In the last edition
of the crunchy power rankings I switched from using net shots to net shots on goal to help deal with the big outliers in New York and Toronto. It's interesting to note that since I wrote
the article on those outliers
on May 21, the Red Bulls' MLS strike rate has been a very average 10.2% (6 goals in 59 shots) and was well below average before their 3 goal performance on Sunday. Meanwhile, Toronto's maintained an excellent strike rate of 13.8% (9/65). So while the huge deviations from the mean early in the season seemed to argue against focusing on shots, there's some compelling evidence that over the long run the teams are in fact regressing to the mean. One big caveat for the New York results is that they haven't been playing with
Thierry Henry
, so it remains to be seen how their strike rate changes when their best striker returns.
Of more local interest is the fact that the
Seattle Sounders
remain one of the top teams in the league, even though the rankings are weighted towards recent results. In fact, they're the only team ...
