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I did some number crunching the other day, and saw that the new players for 2011 have already - after 12 games - played more minutes than either of the last two classes did in their entire first season with the Crew.
Not only did the coaching staff clean house in the offseason, but they are actually using this year’s new players more than they have in previous years…
An excerpt of an interview with Crew rookie midfielder Othaniel Yanez. You can read the full transcript of the interview on Examiner.com
Playing Time Revisited
Last December, I looked into how teams in Major League Soccer distributed playing time. I found some interesting patterns that seemed to indicate a correlation between teams that enjoyed success and those that consistently used a core of players.
More recently, I’ve been digging into the linkage between players’ time on the field and the team’s overall performance. The highlight there has been some surprising conclusions - like the Crew doing worse offensively when their best attacking player is on the field, or conceding goals more frequently when the reigning Defender of the Year is in the game.
In an attempt to understand those conclusions, I’m not starting to compare pairings of players. The first step of this process is to chart the amount of time that any given two players have played together. The next step will be to look a bit further, and analyze team performance (offensively and defensively) in correlation to these pairings.
