The 2013 Table - Magic Numbers, Tragic Numbers & Other Fishy Figures [R]

Well, the thread isn't closed, so we can still pick up on any loose ends. Like the bit I've got left on parity.

 

I put together a league table minus all the results from TFC, DCU and CHV. It's quite interesting.

I'm going to post something about in the next 36 hours.

I'm posting this to obligate me to keep that schedule.

 

I had one last question that I wanted to look at before this thread drew to its practical end. That was about parity. Everyone was talking about the tremendous parity we had in the league this year. That’s why the season had such an exciting finish in which all the games still mattered in the final weeks. Except all that talk about league parity wasn't entirely true.

I've been tracking parity the same way for years with a very simple approach. Look at PPG totals at the end of the season, and determine how much variation there is among all the MLS teams. To do that, you can look at the PPG standard deviation numbers. The bigger the standard deviation, the greater variation among PPG totals. The smaller the standard deviation, the smaller the variation among PPG totals. Larger standard deviations mean less parity, smaller standard deviations mean more parity.

As discussed off and on in previous versions of this thread, historically, parity tended to decrease with expansion, and increase with contraction. The league has expanded in recent years, and that has probably played a role in creating greater disparity. Increased spending by some teams has probably contributed to that as well.

So what happened in 2013? Two contradictory things happened. First, the same old trend of increasing disparity that we've seen for years continued. (Sure it ticked down a small amount, but the overall trend since the lobb ebb in 2004 is obvious.) Second, there has never been a year in which MLS exhibited greater parity. These contradictory statements are both true because the second one comes with a big asterisk: parity existed only among 16 teams.

I predicted in the first post of this thread that we'd see tables with bimodal distributions. That means a bunch of teams clustered toward the top, a bunch of teams clustered toward the bottom, and not too many teams in the middle. I could even explain that kind of distribution: some teams had brains, bucks, or both. Other teams didn't. This was becoming a league of haves and have-nots. That's what we'd seen developing in previous years, and I thought that would happen again. But it didn’t.

Instead we had 16 teams that were broadly competitive, and then three teams at the very bottom: CHV, DCU, and TFC. That's not a bimodal distribution. It's more like 16 teams and 3 outliers.

Most of the discussion about parity had to do with playoff contending teams. Those teams did indeed exhibit tremendous parity in 2013. I've posted charts like this before. It shows the PPG standard deviation since 1996 for established MLS teams. (Long story short: first year expansion teams usually suck, and create momentary blips in this graph, which obscure the actual trends. Better just to look at established teams, 1996 excepted.)

In this version I've removed CHV, DCU and TFC from the 2013 numbers. If you look only at the 16 playoff contending teams, then there's never been greater parity in MLS.



But what happens if you put CHV, DCU, and TFC back in the mix? In that case, the trend toward increasing disparity reappears. More than half of the 19 team PPG variation comes from the 3 teams at the bottom. Those three teams were wildly out of sync with the rest of the league. That's interesting and disconcerting in multiple ways (particularly if your team was at the very bottom).



I think there are valid arguments for considering the three bottom dwellers as outliers and overlooking them. On the other hand, this isn’t a 16 team league. You can’t entirely dismiss them. If you want to make an honest argument about league parity among the top 16, then you have to acknowledge the big asterisk.

That big asterisk is also potentially consequential from a competition point of view. MLS in 2013 did not play a balanced schedule. In fact, it was completely out of balance even within conferences. Some teams played certain conference teams more times than other teams in the same conference. From a competitive point of view, the unbalanced schedule was madness. We all knew this.

It was definitely part of the chatter surrounding NYR winning the Supporters Shield. They played in the Eastern Conference along with DCU and TFC. Given their easier schedule, should that title have an asterisk on it? After all, NYR played the cellar dwellers 7 times while POR and RSL played them only 5.

What would happen, I wondered, if I removed CHV, DCU, and TFC from both the table and the results. In other words, if I just looked at the results between the 16 competitive teams, what would the table look like? It would look like this:



First, note that if you take out CHV, DCU, and TFC, the remaining teams end up playing between 27 and 29 games. So you have to look at the PPG-16 column for the ranking. I didn't even give PT totals here, because in this table those numbers are actually useless. Next to PPG-16 is PPG-19. That's what they actually got in the real 19-team table this season. (Their original 19-team rank is toward the left.) Next to that is the difference between PPG-19 and PPG-16. I've also pulled those numbers out into a separately ranked table.



