The MLSNP Inefficiency: Forecasting Prospects, Intra-League Arbitrage, and Cap Mechanics

Hello and welcome to another episode of the American Soccer Analysis Show. I am your host, Kieran and I am joined by my two favorite gentlemen in the whole world, Benjamin Benito-Swarez-Bellman, and Harrison Highlife Crowe, gentlemen, the World Cup is over, and the less is back. League's Cup break is gone. We played for two games and then we took another two-week break if your team sucked and you didn't get to play. Try to see beat Miami. Seattle has like not one in 12 games. Colorado, Matt Wells is a baller. We're flying. How is everyone doing? Kieran, I'm under the impression that we're still in a break for at least another two months. Yeah, to come to the finals, they're playing well. It's been seasons now, right? To come to the finals, they're playing well either. Yeah, because all their players play for the first time. I'm like, yeah, are they being staffed by a high school team now or how does that work? Yeah, that is a funny thought. Who is the reserve team for the reserve team? I guess it's like your U17 MLS next team, but very funny. Yeah, we're back and we have some more clarity on where the season is going, right? The summer transfer window has two weeks, a little bit less than two weeks, a week left in it. Some teams are making big moves. Sporting Kansas City have hired a new head of analysis that they stole from Nottingham Forest and immediately put out job posting for data engineer, data scientist, data analyst, boom, boom, boom. That is a team who will be rocketing up the off-season rankings next year. Then tried to spend $25 million on Nicholas Fernandez-Marcow, which sure we have Dan Yovalyich moving to Seattle. We have a bunch of teams who have nothing left to play for and should be playing next pro kids. That's where we are going to start today. I'm going to shamelessly plug that I wrote something that I think was quite cool, where me and brother Claude went to town on basically taking an old opta paper where they tried to forecast transfers and used the same methodology to project MLS next pro kids coming up to the first team. This is a thing we are a firmly hashtag player kids podcast. We've talked a lot with, we talked with Nico Soverhu about this, we talked with Matt Fifer about this, we've talked about in the past when, prior to me, when you guys spoke to Sean Davis about the Red Bulls and kind of that whole thing. Sean Davis, right? I messed that up for now. We've talked to all these people about it's a really important tool and how it can get used. We wanted to talk about some of the kids there and some of the ways that we think teams can be much smarter about this with that. Gentlemen, I wrote this and I didn't talk to either of you at all until it came out. This was my secret. I went into my hidey hole. We didn't do a podcast and just me and Claude went into the cave and came out with with the Rosetta Stone. What say you about this? What do you think? Do you have questions? Do you have thoughts? Ben, you worked at a club where smart teams already doing this? What do we think? Well, I can either confirm nor deny what what was going on behind the scenes there. Fair. But I do want to say that this has been something that I think we've been wondering for a while. I feel like this is a conversation that we are having with USL when MLS teams are feeling two teams in that league. Especially that one because it was such an interesting mix of older and younger players all at once. Maybe that's something we could look into as rolling that back and comparing how the USL transfers compared to this. When I think of that, I'm thinking of players like, oh God, he now plays for LAFC, played for the Red Bulls, center back. Aaron Long, thank you. Once upon a time, this was the pathway for people who were drafted and didn't quite find their landing spot and maybe needed some technical development or maybe needed to grow or maybe needed to change positions and learn that position in a different environment. And I feel like that's a very different type of leap to what you're looking at specifically with next pro, which is here, here are the kids. They're playing at a league that is mostly kids. Like you're not, you're not a senior player playing in this league if you're not injured. So this, this is like an organizational shift. And what I thought really interesting about this was like, it wasn't just big number to big number. And I feel like that, that's always the temptation when when we are looking at these stats before without any sort of model to transfer from one week to the next. And like, I remember you think you shouted me out when the, I pointed out that the switchbacks saw one of the fullbacks from the hotel or whatever. Yes. Yeah, I got the most amazing name of all time that I've already forgotten. So hit like the, I think he had like a 0.3 g plus per 96 in this in in a next pro. And the projection frame was like 0.02, which is really good for a 19 year old with zero first team minutes thus far. Like if you're getting that from, from your players, you know, there's, there's a, there's a question to be asked whether there should be more of a line happening in a place like Colorado where, you know, there are transfers that happen. But I feel like there's an emphasis on needing that collective. Like for a while, this team felt very deep. I feel like it's not feeling so deep for, but, you know, could I, this, this is a question that I think club need to be taking a bit more seriously. And you had a great tweet here. And then I think you should bring up more, which is like other other teams next pro teams should be viewed as like scoutable areas for talent now. Like this isn't just, this isn't just those one offs anymore. Like you need to be scouting MLS next pro and like seriously considering those moves as seriously as a lot of the other international leagues at this point. I think the last point is like the, to me, the most pertinent where if you look at the NBA and the G league, which is the equivalent of kind of MLS next pro for, for the NBA, teams are pretty relentless about trying to pick off the best G league guys from other teams. Like if you look at training camp invites, it's very frequently. This guy had a very good G league season somewhere else, or if you look at summer league in Las Vegas, it's this guy had a very good G league somewhere else. And like they have two way contracts, which is like the equivalent of the supplemental roster and guys very regularly. Like the Raptors had a guy in preseason who had an amazing summer league. And they kind of dawdled on giving him a real contract. And the Clippers came in and we're like, yep, we'll give you two way. Come on, you'll join our supplemental roster. And I think in MLS, we haven't really seen that. We have not seen a lot of poaching from other next pro teams. You have some guys like I highlighted in the article, Prince and Ponsa at Vancouver, who is a guy that was in the NYCFC Academy, went to school, came back to the next pro team, looked really good. And just like didn't stick. And, but he was released. It wasn't, it wasn't, oh, we're going to, we're going to trade for him. And you think about guys like Sabberhalter, like Sabberhalter, Kasman Kuhver 50k from Columbus. And so to me, if I was a bad team, like if I pulled up the standings and I was like, realistically, we're not going to make the playoffs this year, what can I do the back half of the season to give us some stuff in the future? I would be looking at the teams who are at the top of the table, who probably want the cap flexibility for the off season of a couple, some extra game. And I'd just be calling, and I'd be like, hey, what do you want for this guy? Like Miami, you have these three guys in your next pro team who look cracked and you're not going to play them. Like what do you want? Or Nashville, like Huntsville have had loads of guys who've looked really interesting on G+. And you're like, maybe, or Vancouver or whatever team you want to go through the whole list. But I think there's a lot of value to be had there if you're a bad team that you could spend conceivably 500k in game and get five top MLS next pro prospects that are projecting to be like league average guys and are all younger than 23. And if they're good, you send them to like league minimum deals for four years and you're like, oh my god, I have this guy till he's 26 for nothing, for nothing. So I think for sure there's a tremendous amount of value there. Well, I mean, especially when you start talking about league average, like league average seems, doesn't seem great, right? Like we a lot of people would just kind of poo poo. Oh, that's just that guy, that's league average. League average is huge when you're playing seven games of 21 days, right? Like you're playing your 23rd, your 22nd, your 21st, you know, guys, we're just made jokes about Seattle playing all the decomba defiance players. I mean, having those players at your disposal is huge and it helps you kind of limp through some of these really tough congestion moments in this schedule because MLS is always, and I don't care if it's the summer or when they flip over the winter, they're going to have moments of congestion. That's just the reality. You have that around the world to where you know that especially with MLS and the way