FC Dallas 2017 GD-xGD 0.410/-1.091 Swing 1.501

And here is the split and swing for 2018 NYCFC under PV and under DT:
NYCFC 2018 PV/DT GD-xGD 0.484/-0.478 Swing 0.962

GD-xGD combines both offense and defense, and Home and Away. Are these big swings due to luck or something else? You can explain 2016 NYCFC based on the team getting used to PV’s new system. You can explain this year with the coaching change. I confess I am less familiar with 2017 FC Dallas than either NYCFC iteration, but they had no coaching change and they had an important player, Mauro Diaz, return from injury about 40% into the season. Yet they had an enormous negative swing with no clearly obvious cause. So is it mostly luck, really? Are the NYCFC splits that seem to be based on coaching changes just a pair of big coincidences?

Also, The H/A weighted PPG of opponents facing PV was 1.42, and for Dome to date it is only 1.30. But Dome had more injuries, and a lot of odd double game weeks and rough travel.

I think the data supports enough variations in conclusions that people can argue, but I believe the following with various degrees of confidence.

I think the improved xG figures, on both offense and defense under Torrent, represent something real.
I believe the deteriorated results relative to xG is based both on luck and controllable factors.
I think Torrent has focused on Away form, and controlling possession in the midfield, and defending in the midfield.
I think the poor results relative to xGoal is based on lack of performance in the final third on both ends.
I believe NYCFC’s attack is less direct and gives teams more time to get in front of their goal.
On defense, I look at 3 of the worst games relative to xG (at Chicago, at Seattle, and at Minnesota), and can remember individual plays where an opponent broke us down and/or an NYCFC defender messed up, leading to easy goals against the run of play.
I think this combination of effects can be in sum caused by a team that is uncertain of how to play a new system, combined with a technical emphasis on midfield play.
I fully expect this to improve.
Despite a half-season under the new coach, I believe that whether this does or does not improve in time for the playoffs will mostly be luck, if only because of a super small sample size.
I strongly expect this to improve next year.
I fear it might not improve early, due to roster turnover and a guess that Dome is — believe it or not — holding back, and that next year will bring even more changes for the team to acclimate itself to.

I started quantifying NYCFC offensive production beyond Villa. I know many players do important things that don’t result in goals or assists. I try not to be the guy whose answer to my team’s woes is “We need more people who score goals. All the goallzz!” But damn, NYCFC needs more people who score or create goals.

Here are the top 5 goal scorers for every East playoff team, plus Portland and Seattle. The first line is the team name and its total goals for the season. Below that the columns go Player|Goals|Pct. of Team Goals|Assists. Then I added salary info for selected individuals. I left the labels off to save space:

Where to begin. First some stuff not in these charts.

• Our second highest goal scorer Harrison scored 7 of his 10 in the first half of the season.
• Wallace scored all of his 4 by Game 13. Yes, our 4th highest goal scorer was goalless over the last 21 games.

Now let’s compare:

• With 5, 4 and 3 goals our 3rd, 4th and 5th best goal scorers compare mostly to Chicago and the Red Bulls. With everyone else there is a clear gap.
• With 10 goals our second best goal scorer is even with Portland and behind everyone else.
• NYCFC is the only team besides Chicago in this group without a double digit assist generator, though 9 and 9 from Villa and Maxi compare favorably to most teams’ top 2.
• Remember that on 2 metrics Chicago is one of the few teams NYCFC compares favorably with and they are eliminated.

To make it clearer, the next tables show (1) the ranking of the same teams by how many goals their 3-5 top scorers made, then (2) the ranking of the same teams by how many goals their 2-5 top scorers made. NYC comes in next-to-last and dead-last respectively. The last column in each chart is what percentage of each team’s goals that group generated:

Again, I love the guys who do the work that don’t make the scoring stats, but somebody does have to score the freaking goals. And NYCFC doesn’t have those guys beyond Villa.
Let’s look at previous editions of NYCFC. This is depressing.

• Our total goals this year are down by 6 from 2016. The difference between a half season of Lampard and his DP replacement is a loss of 7.
• I included Pirlo in 2016 just to show he is our only double digit assist maker in 3 years.
• 2017 McNamara is 2015 Ballouchy.
• 2017 Moralez is 2015 McNamara with more assists. Significantly more assists, but still. Both were the 3rd highest goal scorer with 5 goals. Maxi makes 10 times what TMac makes in 2017.
• With 3 goals, McNamara should not be in the 2017 top 5, but that’s not his fault. The problem is NYCFC doesn’t actually have 5 better goal scorers than him. Plus, he only played 53% of the team’s minutes. How does NYC not have 5 higher goal scorers than a guy who played barely more than half the time? Or 4 goal scorers better than that PLUS a guy who was goalless over 21 straight games?
• Shelton 2016 was a fluke or he regressed horribly. Take your pick. Or a combo pack.
• Who did Reyna and Vieira think would replace Lampard’s goals in 2017? Harrison? Moralez? Remember how much the team improved the second half of 2016 after Frank and Jack showed up? First half of 2016 27 goals. Second half 35. NYCFC needed that production.
• Jack played 21 games in 2016 and had 4 goals and 7 assists. The latter let Shelton edge him slightly which is why he’s not on the list. Jack played 21 games. Projected to 34 games you get 6.5 goals and 11.3 assists. He outperformed those projections on goals and under on assists. I can live with that type of development. He also came nowhere near to being a goal replacement for Lampard and it was crazy to think he would be. But if he was not supposed to do it, then who?
• Project Frank’s stats to 34 games and you get 21.5 goals and 5.4 assists. Project to the 29 games Maxi played and it comes to 18.3 and 4.6. Instead NYCFC got Maxi with 5 and 9.
• Maxi did not have an off year. Here are his stats from whoscored. I don’t know why the 2017 numbers differ from MLS but this is what we have:

• Maxi 2017 is exactly Maxi every other year. Actually better than some. There’s no reason to expect a jump up next year.
• Again. Maxi does lots of great things that don’t get him a goal or an assist, but he cannot be our 3rd highest goal scorer and 3rd highest paid player.
• Can Jack improve, so he gets 7 goals in both halves of the season, assuming he stays? Maybe. I can’t count on it.
• Maxi was a disastrous DP signing. Maybe he could have worked if NYCFC didn’t already have a DP who scored 1 goal in his only full season of contributions to us and was about to become fully useless. But a DP like Maxi is a luxury at best if you are already stacked with goal producers. As NYC does not.Maxi gives us half of what Vazquez creates for 3 times the price and a DP slot. Meram, Higuain, Villalba, Asad, Royer, Blanco all created more goals for less. Hell, Roldan is competitive at about 6% of the salary and no DP slot.
• Maxi can be a great contributing player on a team without MLS salary limits. Or maybe he can be like Bradley, a DP on a team with 2 DP scorers and a TAM who also produces. I don’t know what the hell he is doing here at this cost with this roster.

What does NYCFC do now?

• We’re not cutting Maxi. On top of what I wrote a few days ago about how it will hurt the team’s credibility, I have no reason to think the club is willing to eat $2 million.
• Our Pirlo replacement has to be a goal producer. I have no interest right now in a defensive DP, or some guy who is great at starting a buildup, or goes box to box but doesn’t score, or anything like that. This is even more true because Villa turns 36 next month and we have no idea when he will start to fade. I think one more year of excellence is likely, but far from a given. If he does fade even a shade next year and NYCFC does not get a true goal scorer, the team is toast.
• Do something with TAM. Do we even have a TAM player? After the DPs the highest paid player on our 2017 list is Mix at $770k and he doesn’t count. The next highest is Chanot at $383k. Where is our Vazquez for $700k? What are we doing with it? Why are buying down nobody?
• Maybe try playing Lewis?
• The only reason I wouldn’t can Reyna is the hope we sign his kid in the next 12 months.