I'll be honest. As a DCU supporter, I was hoping NYR's Supporters Shield merited an asterisk. But -- and this hurts to write -- it doesn't. They deserved it. (They also deserve to go to Hell.) NYR still comes out atop the 16 team table. In fact, I think you could argue the top 5 don’t change in any meaningful way. The top two are exactly the same, and the next three are tied at 1.52 PPG, their order shuffling only on tie-breakers. Actually, the whole table remains remarkably consistent. Teams move up and down a bit, but nothing major.

Except for two exceptions: one odd, and one major.

MTL, surprisingly, moves up quite a lot: 11th overall in the 19 team table, 6th here. MTL is the only team whose PPG numbers improved with the results from CHV, DCU, and TFC removed. That's the odd exception: MTL did worse against CHV, DCU, and TFC than they did against the rest of MLS.

The major exception is SEA, which drops from 6th all the way down to 13th. I could spin this in two ways. First, SEA cleaned up against the bottom dwellers. SEA played the bottom three 5 times, and they managed a clean sweep of 15 PTS in those games. No other team did that. That’s good, and it’s something other better teams failed to do. Top teams should clean up against bottom dwellers. (Right?)

Second, when facing the elite teams in MLS, SEA was never truly competitive. At times SEA seemed like a top team, but they never actually were a top team. Against the top 16, SEA was a bottom of the table team. SEA sometimes looked like an elite MLS team, but that appearance was actually something of an illusion, and to the extent that it became a hyped talking point, it was basically a fraud. Against real competition, SEA wasn’t even in the top half of the table.

(If any team has a legitimate gripe about all this, it’s SJE. Their position doesn’t change that much between the 16 and 19-team tables. But they’re the team that SEA bumped out of the playoffs by beating up on CHV, DCU and TFC. Between SJE and SEA, SJE was the far, far better team against elite competition. If regular season performance is any guide, SJE probably would have been the stronger playoff team. Honestly, after mulling these numbers, I’m basically convinced that SEA does not deserve to be in the playoffs.)

The sense of illusion surrounding SEA leads to one final point on this: on the 16 team table, the teams that benefited the most from playing CHV, DCU, and TFC weren’t at the top of the table, but rather at the bottom. The top of the table teams did well against everyone. (And if they failed to rout the bottom three, it might have been because they slacked off against inferior competition. That would not surprise me at all. If that’s true, credit Sigi for knowing how important it was for his team to grab every low-lying point they could.)

If you look at the bottom teams on the 16-team table, they’re the ones that profited the most from playing the true cellar dwellers. CLB, PHI, and SEA couldn’t beat the top teams, but they sure as hell laid waste to the bottom three.

First, I think this underlines the sense that CHV, DCU, and TFC were outliers. Those three teams weren’t just a bit worse than the others. The worst teams in the 16 team table were destroying them. Teams 17-19 were generally outclassed by teams 13-16.

Second, SEA, FCD, and CLB were much worse off than they appeared. The stark case here is CLB, because no team owed more to the three bottom dwellers than CLB. If you take away all their results against CHV, DCU, and TFC, then CLB really doesn't look like a competitive team any longer. In the 16 team table, NYR has 1.67 PPG while CLB has 0.89 PPG. CLB's PPG total was a little better than half of NYR's. That's nowhere near competitive. Indeed, that's starting to look more like the bottom three than the top 16. A similar (but less severe) point could be made about PHI. (CLB, by the way, remains burnt toast.)

Finally, just for fun, here’s what the cellar dweller table looks like.



As you can see, CHV is the undisputed king of the crappy teams. TFC comes out right in the middle, and DCU ... oh, for fcuk's sake! Is that for real? DCU actually did worse against CHV and TFC than they did overall in the 19-team league? I take it back. This table is no fun at all. This table sucks.

That’s more than I intended to write, and all I’ve got for now. So there you go.

 

One little addendum to the above ...

There were teams that absolutely blew it this year by under-performing against the bottom three. MTL is obvious. FCD absolutely should have done better too. Not so sure about NER. SEA and CLB weren't good teams. Not by a long shot. They still swept or almost swept CHV, DCU, and TFC. (And I do think Sigi deserves credit there.) Yeah, bad teams get wins from time to time. But if lousy teams can excel against even worse teams, then good teams should dispatch the bottom dwellers with ease. LAG in particular looks to me like a team with absolutely no excuse. To me, they forfeited the Shield contention by under-performing against bad teams.

I'm not so sure they'd like me saying that all their talk about parity this year was something of a fraud because there were three teams that were so bad they effectively didn't belong in the league at all.

 

Shoot ... I checked everything twice too!

In any case, it just changes the decimals, not the overall picture.