In 2013, Caleb Porter led a remarkable turnaround for the Portland Timbers, garnering coach of the year honors in the process. The team only lost five times in 34 regular season games (now seven in 40 counting 2014). Despite this enormous success, there is some vague discontent in the Rose City. The reason? Of the 33 games the Timbers have gotten a result from, the team has only 14 wins compared to 19 draws. This is highly unusual. Even if Portland drew an above average number of times (let's say 35%), you would expect the team to have 19 wins and only 14 draws from those 33 results.
All indications are that the abnormally high draw rate being experienced in Portland is not sustainable and will regress toward the league's average draw rate in due course. Caleb Porter is still an excellent coach and team seems very likely to be in the hunt for the Western Conference crown.
Alternate Table Realities
There was some discussion on twitter about MLS' high draw rate (38%) in the first month of the 2014 season. Ravi Ramineni, of the Sounders, made an interesting comment.
The odd part is how PTFC had the highest GD while half of their matches were draws.
ReplyDeleteIt is unusual and (I think) is a sign of just how unlucky they were
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