I watch a lot of MLS soccer. I watched about 90% of the games this year. For the life of me I do not remember one team looking like they were coasting into the playoffs. The only playoff teams that had uneven to poor form going in were RSL and VCW. Does anyone have an observation they would share that they think showed a team coasting in the regular season?
I think this year was very competitive compared to years past. I am not down on the current format like some may be, but I do think it could be improved. Using the word "coast" was a bit strong. But I think we need every game to feel a little bit more like it is a playoff game to really get the quality of the league to rise as a whole. One way to do that is to put that emphasis on finishing as high as possible during the regular season. I can tell you with pretty good certainty that Kinnear doesn't see it as a high priority to earn 1st in the conference as opposed to 3rd. It would probably just feel like a bonus to him. The more we can reward a high finish during the regular season, the more we will see the best out of teams game-in and game-out. It's a healthy pressure to improve the product overall.
I, and maybe I'm alone, find the regular season to be quite meaningful. I don't find it an issue. But for arguments sake I'll accept the premise and ask: Would it not be better to find other ways to make the regular season more meaningful than to create enhance home field advantage for higher seeds in order to rig the playoff results? Again, I guess I'm out of step with you guys, but I find the two-legged cup tie with aggregate scoring to be wonderfully exciting through every minute. Tomorrow will be fantaboulous because of the tension and pressure that mounts over 180 minutes of soccer. So much can happen in that time.
I too enjoy the 2 game series. Sometimes the lower seed prevails. Oh well. Just make sure that the schedule doesn't overly burden some teams over others. I would prefer 8 teams in the playoffs, but I'm not holding my breath on that happening. The potential downside might be lesser starting XI's for teams in the USOC and CCL. I can't speak for other teams, but Sigi would often shuffle his lineup for a MLS game to have starting players available for an upcoming USOC or CCL match.
Im surprised a format hasnt been created that gives the supporters shield winner a double chance or the top 2 teams from both conferences. I know its different but here in Australia 6 teams make the playoffs, the top 2 teams play a 2 leg series and the winner hosts the final, the loser waits to see who progresses from the 3 v 6 and 4 v 5 matchups...this system rewards the highest placed teams whilst still giving the lower placed teams a chance to go all the way if they are good enough. Of course i have absolutely no idea how such a system can be integrated in mls but i cant say im a fan of the Earthquakes blitzing the league and the only reward they get is hosting the 2nd leg of a knockout matchup...under the Australian format San Jose would be rewarded with a 2nd chance for being the best team in the regular season.
I think that I've been fairly consistent in downplaying the results and winners and losers. It's a part of the data set, but not the determinant in it's justification. To paraphrase a popular quote, "it's about the structure stupid." I'm not calling you stupid, that's just how that quote works. Let's not worry about an analytical debate on what setup determines absolutely who the better team is, bc that's subjective and you can take that argument absolutely anywhere. I mean why even play the games then? Just because a team scored more points doesn't mean that they're better. Just because that guy kicked the ball into the net doesn't mean he can play soccer. Just because that guy was born, doesn't mean he deserves to live. Where does that end? We have games, we have rules and that's all that matters. The question is what set of rules most adequately represents the events of the season and rewards a team's performance. So let's stick to objective facts. The facts are that sports are performance based. You can have a team full of superstars and skill and lose and a team full of journeymen and win. Maybe the breaks all go to one team. Maybe a team has a season full of injury. But unlike so many professions out there, it's performance that matters. That's why I love sports. That's why I love athletes. That's why I loved competing when I played and why I still participate in athletics whenever possible today. So ultimately it doesn't matter why a particular team didn't finish with as many points, the objective fact is that their performance over the course of a season did not afford them an adequate number of points to be seeded high and thus do not deserve to be rewarded for it in the playoffs. It's about objective fairness. If you performed from day one, if you found a way to stay on top all season, you deserve to be rewarded for it. By your argument, why even set a limit of teams in the playoffs at all? The regular season doesn't identify better teams, so maybe those teams that missed the playoffs are better. Just stop. Reward performance, that's all. Simple. Objective. There's no argument about who performed better, or earned more points. They're numbers and numbers don't lie. You know what they would have preferred even more,... home field advantage. Despite the duress of needing favor from the league, more players and coaches have criticized the setup than supported it. This is a fact. No amount of mitigation can change that. Once again, let's use some common sense. You're trying to turn objective concrete statistical reality on it's head. Bottom line it's been tried and true that home field advantage is real. We have almost a century of data across many sports to prove this. Teams win at a higher percentage when they're at home. So there is no possible way that a home and home series that is aggregately scored can be as much of a benefit as a true home advantage. You can ask any statistician to calculate the probability of the two systems and they'll pretty much tell you that it's a significant difference. You can try to say that 40 trials is a small sample, but statistically speaking it's a sufficient