Questions About Depth

View from the Upper Deck

By Charles Barnard

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

I am sure that was the reaction of some RSL fans on social media after last week’s loss in Champions League. And I think that reaction would be very harsh. For the first 60 minutes of the match the team actually looked really good. Would I have liked a better result than a 2-0 loss? Of course I would have. But on the whole I think RSL put forth a very respectable effort all things considered.

Now that we have seen the team in action, I think some questions do need to be addressed. My biggest frustration at the end of the match was Coach Cassar not using his third sub. I think this might be my biggest pet peeve in soccer. In my mind, you have three subs and you should use them! Especially when it was clear to see the team was running out of gas.

After expressing these thoughts on Twitter, @JKBranin made a very good point that got me thinking.

“Who would you have subbed in/out? Half of me is frustrated it wasn’t used. Half of me is frustrated there was no one worth bringing in.”

Who would I have brought in? I don’t know. While unlike some I am a big fan of Sandoval. But I don’t think he is what was needed in that match. And who would you take out for him? I guess Stertzer could have been an option. You didn’t need Glad or Wingert in that match.

You know who would have been a good option? Luis Silva. I am sure he was somewhere in the stadium but he wasn’t wearing an RSL kit. What about Mansally? I would have liked to seen his fresh legs getting forward into the attack. What about Jaime coming in providing a spark off the bench? 

Now I know even if we still had all these players on the roster that they wouldn’t have all been on the bench the other night. But it leads me to a question. Do we have a depth problem on the team this season? Yes, we all know and are worried about our lack of depth at center back. That is a huge issue. But I am talking about the lack of depth for the whole team in general.

I don’t think I really thought about this too much in the off season. Did the signing of Yura blind me to how many players we actually lost? Just look at the list.

Gil

Silva

Vasquez

Pecka

Schuler

Bofo

Jaime

Mansally

Honestly did I want all of these players to come back? Absolutely not.  We needed to shake things up. The point I am wondering is this. Did we bring enough talent to not only replace these players but to also improve as a team?

I went back and added up minutes played for players that were on the roster last year that are no longer with the team. The total came to 7658 minutes. That is a lot of minutes to replace. The breakdown of those minutes is 2515 for forwards, 2116 for midfielders, and 3027 on the back line. Those minutes will have to be filled. The question is who is going to fill them?

Now I am sure that Yura will take up a big chunk of that time. And Burrito and Plata will (knock on wood) play more minutes than they did last season. Sunday will take up some of those minutes as well (or steal minutes from Luke). I think these are upgrades to what we had last season. And hopefully the team will get some good luck and sign a center back or two.

Is the sky falling? There is no way you can say that after one game. My question is during the dog days of summer when players start getting injured do we have enough quality off the bench to keep us competitive? That question can’t be answered today, especially since our roster is not set in stone. But I do think it is a question that we as fans should keep our eyes on over the course of the season. 

The Return to the Upper Deck

By Charles Barnard

I am here to announce that I am bringing my writing talents (or lack thereof) back to my blog From the Upper Deck.

 

When I started this blog back in 2013 I wanted a place where I could express my thoughts on all things RSL. I named it From the Upper Deck because that was my viewpoint at the time. I had no team access. All I knew was what I could see from my TV or from my favorite seats at Rio Tinto (hence the name of the blog). I was just a fan that randomly spouted off stats on Twitter. 

 

And then something I didn’t expect started to happen. My blog really started to grow. I discovered that the media relations side of the team was really awesome to work with. People like Trey, and when he was still there Sam, helped with their time and treated my blog with a respect that it probably hadn’t earned to that point. I was given the opportunity to interview players, members of the front office, and the coaching staff. It was awesome.

 

The blog continued to grow. I was proud of what I had created. Even though I loved writing about stats, my series looking at what the RSL family meant to people (players, coaches, fans) was probably the thing I enjoyed writing the most. Some of the stories that people told me were incredibly powerful. I still tear up reading some of them two years later.

 

But as the blog continued to grow, so did the time it took to maintain it. It takes a lot of time out of my life just to maintain the stats that I keep track of. And on top of that I was trying to grow this blog. Not only was it taking away from time with my family it was starting to burn me out. So even though I was having some incredible experiences I let the blog die.

