Nashville’s (slight) drop continues, the East converging toward a top six, and the situation in the West remains hectic as always. Don’t forget to follow the site on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for all the content on USL, US Soccer, and Nashville SC.

Table Power

This rating method counts only opposition played and points attained in a given game – it is best used as a proxy for how the table is likely to play out at the end of the year.

USL East power rankings:

Cincinnati 2.91 Louisville 2.64 Pittsburgh 2.51 (+1) Charleston 2.37 (-1) Nashville 2.22 (+1) Indianapolis 2.20 (-1) NYRB 1.94 (+1) Ottawa 1.89 (-1) Bethlehem 1.86 North Carolina 1.85 Charlotte 1.60 Penn 1.59 Tampa Bay 1.49 Richmond 1.10 Atlanta 1.03 Toronto 0.58

I was tempted to re-scale the chart to include Toronto FC II after their second win of the season (over Richmond), but the distance between them and ATL UTD 2 is still enormous – it would be the largest gap between consecutive teams on the chart, almost 25% bigger than than huge hole between Tampa and Richmond – so I didn’t. The chart is more informative without that. But that I was considering it means something.

There were mostly minor shakeups in that 2-8 range, with Pittsburgh/Charleston flipping spots (Charleston’s rating actually dropped slightly despite a win, because Atlanta is such weak competition), Nashville’s 2-0 win over Ottawa moving them past idle Indy Eleven, and Red Bulls’ loss to Louisville not enough to drop them below Ottawa in the face of that result in Music City.

The big picture mostly remains the same: now that Louisville has stabilized after losing its coach, there’s a fairly solid top two, and there’s jockeying within the next four teams in what has been a comfortable top six ever since Charleston moved into it in early July. It’ll be interesting to see exactly how much of this resurgence from Charleston is permanent, and similarly if Nashville’s recovery from a drop of its own is permanent (if so, they were one of the better sides in the East before the slide) or if they’ll dip in form again. Either way, the top six seem in.

The next two spots have four teams realistically jockeying to make the playoffs, and it should end up being pretty close between them. I have more faith in Red Bulls, Ottawa, and Bethlehem than I do North Carolina FC, and despite the order of them today, I’d probably pick Bethlehem/NYRB as 7/8 over the course of the season. Ottawa’s recent form has been far better than their beginning to the season, though, and even though they’ll have ups and downs, perhaps they’ve smoothed out just how low those downs can go. Should be a thrilling stretch run among that group.

Tampa is awful, and the second most expensive team in the USL (I believe they were most expensive before Cincinnati’s recent signings, though much of that bill is tied up in one player, Joe Cole) has no excuses for being as bad as it is.

USL West power rankings

Real Monarchs 2.93 Orange County 2.56 (+2) Sacramento Republic 2.50 (-1) Phoenix Rising 2.41 (-1) Reno 1868 2.36 San Antonio 2.11 Portland Timbers 2.05 (+1) St. Louis 1.95 (+1) Swope Park 1.94 (-2) Fresno FC 1.67 Colorado Springs 1.58 Las Vegas Lights 1.54 OKC Energy 1.48 LA Galaxy II 1.36 (+1) Rio Grande Valley 1.27 Seattle Sounders 1.16 Tulsa Roughnecks 1.06

It was a wild week in the West. Real Monarchs lost(!!) to a somewhat-crappy OKC Energy team(!!!). Orange County SC won a thriller in Phoenix to move into second position in the power rankings. Tulsa won(!) against what had been a decent Colorado Springs team climbing the table. Even when there weren’t a ton of position switches, there were big swings in teams’ raw scores.

The struggles continue for Swope Park Rangers, who were beaten at home by Timbers 2. Check out the trajectory of that line: it ain’t good. The good news for SPR is that six of their next seven are at home, so while we know that home games aren’t a guarantee (see: this weekend), they certainly have a better chance there than on the road. A rebound may be in the cards.

