By Sean Steffen (@seansteffen)

With the retirement of Landon Donovan, the Galaxy have lost a player who in large part defined their identity. To say that the LA Galaxy are a team in flux is an understatement, which makes making predictions about next season a fool’s errand. But the fear of looking foolish has never been an adequate deterrent in my writing career, so let’s give this a shot.

Let’s make no mistake about it: Landon Donovan was a chance creating God. Last year 32.2% of the Galaxy’s total xG came from either a Donovan shot or pass. His stylistic impact on the team was perhaps even greater. This can be backed up by my own recent passing analysis of the team which can be read here.

In short, I isolated two distinct buildup styles that the 2014 Galaxy employed to score and Donovan was involved in 75% of them. He was also the driving force behind the famed "Tiki-Taco" style of play which lead to Gyasi Zardes getting so many uncontested shots within the box, a phenomenon I wrote about here. Now that 75% is admittedly skewed somewhat by my methodology since my article was aimed more at analyzing style than overall number, however, if does show that Donovan either scored or was within four passes of a bare minimum of 39% of the Galaxy’s assisted non-set-piece goals.

It took a lot of math, but I think we've finally proven this Donovan fellow was pretty good at soccer. The obvious question becomes, who replaces him, and how does that effect the Galaxy’s xG numbers? This is a huge question mark because the Galaxy have played few preseason games and have rotated players at left mid to a point that it’s impossible to guess who will be starting. As of now, Bradford Jamieson IV looks to be Bruce’s pick to be the starting left mid on opening day (whenever that will be). We have no data available on Jamieson, but his season in USL Pro last year suggests he will be a player that will contribute mainly by way of expected goal and will have few expected assists. Now, from a numbers standpoint, a goal is a goal, however, the expected goal numbers of an entire team fall when chance creation is depleted, which is a very real possibility for the Galaxy next year.

Luckily for the Galaxy, however, their expected goal difference totals from last year were so great, that they actually have a considerable amount of xG to give, if the defense can remain consistent. I addressed this quite thoroughly in this article, but here is a key takeaway