Chicago Red Stars – 2016 NWSL Season Review – Maybe Next Year?
By Steve Fowler
The Chicago Red Stars are the “bride’s maids” of the NWSL.
They finished 6th in 2013, missing the playoffs. In 2014, they finished fifth, just missing the playoffs again. Last year in 2015, they made the playoffs, only to lose to eventual champion Kansas City. And even before the NWSL, they lost the WPSL-Elite championship to the Western New York Flash. And failed to make the playoffs in 2 seasons with the WPS.
So, what happened this year? They made the playoffs again, only to lose in overtime to Washington.
There is a well-known saying by Paul “Bear” Bryant that “defense wins championships”, and hopefully U.S. National Team coach Jill Ellis gets that memo someday. But, Chicago knows that with every successful team, it begins with defense…
So, to prove their point, Chicago had a 485-minute NWSL record defensive shutout streak from April 16 to May 22. Julie Johnston seems to get a lot of credit for this. But she cannot take full credit for this streak. Rookie Katie Naughton, a recent Notre Dame graduate, played in the Orlando and Kansas City shutout victories, where Johnston played in the Boston and Western New York shutouts. To have a rookie center back be part of 2 shutout victories early in the season is impressive.
The rest of the defense:
- Goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher, who spent a couple of seasons baptized by fire at Boston, is one of the best in the league. Naeher and Ashlyn Harris are now competing for the title of “world’s best goalkeeper” vying for the starting job at the U.S. National Team.
- Sam Johnson is the underrated center back who is no-nonsense, takes no prisoners defender who seems to come out nowhere to save the day. According to my math, she is equal to Johnston.
- But all the attention this year were on their “rookie” fullbacks Casey Short and Arin Gilliland. Gilliland graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2015 and had a full year on the team last year playing quality defense. And Casey Short was drafted by Boston 2013 but suffered an injury, and this is her first full year in the league. But she played on a Norwegian club team last year. Both fullbacks have decent speed and both are good in their attacking roles with Short scoring a couple of goals this year. She also received a couple of call-ups by the U.S. National team and has a decent chance of earning a full-time job there.
- And in soccer, the good defense also comes from the defensive midfielder position. Dani Colaprico finally received a call-up to the U.S. National team. She may not score many goals for the Red Stars, but she is arguably the best defensive midfielder in the NWSL. She might not succeed with the U.S. National Team as she might not fit in with a coach Jill Ellis system. Her only flaw is that she is foul prone.
And their offense:
Christen Press and Sofia Huerta accounted for most of their goals. The team acquired Stephanie McCaffrey from Boston later in the season, and those 3 will be the key to their attack in 2017. Vanessa DiBernardo is the team’s “quarterback” who quietly sets up goals in the attack and through set pieces. Statistically, she is not going to impress anyone, unless you are some rambling old man with a bunch of “crazy data” that indicates that Jill Ellis needs to invite her to U.S. team camp soon.
I will have an upcoming article on the statistic comparison of all teams.
But first here is a rambling old man…
I will digress here on statistics. I spent a few hours trying to come up with a mathematical formula to compare all the players in the league to each other. No, I am not a professional statistician, and hence the problem. But my goal is to create a “simple” mathematical formula that equates passing efficiency with scoring efficiency (using scoring conversion percent), and some (best guess?) measure of defensive efficiency.
I have manipulated some of Alfredo Martinez’s data, plus added goal scoring numbers from the NWSL official statistics. I even had set-piece efficiency plus dribbling efficiency. However, I came up with a crude formula that basically puts all the league’s best defenders as the best players in the league. I am sure they will all agree with me. 🙂
But if I were Jill Ellis I would still be looking at Christie Rampone at age 41, not Kelly O’Hara, not Megan Klingenberg, and why is not Ali Krieger the starter on the U.S. team? But that might be an article for another day.
However, the point of this is that we should have an NWSL “deep statistical analysis” set up by the league and the U.S. Soccer Federation.
Part of the problem is that no one knows truly how good/bad some of the “stars” are for the league. If the data is publicly viewable, it would force the players to look at their own stats and try to make improvements. Or perhaps the coaches do not want the fans to second guess them using statistics as an argument?
A glimpse at what some coaches do is “track” their players with GPS devices. To me, this is a desperation ploy to cover for the lack of data. Sure, it is nice to know that a certain player ran about 8 miles in a particular game.
But are they not really looking at how fit the players are? A coach should know a player’s fitness before putting her out on the pitch or naming them to their roster. (Hint, Rio Olympics quarterfinals with a nameless North American team vs an unnamed Scandinavian team.)
I will get off my soap box once again (reluctantly).
But, I will continue to look at player and team statistics. I hope to offer a glimpse of which players are underrated and overrated. But, perhaps we can have a reasonable understanding of why the Rio Olympics were a disaster for the U.S. National Team. Maybe Coach Ellis probably had no data to show that her “chosen pets” were defensively deficient, inefficiently making errant passes, and depending on luck for their scoring conversion rate.
s, soccer is a team sport, and “selfish stars” cannot always win you a championship. I hope to compare the undeserving players at the Rio Olympics with those that should have been there in an upcoming article. But I will need to see if I can somehow make the statistics verifiable
And in conclusion, next year the Chicago Red Stars should threaten the NWSL playoffs again. Remember, a good defense will win a championship.
Now, they need some more good all-purpose scoring players. Perhaps, they can trade for Washington Spirit forward Crystal Dunn for an allocation spot, and change their name to the “Paris Red Stars”, since Dunn supposedly wants to play in Europe? But move the team to Paris Illinois. The Spirit Squadron fans will not be amused if this happened.
I apologize for all of my bad jokes. But Boston should seriously consider a similar trade, and move to Paris Maine- and give Dunn all the lobster she can eat. 🙂
“Here’s looking at you, kid”.
Videos for those who may have missed them the first time around:
This game could have been placed in my Seattle Reign review. But here shows a victory for Chicago. This, in a sense, is one of the reasons why Chicago made the playoffs, and Seattle stayed home.
This is a victory over their chief rival, Kansas City.
Here is their overtime playoff loss to Washington.
