Interesting (though not really unexpected given the relative crap shoot knockout playoffs can be) you're more likely to not make the playoffs then you are to win the whole thing (which is skewed even more considering the early years and how many teams qualified).
I suppose you could make an argument that if you have a league "top scorer", than your scoring on your team is probably somewhat unbalanced, and teams could key on the top scorer guy and possibly shut him down. But I think the "crap shoot" nature of playoffs just kind of overrides everything. I mean, come on, 2005 MLS Cup champions - LA Galaxy? 'Nough said.
The matchups are shaping up an awful lot like 2005, a great year in San Jose, spoiled by a under achieving LA Galaxy team... I like the odds of that.
Yeah, but FWIW, I think this year's Gals team is light years better than the 2005 team. Pando anyone? Steve Sampson? Seattle and RSL are good and could certainly beat the Quakes in a short series, but the Gals, at this point, with all hands on deck, are going to be a real challenge, unless of course Vancouver pulls one out - crap shoot style .
The Quakes are certainly going to have to improve their recent play if they hope to advance in the playoffs. We maybe on a nine game unbeaten run, but, that includes ties our last three home games and a tie to a non-playoff Portland team. Hopefully the niggling little injuries heal up and all hands are on deck for that first game.
Not to cheapen Wondo's achievement, because it's a great achievement any way you slice it, but he did have the most PK attempts (7, he made 5) for a Golden Boot winner since Carlos Ruiz in 2003(?), who was 7/8, out of a GB-winning 15 goals . And I think those are the two highest totals for PK attempts for a GB winner.
Hah, but no, because I called it a "great achievement any way you slice it". Just in case I'll think of reasons to "enrich it", to balance it out, like the quality of the defending in the league now relative to Roy's time and the desire to play a relatively wide open style at the start of the league (according to Yallop), the fact that the next closest guy is 9 goals away, etc. In Roy's year, there was a guy with 23 and a guy with 21. In the end, comparing Roy's number with Wondo's is not quite apples to apples, but I think it's safe to say that they both had incredible respective seasons.
Left behind in the post of mine you quoted, when you got all sensitive about Lenhart: And in another thread, regarding defense: And they also played Toronto once, who gave up 62 goals by themselves. Those four teams conceded 56.5 goals a piece. By comparison, the average number of goals given up by all squads in '96 was 57 (In 2 fewer matches, so let's bump that up to ~60 for the apples-to-apples). So FWIW, San Jose undoubtedly played teams with better defenses this year, and the overall defensive level of the league has risen, but they played out almost a 3rd of their season against teams that were defending on a 1996 level. Thus, I'm willing to go a certain distance in "enriching" Wondo's accomplishments by comparing the level of play then, to what it is now, but I don't see it as cancelling out all of the other tiebreakers I listed above. What's kind of funny, looking back on it, is we wouldn't even have to have a tiebreakers discussion had Wondo's teammate not run into the box early on that one PK he made, and then had to retake, a few months back.
Meh, I think by cherry-picking particular teams you are just making the sample size less significant. And I could probably find some "good defending teams" that let in less goals than the "good defending teams" in 1996. To get a general sense of the "ease of goal scoring" in 1996 vs. 2012, I would look at goals per game across the league. The 1996 number is over 30% higher than the 2012 number. That's pretty significant IMO. Even if you tossed Wondo's 2 additional PK goals relative to Roy, after you factor in the 30%, he'd have 32.5 goals. If you then trim that down by relative number of minutes played for both, it would around 30 goals. So if you even out PK's by giving them 3 apiece, and normalize goals scored by number of minutes played and the frequency of goals scored in their respective years, by my back of the napkin calculation, Wondo wins at about 30 goals to 27.
