Chalk Talk – Sturftistics

MLS recently introduced a wonderful new feature called the Chalkboard, brought to you by OptaSports. After every game we will be dissecting a player or two from the Rapids using the Chalkboard from the previous game.

This obviously wasn't one of the Rapids better games despite the fact that they scored three goals, so I'll be using Seattle's stats as well. Going three games back with both teams – somewhat small sample size but suitably big for our purposes here – I'll be checking how effective the teams were at passing, keeping possession and dribbling, three stats that the turf might have had an effect on as ball possession seemed to be the biggest issue. (In this case I'm not counting the Rapids front line of Folan and Nyassi as an issue, though I probably should have.) Unfortunately – and someone at the bar actually asked me this yesterday hilariously – they don't have 'number of times fell down' as an Optastat. Someone get @Optajack on it right away!

The slash marks indicate Successful/Unsuccessful so if you see 140/42 it means that there were 140 successful whatevers and 42 unsuccessful whatevers. Here's the statistics from yesterdays match for the three stats I've picked out:

As raw numbers, these don't look particularly bad, though the Rapids seem to need work on their dribbling and to the naked eye that seems like a lot of lost possessions. Of course, there is no real data to cross-reference this with so any judgments we make like that will be pretty much guesswork, which is certainly what I did yesterday since I wrote the article right as the game finished! Let's check three more Rapids games going back. The following stats are from – the links will bring you to the chalkboards in question – the 2-1 win against Vancouver, the 1-1 draw away at Kansas City and the 0-0 home draw against Houston.

So the possessions seem to be a null stat after all, as the 129 was actually all right in the context. Dribbling just seems to be a Rapids problem in general as the 0/8 seemed average as well. What is noticeable about these is that with exception to the Kansas City match – one in which they lost one their best and most frequent passers mind you – the Rapids attempted far fewer passes in this match in Seattle than they did in the other three.

How about Seattle though? Four goals they may have scored but they looked like they lost a few edges as the game went along as well. They've also had much better form in the last three games than the Rapids have had and have had a lot more stability in their lineup. The games here are the 3-2 away win at Portland, their 0-0 away draw in Los Angeles and their 2-1 win at home against New England.

A little bit more interesting as the Sounders seemed to have an improvement to at least one stat in every game, most noticeably their dribbling abilities. their passing was well above the 50/50 mix that we saw in the original game in two of the examples, with the third being a fairly boring 0-0 draw. So it looks like the stats, while a bit buggy on both sides, aren't quite as hilarious as that game would have had you believe. Until Opta impliments that 'most times fell down' stat, in which case I'm totally re-doing this for the laugh factors alone! Still, an interesting experiment to run.