Based on most recent form, though, I’d have Swope, currently in the nine spot in the power rankings, not only maintaining that “not in the playoffs” status, but perhaps even getting further away from the Mendoza line there. If it holds true – and again, their upcoming stretch of home games has potential to change it – there’s a nice solid gap between the top eight and everyone but SPR: while there are bigger swings week-to-week in this conference, we seem to have at the very least settled into a top-nine, bottom-eight that looks clearly stratified. The wild swings become less so as each individual game has less of an impact on the season averages, so this could settle in.

At this point, I’m rooting for somebody to knock Real Monarchs out of the top spot, just because it’d be fun to see that happen after they had such a huge margin on the field earlier in the season. OCSC’s win hurt that cause slightly (Phoenix had been closer than them), but as we know from following the pure power method that we’re about to get into, Orange County has actually been the best team in USL for the past couple weeks…

Pure Power

This rating method uses almost an opposite philosophy: focusing only on goals scored for/against in each game, without attention to individual results. It looks at the quality of offensive and defensive performance against each given opponent, with a home/road component attached. It’s more effective for predictive purposes in single games, rather than necessarily projecting the end-of-year table.

It should come as no surprise that Orange County widened its gap atop USL, then. A road win (remember, this method accounts for location) against one of the other best teams in the league is pretty darn meaningful.

As you can see with the new column on the far right, tracking change in position, Louisville City is the big riser this week with a road win of its own. Scoring six goals in a venue where NYRBII hadn’t given up more than three all year will do that for you. Even giving up four wasn’t all that bad, given the Baby Bulls are a high-scoring outfit at home (that output is only a three-way tie for fifth-most scored at home this season for them).

Bethlehem Steel is also a big riser, not for its 2-1 loss to Pittsburgh Riverhounds, but for smacking Charlotte Independence 3-0 on the road (and Charlotte is an OK team there, though pretty bad away from the Queen City). To me, the loss to Pittsburgh isn’t even that bad – a one-goal margin to a team that wins by one or draws basically every game, regardless of venue – though I was surprised the numbers considered it almost a full standard deviation below the average performance.

Charleston Battery dropped a couple spots for only earning a 1-0 home win over Atlanta United 2 (Nashville fans feel your pain there), Indy dropped despite being idle on account of the out-of-town scoreboard, Red Bulls dropped a couple for being on the other side of Louisville’s big day, and the remaining changes happened far enough down the table as to be… I don’t want to say uninteresting, because that’s unfair to the fans of those teams, but certainly a little less relevant to the big picture of USL.

Toronto beat Richmond, solidifying that the Kickers are the worst team in all the land (and though only winning 1-0 at home was a below-average performance in the grand scheme, it was better than “loss to Toronto”‘s impact on Richmond’s averages – and again, Nashville fans feel the pain there).

What it means for Nashville SC

Is the slump over? It’s impossible to tell with just a two-game sample. Similarly, it was impossible to say Nashville would miss the playoffs because of a slump that included just a 1-2-2 record in the end (not ideal, obviously, especially against that competition, but 1.0 points per game in the worst stretch of your season isn’t a kiss of death).

What I’m trying to say here is that “what happened in the most recent game” and “what the season as a whole adds up to” are not the same thing. If your analysis fails to realize that, you are wrong. The flipside of that for the more recent results is similar to what I said in the above paragraph: we can’t tell if Nashville’s slump is over just because of a road draw against the East’s best team and a home win over an OK one. Even a loss in Louisville this weekend would be more in the “these are the expectations” category than a sign that the slump is ongoing. A win or draw would be enough for me to say NSC has re-found its form.

After this weekend’s game, though, Nashville has only one contest against teams better than it (hosting Charleston Sept. 22) before the season finale against Cincinnati. Similarly, seven of the final eleven games will be at home. If there’s a time to make a late run up the table, this is it. And if they begin it with a road result in Louisville – which as I’ve said I’m not really expecting – I could see a finish as high as third in the East.