number to get a baseline from. You don't need much more than that to see a trend, especially if it's supported by the probability inherent in it's very structure. You don't need to flip a coin 100 times to realize that the odds are around 50 percent. And, let me add something. When you casually dismiss the importance of a statistic like say, regular season records and then suddenly decide that you want to base part of your argument on statistics which also don't support your argument,... you lose a bit of credibility in my book. First part: Exactly the same home field advantage that every other league in American sports gives. Why is this suddenly taboo? Second part: Yes and this is why games are played. Noone is suggesting having rules that say that no matter the score, the higher team wins the series. What we're suggesting is that lower seed be required to overcome their deficient performance in the regular season by way of reasonable handicapping them based off of their lack of performance. See how many times the word performance comes up in my statement. This is about performance. If you don't perform in the regular season there is nothing unreasonable about being punished for it and vice-versa if you perform well. Then you're more of a lost cause than I originally gave you credit for. Scheduling often takes a backseat to other considerations. But show me an instance in any of the other four sports' histories where they gave home advantage to the lower seed and said all is well and I'll whole-heartedly buy into your point. You can't because only a group of idiots think that it's all the same to them. Because if it didn't matter to them then the situation that we saw in the NY/DC series would be much more common. But you will never see this in other league's nor will you ever see a league eliminate home advantage for it's own sake. Any mitigation to scheduling has more to do with travel, tv and weather than anything else. I'll tell you what, imagine what would happen if someone suggested that MLB's playoffs series' be evenly divided between higher and lower seeds and scored on aggregate. I'm pretty sure that fans of teams that finished better would lose their shit. And they should. Any reasonable fan that isn't looking for reasons to support MLS' stubbornly ridiculous system would. This is easily the worst point you've presented so far and I'll explain why. First off, now you're back to liking statistics again, but you use ones with the most insignificant difference. The difference between the home advantage in soccer and basketball is statistically negligible (tenths of a percent here). The difference is almost as insignificant with American Football. The difference, however, between basketball vs baseball and hockey is far more significant than the difference between any of the first three sports. This, however, doesn't seem to stop the NBA, MLB, and NHL, from using almost identical postseason series setups. Give or take a few round due to constraints in available time (MLB has a very long regular season). If anything the NBA, the sport that is statistically equal to soccer in terms of home field advantage, utilizes the home field advantage far more than MLB which has a shorter playoffs and rotates the World Series based on the All-Star game. In any event, I fail to see how the nature of the sport somehow makes the basic premise of rewarding regular season performance any less valid. Did the higher seeds play more home games during the regular season that I'm not aware of? That's the point of calling home advantage a reward rather than a gift. It's interesting that you note the concept of deserving advancement but apply this as only being important in the post-season. This is the biggest reason that home advantage is important. Because the regular season is 34 games long. It should not be something that is easily dismissed or ignored. Yet the first time that you introduce the concept of "deserving" in your argument, is when you talk about the post-season. As if, somehow during the regular season they were playing a different sport. I don't know. Maybe they were playing golf and I just didn't notice. Here is the way that I see things. If you cannot perform adequately to acquire more points across 34 games you deserve to be disadvantaged, significantly to the opposition above you. It doesn't matter how close it was, this is a results-based business. If, however you, as a lower seeded team, manage to overcome the handicaps, (as the Houston Rockets did in a sport with a statistically equal home advantage) then that lower seed has earned the right to move on. They will have deservedly overcome the deficiencies that they demonstrated over the regular season. This is how you tie the two seasons together. Otherwise why even consider them the same seasons? I think that alot of the defense of this system comes from people who just enjoy the setup. And that's fine. Alot of people like it's unpredictable nature. First off, I'll just say my thoughts on playoffs. I understand that there are people who enjoy the home and home. You like the excitement, it's more unpredictable. Well alot of people get excited watching people jump from planes without parachutes, but it doesn't mean that I'd recommend it. One thing that I think people are too quick to assume is that ppl who don't like the playoffs will only be happy if high seeds win. That's not the case. I agree with Don Juego that last season was close to ideal, not bc the Galaxy won, but bc they had a distinguishable advantage in almost every round. It still wasn't ideal mind you. And then MLS cements the final only to take a step back significantly in the Conference finals. That's very frustrating. I don't care if the low seed wins every season for the next 100 years so long as they have to crawl past the obstacles that their deficient regular season earned them every time. E2A: I just re-read what I wrote and I probably was a bit more snarky than I meant to be. It's just a habit that I tend to get into on BS bc BS makes you that way after awhile. I actually appreciate what you wrote and the time you took to write it. So I apologize. I like to think that I'm nicer in real life than I sometime am in print.
[quote="SteveK, post: 26794847, member: 58561" but i cant say im a fan of the Earthquakes blitzing the league and the only reward they get is hosting the 2nd leg of a knockout matchup...under the Australian format San Jose would be rewarded with a 2nd chance for being the best team in the regular season.[/quote] Currently they get a second advantage. Their first round opponent has just played an extra game and is on short rest. Others may disagree but I think this is meaningful. Watching Houston's legs go out from beneath them in LSP you could see the impact it had.
I'm sorry, but if you don't think Sporting KC and San Jose had a massive advantage in their first playoff series you have an agenda. The Dynamo were so gassed by the third game in 7 days that they could hardly even play in KC. The disadvantage Sporting and San Jose had were that the Dynamo are a tough matchup for KC (1 win and 2 ties against them on the regular season, beat them at KC in the playoffs last season) and for San Jose that LA was the best team over 75% of the season this year. Honestly, the fact that LA and Houston overcame that disadvantage just shows how they were actually stronger teams. This is like the quote from Klinnsman after some people said Germany were lucky against the Americans in the 2002 world cup and he responded that they weren't lucky at all, but that the Americans were not mentally strong enough to win. He was right...you have to be able to win when it counts and betting against LA or Houston in those series would have been foolish because they were the better teams.
Reference UNAK's most recent post: (I'm on iPad, doing the quoting thing is too much work for me this morning) I just looked up MLB's playoff structure: 2-3-2. So no home field advantage unless the series goes to seven games. Over five games the lower seed has home field advantage. NBA uses 2-2-1-1-1. GIves higher seed HFA over 5 & 7 games. NHL uses the same as NBA. So no home field advantage unless the teams are tied at the end in games won. ------ If the #1 seeds had won the conference semi-finals do you think this thread would exist? Would the pundits be criticising the playoff structure? It can only be a guess but my guess is no. ------ I'm pretty sure I did not get my point across to you succesfully on SS winner. Your response on that is not relevent to my point. If your arguing for single table champion (reward regular season success) I've no beef with that. I view the SS winner as the regular season champion and consider it a major trophy. If the league wants to say that henceforth the SS winner is THE champion and the MLS Cup is just a cup competition -- I'm fine with that as well. I don't think my statement go where you took them. I must not have stated them well. ------ I have not seen any reasonable assessment of what all the players and coaches prefer. It really wasn't the point. The point was that there is a home field advantage to the second leg host. It may be slight. It might even be not enough in some eyes. But the argument was by some that there was no HFA advantage at all. It is that to which I disagree. I'm simply saying that there exists some HFA in the current format to the higher seed. ------- For me what the other sports due supports my view that those sports suffer HFA in the playoffs only to the degree that they must. Some has to get it, but it is mitigated, so the higher seed gets it. ------- I'm unable to follow your references to statistics not supporting my view. ------- I only remember references that soccer has the strongest HFA in sport. If the data says otherwise than I stand corrected. I'm still ok with lower seeds winning. I'm still OK with a small HFA for higher seeds. #1 seeds get an additional advantage of facing a wildcard team that is on short rest.
I completely agree with you here. The Dynamo have really had to overcome a lot to get where they are. But looking at the other side of the coin, I'd feel a little cheated. If I'm a SKC fan, I feel a little hard done when my team did so well in the 34 game regular season and we are basically out after 1 poor game at BBVA. The advantage for the top seed either needs to be bigger in the playoffs, or we need to shorten the regular season and make the playoffs a little longer.
OK, here's a format guaranteed to please everyone ... or, at least, me and maybe Unak78. Using a desire to create two or three discrete events with an advantage given to a higher seed, I think I may have found a decent balance. A home&away series with the First to Four rule. (a win and a tie and either seed goes through) HOWEVAH!!!! if the series is tied on points (either 2 draws or a win each), the third game will be played only if the lower seed has a better two game goal aggregate. So, something like this : 1) A win and a tie - i.e., 4 points from 2 matches - gets you through the next round, regardless of the seeding. 2) Should teams be tied at 3 or 2 points after two matches, the high seed will advance with the tied or superior aggregate goal score. (in this case, it's a quasi Mexican Format) But, if the lower seed has the better goal aggregate, there are two additional scenarios : Plan A) The third game is played at a higher seed (which means the series opens at a lower seed) with the OT and the PK's, if necessary. Plan B) An aggregate goal leader hosts the third game (high seed can chose whether to play the opener at home or on the road), also with the OT and PK's, if necessary.
Let's look at the key difference here. The higher seed can win the series simply by winning only their home games in every single instance. The lower seed cannot win a series without winning at the home of the higher seed. That's a constant no matter what order you place the games. The only way a lower seed can avoid the deciding game at the court/field of the higher seed is to win at the home of the higher seed in one of the previous games. This is pretty simple. The home advantage affects the entire series, whether you want to believe it or not. Only in MLS is the lower seed not required to win at the home of the higher seed. It's been written in several articles. Coaches have been quoted. You have the article by Eskandarian. Let's stick to objective arguments please. You have absolutely no way of proving this. This is just your interpretation. The fact of the matter is that they do use home field advantage. The argument that you use basically proves nothing. Doubling games before travel limits the amount of travel and time between the games, however the league also ensures that games will be played in both venues for revenue purposes. It makes economic and logistic sense . It really doesn't do anything to mitigate home field advantage since the lower seed still, and always will, have to win at the home of the higher seed. This argument is complete opinion. It's the fact that you use the amount of single game HFA as an argument against giving a true HFA in soccer, when that argument would also preclude basketball from using a home field advantage as well. Yet the NBA doesn't use this as an excuse to differentiate from hockey or baseball. Instead they seed their entire playoffs based on home field. Nor, do they go away from seeding in the final like baseball does. It's 7 tenths of a percent difference between soccer and basketball. Rugby is slightly higher. I looked it up. That's statistically a non-existent difference.
I just can't agree. KC weren't out after 1 game in Houston. KC were out when at home they put on a highlight show of bad finishing against a completely gassed Dynamo team that performed at a pub team level. That KC didn't win that game 3 or 4 to nothing is bewildering.
I hate the home and home series. The first game is just the first half of a 180 minute game it decides nothing. The second game is boring if the first game ended in a rout. The excuse MLS gave for introducing the home and home was so every playoff team got a home game,well vancouver did not get one.La and houston certainly did not deserve a home game especially in the conference finals.What is the point of the regular season if you are not going to give true home field advantage a one game winner take all?
I don't like the first-round round-robin formats. To me, the regular season is the round-robin portion of the year that precedes the knockout rounds of the post season. I also don't like the proposals that send the two games to a potential full third game. My preference is the first to 4 points format, with a 30 minute tiebreaker and PK's to decide the series if the two teams are tied at 3 points or 2 points, rather than a full third game. I believe an earlier poster showed that this type of format would have resulted in more overtime games since 2003, which means more top-seeded teams would have enjoyed more minutes of HFA.
Well, this system is typical Australian (I love it, by the way, but it is strange outside down there), and used in many leagues (NRL, AFL) even if not in the same way. With some changes, here is what a "Aussie" MLS Playoff would look like: Play-In: E5 @ E4; W5 @W4; [Winners go to Wild Card] Wild Card: EPI @ E3; WPI @ W3; [Winners go to Conference Semifinal] Small Final: E2 @ E1; W2 @ W1; [Winners go to Conference Final; Losers go to Conference Semifinal] Conference Semifinal: EWC @ E Loser SF; EWC @ W Loser SF; Conference Final: ESf @ E Winner SF; WSf @ W Winner SF. MLS CUP: EGF @ WGF
I knew someone would argue this. It's a fair point. Again, I like the current system, but I think improvements can be made. Why have 34 games in the regular season, just to have the best team in that format lose in "2" games (one of which they won)?
That's right. That's why the NHL, the NBA and the MLB have truly discrete events. A win is a win, regardless of whether it's a blow-out or a squeaker. An MLS playoff series is basically one long 180 match split in two - or four, if you will - halves.
Someone is bound to make noise again, as soon as the better team(s) in regular season are booted out in a 2-game series, if they won 1 game by a blow-out (which reflect their superiority in regular season), yet lost the other by a squeaker (which are often attributed to "bad luck" for the top team(s)). Will people be more receptive if the situation is the other way round? I.e. the team with better regular season record is able to advance with a squeaker win and blow-out loss. If that's the case, the "aggregate points" system (rather than "aggregate goals") as proposed by someone previously may well work...
Meanwhile, in Mexico...all four teams that finished their quarterfinal series at home won. Carry on...
Mexico should get rid of the aggregate tiebreaker since that favor the higher seed. Mexican fans want to get rid of it so it might happen one day.