The other day I did a preview of the highly anticipated match up between Kansas City and Portland. Today I’m going to be looking at Seattle and Washington. Once again I’m going to be looking at this mostly from a stats based point of view. For a refresher you can look at Richard Whittall’s primer here. TSR is the ratio of how many shots you take vs. how many you give up, .50 would be taking and giving the same amount of shots. PDO a metric that is measures a team’s luck. It does this by combining save percentage and shot percentage, both of which are highly volatile and most often quickly regress to their mean.

Looking at Seattle, there is only one thing to say about them. Simply the best. They locked up the regular season title absurdly early, failed to win on only 8 occasions, had the highest TSR (.60) in the league, the highest shot conversion percentage, the highest save percentage, and therefore also the league’s highest PDO. On the other hand Washington, despite finishing fourth, pales in comparison. Its TSR is only better than two teams, Boston and Houston (who were the two worst teams in the league), at .46. With a TSR that low and the fact that they finished in fourth place you would expect their PDO to be high, but it is actually slightly below the league average at 986. Washington not only failed to control the games but they were, from a statistical standpoint, not exactly lucky either. In fact, for all their goalie Ashyln Harris has brought to the team this year, they also had the league’s 2nd worse save percentage. Meaning they not only gave up a lot of shots, but the ones on target also had a high chance of going in. Looking simply at these numbers, Seattle has the edge. They not only dominate the game, with an absurdly high TSR, they are also extremely efficient and playing with luck on their side. Seattle seemingly did everything right this year to put them in a place to win.

While Seattle was a highly dominant outfit throughout the year, how did Washington make the playoffs with such a low TSR and average luck? 9 out of 10 of the team’s wins came by one goal; their only multi-goal win was against Kansas City in their second win of the year. That would explain how the Spirit were able to make it through with not only a weak TSR and PDO but also a goal differential of -7. While this may be a bad sign about Washington’s ability to repeat this season’s success (goal differential statistically has been proven to be another indicator of future performance) it may be good for their playoff run, their success in close games shows that they have experience playing in and winning close games.

The season series between the two, Seattle out scored Washington 6-3, and out shot them 40-17. Washington though in their last match up was 2 minutes and stoppage time away from beating Seattle 1-0. While the stats themselves give Seattle a lead, in a one off game anything is possible. Washington has lead the series twice, while they gave up the lead in both situations, it shows that they aren’t scared of Seattle. The problem is that both times they have given up that lead, and Seattle has proven that they are a team that can play from behind.

From a season long statistical point of view, I don’t think that there is a lot going for Washington. However in a one off game, I think Washington probably has a better shot than the statistics suggest and could surprise people, especially after watching their last game against Seattle. Remember to tune in on ESPN2 at 3 pm EST on Sunday