General MLS Discussion
- Thread starter Shwafta
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Was close. Just a 1-0 win up a man for 35 minutes may be a good result for DC. It was a matchup of the best vs worst team in the standings.
Just checked the "Game Summary" on the league site for this one and the first 6 "actions" in the game were:
Easiest way to win a game is to wreck the calves of the opponents
Moving this from Chicago to General MLS:
This is kinda what got me thinking about the ppg comment from my earlier post - since so many lower teams have higher ppg, does that mean the bottom teams are better? or that the top teams are slipping a bit? I'd love to know if anyone has some sort of metrics that can help figure out if it's the former or the latter? How would you even figure that one out?
Doesn't sound to me like it should just be looking at xg / ga / gf.
This is kinda what got me thinking about the ppg comment from my earlier post - since so many lower teams have higher ppg, does that mean the bottom teams are better? or that the top teams are slipping a bit? I'd love to know if anyone has some sort of metrics that can help figure out if it's the former or the latter? How would you even figure that one out?
Doesn't sound to me like it should just be looking at xg / ga / gf.
Yeah, but is the parity caused by the better teams regressing or the worse teams progressing? I would have to think it depends on the season, so I'm just curious on this vs lastMLS parity..
i think it's a bit of both. aside from us, i don't think there are many teams in the league who are consistent year over year. most yoyo up and down the table. some stay near the top, some stay sorta near the bottom. even without relegation, those bottom teams do make an effort to get better each year. Teams like cinci and miami, who were wooden spoon contenders for a couple years, have improved a lot this year.
good teams lose players to europe and get a little worse. bad teams get players from europe or south america to improve. MLS whackadoodle craziness thrown in and you got yourself a fun league where almost anybody can beat anybody on any given day.
Yeah, I get that - but I want real hard data, not Shwaftas and Moogoos speculating, if that makes sense! hah. (I'm not statistics-y enough to know how to check something like that...)
First you need to find out if the best and/or worst teams actually have are less great or terrible this year. To do that you need to pick a cut off - top and bottom 10%, 25%, 33%? and compare across years, and go back at least 5 I think. To pick your cut off I would eyeball the data and try to pick were there tends to be a bit of a gap every year, but there might not be such a thing. If not, take your pick, knowing that the answers could be different depending on the cutoff.
M moogoo is right that the teams in these sets will change a lot, but that does not bother me given what you are trying to measure.
Then if I were being really thorough I would compare (1) the best and worst single teams each year against each other across seasons, (2) last teams to qualify for best and worst status each year against each other across seasons, and (3) the average of the best and worst teams against each other across seasons.
Then you finally get to the fun part where you interpret. It is possible the worst teams are better mostly because they're better against the middle. But if the best are not as good also, it might mean parity is increasing overall.
I'm going to wait until the season ends, but I plan to do some comparisons of road records. Right now 6 teams have more road wins than losses, and 4 have the same number of wins and losses, including us. I think that's high. But I will wait for the full season to check in detail.
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I think we might need some weighting to make this at all meaningful. Points per game is fine on its own but it's not the whole story. Or expected goals for/against. Three points against the top team needs to be weighted higher than three points against the bottom team. And maybe moreso the lower down in the table you are. So if you're at the bottom of the table perhaps a draw against a top team would be worth as much or maybe more than if you're a top team and beat a team near the bottom. PPG or xG are useful, but they're not necessarily the whole story, or meaningful without context.
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