DC United now has 4 games completed. This year I have decided to publish the normalized player ratings from B & R, fans and WhoScored in fanposts. This will be updated about once a month. This season I will give consolidate game by game results and the season average for players.
The results are presented in the table below. Obviously the team is built around Acosta. He did not play in games 1 and 2 and this definitely hurt the team changes. He is currently the highest rated player. Even the first game back for Columbus he was rated highly compared to other players. Hamid would rank higher but for his second game when NYCFC scored so many goals against him. Boswell has a very high ranking compared to Franklin who has clearly struggled in central defense. DeLeon is doing pretty well at right back at the expense of Franklin. It is encouraging to see that Harkes has been improving game by game. Sam has struggled except for the last game and Nyarko has been among the best and most consistent players on the team.
It should be cautioned that the players that come in as substitutes generally have lower ratings that those that play the whole game. This is not the result of the statistics, but rather because they don't have much time to impact the game. Le Toux, Neagle and Vincent fall into this category.
Conclusions are hard, but I'll take a stab at it. Clearly the Franklin substitution for Boswell has not been going well so far. Ortiz in his only start has been better than Mullins, who has had some bad luck this season. Sam needs to be a more consistent player to stay on the field. Finally, Hamid is a gem in most games. DeLeon is one of the team's better players and needs to stay on the field, hopefully at right back or wing.
As a reminder, the ratings for players are the normalized ratings from the three sources-B&R U, Fans and WhoScored. What does normalized mean? It means that the ratings have been adjusted so that each of the rating groups (B&R, Fans, and WS) have the same mean and the same standard deviation. Generally this lowers the WS ratings and slightly raises the fan and B&R ratings. Once they are all on the same scale, then they (B&R, Fan, and WS Ratings) are added and averaged, so each rating system gets equal weight. As an example, here is a table for a single game from last year. Finally, if a substitute player is not rated by Black and Red, then they are not included in the analysis. The reason is because the player was not of the field long enough to be evaluated.
That's all I have. Any thoughts. Should I keep these coming periodically in the future?
