First off, it is time to throw the stats out the window. Statistics and analytics are a good for predicting outcomes over a long period of time, for example the teams with the top 3 TSR’s are in the playoffs.

What they’re not good is one off results. For example, Seattle has only dropped points on 8 occasions all year. Which shows their dominance, however half of those dropped points came against teams that didn’t make the playoffs. If you flip a coin enough times you’ll get to 50%, but that doesn’t help you predict what’s coming next.

This match up is by far the more intriguing of the two. Not only because it is a rematch of last year’s compelling semi-final. These teams are also two of my favorite statistically because they both demonstrate the power of TSR. Both do a lot of things right and both result in the same thing: wins. Both teams outshoot their opponents regularly, Kansas City has a TSR of .55 and Portland has a TSR of .57. It doesn’t matter that they have slightly lower PDO or luck ratings, because of how they control the game. Since they consistently take more shots than their opponents it doesn’t matter that they both convert them below league average, because they also don’t let their opponents shot as much also. For both teams their TSR and PDO are fairly similar, Portland has a slight edge in both, but nothing here really distinguishes the two.

Looking at the season series, it would be easy to hand this weekend’s game to Portland, as they won the season series by a combined score of 10-3. It seems pretty clear then, put your money down on Portland and lets move on to the Sunday’s match up, right?

Not so fast. Looking at the underlying stats shows another story. Portland scored more than 3x as many goals as Kansas City, they should have substantially more shots, right? No. The numbers show a much closer season series. Portland has only taken 4 more shots then Kansas City throughout their series. The difference has been that Portland played extremely well in these 3 games, converting 41% of their shots on goal, which is almost double their season rate and their save percentage was at 80% which is 8% higher than their regular season rate.

What does this all mean? Well both of these numbers are highly volatile, which means they will most likely regress. While the shot ratio for the game is slightly in the favor of Portland, until the last game (the 7-1 Portland win), they were actually at .50 TSR at 25 to 25 shots taken/allowed. I have a very hard time picking between the two teams, for me it comes down to two main factors.

For Portland, a team with Christine Sinclar, Alex Morgan, Tobin Heath, and Allie Long, the key to winning this game is surprisingly their net minder Nadine Angerer. The current holder of the Ballon ‘dOr, you would expect her to be the elite goal keeper, and the Portland Thorns to have one of the best save percentages in the league. However, it is actually the opposite. Portland has a save percentage of 70.2%. To put this in perspective, Seattle has a save percentage nearly 12% better and only 2 teams have a worse one, Washington and Boston. However in the season series against Kansas City, Angerer has only given up 3 goals and has made 12 saves. The three goals allowed were a penalty, a shot where she was wrong footed by a deflection, and a golazo from about 10 yards. If Angerer continues her form against Kansas City, then I would give Portland the edge, however if instead we get the Angerer from the rest of the regular season I would give the edge to Kansas City.

For Kansas City though, the key is limiting the mental errors. This may seem like an obvious ask, but this rings especially true for Kansas City against Portland. All year has Kansas City has only given up 32 goals, only 2 teams have allowed less goals. Almost a third of their goals allowed have been scored by Portland (10/32). A big part of this is mental errors committed. Many of these mental mistakes come from places you least expect, the hallmarks of how Kansas City plays, such as their energetic pressing and passing out of the back. Many of these mistakes have lead directly to goals. For example, all season Kansas City has only given up 5 penalties, however 2 of them were against Portland. Another example is in the third game, Kansas City failed to close down and mark Portland on short corners and twice Portland scored. What does it look like when Kansas City eliminates the mental mistakes? We know because in their second match-up Kansas City did exactly that and was able to win 1-0 at home. If Kansas City can keep their mental mistakes at a minimal and play a clean game, they have a good shot at winning.

Thank you for reading. And remember to tune into to ESPN2 at 1 pm ET to watch the game. If you have any comments be sure to either leave them below or tweet at me @huanandonly.