You Request, We Respond

A few reader questions on which I am happy to provide a response:

THE WINNINGEST TEAM OF ALL TIME

Anonymous K had a question in the wake of our noting that DC United has once again regained their rightful crown of winningest team of all time - "What about in terms of points?" Well, decent question, so here are a few other ways of looking at overall history. If you take points in terms of regular standing points, United is, wait for it... tied:

1t) LA:526 points through 2006 + 17 pts to date in 2007 = 543
1t) DC: 494 pts + 49 pts = 543 pts
3) KC: 445 pts + 36 pts =481 pts

So United will need to finish off the season better than LA in all games remaining in order to obtain the all-time standings points lead.

Now, the other thing that might be interesting is if you convert shoot-out wins and losses to draws, which will sort of make the previous seasons more consistent for the sake of comparison and compilation. On that basis, adjusting the number of wins for shootouts, we get the following:

1) LA: 156 adjusted wins through 2006 + 4 wins in 2007 = 160 adjusted wins.
2) DC: 143+ 15 = 158 adjusted wins.
3) CHI: 128 + 8 = 136 adjusted wins.

So United needs to get two more wins than the Galaxy of the rest of the year in order to gain the title on those terms. Similarly, lets look at adjusted points (counting shoot-outs as draws):
1) LA: 540 adjusted points through 2006 + 17 points in 2007 = 557 adjusted points
2) DC: 507 + 49 = 556 adjusted points

Again, this one is also up for grabs for the remainder of the season.

ROLLING AVERAGES vs. SEASON AVERAGES

A few days ago we posted our analysis of what's going right for United based on some moving averages for goals. Commenter Bob had this to say:

I think that the third graph should also include the full season moving averages, so you can quickly see how the past few games have shown above average scoring. You will also see a danger point if the scoring average drops below that trend line.

That seams reasonable Bob. Since you ask, here it is (Click to enlarge):

You can see quite clearly that United has recently been allowing about half-a-goal per game more than season-to-date, but they've compensated by scoring about two-thirds of a goal more per game recently than the season-to-date. Now, the good news about the defense is that you would expect it to get better. The bad news is that you also expect the offense to similarly regress to the mean over the final games. The great news is that the season to date averages show United scoring about .75 more goals than they allow, and that's a good place to be. Okay, that's enough dorkiness from me. Any other concerns you need follow-up on?