By Kevin Minkus (@kevinminkus)

There’s been a decent amount of discussion this week about how the pace of play in MLS looked quicker in week one than it typically does. Teams like Atlanta, New York Red Bulls, Kansas City, and Houston all came flying out of the gate, with fairly up-tempo styles of play both with the ball and without the ball.

Unfortunately, coming up with a metric for pace is pretty tricky, and it depends specifically on what type of pace you’re talking about. Going all the way back to 2013, Ted Knutson looked at pace as the total number of shots taken in a game. More recently, Thom Lawrence looked at pace as the distance covered over time within a team’s possessions. Both of these definitions speak to a certain amount of directness of play that I don’t think meshes with what people currently mean when they say MLS is playing ‘faster’ so far this year.

Alex Olshansky has done a lot of work to define tempo within MLS based on the number of possessions in a match. This is probably a pretty good stand-in for the type of pace MLS fans and analysts are talking about- a faster pace means the ball is changing between teams more quickly. In a similar vein, Matthew Doyle recently used total passes per game as a shorthand for MLS’s pace. Generally I think the rationale there is that the more passes made, the quicker and more often the ball moves, and the quicker a player makes a decision about how the ball will move, and therefore the faster the pace. This, I’d suggest, is what is currently meant by ‘pace’, and therefore I think the logic behind the metric is sound.

Going by this definition, we do in fact see an uptick in pace in week one of 2017 over week one of the two seasons prior. There were 944 total passes attempted per game in week one this year, versus 906 in 2016 and 895 in 2015 (these are a bit different numbers than what Matt Doyle has, since the data is different).

Here’s where the total passes of the 11 games of this past weekend fall on a density plot of all games played since 2015: