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Table Power

This rating method combines points per game with the quality of opposition played (also measured in points per game). It’s blind to home/away splits as well as scoring margin. The goal is to project a final table based on the games already played.

USL East power rankings:

Tampa Bay Rowdies – 70.07 projected points Indy Eleven (+1) – 68.55 points NYRB2 (+1) – 64.23 points Ottawa Fury (+1) – 60.90 points Nashville (+1) – 60.59 points North Carolina (+2) – 58.90 points Saint Louis (-5) – 57.82 points Louisville City (-1) – 53.28 points Charleston Battery – 51.10 points Pittsburgh Riverhounds – 42.48 points Birmingham Legion – 34.84 points Atlanta United 2 – 34.46 points Loudoun United (+1) – 34.30 points Bethlehem Steel (-1) – 30.98 points Memphis 901 – 26.43 points Hartford Athletic (+2) – 23.82 points Charlotte Independence – 22.88 points Swope Park Rangers (-2) – 20.67 points

It was a wild weekend at the top of the East, with Tampa Bay Rowdies taking their first loss – and at home, which is wild given the club’s history of being great in St. Pete and horrible on the road – Hartford Athletic not only winning, but beating a team that had been very close to the top of the league in Saint Louis FC, and Pittsburgh (OK, I’m stretching the definition of “top” here) missing a stoppage-time penalty kick to settle for a draw with Ottawa Fury. STLFC goes down, down, down, and Tampa loses a significant portion of its cushion at the top of the league, but is still No. 1.

Indy, Red Bull, Nashville, Louisville, and Charleston took care of business against teams in the bottom half of the table, and their movement is mostly more about who shifted around them rather than a whole lot learned of those teams.

Indy is starting to look like the team we expected in preseason from a results perspective, at least: they’re not often pretty doing it, but the Eleven are getting the job done home and road against whomever they face, good or bad, and that’s all you can ask of them. Maybe you could ask for their high-profile offseason signings to score a bit more, but hey, they’re winning (or drawing).

We’re really settling into the tiers I’ve identified for the past couple weeks – with some obvious shifting available, a la Saint Louis – and if current form holds true enough, there looks to be a pretty hard line between the playoff positions and those squads missing out. That’s not fate, of course: Pittsburgh was in range of being caught by Birmingham just this weekend, and there’s still enough season that Tampa Bay could theoretically finish 45 points behind Hartford Athletic, but that dividing line has been consistent for several weeks now, and it would take a change in form to see anyone’s playoff projection (in or our) change.

Speaking of Hartford, though, hey! Huge win for Athletic, which is now 1-1-3 (0.8 points per game) at home, and looking like a second-half run is possible when their home games start to pile up. They’re coming from a deep, deep position, but they’re one team whose current form could see them shoot up the table if it continues.

USL West power rankings

El Paso Locomotive (+1) – 62.17 points Phoenix Rising (+4) – 59.02 points New Mexico United (-2) – 58.77 projected points Portland Timbers 2 (-1) – 57.72 points Fresno FC – 54.72 projected points Sacramento Republic (+4) – 53.76 points Reno 1868 (-3) – 51.49 points Austin Bold (-1) – 50.37 points OKC Energy (-1) – 47.93 points Orange County (-1) – 45.95 points Real Monarchs (+3) – 42.26 points Tulsa Roughnecks (-1) – 40.77 points Rio Grande Valley (-1) – 38.69 points Las Vegas Lights (+1) – 36.85 points LA Galaxy II (-2) – 36.52 points San Antonio (+1) – 35.00 points Colorado Springs Switchbacks (-1) – 34.66 points Tacoma Defiance – 19.16 points

Meanwhile out West, Saturday evening somehow managed to be almost as crazy as it was in the East: previous No. 1 New Mexico was thrashed at home by Sacramento, a struggling San Antonio knocked off Reno, Real Monarchs and Rio Grande Valley played an eight goal game, and there was plenty of shakeup top to (second-)bottom. The West was stable to an almost annoying degree early in the season, and it’s making the hell up for lost time.

Meanwhile, Phoenix took the field a night earlier than most of their USL brethren, and while they’ve been sliding up the table in workmanlike fashion recently, they hit the accelerator for a 5-0 win. Yes, it was against a Tulsa team that’s clearly trending down, but a Phoenix team that underachieved to start the year and had quietly righted the ship will be quiet no more.

It’s El Paso they’ll be chasing now, with one expansion team replacing another atop the table. Something tells me they will not be the last team to occupy the No. 1 spot.

As for the playoff race out West, I would say based on current form (and with the caveat that this side of things has been more prone to wild swings lately) that Sacramento is in the last “safely in” playoff position with nearly 12 points separating them from 11th place. It’s worth noting the Republic was 10th literally last week though, so again, it’s too early to make sweeping statements with any expectation they’ll hold true for long.

It is worth noting that the West – while more volatile – has played a little bit more of its schedule so far this season: 32.8% of games are completed, compared to 31.9% in the East. While the boys on the right side of the Mississippi seems to have more stability in form, those on the left are closer to the actual endpoint of the season. You can largely blame weather (five games have been abandoned and rescheduled for later in the year, all of them in the Eastern Conference), and the East probably won’t catch up until September,

Pure Power

This ratings method uses goals for/against in each individual game (compared to the opponent’s averages) to determine teams’ overall quality. It’s blind to result but not location or score, making it essentially the opposite metric of the Table Power.

Saint Louis’s loss to Hartford eliminated the final two statistical quirks (STLFC zero road goals allowed, Hartford exactly one goal in every home game), so the data are now robust – though it’s worth noting that there remains a small-if-valid sample size in a couple spots.

Zero is average for offense, defense, and total. A team with a 2.0 overall rating would be two standard deviations better than average (by some combination of offensive and defensive quality), 1.0 is a single standard deviation better, etc.

Thanks to Tampa not only losing, but doing so convincingly – along with their own convincing win – Phoenix Rising takes over the top spot in strength. The offense and defense are both borderline elite (this is one of the more balanced teams out there), and the results are also finally breaking their way – as you can see in the table power above.

Other major swings include an understandable slide for New Mexico United after a draw to OKC and a 3-0 home loss to Sacramento (and down the table, the Republic’s corresponding rise), North Carolina earning the positive end of Tampa’s minor fall from grace, Colorado Springs making big gainz by doing what is expected against Tacoma, Saint Louis and Hartford getting opposite ends of the same result…

…and weirdly, Ottawa moving way up after drawing Pittsburgh? Winning at Highmark is darn near impossible, and earning a draw there against the Riverhounds is very good. But to move up three spots on that result is a little odd. Has to be a combination of that result and the out-of-town scoreboard (New Mexico and Saint Louis both did their respective parts). Both the table power and pure power metrics like Ottawa more than makes sense to me, so I guess we’ll see over the course of the year if the computers have outsmarted the humans.

Games to watch

Here are the games that should have interesting impacts on some of the numbers.