You absolutely could find "good defending teams" in '96 that were worse at defending than this year's best teams. You could also try reading my entire post, where I say "Thus, I'm willing to go a certain distance in "enriching" Wondo's accomplishments by comparing the level of play then, to what it is now," acknowledging such a fact. But I'm not cherry picking, I'm looking at the schedule they played, since you're trying to make the point it's more impressive Wondo outscoring his competition by 9 goals, and trying to make a point that defense was so much worse in '96. In 2012, they did not have a balanced schedule, and your team got the better luck of the draw playing against 3 particularly poor defending sides 3 times a piece, and 1 game against Toronto. In those 10 games, Wondo scored 10 goals (1GPG). Against other opposition, he scored 17 goals and a rate of 0.7083 GPG. It's a large disparity and has to be accounted for, if we're trying to normalize things to compare cross-season statistics. In '96, they also didn't have a balanced schedule, but the disparity between best and worst defense was 16 goals. This year, the disparity is 35 goals, so the affect of the luck of the schedule draw is much larger. As for your hypothetical of Wondo playing against '96's defense, it's a worthless argument, because Wondo did not play his games in '96 and who knows how he would have performed in that incarnation of the league. You're taking stats completely out of their context and expecting pace/results to continue the same way, when there's no reason they would. If I were playing your game, I'd counter to say "Hey, Lassiter played 233 fewer minutes than Wondo. Who is to say he doesn't score 5-6 goals in that extra 2.5 games? Who is to say he doesn't continue scoring at the same pace as he had all season (1 goal every 95.5 minutes) and finish at 30 goals?" But that's not how reality works. As such, again, I'm willing to give Wondo a certain amount of credit for accomplishing the feat in this particular year with this particular talent base in the league, but there's still a number of statistical factors that give Lassiter the edge, and "poor defense in '96" doesn't cover all of them, especially when you have teams this year playing the same quality of defense.
In order to make this a fair analysis you'd also have to look at the 24 other games, and see how the GPG of those teams stacks up to the average. You conveniently left out the fact that the Quakes played 6 games against the teams with the 2nd and 3rd lowest GPG in the league. In fact the GPG looks roughly equal across conferences, so I think the unbalanced schedule thing is largely a wash. The easiest way to measure the relative ease of scoring a goal in 1996 vs. 2012 is to look at the GPG numbers. And remember that in 1996 Lassiter played against teams with GPG significantly worse than the 1996 average. Hah, then why are you comparing the 2012 poor defending teams to teams in 1996? Umm, guess you're not familiar with the concept of normalization. I normalized minutes played and I normalized the goals by the frequency of goals scored in the league during those two years. I even normalized PK's. I'm not sure how else you could normalize the data. Of course this is just fun with statistics and we'd never know how Wondo would do in 1996 and vice versa, and of course there are a million variables like the nature of the team that you're on, etc.
I'll let you complete that analysis then, since the argument that '96 defense was so much worse is one that Quakes fans are making, not me. Not that significantly. You caught my post mid-edit, so as shown above, the disparity between the best defense and worst defense in '96 was just 16 goals. The disparity between the average and the worst was just 8 goals (57 goals vs two teams that gave up 65). On a GPG basis, that's only 0.24 GPG difference. There's a huge difference between comparing goal totals from season to season (concrete, simple facts as they played out in reality), and living off in hypothetical land by taking a player from today and putting him 16 years in the past, expecting results to be the same. You acknowledged as much in the bolded part below. And what I'm saying is, the normalization doesn't work because of how it pulls things out of context. Also, if you want to get picky, you're normalizing in the wrong direction: because as I understand your methods, you're normalizing Wondo's numbers back to '96 (in other words, reducing his stats to a 32 game season), which means you're counting two goals he scored in two games he never should have played (@ POR, vs LA) because those were games 33 & 34 of the season. Which, quickly running through the math again with PKs normalized and your theoretical 30% defense bump, puts him at basically the same GPG pace as Lassiter (.94 vs .95).
The burden of proof is on you. The null position is that they both scored 27 goals. If one is going to try to parse which 27 is 'better', the next closest-to-hand facts are that Wondolowski played more games (34/32 = 6% more games in 2012), but that the decrease in average goals scored (1.68/1.32 = 27% 'easier' to score in 1996) counts for more. So it's not just 'Quakes fans' making that argument. It's that on average MLS teams allowed more goals in 32 games in 1996 than they allow in 34. You're going to have to work harder at debunking the significance of that fact, as the idea that Wondo played a few bad defenses doesn't speak to a season. You would have to go opponent-by-opponent for the entire schedule to make the claim that you're making (which appears to be that the specific schedules each team played make the defensive disparity less than it would appear using averages). Without that, I don't know why you would expect others to believe it's true. No, that's cherry picking. Why are the two last games 'the ones he never should have played' rather than two random games in the middle of the year? You can't throw out data that's there. To normalize, you'd count each for 32/34ths. Or Lassiter's for 34/32nds. It doesn't actually matter which 'direction' you normalize in. Multiply Lassiter's count by 34/32, then divide it by 1.27, and you get 22.6. Again, maybe that's deceptive, and if you went opponent-by-opponent, you might be able to prove it, but you certainly can't prove it by declaring arbitrarily that two goals don't count.
When you do a normalization you don't do things like throw away specific games, 'cause then which games do you throw out? You assume that things will occur at the same rate they did over the course of the season, and then correct by adjusting / normalizing factors. So for example to normalize minutes played, you multiple by a factor, either Wondo goals x (Lassiter minutes / Wondo minutes) or if you want to use Lassiter as the point of reference, Lassiter goals x (Wondo minutes / Lassiter minutes). Then to normalize the frequency of goals scoring in the league, you multiply Wondo goals x (1996 goal frequency / 2012 goal frequency) - or the reverse. So, starting with throwing out 2 Wondo PK's, so they both have 3, you have, for Wondo: 25 x (2580/2813) x (3.36/2.64) = 29 OK, I think I used the wrong GPG for 2012 when I got 30, so one less goal, but that's how the math works. If you want to work the number in terms of Lassiter, you could give him two extra PK goals, and so then, for Lassiter: 29 x (2813/2580) x (2.64/3.36) = 25 Here's a good article that compares the two seasons, and includes the GPG factor. http://soccernet.espn.go.com/blog/_/name/soccerusa/id/391?cc=5901
I'll only disagree with this, because I don't think games should be thrown out (I was only doing that to illustrate this point). If you're gonna normalize, you should work with more reality, not chop it down to fit the smaller sample size. I have no time at the moment to run calcs for all factors at the moment, perhaps later tonight.
Lost in the nitpicking of Wondo's share of the single-season goals record is the fact that Wondo has scored an average of more than 20 goals per year over the last three seasons, during each of which he was alone or tied as the league's leading goal scorer. And Wondo went into the 2012 season with every defender in the league on notice to pay extra attention to him, and he still emerged with a share of the all-time record. Wondo has led the league in goals scored with and without a 34-game season, with and without an unbalanced schedule, with and without a supporters shield supporting cast, and with and without Lenhart and/or Gordon.
What I mean by 'it doesn't matter' is that the conclusion will be the same regardless of which direction you go--either assume Lassiter played more games against a tougher defense, or assume Wondolowski played fewer games against weaker ones. Either way, the point is, if you go by averages, the difference in defenses is greater than the difference in games played.
Wasn't there only 10 teams in 1996 with less traveling? If that is the case, wouldn't that make more games against the same teams and the same defenders? Therefore, wouldn't any forward who is worth his weight know how to tactically play (in one way or another) against the same players? I mean doesn't this account for anything? Just curious...
Exact opposite holds true as well though right? Any defender worth his weight would be able to figure out how to defend said player. That being said I think it's a silly to try and negate or down play his achievement I think the only one that has a little merit is possibly looking at number of goals from open play vs. penalty kicks, and even that's questionable.
Only that the defenses and/or defenders in 1996 from what I recall were crap and if that is the case, then a good forward may or should know how to score against them easily. I attended every game in San Jose in 96 and was the first person to arrive at San Jose -DC United inaugural game in April of that year and the first game alone was horrendous. It was a new league and teams had amateurs as well as internationals thrown together and teams were loading players at every position and guys were coming and going. This years expansion Montreal Impact for example, will have won that league easily.