The 2015 Table: Magic Numbers, Tragic Numbers & Other Suspect Ciphers

Let us pause for a moment to remember this thread's fallen hero. I speak, of course, of Chivas USA. Or as we said in this thread's parlance, CHV. That storied team, which so often held weak at the bottom of the table, holding the entire league upon its stooped shoulders like a contemptible Atlas, is sadly no more. CHV brought us so much joy and so many jokes. But mostly it brought us great disappointment. Horrible, draining, unending disappointment until its end. That was CHV's true legacy.

It is that extraordinary legacy that I hope to emulate in this thread.

Which shouldn't be too hard seeing how I haven't written anything worthwhile since before The Great Crash of 2002. (But woe those posts of mine that were forever lost! Such marvels of eloquence and brilliance, they were.)

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Things that nobody reads.
Links that nobody clicks.

I know nobody reads this stuff. The old-timers already know the deal. The newbies stupidly think they know the deal. Nobody even gives a damn. Why bother? With anything. But here I go, once again, wasting valuable pixels (that we'll never get back!) to restate all the preliminaries.

• Previous editions: 2007, 2008 (apparently lost), 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014.

• Companion threads: DCU 2010, and DCU 2012.

• Parity related notes: "Yoshou’s Blind Squirrel Theory,” Parity, Player Selection & The DCU Front Office, (Dis)Parity and The 2013 MLS Season.

• Background on the Calculated and Actual Despair Numbers: 2010 incarnation, 2011 explanation, 2012 revision.

• Toast: The taxonomy of toast (which runs from untoasted bread to burnt toast) is rigorously scientific, and certainly not some back-of-an-envelope calculation based upon an anecdotal sense of the probable, improbable, and highly improbable. Nor is it purposefully designed to infuriate Crewligans. That is, however, an unintended, but quite welcome, attribute. Plus, you don't need promotion and relegation if you have toast. Indeed, toast is better than promotion and relegation because it's got toast. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill Peterson!

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ToastMania 2015 is sponsored by Quaker Oats, the official oats of MLS playoff failure.

And USOC failure as well.

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The Customary Disclaimers

I am never responsible for any mistakes in this thread.

Yes, of course, my spreadsheet is known to be glitchy. Sometimes there are goofs in the data. Something is always awry on the schedule. From time to time things get a little confused and screwy. Indeed, that happens all the time. But it's not my fault. It's @sitruc's fault.

He's always going on and on about Sacramento Republic FC. Oh, it's such a great team, and it's in a really cool, up and coming city. Everybody loves SRFC! On and on and on. Of course, he never stops talking about how SRFC should be in MLS, and it's terrible that they were passed over in the last round for Minnesota and Miami. Especially Miami. Even in threads where the topic just plainly doesn't belong, he's going off about the greatness of SRFC, and calling Sacramento the Portland of California. Indomitable this. Indomitable that. #Built4MLS! #SRFC4MLS! It never stops!

All that incessant fanboy chatter is enough to drive a man batty. And boy does it! It's all just too much for my already delicate soccer psyche, and it leaves me too frazzled to take any responsibility for the mistakes I make, let alone of sound enough mind to catch the spreadsheet glitches and data errors. It's a miracle I've got enough of my mental faculties left to start this thread. If only MLS would accede to the inevitable and name SRFC the next MLS expansion team, then maybe I could get a little peace and quiet around here and this thread wouldn't be so crappy. So if you see an error, please direct all your rage at @sitruc, and then kindly point out the mistake here in this thread. I’ll try to muster the intellectual wherewithal to correct it.

One thing's for sure: it's about time that guy took the plunge and changed his avatar.

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Full updates once a week, mini-updates as warranted.

Onto the tables, ridicule, cliches and nonsense. Not to mention some ridiculously cliched nonsense.

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Notes

This first post always sucks. (Are you disappointed yet?) No narrative has been set. There's nothing much to poke fun at. I'm not really in stride myself. Even worse, I'm not sure which posters I want to needle! (Well, except for @sitruc.) It's mainly just going through the big picture, and laying out the broad ways I'm gonna be wrong in the long run. So let's dispense with a few details, and then get onto that.

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I had plans for you, PHI! Big plans! And all you had to do was lose to CHI. I know that's tough. CHI is pretty bad. But you, PHI, are terrible. I was prepared to go all doom and gloom with you. It was gonna be great. I was gonna call your 2015 season a total waste. Then I was gonna rub it in by saying that though the important thing is that you tried, the only truly relevant thing is that you utterly failed. But then you went and won your USOC game and ruined everything. You damn jerks are still alive in the USOC! Good lord! Now all I've gotta say is this:

Do not ask for whom Powdered Toast Man toasts. He toasts for PHI.

How can a team guided by luminaries like Nick Sakiewicz, Chris Albright and Big Bird fail to make the MLS playoffs? It's inconceivable, I know, but it's true. PHI's playoff prospects no longer have any genuine practical reality. Both of PHI's despair numbers are over 2.00 PPG, meaning (barring some sort of extraordinary meltdown further up the table) they'd have to average above 2.00 PPG for the rest of the season just to sniff at a playoff spot. Even then there'd be no guarantees. Does that mean all hope is lost for PHI? Technically, no. Is all hope for PHI foolishly devoid of all reality? You bet.

