Another week, another loss. It serves neither the readers of The Denver Post nor my own fragile mental health to break down in detail the specific tactical failings of the Colorado Rapids in this past Saturday’s 3-2 loss to D.C. United. Suffice to say the defensive back four made critical mistakes, and Colorado paid dearly for them.

On the first goal, Colorado left United’s Donovan Pines un-defended in the 18-yard box, and he flicked a headed pass across to Luciano Acosta for a goal. On the second, Jack Price, Tommy Smith and Sam Vines were all ill-prepared and ill-positioned to stop Lucas Rodriguez and Chris Durkin from combining through the lines for a goal. On the third, the ball takes a bad bounce off Kellyn Acosta, and Kofi Opare takes a touch and makes it worse, as the ball falls right into the path of onrushing United midfielder Lucas Rodríguez. As the 21-year-old Argentinian hits the accelerator, Smith is absolutely skinned, and the Rapids are down 3-1.

Those three goals were scored in the span of just 7:37.

Normally I would write what an epic catastrophe that is. But that would make it sound like this is an exception to the Rapids’ normal play. It is not.

Colorado’s passing and positioning continue to be just a little bit off compared to the rest of the league, and week after week, they get punished for it. To date, the team has conceded 19 goals; worst in MLS.

Throw-ins, quick passes

There are a lot of little items that caught my eye this past week.

Sam Vines got his first start ever with the Rapids. This follows a lifetime with the club as a youth player at the U-15, U-17 and U-19 levels. Sam started with the club as a 13-year-old — he was identified by the club’s academy team, led by Development Director Brian Crookham, as a player in Colorado Springs. Sam’s parents, Mark and Deena Vines, took the drive up I-25 to Denver and back again regularly for training and games for Sam to get the opportunity at the highest levels. In 2018, Vines was the left back for the Rapids’ USL affiliate Charlotte Independence. He had a good game, bar that one error mentioned above. I imagine the experience of playing his first MLS match was pretty special. But I also imagine that, in a pause in the game action, Sam gazed across the field to see former Manchester United talisman and EPL legend Wayne Rooney a mere 30 yards away and thought “This is really something … ”

Speaking of Rooney, there was a bit of an MLS kerfuffle last week as fans in Vancouver showed up in droves, and often in LA Galaxy jerseys, to see football legend Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Whitecaps midfielder Felipe Martins was not pleased to hear the cheers for the opposition, and in a halftime interview, he let the fans know.

Felipe Martins not too happy that the BC Place crowd is cheering for Zlatan. "I think this is kind of sad." #VANvLA pic.twitter.com/xMnGF2DgB1 — Adam Serrano (@AdamSerrano) April 6, 2019

Which begs the question: Is it OK to set aside your team loyalties for a week and root for a European legend? Is it to be considered more acceptable to cheer for a player like Zlatan or Rooney or Bastian Schweinsteiger if the local team is lousy? I personally wouldn’t do it, but I’m OK with it if somebody else does it. If your local club doesn’t give you much to cheer about, then is it so wrong to come to a game just to see Wayne Rooney in person, so that someday, you can tell your grandchildren?

After the Rapids’ loss to D.C. United, Colorado midfielder Nicolas Mezquida said, “We need to score. If we want to win and get more points, we need to score. We push hard, take a lot of shots, and create a lot of chances, but if we don’t score we can’t win games.”

Looking just at the advanced metric “expected goals,” you could argue that the Rapids have been a little bit unlucky, or at least that their finishing has been below average while their opponent’s finishing has been above average. “Expected goals,” or “xG” for short, takes a huge amount of mathematical data on shots and shot location from the previous season, and then assigns every shot a value based on how likely or unlikely it is for any one shot to go in. Add all the shots together, and you can determine whether a team should have scored more often than it did, but were either unlucky or shot poorly. Here’s an extreme example from a recent Serie A match in Italy, including the shot chart — bigger dots are higher percentage shots, smaller dots are lower percentages:

Atalanta had 47 shots and 5.86 xG in today's SCORELESS DRAW vs Empoli. That's the highest xG total without scoring in any of the 85K games in our dataset. pic.twitter.com/BUjEgPcQbq — Paul Carr (@PaulCarr) April 15, 2019

Atalanta’s 5.86 xG means that, statistically speaking, in an average game in which all those shots originated from the exact same places, they would score almost six goals. Looking back at Rapids games from this season, we see Colorado bettering its opponent on xG on three occasions, although not quite to the extreme of Empoli and Atalanta. In the Rapids’ last game against D.C. United, which they lost 3-2, they generated 1.64 xG, while United had 0.84 xG; meaning Colorado shot with close-to-average effectiveness while DC United shot better than expected. Against Houston on March 31, Colorado had an xG of 1.81 while the Dynamo created shots worth just 1.42 of xG; Houston won 4-1. And against Sporting Kansas City on March 17, the Rapids’ xG was 1.24; Sporting’s was 0.81. That game ended in a 1-1 draw. Instead of three wins from those matches, Colorado emerged with a draw and two losses. All of those numbers come by way of the awesome work that’s done by the folks at AmericanSoccerAnalysis.com.

This could mean one of three things, or a little bit of all three. It could mean the Rapids are a little unlucky — other teams have been taking shots and they’ve hit the boot just right to go in. Or it could mean that Colorado’s strikers are below average to this point in the season — that the struggles of the team are due to their shotmakers simply not making shots, which lines up with Mezquida’s comments. Or it could also mean that Colorado’s defenders and goalkeeper are really the ones that are below average, since in three matches with a total xG conceded of 3.07, the Rapids actually gave up eight goals — an average defensive effort pressures the shooter or deflects the ball away from the target more often.

As it stands, we know that at least one of the following three things is true: the finishing isn’t quite good enough, the defense is woeful and/or the team is somewhat unlucky. We know for certain, however, that all the numbers add up to a team that will start Week Eight of the MLS season still searching for a victory.