2012 MLS Player Shot +/- Stats So Far

In seasons past we've generated shot +/- stats for players to illuminate how teams play with certain players on the field. We've been a little remiss in waiting this long into the season to get the 2012 stats out, but with the international break it's a good time.

As a refresher, we count the net shots a team generates with a player on the field (so their team's shots minute shots allowed) and normalize it to 90 minutes. Players with a very high percentage of minutes played for their team will regress to the overall team value, so it's particularly useful for comparing rotational players who've played around 30-80% of a team's minutes. And it can be dominated by a team value. For example, the 2nd through 12th ranked players in the league are all Sporting Kansas City players — basically their entire starting roster, because their team value of 5.7 net shots a game is better than even the top player on nearly every other team. So it's more useful looking at comparisons between players on the same team.

The top two players per team with at least 240 minutes and the full list of Seattle Sounders is below the jump:

Again, it's pretty team driven. The top two Union players are the worst two players on the table and in general the team pairs are pretty closely clumped. The big exception is Colorado, where Kamani Hill is much better than #2 Tony Cascio. And in Montreal Andrew Wenger is also the clear leader.

Here's the full list of qualifying Sounders:

Ianni is the leader, and it's worth remembering that he was playing more at the beginning of the season when the team seemed unbeatable. Some of that is probably coincidence, but then again it may reveal something about Ianni versus, say, Hurtado. Caskey being #2 really says something when you consider that he's played more recently during the rough stretch.