The More Shots You Take...

The better chance you have to score. Not only was this a motto of an end of the year party for the soccer team when I was in college, but it's also a philosophy for sports like soccer. It's straight forward enough, if you take more shots you should have a better chance to score more. Well that philosophy didn't exactly pay off for the 2010 KC Wizards. The Wizards led the league in not just shots with 393 shots, but also shots on goal with 169. Yet the Wizards finished 10th in the league in goals with 36. That number of shots is almost 30 shots more than Dallas (367) who had the second most shots, while KC had over 20 more shots on goal than second place LA (146). Meanwhile Dallas and LA had 6 and 8 more goals than KC respectively. Put another way, KC scored a goal just under every 11 shots, and a goal every 4.69 shots on goal. While Dallas scored a goal every 8.34 shots, and LA scored every 3.13 shots on goal.

It looks worse when you look at the fact that it took 4 goals on the final day of the season to get to that 36. Want to be more depressed? KC scored 4 goals in 4 games this season, and while it's nice that the team broke out and did this a few times this season, what that means is that in the other 26 games this season, KC only scored 20 goals. That's an average .77 goals a game in the team's other games this season. Obviously the Wizards are taking one step to try and improve that for next season with Omar Bravo coming in, but it's going to take more consistency and better shot selection all around to turn this around.

I'll have some more end of season stats, both individual and team soon.