that they're going to cater towards in-season tournaments, especially with League of Meckys, you're going to have these huge congestion moments. And so having a league average center back, a league average midfielder that you can plug and play and give some guys some either limp through some injuries or be able to give them some minutes while someone rests. That's huge, huge. The difference between if you just like look at it as pure G plus, right? Like G plus converts, G plus difference converts to expected goal difference at like 0.7, 0.8, something like that. Some of that is like because of how we handle passing. But so if you say the difference between an league average player and a replacement level player, if they play 34 games, right? They play the entire season. It's about four goals of goal difference. So like I get these players are not playing the whole season. Let's say they play half of the available minutes, but like if you have to play a replacement level player, so a bottom 10 percentile player in the league or you get to play league average player, you get two goals of goal difference. When the whole table for everyone but SKC is like minus 10 to plus 10, that's hugely impactful for you as a team. Oh, that's the difference between making the playoffs or not, right? So for a lot, I mean for a team like Portland, for a team like Seattle, especially, there's a there's the back half of the Western conference is ugly right now. And there's a lot of teams that can make huge, make or break moments in the next month and a half with just average players. I mean, even even some of the guys should project better, like I think it's very clear you look at the union, right? Like the union had a pretty terrible start to the year. And their back half of the season has been somewhat catalyzed by Kevin Sullivan is unbelievable. And like he's a player we can talk about in relation to some of the back tests that came in here. And Neil Pierre is now play the center back is now playing a lot. And those guys look phenomenal every game. And the projection system was really high on Neil Pierre. And like if I had done the projection on Kevin Sullivan's most recent MLS next pro minutes, he would also look amazing there. And so it's like, huh, you like sure, like I don't I to me, it's insane that someone like sport in Kansas City, who their season has gone, right? And they are going the root of what we're going to bring in these big DPs now because it's the summer window. And then in the winter, we can figure it out. That's fine. Like do that. Sure. No problem. You have the slots like you want to go get Andre Louise or whatever I get it. But if I were them, I'd be like, well, the season is gone. I'm going to go take four punts on really good next broke kids and just trade you can because you just got three million of it. So I would definitely do that. So I hear that I hear this, but oh, that's interesting. Okay. So here's here's what I just did. I've been always been terrible at life coding during this, even though I want to like pull stuff on its cult software. So I just thought I'd do it for me. Nice stuff. So before I had this, it was a minute I want to like show me, show me the team, rank me the MLS teams by the minutes in MLS that they've gotten from players who played at least 750 minutes in next pro. But with 750 sporting KC was number three. I just up to 1,000 minutes in next pro. They dropped to eight, which I think is which is a much larger jump than I would have expected. I'm curious what players fell out of that. But this is still a team that has actually been in the past few years using a lot of the players that are playing for school park. So I don't know if that's like senior team players that are dropping down more than they should be or what. But you know, looking at this list, I see a lot of good and bad teams at the top. I see a lot of good and bad teams at the bottom. So I'm like, this might just be a thing like, you know, they can't all be half and Sullivan or like you're going to get a lot of unpredictability from younger players, whether they're greater or not. So I do, I do think that there's going to be an aspect of like what is your club trying to be an MLS. And we all know that MLS in terms of like World Soccer is the most diverse of club strategy. Simply because we have the mechanisms, the weird mechanism strategies, these strange strategies. But also just because you can, you can let them simmer and let them cook and you're not going to get relegated. So I feel like you can have teams like Philly that lean into it that can suffer those like off years where you are, those moments where you are literally playing 10 kids and it's not working. And oh, now we're citing Mark McKenzie. He's not going to, all right, but at least that's going to sort of bolster that that's fine a little bit more. And that that should like help even out the unpredictability of having to rely on such such a young master. So if I make like a counterpoint. Yeah, I think seeing teams at the top and bottom who are both good and bad, I think makes total sense, right? Because broadly, this is not explicitly true, but the gap between the best academy and the worst academy and MLS is probably smaller than the gap between the best first team and the and the worst first team. That would be my, I don't know how explicitly true that is, but I would bet given we have seen like if you look at like GA Cup and Dallas and stuff, it's like not like LAFC were like the best team multiple times. But the union have looked really good. TFC who like have had amazing U15, U16 teams have garbage next pro teams. So like it's kind of up and down. What I suspect if we are talking about this strategically is if you are a bad team at the end of the season, what often happens is you're like, well, we're going to play a bunch of our kids, which is like totally fair. I wonder if it is not significantly better EV because like you look at some of these kids who are playing, like if we take Seattle, for example, Seattle played a bunch of like so many to come the kids on the weekend. One of the players they played was a winger whose name I cannot remember, Harrison, you will remind me what it is. I hope who had it was like yet a four letter. It was like espy or airy or nary or something. I can't remember. I live shit. I had to google that dude. I like I live shit was like yeah, yeah, same. I was like, you're not alone. I was like, hey, I've never heard anyone who's like plugged into Seattle talk about this guy. I wonder if he's any good. And I go look and he's like one of the worst players in the next pro team by his name is Carly Edson Carly. Thank you. Yeah. That's one of the worst guys on their next pro team and his projection was really bad. And so I look at this and I'm like, okay, would you rather as a team in this predicament, put let's say you have 2000 minutes down the stretch across a number of positions to give out. Would you rather what we have these guys, let's just see what they are. And if we confirm they're not good enough then fine. Or be like, well, we project them as probably not good enough. Let's go spend 500K in game and go get five really good guys or that we think will be really good. And then see what they turn into because like if you hit on one of them, it's plush. Like if you hit on one young player signing of that magnitude, you're selling them for four million dollars or whatever. So I don't know. It is a weird like we, I definitely overestimate like, no, you should just play all the kids and if you lose all the games, it doesn't matter because like it does. People stop going and it's a problem. But I do think if teams were much more strategic about how they did the youth development beyond like, like, I don't know, I've seen TFC throughout like genuinely terrible next pro players into first in games towards the end of seasons and I'm like, what are you doing? This is a waste of everyone's time. So I don't know. I mean, that leads me to the follow up question specifically about this model and something that you identified within your article was Visante Garcia, who obviously the data doesn't love, Chelsea spent like an enormous amount of money at 16. I'm sure you have some personal detachment that needs to happen there. But I'm kind of curious when you have guys like Carly and you guys have guys that you've obviously invested and spent years and where is, where does the data, where's the scout, what are we missing from the data, especially with this type of model? What are we missing? What type of information can help better inform us, especially when we start asking our scouts, hey, I want you to look at this kid. Hey, I want to know what we have in these next pro type players. Well, I think there's a couple things. I think one is like what are the limitations of G plus as a model, right? Like you kind of have to face that head on first. And like the model here projected a bunch of other non G plus metrics like progressive passes and XG and shots and stuff like that. And it actually does, it's kind of unfortunate that there's like not a nice wheel type metric, like graphic for those because it actually does a better job projecting like shots and XG than it does like many of the G plus metrics or progressive passes like it does an amazing job of projecting progressive passes in the first team. So you kind of have to face head on like what is this guy? So like Vicente Garcia is like a winger who plays as an eight. He's not like a winger who gets into the box. He's a winger who comes deep in passes. So you look at it and you're like, well, his receiving is terrible. But that's because of the role he's doing. So it looks at its projected projection. It's like, well, this guy's probably not going to be good. And similarly, like it sees that G plus wing winger dribbling comes down quite a bit. But if he's coded as an eight, his dribbling would not suffer as much because that the sentiment field there to sentiment field, the transition is a little bit more stable. So there's like stuff you kind of have to be aware of there. The other types, we should be going by arc types instead of actual positions. But yes, okay, when when opta, when opta have a feed of formations that says this player is a wing fielder, we can move. Bro, I have ideas. I have ideas. This figure, another podcast of itself. I'm sure I'm sorry. I'm rather trailing you. No, no, no, you're good. So I think that's part of it. The other part of it is like, what role are they being projected into? So like one of the piece of feedback that I got from Doyle, and I think is like a really good conversation to have, is the role that a player plays in next pro might look very different than the role they're going to play in MLS. So some of these guys who have like huge production in next pro also have huge usage, huge burden, huge touch counts that when they go up, get cut in half. And now it's like, well obviously the numbers are going to go down because they're touching the ball less. So if you look at like the players that the model misses the most on, on average, their usage drops 70%. So it's like, oh, yeah, their receiving value went down tremendously. They're passing the dribbling value in down by 80%. Of course it did. Their touches went down 70%. So stuff like that where like you as a coach might look and say, look, Vicente Garcia is about average at 16, which is actually pretty good in a MLS next pro. You have him projecting as really bad his first 1000 minutes, but we know he's going to play this role. And his usage is going to be much lower. So per touch, we actually don't really care. Now I don't think that would quite justifies and move the Chelsea for $3 million, but I do think that's part of it. And I do think there's also like the model measures what they have done so far and tries to guess what they could do up a level. So like, Kevin Sullivan we talked about. Kevin Sullivan's first first 600 minutes in a MLS next pro. We're not very good. And it was kind of a little child. Yeah, he was 14 years old. The model has no idea what to do with that. It's like, like literally in the age curve, like I can see the age curve in the model. And it's like, I do not revert him to normal. Just we don't know. We don't know. So that's like definitely a thing. But yeah, I think like one of the things that if if I were a team, if I was Keir and FC, like I would be really, really narrow about this is the role that we're going to play him in. And then say like, so if I know, okay, we have 12 games left in the season, I'm sporting Kansas City. I just sold Yoliage, Taylor Calera is going to play a bunch of minutes, but I also know I have like 700 striker minutes that I'm going to give to a next pro kid. But this is what it's going to look like based on our team construction. Who fits the best into that of the kids I have and elsewhere in the league if I want to make a trade. And that I think looks very, very different from the team side. Well, and one thing that I didn't real fast, the one thing that we haven't kind of mentioned was San Diego has been doing stuff like this, right? Madoyles had that or had that joke, you know, running for the last year that if San Diego calls you about one of your young kids, you do not make that trade. But like looking at looking at the numbers and the transition, the transaction that you kind of have with these with this model, how do you think that changes over the course of the next few years when you start having more solvents and you have more of these players, you talked about like who is adjacent Russell Roe who was kind of like the initial and how it's progressed and changed over the course of time. How do you see this changing as you have a bigger data set in the next five years? I mean a theory better, right? Like so the whole model trains on like 170 transitions, including and like only 25 of those are goalkeepers, 28 are goalkeepers. The original paper for transfers was 28,000 transfers. So so the original paper got about 50% reduction in error. So like not to get too technical and like talk about this verbally, which is kind of hard to do. But basically the way we measured how good the model was was you take exactly their next pro number and then you say that's what the MLS number is going to be and then you measure the real MLS number and you take the difference between those two and you square it. And then that's the error for that metric. And so what you do is you say okay if we do this new model, how big is that number? The opt to paper dropped the error by 50%. My model dropped for outfielders by 42% and goalkeepers by 46%. So like still quite a bit of error, right? Like just not 58% is still there. And I didn't want to focus on that. I'm not calling you out by any means. I want to definitely want to like focus on the fact that this was really well done. I'm just curious at what that looks like the future. So my feel is that this will get better with more transitions because like some of these teams have zero transitions like they just don't some of the positions. Yeah, attack attack in midfielders. There are three attacking midfielders ever who have gone next pro to the first team as an attack in midfielder. It's Kevin Sullivan. It's that of Ellen Zuela and Kenji and Balma Dem. Like that's it. That's all the guys. So some of these positions is like I don't really know what to do. So that's why you see a lot of the predictions just get regressed to zero really hard. And like the error goes down because it's like well, if I just assume he's going to be average, I won't be that wrong. So I think it will get better. However, I think there's a pretty hard cap on how good a model like this can be because a lot of these metrics, if you take the same player and they don't move teams, like if I just take this season and say predict their next a thousand and less next pro minutes with no change, you will see a certain level of error. And so what I I'd thought about doing and I never got around to because like it was already 4500 words and I'd cut like 3000. I was like I'm not doing anymore was if I take okay, here's the projection of what their next 1000 m less next pro minutes are versus what it actually is. Like what's the error for that conversion and then compare the error to that. What do you get? Because like some of these metrics, I would bet are as good as the raw variance in the metric, but I'd bet some of them stuff away to go. So I think it will get better, but I think there's a pretty hard cap that like maybe 50% is the hard cap, maybe 60. Yeah, that is exactly what I was going to say is like 50% to like if you have 28,000, you're sort of cap, you know, that's where you're sort of topping out and you're getting almost almost there just with like a few hundred or less than 200 whatever it was like that that shows me that I think the individual estimates will get better, but on average there probably is just too much noise in this data because like you go back to like social science regression models like getting point two five r squared like, you know, reducing the mean squared error that much that's outstanding. Like that's outstanding prediction when people are involved because there's just so much variance in what humans can choose to do. So that that seems like the most logical outcome to me is we this is this is sort of generally I don't think the model would change much. It's just it would get better at seeing these edge cases and understanding that making those fine grain decisions because it actually has something to pull from. I think actually one of the things that's maybe sneaky that like actually there isn't even that much room to get better here is that after I wrote everything I texted Maddie who's like Maddie is our like data science star at ASA and was like any thought and he was like, oh you can do like A, B, C, D, E, F, G to artificially get more data. So like one of the things that did in the paper is called is called them like cross validation folding. So basically we only have 200 transitions and normally the way you train a model like this is you would use every season kind of, blah, blah, blah, blah and then you would predict the most recent one. But that's only like 25 transition. So there's a lot of noise. So you split it into five groups and each of the five groups gets to be the test set and the other four are the training set for all them. And Maddie was like, actually you have so few you can do 200 folds. You can do one player is the test set and the rest is the training set over and over and over and over again. And then C and he's like, that should actually help a lot. It helped 1% and so there's like all these and so like I tried using some of the really fancy