Striking up a Relationship- Another Look at RSL Strikers

Last week RSL Soapbox had a great article posted where Matt looked at our forward combinations that we had available to use while Saborio was out injured. It was a great article that everyone should take a look at. It got me thinking statistically. What is our best strike partnership? I thought I would try to find out.

I decided to use the same statistic that I used in my last blog post. As a review, the stat basically figures out how many goals are scored while a particular player is on the field. They don't have to be the one that scored the goal, but they just had to be on the field when the goal was scored.

For my analysis this time, I decided to figure out which strike partnership was on the pitch for each goal that was scored and how many minutes each partnership played together. From those two things I could come up with a minutes per goal stat. Here are my findings:

Strike Pair		Mintues		Goals		Mins per Goal
Sabo/Findley		224		0		n/a
Sabo/Plata		126		3		42
Plata/Sandoval		179		4		44.75
Sabo/Sandoval		56		1		56
Findley/Plata		73		0		n/a
Findley/Sandoval		31		1		31
Sabo/Garcia		142		2		71
Findley/Garcia		13		0		n/a
Sandoval/Garcia		40		0		n/a
Plata/Garcia		63		0		n/a

Just to get a perspective on the goals per minute stat, on a whole, the team is averaging a goal every 100 minutes played.

So what does this tell us? The lowest is the Findley/Sandoval pairing, but we only have 31 minutes to go off of so we can't take too much away from that yet. I really would like to see more of the Sabo/Plata pairing. The time that they have been on the field together they seem to have great chemistry. There are two things that really stand out to me from the table above. One is how well the Plata/Sandoval pairing works together. The team is scoring a goal every 45 minutes that they are on the pitch together. That is not bad at all. The interesting thing is that neither one of them have actually scored yet, but their play on the pitch is leading to their teammates scoring at a good pace. The second thing that stood out to me is how poor the pairing of Sabo and Findley are so far. I think it says something that they have played the most minutes together and the team has yet to score while they have been on the field together.

Now I know that none of these strikers had played with each other prior to this year and these numbers are bound to change as they learn to play with each other. But I still think there is value in these numbers at this time. That is how I see it at least from the upper deck.

-Charles (ccb1212)