Kind of like our aspirations for expansion, huh? Warning: This is a long post where I pretend to know what I'm talking about. All-in-all, a successful regular season. Maybe if we'd not given away draws at home to bottom feeders like Tulsa and Seattle, the no. 1 seed would have been ours. Then who knows? Yeah, I'm just deluding myself. As good as the season was, there was the same glaring weakness. Finishing. Sure, Cam had 17 goals, but also consider: Cam lead the west in shots Bijev was 2nd The club was 4th Conversion rate? 11th Not only is that a big drop off from shots taken to conversion rate, but it also indicates that we may be too heavily reliant on two players to generate the scoring. Are we predictable? Look at the list of players in the west that had the 50 most shots. Cam and Vilyan are 1 and 2. No other Bear is listed. Not one. What about the other top-scoring teams? Phoenix had five, with three of those in the top six. Galaxy II had only two, none in the top 25, suggesting their attack was pretty well spread because I doubt they had a lot of call-ups to the senior squad. OC had three, each in the top 20. T2 had two, the highest tied for 10th. Reno had four, the highest also tied for 10th. Matajasic was 3rd on the team in shots with 31, just outside the top 50, his shots on target were 21, roughly 67%. Cam and Bijev, meanwhile, had only 32% and 50% of their shots on target, respectively. Cam's conversion rate is a somewhat respectable 18.5%, but that pales in comparison to the other top scorers in the league who convert over 25% of their attempts. So, our leading scorers are volume shot takers, and not particularly strong finishers. There you have it, the numbers behind what we all knew anyway. Assists? Hah! There's Cam sitting at 10th with 6, Bijev and Jure just behind at five. Villyan, love 'ya buddy, but pass a little more. There's nothing wrong with racking up the assists instead of the shots. I don't know what others thought, be we were only somewhat effective attacking from the wings and over the top, but down the gut of the defense amounted to our wingers driving forward down the sideline and then cutting in. Jure came the closest to putting pressure on central defense but he always played wing or forward and tended to attack from the outer third. He was also only a part-time starter. So, our ability to spread the ball from the top of the box to runners on either side was limited. Still, it was fairly attractive soccer. Maybe not Preki-form, but certainly better than Buckle-ball. I guess that's what you get when playing an empty bucket, which takes us to the defense. Fewest goals allowed in the West. Nice! Sure, Cohen had highlight-reel saves, but there were times when he didn't have to do much - the benefit of holding both central mids back. As long as we could prevent the counter, we were stout defensively. However, Hall (who otherwise I really like), Moffat/Villareal (when they played), and Hord are pretty slow even for division two soccer. We had an obvious weakness to exploit. Hord was pretty effective going forward and defending when mobility wasn't required, but the stuff in between was troublesome. Except for Hord, I really like our backline. Hopefully, we can keep it intact. On to set pieces. I guess our corner kicks put balls in pretty good places, but we don't have a big, physical presence to draw the defense's attention. No one really can threaten goal on a free kick outside of Klimenta, who was usually deployed in the box. PK's were a joke and there must be someone better than Hall. Who to keep for next season? Well, I certainly like more players than we had at the end of last year. Keepers: Cohen, Taintor, Klimenta, Gomez, Hall, Matjasic, Iwasa (give him credit for leading the team in goals and assists). Keep maybe for depth: Aleman, Hord and Rodriguez (youngster still has an upside). I don't mind rounding out the roster with academy kids - that's an investment that may pay off in a year or two. There you have it from Mr. Know-it-all. How do you all feel about the season? Who do I want back next season? Well, a lot more guys than last year.
Our defensive Achilles' heel all season was the space between RCB and RB. It seemed like half the goals we conceded at home came from opponents playing the ball into that space. Maybe that's Hord not being fast enough to get back. I'd like to see us sign a good CB so Emrah can play on the flank where he's most effective. He's a better defender than Hord and his skill on the ball is wasted at CB. Size at center back would be nice too. We're not playing undersized CBs as we did in past seasons, but we still don't have the big man who can draw defenders on set pieces. All our starter-quality CBs right now are the height of a team's second-tallest CB. (This may change if Carlos Rodriguez improves his positioning in the offseason.) In the playoff loss, what struck me is that half the game seemed to be played in the SPR box, yet we weren't getting any really good looks at goal. There were a few instances of players trying to be too cute and not pulling the trigger. Mostly SPR was able to pack the box because we didn't have a really dangerous player at the top of the box. Even when we played 4-2-3-1 this season, the player in the #10 role tended to drift out to the wings or (when it was Iwasa) play too high up the field.
I'm never good at this kind of player analysis, so I will just say that, for me, this year's team was more fun to watch than last year's team. I can't think of a time when I thought, "they took the night off." I remember thinking that more than a handful of times with the 2017 crew. It will be interesting to see what Simon Elliott puts together with a full off-season to evaluate and recruit.