neural net models like there's tab FM is Google's new like they call them tabular foundation models instead of like training and decision tree. You just give it all the context and you say you decide you bring everything in and then predict it for me. And they're really really good at handling small data like it obscenely good at handling small data. And it was like not really better like it was a tiny bit better. So so may like if we have 2000 transitions, could I see it getting up to like 46, 47, 48% yes. But if it stayed at 42, 43, I wouldn't be that shocked either. So I don't know. So last question and just going back to Seattle and some of the stuff that we were talking about with, you know, Tacoma Defiance, it's just kind of an interesting quandary just because of the simple fact that they are illuminated them in the in the paper. They're of a higher quality in terms of how they do things. So how exactly does does that hurt when you're trying to identify players from within that context because you do have such a high quality team and high quality organization, how to differentiate a specific player in that group of like who's going to stand out long term. Yeah. So there is one of the things that felt really important to me was like, this has to pick up that like certain teams bring players up better. And so I included a bunch of information about the source team. So what MLS X Pro team in terms of how good they are in their league. So there's like their ELO, their XG difference, their ELO as a ranking, like kind of a bunch of different ones all molded into one. And then the same with the first team. And then there's also style metrics. So like, what's their G plus passing? What what percent possession do they have? How what's their final third share a touch share is? Things to be like, are they mostly a transition team? Are they mostly a possession team? And those really matter for some stuff and really don't matter for others. So like if you look at things like how much a player gets to dribble, correlates very well with their team styles. But if you look at things like team strength, the amount of shots that they take travels really well. And so when you think about Tacoma, where Tacoma are really good, or like maybe a better example, this is actually Austin. Austin too, right now, are top of MLS X Pro. Austin one are not very good. And so you have this like weird double regression of like, okay, you're moving from a league where you are one of the best teams in the league. So you're going to get dragged to average more because like you're dominating. And now not only you're not even going to a league average team, you're actually going to a team at the bottom of the league. So you get double hit. So if you look at Chase, bad soccer stats, was like asking about some kid who scored a banger and MLS X Pro in Leaks Cup for Austin. And like his, he has okay, not amazing, but like just good and less nice pro numbers. His MLS projection is actually not very strong at all. Like weaker than you would expect for the profile he has because he's getting like double whammy regressed. So in the case of Tacoma kids, this season in particular, some of the Tacoma guys look worse than they would because Tacoma are quite good and Seattle are having a bit of a down year for them on the metrics. So like Mark Bronek, who I am super high on because he had obscenely good USL data for you for Union Omaha. And now has looked amazing for Seattle. Or for Tacoma, like he comes across, it still looks very good, but he only looks, he only looks good. Whereas the next pro he looks like this guy might be the best striker in the league. So you have some very interesting kind of transitional data points that make it really, really difficult. Seattle are one of the ones that the model is quite a bit of confidence on because they have so many transitions. Which is to say they are number two on the list that I would yeah, and they only be who's number one crew crew. Yeah, fair. Oh, that's interesting. I wonder, I guess like far see Russell row more as well. I think this is counting Arfston too. Yeah, yeah, poaching other people's next pro talent. Actually, he's a great example of like he had really decent next pro numbers for San Jose and then went back into the draft. So quite fun. Is there anything you guys looked at that like didn't pass the sniff test that you were like, I don't know how much I agree with that or like you kind of were like, I don't know, I don't know about that. Not really. I think I think my big thing when we were we were in the discord slash slack talking about this is as you were putting it together was just like how do we express these uncertain probabilities? Because like really when we're doing projections, people like seeing one number and I get that. But I really think of the more appropriate way of doing this is like a rain. Here's a range of out. We expect this player to be between he and here and here. And that's like quite frankly what I think coaches would most find useful. Like, what can I expect from this player? Don't tell me one thing. I know the one thing you stats and it's tell me never happens. So like what are the reason of a lot of comes here? And I hope that that's where this conversation can go because there is going to be a you know there's it's going to be changing from game to game with these players and just like trying to you know relate high variant statistics for the most high variance group of players that you have which is the youth is going to be difficult. But I feel like this does such a good job of like distit like what are the things we should be considering? Like I think that's like here and you talk through that. I think because I you know I just you you get lost in these players and I haven't watched any of this these games and next pro. So to hear you talk through like this is what the model cares about and why things might not be what we expect in these individual projections compared to what we see. And then training ourselves as maybe the model gets better we get to see more projections in the next few years using whatever app you've put together. And I think it's going to it's going to help train our eyes a little bit more as well. I think one of the one of the things that I thought was maybe important to convey that I didn't talk about enough is like I think this is much better at predicting the shape of a player's production than the absolute level where like when I back tested a lot of the data for this I was really happy that like the shape was right. So like you look at like if I take like Mehmedi for example like shooting, fouling, dribbling all about zero the passing is definitely a plus. I'm like yeah cool that's what that guy is or if you look at like who's another one if I just like click through like is any Buddha it's like yeah this guy's going to receive so much he's going to shoot pretty well he's a below average pass or he's a below average dribbling it's like yep that's exactly what he was like that stuff like whether like Buddha for example the prediction was plus zero four receiving the end of being plus one plus 13 like it's okay that he was way better than that that it was like no this guy's definitely a plus receiver that feels more important to me in terms of like identifying skill sets than the raw the raw actual number you know what I mean well because that's more useful right like you wanted you don't want to like just be like oh this guy's a you know plus 2.5 g plus player no well why is he good like this is something that you know we can talk about this more here next segment but like you don't want just oh this guy's good he scores goals we're we're at the point to where people are just looking at xg and they're going well he scores xg he creates xg well how is he how it this is the next level beyond that right how are teams creating that that pressure how are teams creating those shots those high leverage moments that matters that matters almost more than the fact that they're actually doing it yeah it was pretty fun I I had a lot of fun doing this and I think one of the things that has made me very happy is like a bunch of these kids now have like gotten looks afterwards or one of the things I really like is when team fan bases get really behind a guy and they're like no like you got to play this guy more like I think he's really good and then the data is like no yeah you're right like he actually is pretty good the teams should probably play him more like Chicago have a guy Jason Shuka Luke which is a sick name and all the Chicago fans are like yeah this guy is a baller like I wish he would play this is me and do it all season like all season yeah yeah Hawkins is nice that guy can play so I think that's fun Ben were there any color out of guys that were really good in there other than Jabari Jakito no honestly the projections were not great I think there were more average than anything but this this is this is going to have me going but I want to look historically too because what I think through the rap it's like they were they were high up on the list a lot higher up than I expected to get there let me look it up yeah the guy yeah seven they're just above sporting kc at 26 thousand minutes from these players since the inception of the league so I you know I think of yappy I think of Frederick and like there is some movement but I feel like there's like the kind of space stall out a little bit in the first team and I feel like there's there's a lot of competition and no one's really settled right now and I do think that's natural with a new manager so we'll see yeah there's I think it shows there's movement happening in the team it's very fair there there were some fun the one guy that I showed for Colorado in the projections was like um what's his name uh chumba something chumba Nathan chumba he's like 15 and he looks really bad but it's like he's 15 who cares um because some U.S. national team people like now this kid's super legit like he's not good for like men's football now but like he will be and even guys like Justin Hilton Justin Hilton showed up as the best defensive at fielder in the set and I'm like I've literally never heard of you before and he's like a kid who was at Cincinnati and got poached by Orlando's Academy at 15 and now he's like the best DM league I'm like sure yeah but I mean it's again and you you put this in I'm I'm regurgitating your words against you that's a 15 year old going against a 25 year old right like yeah obviously there's going to be things in aspects oh yeah absolutely exposed this is actually the other thing that I don't really talk about in the article at all like if you look at the projections the projections is like no the 25 year olds are sick you should play the 25 year olds like the 25 year old guys who are in next pro it projects them as way better than the young kids like now this guy is ready right now and there's so many guys that are like full back age 24.7 and you look that you look them up and it's like they got drafted two years ago like there was a guy for Charlotte who he plays for I'm going to look up his name his name is Nick Skardina and I never I'd never heard of this guy before um I think I think Charlotte is the people who really need to be like so the coaches and I guess it's I guess it's down to Dean Smith because the club has set this up so they're bringing in multi-million dollar signings to put sit in their next pro team and they are 25 out of 30 teams at playing their next pro players in their first team so this is why you have those players going off to other teams like is this all seasons well I guess it's all seasons this is all season well I keep in mind this you that for the players to be in here the next year yeah yeah this is only the past three years anyway so he so this Nick Skardina guy played for Portland too as a teenager then went to University of Washington Huskies played four years came out got drafted by Charlotte played like 50 games at full back for Charlotte scored 10 goals from full back had unbelievable MLS next pro G plus and it's like no no this guy is the best full back in next pro he played like 15 games across three years was actively good in MLS gone plays for Rhode Island in USL now and I'm like I'm sure I don't remember this guy at all maybe he wasn't good in MLS and he just was like a tronco who defense but it was just there's so many dudes like that they're like no no the 25 year old guy you should play him um that I thought was quite interesting like in particularly when you think about um not that like because we probably need to move on and talk about um Seattle and and Yovlietch but like you there's so if if I'm a tea like I look at Tronfc okay and Tronfc like don't really have guys like if you go through the projections there's not some guy play there that should be playing for the first team the most exciting guys are like really young and have bad projections because they're very young um so you look at those guys and you're like okay but if I'm Tronno like would I rather bring Derek Etienne back or would I rather call Columbus and say we will give you 100k game for Kevin Gabamble or Gabamble Air however you say it I say it like Bramble like the cocktail and would you rather like what would you rather do between those students like well yeah I definitely rather take the chance that that kid is unbelievable and I think for the most part they don't agree and it makes me sad it makes me very sad oh speaking of teams and sending their academy products to go succeed elsewhere yeah uh so Seattle traded six million dollars in a cash fair for day in Yovlietch uh to export in Kansas City um I have takes on this the analytics community has takes on this Harrison you told me I when I said hey I think we should talk about this today your message was word for word and I'm gonna read it to you was you can put me on the mic about that but I guarantee you won't like what I have to say so Harrison you're on the mic and I want to hear what you have to say all right so we can all agree Jolvich is he's a talented player I think he would be very ignorant to suggest he's not a good player right I think bottom line and to make this succinct the problems that are going on with the Seattle Sounders aren't going to be magically fixed by upgrading their striker position I think that's fair Ben do you do you have strong Yovlietch opinion I so I didn't and I think so Harrison but I'm a bit Harrison I thought you were going to come in so much hotter than that what a let I love so what a let this holding back all right so let's go no no you don't miss gotten I am a huge moose fan wasovski like when he came you all remember I was freaking floored on this podcast and everybody was like oh what he's like washed out from our cell we washed out from you know LFC really can't keep a spot like oh blah blah blah and I was freaking psyched I've been championing Mazovski for five years and when he was not getting any playtime for LFC and I'm like look he's he's not as good as Jolvich and that's and that's fine look whatever I'm not going to try to like claim he's worth going in acquiring for six million dollars Jolvich does what he does essentially on a probably a little bit higher scale maybe more fine tune he is a better version of that cool you paid six million dollars to upgrade mine early mine early upgrade that position that wasn't a problem to begin with we just got done talking about how it matters how you're creating those opportunities how you're getting to those high leverage opportunities for team that doesn't spend money this is where they want to throw their money this is how you do it for a team who's back half who Peter Kingston's playing 600 minutes since the start of the world cup this is how you're going to fix your lineup like no shade of Peter Kingston like none at all I think over time he's going to grow into an MLS average player but that's ridiculous not I'd be honest I don't even know who Peter Kingston is bro if you told me that was the head of the head of ticket sales for the soundrash I'd believe you I mean he's not selling tickets that's kind of the problem you know just respect up Peter Kingston of course he is selling like bro someone needs to get on FIFA and be like bro you're selling playing Peter Kingston like because they are because they are because there are numerous players you can go and look at and say hey you know what this probably doesn't work for what we're trying to look for look we need a one-to-one replacement for Christian rolled on we're like obviously like this is the money ball thing right I can't replace like Christian rolled on but I can I can build rebuild him and the you know I don't think he makes sense because he doesn't even make that much money he's like you could just go get that guy you could go get another one that's the point that's the point they don't they don't because they're not spending any money and look I have no problem them not choosing to go and rebuild in this actually I've been talking to Armin the texting Armin all week about this right like it does it's fine that they don't go and make a case at this situation look if you don't make the playoffs or even if you do and you go on the first round who gives of who cares right it means nothing to go out in the first round congrats you maybe get one game that's not a huge financial maker it doesn't make sense go into the offseason figure out your guys is roster and fit not and more importantly figure out your budget that's what matters that's what's crippling people and teams is that they're spending money long term into these slots that they can't get out of that's what's being having trouble that's what tons of teams have been having problems with on this and good teams figure out a way not to cripple themselves and the sounders can are in a position to where they're about to be done with several different contracts they need to spend money and this is how they do it this is how we do it that's that's that's what I wanted to do yeah Ben what do you think good work um I I I am of two minds here because I don't disagree with what Harrison just said and I'm so I'm looking at Danny Musovsky's XG per 96 there he's solid like you're getting you're getting value I don't know if he puts you on the top and especially this year his conversion rate has just been abysmal my my take of with Yolvalich Yolvalich I need to get that there's a second J in there Yolvalich it's we've always sort of dinged him on his skulls added scores his I've now questioning if that's if that's worth it because his XG has just been consistent his XG per 96 it's a little low this season it's a little low this season but it's a little low this season it's quite strong it's quite strong this this season has been his historically bad for sport in Kansas City and his XG per 90 is a little low for his standard he's got he's got eight goals he here's I think here's I think the most important thing about what I'm looking at with his XG chart is his actual goals per 96 always tracks really closely with his underlying um that's something that is the most repeatable about his dot profile that I can find on the ASI app I look at his goals added his goals at start around zero as he when he first joins the galaxy it's negative to point 22 right now per 96 but it doesn't matter he's getting garbage receiving doesn't matter garbage passing and dribbling the past years doesn't matter he still gets it in the spot to put his foot on the ball and put it towards the goal year after year so I think in that sense he's going to be an immediate impact for Seattle this year long term I'm not so sure I'm with Harrison I don't I'm less confident that this is going to be like I think there's going to have to be more shifting around or like what are the wingers like Ken Jordan Morris stay healthy and like actually stay on the wing and own that spot uh can they move off of Pedro de la Vega and actually get someone who can stay in that you know I like part of part of the reason the team feels so weak is this constant injury I don't want to call it a crisis but there's constant injuries with this team I think Yovlie which is as a player doesn't get injured constant goal value genuinely a low price compared to the actual goal output that he brings to the team he has consistently been undervalued in this league for multiple reasons and I think I think that in that sense it's good value you know he's a look he's not the most physically imposing forward he is kind of like the Serbian Chris Wandelowski in that way but Runt Wando is underrated too so I think I think there's value here if if they do these other moves correctly Harrison like I think that's what's going on like this feels like a good buy now improve the team keep us afloat to like make playoffs this year um and I think it could be successful going forward but it's not it's not it's it's a it's very much a band-aid a really good band-aid but there has to be so two things real fast uh talking with Jayman Moore today he pointed something that was really really clever out uh Mazowski was number one and where goals came from from the sounders last year and he would in his words he was a problem uh in the most positive way um that's number one picture one xg for 96 like picturing Jayman say he was a problem is incredible that's number one and I I love that and I think that that's that's something that we should keep in mind with Mazowski but number two is he hasn't been respected this year and rightfully so teams have kind of traded the fact that they don't have to be worried about him and they've been right uh you know as much as I I want to champion him and and say like this is this is a dude um the reality is that the sounders are going to get somebody who's going to bring gravity to their attack and like he's going like defenders are going to respect him they're going to be scared of him um so you know I think the overview is uh is somebody that like he said is going to make a difference he is going to affect how teams game plan so from that perspective I think you're right I'm not opposed to having him on my team again I think he's an upgrade over Mazowski I just think he's a marginal flex upgrade so I'm going to straddle the fence in an elite fashion here so on the SKZ side I think there was a lot of like talking analytics communities and like really in our discord and like other places about how you know he's actually he's not that good this year his G plus has never been that good his archetype of striker doesn't help other guys get good like on a bad team is this someone you should be looking to move off of and my opinion was like well let's take a beat and say SKZ are terrible and in two seasons he scored 26 and 50 he's like 30 goals and assists in 50 games for like a truly terrible team that's really good I would not move off of a player like that without like a really good offer because you just need good guys and I would let my team get to the point of like well we're really good now and he's holding us back now before I would do that move right because like there is SKZ are not like if we get rid of him we're going to win the elite like they're not they're so far away from that however I think six million is a pretty good offer it's a couple million dollars profit you free up a DP slot for you you can do other things with it you have a guy and Taylor Calary you probably want to play more like okay spot to be if I was SKZ fan I'd be like what the fuck but I think organizationally it's an okay decision so totally defensible on the Seattle side I don't think he really solves any of the problems that the team has like I don't look at the team that they have right now and I'm like yeah they need a poacher striker who's gonna score 13 goals this season but not really do anything else he's not really gonna press he's not gonna really link play he's not gonna really create things for the wingers however I can understand them looking at the last two years where they have played Ferreira and Morris as like guys who do a lot more facilitating for other people and been like hey we really haven't been that good and the team has really looked good when Osay's the Rosario or Osay's the Rosario is scoring a million goals being a poacher nine who does nothing but smash people and score goals we'll just go get a super version of him and we can play those two guys all the time it's like I think that is an okay place to be I don't agree I don't think that will work in their favor but I don't think it's like unintelligent or indefensible and I think people have gotten out over their skis about like well G plus is not good like the whole point of the game is to score the goals like if you get a striker who scores and it's just set like roughly two-thirds of a goal or point six per game and he plays he's played a lot for SKC historically isn't played that much like that guys probably find to have the problem for me and the reason why I say I would not do this is that this roster is now exceptionally locked in to whatever it is right now so if you look at their contract Yovliyich has four more years left on his deal Rusnack has just signed into extension to drop down to Tam that is what it is Jordan Morris has two years on his deal as a DP Haysu Ferreira has four years left on his deal as Max Tam Krischer Moldon has two more years at Max Tam Pedro Delivega has three more years as a DP Paul Ariola has three more years as very high Tam Nuhu Tolo has four more years as very high Tam they are in terms of guys coming off the roster at the end of this season that make any money it is Yimar and nobody else well so I will say armate like I've been talking a lot to armate about this he's of the opinion that it wouldn't be very difficult to restructure Jordan Morris and Pedro both of their contracts um he has thoughts I don't want more words in his mouth well I just want to just leave it very simply at that and and what what I will say about this is like there is a lot of talk behind the scenes from teams from people around teams from agents whatever that like the cap is going to look very different after the sprint and so there is a world where Seattle get out of this super scot free however as currently constructed this team is pretty locked in at least through 27 28 as this maybe the the cap hinges and their 60 p's are like whatever we'll talk about those things as they come up but like that this is the team they've got for a while and a lot of those guys make like real good money um not huge money but real good money like so we'll see um but I agree with Ben like I think if the team is very healthy and he looks and he's normal the team will look pretty good like they have a lot of guys who can create stuff and who can pass and can do whatever so um we will see on that point um we're going to finish unless either of you have very strong feelings that you would like to get off your chest remaining we're going to play a little game of road to 75 so road to 75 was also come out since we last potted another cure and in clawed creation where I got bored on the weekend um while my mom was here and I wanted to pretend that I had soccer work to do so she could like just watch her shows and the living room and leave me on for a bit and um so we have the spinning game and I've built a little custom one that you can play against your friends no fast I want you know I've never related more to you ever ever that quick little bit so yeah that's fun we get a good time um can you see my screen yes okay so we have uh we have it set up here and um this will be out on the app sometime in September I played one yesterday with Ariana and Eric from expected angles on the NWSL side so we'll play an MLS one we're going to play on max difficulty we are going to um we have we're going to play so it's max difficulty so we are all going to go into the same league you can pick your conference so we can like try and avoid each other if you want um you can pick your formation and then yeah max difficulty so three subs starting 11 what I will warn you is if we all get to the end and there's only one goalkeeper we haven't picked the goalkeeper yet it will regenerate new teams so if you see a good goalkeeper don't dally um but we are all in the room are you so what I just heard was if you're thank you you're losing you don't take a goalkeeper because you get another shot that's all right that's what I heard possibly possibly um Ben is in the west Harrison and I are in the east I'm going to try and stay away from Vancouver so I'm gonna I'm gonna go and I'm gonna go 442 are you guys ready to start the draft okay I'm gonna switch to west so the draft starts it is me then Harrison then Ben in the draft order and we get 2023 Montreal this I believe was a Wilfred I don't know if it was a Wilfred Nazi season I don't know I don't know I don't like any of these guys oh I'm gonna I'm gonna do it only because I know he has to do it I'm gonna take Joel Waterman I'm gonna take Joel Waterman I had this I had this thought beforehand I don't know why I I had this thought but uh Romeo uh Kyoto is who I'm gonna take because oh I I don't know why I had a that remember this guy moment today but I had to remember this guy moment and he's still in my head so boom I I had a dream three days ago that arm and calf I was man marking out birth at least on a corner oh my god and and I was a net and I was like four man oh man they're gonna try and set a pick on you like they're gonna block you and and literally and literally they set they set a pick on arm and but it was a woman who set the pick and blocked arm and Kyoto scores a header at the back or at least scores a header at the back post and I'm like dude what are you doing yeah I was a very strange dream you know what when you said when you said I had a dream tonight I was gonna ask you if it was out birth at least I told it was we'd ask you that's so wild I love it I'm just shouting out for our listeners that I picked to Kamal Miller as a backup no no you picked Rudy Kamacho I've had Rudy Kamacho as backup whoops as a sub well you're back on the clock it's a snake draft big dog snake draft uh-huh uh-huh and we have Portland 26 2016 uh-huh good well they're just after just after winning their championships you know it's a bad border year you could pick Jack Mack who is making a return to professional football after five years and it's signing in the CPL oh man is this a good darling senior no they were no good darling seniors I'm going for Larry attacking that so that's a good that's a good show that's that might be maybe chara I feel like chara has a lot of good ball when it like a high interrupting seasons yeah you never really dip down too low for what I remember I'm gonna take um darling eggs can play midfield for me if I need to yeah yeah but but Derek Vowenton is like a safe full back pick I feel like yeah he's good I'm gonna go Vowenton because I feel like I feel like the um the darling eggs seasons aren't that good so I'm gonna take Zarepal to eat he was never a G. I think that's I think that's a safe it's safer pick white caps 2018 which is a garbage year there is oh actually I'll take Davies because I think Davies had pretty good G plus so yeah a fonds fonds he will play left wing or for me and my team is so cheap I've only spent 450 grand I never even get close to maxing out my budget whenever I play this I have only capped out ones but it's because we only have 14 players instead of 20 the cap is supposed to be the way I made it is that the allocation number plus the cap is scaled down from 20 to 14 so it's just like divided by 1.3 or whatever and uh it didn't uh don't really work out I'm gonna go with uh I'm going with Kindle damn it oh step step piece threat that's what I wanted Kai Kamara Yordi Reina yeah there's there there's Brecht Shea actually this is this is the season that I lived in Vancouver so I actually watched this team a lot I used to come I used to go down every game because they were so bad too so like it would cost me like $17 to go watch Kai Kamara scored some goals that year before it went to the rap it's I'll put them on the bench you know what Mariana Vitch I think might have had a really good season that year like oh man we're just getting ass teams 2015 this was Ferrell's rookie year wasn't it yeah uh no 2014 2013 okay it's close it's close yeah well Ben you're you're up oh it's me if you have first pick your main Jones DP you know you gotta do that is isn't he like coaching fifth division in Germany now or something hi whatever gives him a microphone to yell I don't want to hurt you I don't know less about him Kobayashi I know right London Woodbury is a crazy name I've never heard of that guy before I pick Lee but I already have a Larry so I guess also also I'm pretty sure every I think the mid the lower minutes limit I think is um the lower minutes limit is like 250 minutes so that means these two center racks played like legitimately every game yeah no that yeah Andrew Farrell basically has been the revolution for the past Lee win for the win there oh I do I want to use a winger spot on Kevin row that's what that's what the game turns into it's like what are the positions I can burn I feel like my go-to if I don't know it's like I just take a full back and hope that they're close zero so it's a Christianity give me a good 20 like none of these teams are good we're just getting shagged what is 17 DC United all these folks like is this the is this the really good bill hemedia or is it the really bad bill hemedia I've right yeah I mean this is a DCT with the shorn Brown and Sebastian Latu so also fun fun story fun story this season my high school girlfriend was going to GW to George Washington and Kofiopara matched her on Tinder and was like I will marry you I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I don't have a 10 so I'm not gonna take I'm gonna gamble on this being a good bill hemedia I think well I don't know because like I could wait for Matt Turner we've had so many bad teams that you're just assuming we're gonna have new England again I'm gonna take I'm gonna take bill hemed I'm gonna I'm gonna gamble I'm gonna again because if you if you get a good goalkeeper it swings the whole season if all of you thought I was gonna pass on patty mollons you guys are oh there we go I love it of course oh man and you already have a 10 men so you gotta oh yeah well I work on we're doing I'm on a sledge and nick to lay on baby oh wow Lucho Lucho survives I think Lucho had a good deal that was on there I missed that yeah oh Tony I think that's oh no 2015 Toronto oh my god oh this team is so good I think this is actually not the super Gavinco G plus season though I think it's the next year yes but still like I think you gotta take this is like the first year that Toronto got good then yeah they were this this was the they didn't make the final they lost a Montreal I think in the playoffs yes that sounds right because you have 14 was me oh yeah sorry oh my god wait done Harrison you're up this is the year that this is the year that they started playing the diamond did you take Michael Bradley I'm I'm 100% taking do you think I love how he's just like go off 1 1 2 3 on the DPs yeah absolutely SKC 2021 do I take G plus legend Andre of Fontas or do I take Graham's UC I'm gonna go Fontas because I know he's good that's who I was hoping you wouldn't choose uh you know what I'll swing in a different uh different way I I think I'm gonna go with Amelia oh is that is that he had he was very up and down he is some good some bad I think this is a good one I'm going Johnny Russell oh Johnny Russell that he I loved him he's a beast he's I think he may have maybe only one after crew 2023 very strong career season very strong career season I think this is Wilfred Nazi 1.0 we got we got some boys I think you're right I think you're right I think yeah I think this was the year that Porter got fired and they brought him in Gustavo Valla Sevilla Milo's Degamek Yaya Boa just reading some guys darling eggs sent him a field of minutes Ben who you thinking oh yeah it's me huh let's do eight more us oh my goodness Bench how are you son oh man never grabbed my pick but it really sucks here because of how I went with the 4x4 2 I had to pass on Geo Vico because I have no like I need I have no striker spot I need a winger so bad I need fullback so bad you could take Yaya Boa you could take Mo Farsi you could take Julian Gressel and play him at right back because he is the versatile tag you can I think I'm going to take after saying what I needed I'm going to take Steven Moria that I think that's I think that's the move you guys are blessing me I am taking Kucho I'm I'm getting the strikers I had I had I had a jizzy already so I couldn't pick him that's true that is true Dallas Dallas Dallas Dallas Dallas what do I need I need some center of the fielders I need a right winger and I need all my subs um center of the fielders I don't like any of these guys and I don't really like Obreon as a winger and I don't like Hasey's for era because G plus never liked for era um I'm going to take Matt hedges and hope he had good G plus this year and put him on event I am almost capped out already I won D piece I won D piece lot left and very little money Harrison you are up who from the 2022 FC Dallas raging bulls excited I think I'm going to take oh god is this a good year for a packston on the call I was wondering about that