 

Even keeping stats started to be a grind. Through most of this past off season I debated with myself if I would even continue to tweet out my stats. But as the season started to get closer I knew I would dive back in. I just love stats too much to give them up. I also wanted to write again, but was more hesitant to even think about that.

 

Then something happened  that I didn’t expect. I had thoughts about last Wednesday's game and the team in general that I wanted to express. So I just started to write. 700 words later and I had a blog post ready to go. This leads me to this reintroduction to myself and the blog.

 

I know things will be different this time. I won’t post as much as I did in the past. I don’t want to burn out again and my family needs to come first. Will I put some of my stats up here? I am not sure but I probably will. One thing I will do is that I want to write more about my thoughts on the team.  I am going to call these editorials Views From the Upper Deck. I am back to my original view of the team where I don’t have any inside access (although I am sure the team would support me if asked). I am just that guy that randomly tweets out stats and will put my thoughts here on the blog. I hope you enjoy it.

Why Charles Barkley Was Wrong

By Charles Barnard

When I was a kid, Charles Barkley was one of my favorite NBA players. It probably had more to do with his name and initials than anything else, but I really liked “Sir Charles”.

During the course of his playing and broadcasting career, Barkley has never been one to shy away from controversy. Barkley started up a media storm last month when he expressed his opinions about analytics.

“I've always believed that analytics is crap.” Barkley said. “Analytics don’t work at all. It’s just some crap that people who were really smart made up to try and get in the game because they had no talent. Because they had no talent to be able to play, so smart guys wanted to fit in, so they made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.” He went on to say “All these guys that run these organizations who talk about analytics have one thing in common: They’re a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game, they never got the girls in high school, and they just want to get into the game.”

Ouch! As someone who has always loved analytics and stats in general that was a pretty harsh thing to say. Barkley’s comments were one of the main talking points in almost every sports radio show the next day. Many people agreed with what Barkley had to say. Others did not.

Needless to say I am in the camp that thinks Barkley is wrong. The ability to track and analyze stats is an extremely useful tool when it comes to sports. Stats can show you things that you might miss picking up on when watching a game. My favorite example of this actually comes from the movie Bull Durham.

Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It's 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week... and you're in Yankee Stadium. -Crash Davis

People that know baseball knows that the difference between batting .250 and .300 is huge. But by just watching every baseball game in a week will you really notice the difference if a player gets one more hit during that week? Probably not. Stats show us things that we might have missed otherwise. This is extremely important when trying to make decisions on who to play and when to play them.

The other thing about stats that is beneficial is that the stats themselves are emotionless. Sports are full of emotions. When people are watching sports they are going to see things through their own “rose colored glasses” depending on their emotions. They are going to look past a bad play by their favorite player. They are going to be more harsh on players they do not like. Stats don’t have any emotional biases.

So how does all of this apply to soccer? When compared to other sports like baseball and basketball, soccer doesn't really have that many stats. It is much harder to track what is happening on the field in soccer. Because of this many people don’t believe soccer analytics is that important. In my mind it is the opposite. These factors make soccer analytics more important.

Let me give you some examples. Soccer is a funny sport. You can sit next to your best friend while you watch a match and can come away seeing two very different games. You might think Player “A” had a great match when your friend thought he struggled. The perfect way to see this is to read any player grades after a match is over. I love to read Randal Serr’s player ratings over at RSL Soapbox. Randal does a wonderful job with these reports. Do I always agree with him? No, not at all. Does that mean he is wrong? Nope. He just sees different things than I do during the course of a match.

Soccer is not exempt from emotion clouding what you see on the field. In my mind the best example of this comes from former RSL player Lovel Palmer. Palmer played for RSL during the 2013 season and he really became a fan favorite. While I never had the chance to meet him personally, I have heard from many people that he is one of the nicest people on the planet. If you were to ask many RSL fans if they would like to have him back and playing for RSL they would say yes in a heartbeat. It makes sense. He is a really good dude and he played great. Well….while he might be a great guy he did not play great. Not at all.

In the 2013 season RSL had a really great goal differential of +16. When looking at goal differential on a players level Javier Morales led RSL with a +18. In fact every player on the RSL roster had a positive or at least an even goal differential that season except Lovel Palmer. Palmer came in with a -6. Not only was he the worst on the team, but he was the worst by a very wide margin.