A couple other teams, CHI and NYC, are pretty close to toast as well. Indeed, a case could be made that they are effectively toast already. The AD# reflects the actual performance of the current 6th place team. As such, it tends to be a little more variable than the CD# which reflects the overall PPG distribution of the table as a whole. That's why the further out we are the more importance I tend to put in the CD#. The specifics of the 6th place team might change from week to week, but the big picture is probably a bit steadier. Right now, the big picture CD# for CHI and NYC doesn't look good. So while I'm not saying those teams are doomed, I am suggesting exactly that in writing on the internet.

If that's true then the EC playoff picture could become pretty clear pretty quickly. PHI, CHI and NYC will be out of the picture, and DCU is a whisker away from effectively (but not technically) clinching. That leaves 6 teams vying for 5 spots. Not exactly a wide open playoff race.

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The picture in the WC is very different, which is a bit surprising because the WC really isn't that much less competitive than the EC.

Much has been made of the idea that the WC is the much stronger conference because, top to bottom, it features much stronger teams than the EC. Rattle off the best teams in MLS (especially on paper), and most of those probably will be WC teams. Look at the top of the EC, and you might wonder how the hell a so obviously unconvincing team as DCU is doing it. Maybe the WC is the stronger conference, but that "quality" hasn't translated into any real competitive difference between the conferences. That's the big picture right now.

To measure a conference's competitiveness, I like to look at the PPG standard deviation (SD) within the conference. The bigger the SD, the more spread out the teams are across the table, and the less competitive the conference is. The smaller the SD, the more compactly the teams are clustered within the table, and the more competitive the conference is. Currently, the PPG SD for the EC is 0.267 PPG, and the PPG SD for the EC is 0.25 PPG. (For the league as a whole it's 0.26 PPG.) Hence the EC is only slightly less competitive than the WC. Indeed, I don't recall a recent year in which the conferences were more even from a pure competition point of view. (Though I admit I did not research this, so my memory may be faulty. If it is, blame @sitruc.)

What's the point of this? It's not that both conferences are equal in terms of quality. That may not be true, and the measure really doesn't speak to that in any way. Rather, it's that it really shouldn't be that much easier to make the playoffs from the EC than the WC. And, yet, three teams in the EC are toast or close to becoming toast, and no teams in the WC are in a similar position (though COL is getting awfully close).

However, I don't expect this appearance of top to bottom competitiveness to be sustained for very long. The only thing keeping COL from being toast is their games in hand. SJE is also being buttressed by their games in hand. Tick off a couple more games without wins for those teams, and that'll be it for them. If that happens, the situation in the WC looks more like the EC currently. The EC just got there a little bit sooner.

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So, what are we looking at down the stretch? I'd like to be wrong, but I don't think it's all that encouraging if you want an exciting playoff race.

If ORL falters, we're probably not looking at much at all in the EC. In the WC, hopefully we're looking at POR, HOU, SEA and RSL all contending for two spots. (Yeah, I expect LAG to get the points they need to stay above the fray. Doesn't everyone?) More likely, however, RSL won't be able to remain in that mix. That team is bleeding goals nearly as fast as PHI. If they drop out of serious contention, there's not much going on in the WC either.

That's what you get with 12 teams making the playoffs in a 20 team league. This reminds me of the old days when we had 10 MLS teams, 8 of which made the playoffs. Eliminate those two awful teams, and then the rest is settled. Thing is, the old top 5 system wouldn't make things too different. If it was still top 5, the WC would basically be set already. The EC, however, would be a bit more interesting. What the playoff system really needs right now is not 2 to 4 fewer teams in the playoffs, but at least 4 more teams in the league.

Which brings us to Sacramento Republic FC ...

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Quick Hits

VAN and COL are both stronger away than at home. VAN is crazy strong away, and yet thoroughly mediocre at home. COL is somewhat respectable away, and trash at home.

DCU is facing the second weakest SoO in the league. What could possibly go wrong on their run to the SS?

TFC is facing the absolute weakest SoO in the league. What could possibly go wrong on their run to the playoffs?

LAG is pure crap away from home. Even NYC is better away from home than LAG.

If I was to doubt any current playoff positioned team, it'd be POR, who face the toughest opposition in the league.

It's important that I poke fun at SEA whenever possible. But I can't think of anything except to note that they've definitely achieved their typical playoff form earlier than usual this year.

The dark horse SS contender? NYR. Easy schedule, and only one game against another SS race team.

PHI is in contention for a coveted DCU Double, which is to say they're a prime candidate to win both the WS and the USOC during the same season.

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Housekeeping

As a special bonus next week I'll be posting a long winded disquisition on how @sitruc caused me to get everything so terribly wrong in this thread's opening post.

By the way, did you see my sweet new avatar?

 

You know who to blame!

 

Got'em. There's a work section of my spreadsheet and a post section. The work section was fully updated for the enlarged league. The post section -- well, I thought it was, but it wasn't. Didn't even notice when I posted. Like I said about mistakes ...

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I'll contact a mod.

 

Ah, I see it in the description. I think I have everything else updated in that key.

 

Lose or draw, I'd say.

There are a few teams right now for whom draws equal slow losses.

RSL is definitely one of them.

 

Oh, how cute ...