Would Bair have gotten more playing time next game if he had scored? Would Busio have earned less if he’d missed? On a case by case basis it’s hard to say. But the data suggests that, in general, MLS coaches reward attackers for scoring or punish them for missing memorable chances—and those lineup decisions may be hard to justify.

Coaches — They're Just Like Us!

If a decade of analytics work on shot metrics has taught us anything, it's that soccer-watching humans are hardwired to care too much about finishing. Is it a skill? Yeah, of course. Anyone who tells you they're as good as Lionel Messi at kicking a ball into a net should be assigned to either a Champions League roster or Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. But the differences in professional attackers' likelihood of scoring from similar situations are slight enough that finding good shots is a more valuable skill than finishing them. In fact, to even guess at differences in shooting ability you'll need data on hundreds of shots per player.

Unfortunately, that's just not a natural way to think about soccer. We watch sports to find out which players can do really difficult things marginally better than their fellow pros. It's hard not to see everything as proof of skill. People like heuristics, shortcuts that help us draw practical inferences right away instead of waiting for data to pile up. And we like narratives, running dramas where the young forward who cost our team last week's game seals his fate as a bottler or finds redemption depending on whether this weekend's two shots go in. As Joan Didion probably wrote somewhere, we tell ourselves stories in order to live with our choice to spend two hours watching the Vancouver Whitecaps.