I am not writing this to criticize Palmer’s play that season. The point is that many people didn't notice his poor play because their positive feelings for the player was masking his true play on the field.

Collecting stats and analyzing those stats are incredibly important. Do they tell the whole story? Absolutely not. Anyone that says so is wrong as well. But they are a vital tool that can be used to get a better understanding of what is happening on the field of play. Charles Barkley was right in one thing. I never played the game. But just because I didn't play doesn't mean I can’t find valuable pieces of information by looking at the stats. Is analytics “crap” like Barkley said. No, not at all.

4 Questions for the 2015 Season

By Charles Barnard

The RSL preseason is over. Hopefully the 2015 season will begin this Saturday. I thought now would be the perfect time to dust off the cobwebs on the blog and share some of my thoughts on the upcoming season.

If the offseason could be described in one word it would be “change”. Nine players that were on the RSL roster at the end of last season are no longer with the team. General Manager Garth Lagerwey has moved on to Seattle. And it appears that Head Coach Jeff Cassar has traded in the long used diamond formation for a 4-3-3.

All those changes leads to many questions for this upcoming season. How will the new formation affect the team? How will the new (and in Jameson Olave’s case, returning) players mesh with rest of the team? When will Father Time finally start to catch up to some of RSL’s veteran core?

Here are the four things that I will be watching closely as the season begins.

Will Sebastian Jaime become a breakout star?

In my mind the biggest move for this coming year didn’t occur in the offseason, but towards the end of last year with the signing of Sebastian Jaime. Jaime came in and played in 6 regular season games in 2014 playing in 261 minutes. Since he did not score a goal in that time many people think he struggled. Even the MLS preview article that was posted today on RSL said that Jaime was “relatively invisible after joining the club last summer.”

I wholeheartedly disagree. In the 261 minutes that he played, RSL scored 8 times or a goal every 32 minutes. That is scoring at an incredible rate. Although Jaime didn’t score one of those goals, he played a big part in those goals being scored. He also worked on the defensive side of the ball. During the time he played the team only gave up 2 goals. To look at it another way, the team had a +9 goal differential in the 2799 minutes that Jaime didn’t play. When he did play the team was +6.

With a whole preseason under his belt I believe that Jaime is going to have a big year. Will he score a lot of goals? I am not sure, but I do believe that he will make the whole team better when he is on the field.

Will Jordan Allen become a household name?

As we approach this coming season, one player people seem to be overlooking is Jordan Allen. Allen was only 18 years old at the beginning of last season. After a very good preseason Allen appeared in the first two games of the season. Then disaster struck and he suffered an injury that would keep him out the rest of the year.

Allen is back and ready to go this season. Many people think that he might spend a large portion of time with the Monarchs this season. I don’t agree. Not only do I think he will stay with RSL, I think he will get a lot of playing time with RSL. His ability to play multiple positions on the field makes him extremely valuable. I think he is going to force Cassar to play him due to his athleticism and his skill on the ball. I don’t know if he will get a lot of starts, but I do see him being one of the first people off the bench.

How long will it take RSL fans to fall in love with Demar Phillips?

I think the answer to this question is “not long”. I will admit that I have only seen him play in the limited minutes that he played in preseason, but I think he is going to do wonders for this team. While I really liked Chris Wingert, it is pretty safe to say he was not great going forward the past couple of years. The way that Phillips got into the attack in each game that he played in was encouraging to see. I can really see him adding to the RSL attack.

The next question will be how good of a defender will he be?

Will Jeff Cassar rotate minutes more than he did last season?

This might be my biggest concern coming into the season. And it is something that I am not sure people are talking about enough. Last season a 34 year old Javier Morales played a whopping 2645 minutes. This was the third highest on the team. And while Morales had an outstanding year, I wonder how much the amount of minutes he played affected him. How many times during RSL broadcasts did Brian Dunseth say that RSL was the deepest team in the league? At times it didn’t feel that Cassar coached in a way that he believed that.

The core of RSL is getting older. Morales is 35, Beckerman is 32, Saborio is 32, Olave is 33. Cassar needs to feel that he can count on his bench to come in and give these players games off. This is even more important this year with CCL games adding to RSL’s schedule. If this does not happen, I worry about if there will be any gas left in the tank come playoff time.