2020 Season Preview: New York Red Bulls

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2020 Season Preview: New York Red Bulls

Last season was a down year for the New York Red Bulls, and yet they still ended their season with a perfectly respectable first round playoff loss. They enter 2020 with a few franchise faces missing, but primed for a new youth movement.

2019 in Review

What a disappointing season 2019 was for the New York Red Bulls. The Red Bulls are in an interesting place these days as an organization. Having lost the greatest manager in the world (don’t look it up, trust me it’s true I did the math), the Chris Armas era has been, well, completely unremarkable. Whereas in previous seasons the organization drew plaudits for finding so much success despite having a low payroll, focusing mainly on youth and promoting from within, last season they sort of resembled what you’d expect from a team that had a low payroll, and focused on youth and promoting from within.

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2020 Season Preview: Los Angeles FC

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2020 Season Preview: Los Angeles FC

Bob Bradley came in with something to prove in 2018, the franchise’s first year. In interview after interview, he reminded folks that he skippered Chicago Fire to the double in 1998, the club’s first year of existence, winning both MLS Cup and the US Open Cup. Bob had similar ambitions for LAFC, and his ownership built him a team - with Carlos Vela and Walker Zimmerman and Eduard Atuesta and Laurent Ciman - that got pretty close in both 2018 and 2019.

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Offseason Outlook: New York Red Bulls

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Offseason Outlook: New York Red Bulls

The New York Red Bulls have a strong developmental and tactical system in place, from the first team to the academy, allowing them to maintain a high floor performance-wise, as the losses of several high-profile players have not negatively affected them as much as expected. However, the team’s lack of spending (3rd lowest salary outlay in the league) on high-end talent appeared to catch up with them this season, as their point total plummeted from 71 to 48. More importantly in terms of future performance, its xP dropped from 58.8 to 47.6. Additionally, its xGD dropped from the second highest in the league in 2018—18.6—to right around the equator (3.8). In English, the Red Bulls went from being one of the league’s elite teams to one that was merely average. With major contracts like Bradley Wright-Phillips’ coming off the books this offseason, as well as the potential departure of stalwart and 2018 MLS Defender of the Year Aaron Long, the Red Bulls have the opportunity to retool their roster significantly to complement their steady pipeline of MLS-ready academy players. Either that, or they are looking at a severe personnel crisis that could see them lose ground to more profligate clubs.

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New York Red Bulls: Postseason Preview

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New York Red Bulls: Postseason Preview

At times this season the New York Red Bulls have looked like a very good soccer team, sometimes even harkening back to the 2018 Red Bull team that set (what was then) an MLS record for points in a season. Case in point, nine of New York’s 14 wins this year have come against playoff teams. That included wins over FC Dallas, Atlanta, and Real Salt Lake during a five match unbeaten stretch early in the season and back to back wins over Portland and Philadelphia during a late season run to put them into the playoffs.

There have also been times when the Red Bulls have looked exceptionally mediocre. They’ve looked like a team that not only lost its most important player in Tyler Adams, but also lost a whole lot more of something else as well, despite mostly returning their entire squad from 2018. The flip side of nine wins against playoff teams was picking up only one point from four games against Montreal and Columbus.

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Records Are Fun - Let's Acknowledge These Accomplishments Before Vela Erases Them

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Records Are Fun - Let's Acknowledge These Accomplishments Before Vela Erases Them

Records are fun. Recognizable numbers like 56 (game hitting streak - baseball), 100 (points in a game - basketball), 2,000 (rushing yards - football), 61 70 73 (home runs - baseball) give everyone something to root for and an easy way to track the greatest games or seasons of all time.

For a long time, MLS had 27. In the inaugural 1996 season, Roy Lassiter scored 27 goals, and no one was able to match it for a decade and a half. But then a man named Wondo hit the figure in 2012, Bradley Wright-Phillips did it again in 2014, and a seemingly very angry young man named Josef Martinez obliterated the mark with 31 goals last season.

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Expected Narratives Week 33: End of Year Awards 2018

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Expected Narratives Week 33: End of Year Awards 2018

It was a pretty light weekend in Major League Soccer featuring a match seeking to answer that age old question “what happens when the opposite of an immovable object meets the opposite of an unstoppable force?” The answer? Colorado wins 2-0, I guess. That match will probably be remembered more for the altercation following the final whistle which featured two players being showed red cards FIFTEEN minutes into stoppage time so I guess Colorado and MInnesota aren't’ best friends now, which could be problematic as previously they seem to be the only destinations that would actually want some of the other’s lackluster players. I sure hope they work it out. I’ve got $5 on a Franz Pangop for Yannick Boli trade.

But also, Oh my god DC United are just so irresistible right now. It’s like watching Michael Jordan in that flu game but instead of Michael Jordan it’s more like BJ Armstrong and instead of the flu it had something vaguely to do with raccoons. I predicted a few weeks ago that this team would find its way to the postseason and I’m feeling more and more confident about this every week. Watching people eat their crow flavored Pot Noodle about Wayne Rooney has become appointment viewing during office hours. To say Rooney has been a revelation is only true if you’re one of these people who have apparently never once watched Wayne Rooney play soccer. You aren’t seeing some surprising late career renaissance version of a softer more reflective Rooney, you’re getting the same bullish kid in a dad’s body with an innate ability to grab a game by the scruff of its neck and drag it wherever he wants.

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Setting the Table Week 29: Gressel, Guttierez, and getting ready for the playoffs

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Setting the Table Week 29: Gressel, Guttierez, and getting ready for the playoffs

Welcome to Setting the Table. Each week we take some time to focus on the best chance creators in MLS from the last weekend. If you want to see the best chances that were wasted check out Lowered Expectations. Here we focus on chances that ended with the ball in the back of the net.

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Chris Armas’ transformation of the New York Red Bulls

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Chris Armas’ transformation of the New York Red Bulls

Coaching the New York Red Bulls must be a dream for most managers in North America's soccer circle, but Chris Armas also has had one of the toughest tasks in MLS. A mid-season takeover is never easy, let alone the takeover of a contender from the legendary Jesse Marsch. The Red Bulls organization may have boasted that they focus on the same pressing style starting from the academy, but everyone has their own unique ideas they want to implement. Armas is treading a fine line: he is introducing new elements while also keeping what was working for Marsch. The Red Bulls are still playing a similar style of soccer, so it appears Armas has been making quantitative, rather than qualitative, changes. Deciphering those changes will require some analytics techniques.

I first look at how New York has fared under the two managers using different variants of Expected Possession Goal (xPG). I recommend you read that full article, but in short it’s a score that measures the risks a team bears vs the rewards it creates. In short, Negative xPG measures the risks a team bears, while Mistake xPG measures the amount of turnovers a team commits from those risks.

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The Legend of Josef Martinez and what it takes to get to 27 (and more) goals

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The Legend of Josef Martinez and what it takes to get to 27 (and more) goals

Josef Martinez is a man on fire, and, as of writing this, he currently sits on 28 goals in 2018, having just broken the all time scoring record of 27 first set by Roy Lassiter in MLS’ inaugural season and matched by Chris Wondolowski in 2012 and Bradley Wright Phillips in 2014.

But I want to take this opportunity to look at how goal scorers score goals, and compare Wondolowski, Bradley Wright-Phillips and Martinez (we don’t have data on Lassiter, sadly) on their march to 27. Yes, Martinez has broken the record, but this article is going to deal with his stats on the way to 27. For a more complete breakdown of his data and where he lands, I’m sure someone at ASA (let’s say, Harrison) will write you that article at the end of the year.

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