At some point late in the EPL season I could tell when Harry Kane scored more than one goal in a game without having to watch him play. That’s because a couplathree people would Tweet into my timeline a shot1 at me with a link to this. It’s the piece I did for FiveThirtyEight at […]
Statsbomb’s James Yorke put out the following tidbit before this week’s Sunday games1. Leicester opposition all shot conversion rate from season midpoint onwards = 3.4%. Insanely low, can't last forever.— James Yorke (@jair1970) April 10, 2016 Of all the ridiculous stats about Leicester’s season I’ve seen so far this was maybe the ridiculousist. Made even […]
Fred McGriff is a victim. In fact, along with the Montreal Expos, he’s probably the biggest victim of the 1994 MLB players’ strike. That’s because it’s very possible—probable even—the strike is what’s keeping him from the Hall of Fame. This all rests on one assumption: Fred McGriff was clean. How reasonable is that? His name […]
Darren Rovell is annoying. For a myriad of reasons, I’m sure. For current purposes he’s annoying because, as a sports business reporter, he can’t seem to do basic business or financial calculations (although, maybe his editorial overlords don’t even want him to). He put up a list yesterday of the worst dead money contracts in […]
This started a couple of weeks back when there was a single PL game where three goals were scored from an offside position. One was extraordinarily close, so much so that it’s barely conclusive with a frozen frame of the moment the ball was played. The other two were laughably bad. One was from a […]
These are player shot charts for the Championship and Premier League last season. They should be (mostly) self-explanatory. Link here: https://mbertin.shinyapps.io/shotChartBlue crosshairs are goals; whites are misses. A player’s conversion rate is just his goals divided by the number of total shots. The last number, Naked Shot Probability (NSP), is a metric based on the […]
Of all the positions I may or may not have about expected goals, the one that’s truly indefensible is to say there’s not much value in ExpG, then sit on the results as if it’s a set of nuclear launch codes.So this is my model.I should clarify that there isn’t one model per se1. Almost […]
For Argentina. Why is Messi so terrible for Argentina? Sorry, was that headline misleading? Lionel Messi has one goal through the group stages of this year’s Copa America in Chile, a 35th minute penalty against Paraguay. That’s only three games, so small sample size and all, but Messi’s lack of fecundity for the Albiceleste is […]
Note: this is a detailed response to a comment left on another post (found here) about Expected Goals (ExpG).The claim was that I “don’t have any idea what [I’m] doing.” That’s the general from the specific that I had trashed someone else’s work, even though that work was apparently superior.As was pointed out, having an […]
Nothing. He contributed nothing. Maybe you totally believe that.Anyway, inspired by this piece at Statsbomb (it’s about whether Swansea can replicate the relative success of their 2014-25 campaign), I started trying to think of some obvious things that might explain what Swansea were doing this past season that had them outperform their expected goals by […]