is this a good packston season I don't know yeah I feel like this is the year that they I feel like this is I'm going to take a gamble I'm going to put him out left wing yeah that I was wondering if this was the good Paul Arioli year two where he because he had one good Dallas season really good I don't think it was this one Ben what do you what do you need what's your squad I need I need and I'm trying to think of saria was good this year because he went to galaxy the very next year and was good that's true didn't they didn't they sell them recently yes he went to what chevage or something somewhere yeah I think it was cheva's where to fight yeah do saria whatever get that deep I'm getting I looked at my budget and I'm almost hitting my budget and just going on to allocation with only one dp so 2014 new york red bulls you are up Ben on the swing so bad they don't have this is the year that Chelsea bought Matt Miasca after a mid season friendly well I'm gonna really hope I'm gonna hope that this was a really good Tim Kea oh Timmy I actually think he is he was Dax McCarty Terry on re bwp Johnny steel the left-winger who has a super porn star name Peggy Louis and Dula that's a deep cut Ambroise of Yongo I think they sold him for a bunch of money you've yet to name the player the player infamous ASA player Lloyd Sam Lloyd Sam and I say infamous because I for like the longest time I always reversed his name which is you know what's new Lloyd who was the actor that played on scrubs I'm gonna take Gax McCarty put him in my mouth he'll I was debating TT TT get Terry on re but I can't remember what yours I was gonna do back your so you're not you're not oh man Atlanta United oh man in 2021 just what that means is just everybody was overpriced and no one's good you gotta have you gotta have a Zeke Hill barco on your team when you have the chance Emerson Hydeman man like oh my god yeah but you know you know who Emerson Hydeman is now it's Luca Delatoric they're the same player they came from Europe they were like highly-touted young players they were never good and they were like yeah but he's gonna be good nonetheless and they were not good nonetheless Frank we bar I think what year is this 2021 I think in 2023 oh I'm on the clock sorry did you guys take was it was it me the whole time it was me the whole time number one uh Marcelino Moreno because I need a midfielder and I don't know what else to do and I'm definitely not taking barco dude I'm sorry uh I'm taking Brooks Lennon oh I could have and I could have put him as a right winger I could have yeah well I'm taking Bella so let's go Georgie didn't he get sold as well oh 2017 TFC very strong season oh also this is where we find out by the way all those guys are already drafted so you cannot take them yep that's cool I'm picking Glenn Irwin my guy at your turn has yeah you're Denver boy also big analytics fan he has played this game he he messaged the yeah yeah so he he I think he might have been one of the first active players aside from her Gomez to hit us up about stuff um very fun I think actually oh you know what let me check let me see what I need real fast before I make a decision this this team is one of my is the best on most team we'll talk I'm gonna take I'm gonna take legend uh Justin Mauro he's going to hat trick this season as a fullback which is crazy I'm gonna take Victor Rascas and put him as my sub midfielder and if I need to play my zwillinger I will I loved Mauro as San Jose and I was so excited to see him go to Toronto and have a great season Camilo San they saw you are going on to my benches my sub-attack oh my god are you kidding me yeah baby oh no I need a winger yeah you can have Kakudamane or Eric or Tato or Russell Tiber oh sure I can wait until the next one you can have darren maddox I think I'm gonna take well let's see dude who are some of these guys like I don't even know Jordan Harvey well also they've so much honor back this is God no she's an air it only paid so it played 17 minutes 700 minutes yeah I need I need you touch you touch it so bad dude I don't actually what am I gonna do I'm not taking a no name setter back from the 2013 white caps absolutely not the 60 the 16 shounders oh I'll take that um oh my Marshall oh done enjoy oh okay I took Dempsey that's fair that's a good that's a good pick oh I'm up okay yeah but I should have taken I should have taken ball that's what was I thinking no and it's killing me because I want to think Jordan Morris as my sub-attacker and move Sanveso to right winger and it's not letting me do that this is bullshit whoever designed this game yeah is a is an ass fire the devs yeah fire the devs um I guess I'm gonna take Niko Ladaro because I need and I'm just gonna play my right winger and I'm just gonna live with it uh oh oh it's cool I'm saying I'm paying to the gay hell at deep end so you know okay so I'm not gonna lie to you my team is so fucking good yeah you you drafted pretty well okay um oh we got to pick our head coaches wow I got really terrible coaches I guarantee you I got worse oh yeah my my best coach is Adrian Heath I mean Lucy Gonzalez isn't that bad I would take lift Eric I have Petke Struber and Shellis Heinman so oh wow okay I'm speaking of Wensy Dallas I went with Quill make sure um Harrison we are just waiting for you to select your coach and then we will sim the season uh wow I'm doing beat me I beat both of you um and I am flying let's see I am not flying oh it's bad oh I finished with 78 points oh my god in the east uh I didn't even make playoffs oh no so 78 points dad gum did Harrison had 60 points and came fourth in the east um for some reason it doesn't show you how he moments how he moments season leader just won't throw that out there Josie Alta door top scorer for Ben uh I had Kucho with 23 and I'll funds the Davies 11 assists for my team um all right I'm gonna start the playoffs for you and I Harrison and we will see we might play each other yeah maybe could not start the playoffs I don't I don't know why I think I broke the sim so I I don't know what's happening and it just gives me message this is condenser so Harrison you and I co-win because I don't know what I think you want I think I'm gonna defer to the shield winner on this one I'll take 78 is like that's a very I'm very happy I got a good that's a good that's a good sim anyways so this this will be out with fewer bugs in a few days time and uh we will go from there uh but gentlemen any any any parting thoughts from you before we get out of here you're on an all time heater dude that's it bro me and me and brother Claude I come home from work and I have I have a sheet I'm gonna show I'm gonna show the camera my um my sheet that I just have like it's literally just like a Google thing that says analytics ideas and it's just things and so uh I come home I don't have a wife I don't have a girlfriend I don't have a kid I come home and me and Claude do analytics which is very sad for a 31 year old man but it's where we are I don't think that's at all excited we we need actually a say needs more we need to we need more people like you involved in doing this stuff because this is so great and this furthers a lot of our ideas and I really like the discussion today we couldn't have had this discussion today without you and all the efforts that you put into there's a lot of stuff out there that has been tilted towards uh Europe over the last I don't know 10 years that we need a pilfer now that we have more data and more just more ways of doing and recreating a lot of that stuff for MLS and seeing how we can better measure and have better ideas and articulation of some of those concepts here within our our domestic leagues very sweet of you to say um anyways that's that's gonna be all from us we'll be back at some point in the future when we feel like podcasting again or have something interesting to talk about about our respective teams um but as always if you want to support ASA if you want to support the show there's one way to do it there's patreon it's $5 a month you could ask this to the discord the discord has gotten to test a lot of these things early um and kind of have conversations about them which has been really really cool um and it's always very good talking about um kind of the games that are going on in there there's a a secret fantasy league for someone at ASA who's developing a fantasy game around MLS and people are testing that Ben who who's winning right now uh it's either taller camera than doing pretty good i'm like middle of the packers yeah we got we got we got some real we got some real good players in there um but yeah that's that's the place to do it and you can check articles out on the website and there's all sorts of stuff going on if you are on the nwsl site our friends that expected on goals are putting out a podcast a week plus their patreon feed they got some really fun stuff going on i know that they are really building up towards the nwsl championship and i've a lot of really fun things planned they have a video series if you check out their youtube where they show players their own data and talk about it which is really fun um but definitely check out of nannaric those guys are doing like truly i think there is not anyone that exists like them in the women's soccer space so definitely check that out anyways that is all from us as always my friends enjoy the soccer