Wow. Stop me if you’ve heard this before but Borek Dockal (or just insert any other Union player here) just missed out on a point blank shot. Analysis.

I’m not going to address this shot. It is what it is and I’m tired of dissecting these Union shots only to have someone just distill it down to “they’re not good." The growing majority of people think the Philadelphia Union are, and you might want to be sitting down for this---bad.

Yeah, look, I’m not so sure I buy into all of that. Looking at both expected goals against and shots against they’re fourth overall, and in expected goals for they're seventh. They’ve been really solid, and so far it’s these exact plays that continually end up falling in their opponents' favor that are the difference in them sitting out of the playoffs than in a potential playoff spot.

Their PDO, TSR, and GD-xGD all point to the team being both A) unlucky and B) headed back towards positive regression of the mean. It’s not just “one stat” saying this but a collection of various pieces of evidence. What’s more, they’re only 7th overall in the Eastern Conference on points per game, and trail New England by all of three points.

I realize that this isn’t a popular opinion and it comes on the heels of me tearing into Earnie Stewart’s time with the Union on twitter. But this team has some really good underlying numbers and their shot creation/prevention process is much better than at any other time in their history. There is the possibility they could continue to get “unlucky” and never return back to the mean, but with how consistent they’ve been at creating good shots, I’m buying belief stock.

Still, David Accam has not been the same player he was in Chicago. He’s not getting to the same dangerous spots and he’s not helping to create the same high leverage shots that he was consistently doing for Nemanja Nikolić last year and I’m honestly not sure why.

Accam has still been successful dribbling into the final third and at about the same rate as last year. My best guess is that he’s still settling into the Philadelphia attack, that’s also still trying to find it’s own identity at this stage too. This may just need more than two months worth of data to figure out.

Here are Accam's numbers per 96 minutes for each of his seasons in MLS: