I don't get to see many Whizz games, but I wonder how much of their current decline may be due to the age of Preki. At 40 (or whatever) the early part of the season would be easy, but as the games start adding up, the legs start to feel it. And I'm not talking about pure stats (he's scored xx in the last yy games). I'm talking about his overall impact on a game.
I had this exact same thought the other week. Maybe his age is finally catching up to him. Geez, I remember how drained I felt three quarters of the way into my senior season. Or maybe he's just bored.
Did he really have to remind me? I love this guy. I guess I'm more of a stat geek than I thought. As far as the Wizards go, I personally think Preki's still playing pretty well. He takes some good long range shots and still sets up teammates. But early in the year he had a couple of long range bombs go in, and now they aren't, and with the recent injuries to Wolff and Simuntenkov (sic), he hasn't had the frontrunners to play off like he probably needs. Now that they're back they'll be more dangerous I would think. At least that's one point of view.
Somewhat interesting stuff about momentum. I will note, however, that this same topic was touched on in the American Professional Soccer Analyst several years ago, coming to basically the same conclusion Hirdt does. It's important, though, to make a distinction between saying that a team is peaking in the last part of the season and saying that an otherwise mediocre team is more likely to win its next game simply because it won the last couple of games. The difficulty is being able to see the difference.