Sounder Data: Chad Marshall is having an incredible season

Sounders defender is quietly putting up the best stats of any player in years.

By DMP Oct 13, 2017, 11:38am PDT

Greetings Sounders at Heart,

With the nation reeling from a shameful international break, we turn back to our club teams for some soccer solace. This is Sounder Data, and being a data and analytics series, I bring you that solace in the form of cold, hard, yet beautiful numbers. In past articles, I’ve analyzed the performance, strengths and weaknesses of the team as a whole. Today is all about the marvelous 2017 season of one man: Chad Marshall.

You may be surprised that I choose to focus on Chad among all players, given the star-studded, praise-worthy and otherwise headline-grabbing story lines elsewhere on the roster. But none of them, in fact nobody in recent MLS history, has accomplished what Chad Marshall is on pace to do right now.

That’s because Marshall has put together a season with greater than 90% passing completion and greater than 90% defensive success rate. This is an outlandish level of consistency. Don’t believe me? Look at the data for the Sounders 2017 season to-date:

This graph shows the 2017 passing percentage of each Sounders player on the y-axis and defensive action success percentage (the proportion of attempted tackles, blocks and interceptions that Opta counts as successful) on the x-axis. I’ve also drawn the averages in vertical and horizontal lines to show who falls into each quadrant, and scaled each player’s point to show how much they’ve played, based on their total passes this year.

That guy waaaay up in the upper-right corner (good at both passing and defense)? That’s Chad Marshall. Chad so far has 91% pass completion and 92% defensive success, with two games left in the season. Compare that to the rest of the league:

2017 Passing Leaders

Player	Team	Pass %	Number of Passes	Defense %	Number of Defensive Actions
Player	Team	Pass %	Number of Passes	Defense %	Number of Defensive Actions
Darlington Nagbe	Portland	91.8%	1239	72.9%	70
Chad Marshall	Seattle	90.9%	928	92.1%	114
Osvaldo Alonso	Seattle	90.9%	1686	76.5%	132
Anibal Godoy	San Jose	90.6%	1335	75.4%	118
Carlos Carmona	Atlanta United	89.6%	1548	63.3%	147
Joao Meira	Chicago	89.4%	1345	80.0%	105
Wil Trapp	Columbus	88.9%	2162	71.9%	153
Mohammed Abu	Columbus	88.6%	954	63.6%	66
Diego Chara	Portland	88.5%	1255	69.9%	173
Samuel Piette	Montreal	88.4%	448	62.5%	56

This table shows the 2017 passing leaders, by completion percentage. Nagbe leads the pack, completing 91.8% of his 1,239 passes, followed by Chad Marshall (90.9%, 928 passes) and Ozzie Alonso (90.9%, 1,686 passes). To be sure, it’s very impressive that these players all complete such a high proportion, and just complete that many passes.

But what’s incredible about Marshall is that he matches his passing percentage with defensive numbers. Among the league’s top 10 passers, only one (Joao Meira) even breaks 80% defensive success. The rest are very average: in the 60s and 70s. Marshall? 92.1% of 114 attempted tackles, blocks, and interceptions! That’s good for the top defensive percentage in the league, topping Toronto’s Nick Hagglund (91.7%, 60 actions) and Columbus’ Harrison Afful (90%, 70 actions). And it should be noted that the other two players with better than 90% defensive success have way fewer defensive actions than Marshall. He puts up big numbers and high percentages. Both of these tables, by the way, exclude players with less than 250 passes or 50 defensive actions, just to avoid small numbers problems:

2017 Defensive Leaders

Player	Team	Defense %	Number of Defensive Actions	Pass %	Number of Passes
Player	Team	Defense %	Number of Defensive Actions	Pass %	Number of Passes
Chad Marshall	Seattle	92.1%	114	90.9%	928
Nick Hagglund	Toronto	91.7%	60	79.1%	646
Harrison Afful	Columbus	90.0%	70	78.8%	1187
Daniel Steres	L.A. Galaxy	89.4%	85	84.8%	1018
Jonathan Spector	Orlando City	87.4%	103	81.4%	819
Jordan Harvey	Vancouver	87.2%	117	75.2%	1005
Alexander Callens	New York City FC	87.1%	155	85.6%	1863
Jonathan Mensah	Columbus	86.7%	83	86.2%	1083
Maxime Chanot	New York City FC	86.7%	83	86.5%	1063
Oguchi Onyewu	Philadelphia	85.7%	112	79.7%	777

Similar to the fact that the other passing leaders are not especially good defenders, the other defensive leaders are not particularly good passers. Here’s the same graph as above, but comparing the top defenders and/or passers of 2017, instead of Sounders players:

Again, note the one outlier. Chad is destroying the competition. This graph even has the super-lenient criteria of only 10 total defensive actions and 50 total passes.

He’s so good that it’s actually kind of historic. I only have three years of data, but the short story is that he’s the only player in recent history to do 90-90. What I’m showing in the next table is each player’s “distance” from 90-90 (90% passing, 90% defense). This is just the geometric distance (think back to high school math), i.e. the square root of the sum of the squared differences. In other words, it’s how far away each player is/was from achieving this 90-90 mark:

Overall Ranking, Last 3 Seasons

Rank	Player	Team	Year	Defense %	Pass %	Number of Defensive Actions	Number of Passes	Distance from 90-90
Rank	Player	Team	Year	Defense %	Pass %	Number of Defensive Actions	Number of Passes	Distance from 90-90
1	Chad Marshall	Seattle	2017	92.1%	90.9%	114	928	0.0%
2	Kwame Watson-Siriboe	New York City FC	2015	90.2%	88.2%	82	262	1.8%
3	Michael Lahoud	Philadelphia	2015	91.0%	86.3%	78	564	3.7%
4	Drew Moor	Toronto	2016	89.5%	85.8%	152	1460	4.2%
5	Michael Parkhurst	Columbus	2015	90.4%	85.6%	187	1644	4.4%
6	Maxime Chanot	New York City FC	2017	86.7%	86.5%	83	1063	4.7%
7	Ronald Zubar	New York	2015	89.7%	85.2%	58	345	4.8%
8	Jonathan Mensah	Columbus	2017	86.7%	86.2%	83	1083	5.0%
9	Nigel de Jong	L.A. Galaxy	2016	85.9%	87.0%	85	1266	5.1%
10	Daniel Steres	L.A. Galaxy	2017	89.4%	84.8%	85	1018	5.3%

The closest player to breaking 90-90 in the last three years was New York City’s Kwame Watson-Siriboe in 2015, who had greater than 90% defense and 88% passing (though take note of the magnitude difference in total number of attempts). A few others have come close in recent years, but nobody has actually broken this imaginary line of completing 9/10 passes and 9/10 tackles, blocks, and interceptions. Again, it’s most powerful as a graph:

This figure includes more than just the top 10, and in fact, if you look closely you’ll see 2016 Chad Marshall in the rankings as well. Last year our guy had 88% defense and 85% passing. The year before was 93% defense and 84% passing. Needless to say, he led the Sounders all three years. Actually, he was third in the league last year and 10th in 2015.

If you haven’t already guessed where I’m going with this, I’ll just come right out and say it. In my humble (but well-informed!) opinion, Chad Marshall should, without question, be Defensive Player of the Year (let alone be on the national team, have a statue outside CenturyLink Field, and his name tattooed on all of our hearts). And if you’re not convinced of that fact by now, I’d like to see your case for somebody better.