June 29th, 2014

For the first half of the season, the story was Real Salt Lake maintaining a healthy lead on the field and Kansas City struggling to keep up. In their last 11 games, Seattle has nine wins, one draw, and one loss. To be fair, the one loss was a 0-5 drubbing to New England, but that's still a very impressive stretch of games. Those results have put them at 35 points total, 10 points clear of second place. It has also vaulted them to the top of the Elo ratings.

Salt Lake has taken a slide, recording zero wins, two draws, and three losses in their last five games (not coincidentally, all these games have occurred since Beckerman and Rimando were called up to the national team). Their rating has slid from a comfortable first place to a precariously-close-to-slipping-farther 3rd place.

Kansas City has managed to turn around their slide with two back-to-back road wins against Houston and Portland. Astonishing considering their injury woes as of late. Despite a string of fortunate results, I fully expect the limping KC squad to sink farther.

Los Angeles is starting to show some life, finally getting back to the rating they finished the season with last year. Philadelphia, Montreal and Chivas also made big positive moves this weekend, but they all have a long way to go.

This week's big sliders were New England and Vancouver, tanking almost 5 full End of Season Predicted Points each. Here are the full numbers:

So all this boils down to Seattle having a 78.5% chance to win the Supporter's Shield at this point. If Seattle doesn't start dropping points soon, they could easily put that race out of reach in the next few months.

June 11, 2014

Here are the standings through the beginning of the World Cup break on June 11, 2014. The "Season Change" numbers are the comparison of the June 11th ratings to what they were at the beginning of the season. This is a change from what it was previously - a comparison over the last month of play. I think this makes it easier to visualize how teams' overall seasonal form is. In the future I hope to include graphs that even better display this information, but I'd need to go back and re-run some numbers to get all the data to do so.