Stats Summary – Week 4: Who Scores Bonus Points?

Diego Valeri. End of article.

Seriously though, what patterns are the data starting to reveal about which teams score bonus points? What, if any, hypothesis can we come up with about how likely a team is to score a lot of bonus points based on their style of play?

Team	Total Bonus	Offensive Bonus	Defensive Bonus
POR	21.25	10.75	10.5
NYC	20	7.75	12.25
CLB	19.5	8	11.5
LA	18.75	7.75	11
SJ	17.5	4.5	13
COL	17	6.25	10.75
ORL	16.5	5.5	11
MTL	16.25	5.75	10.5
TOR	16.25	4	12.25
DAL	16.2	4.6	11.6
DC	15.8	4	11.8
NY	15.25	4.75	10.5
RSL	15.25	3	12.25
CHI	15	5	10
PHI	14.75	3.75	11
NE	14.6	3.8	10.8
HOU	14	5.25	8.75
VAN	13.8	4.2	9.6
SKC	13.25	6.25	7
SEA	12.25	4.75	7.5

Note: foul points are not included as either offensive or defensive bonus points.

Portland are the only team to score more attacking bonus points than defensive bonus points. A big chunk of those belong to Diego Valeri, who has more bonus points than anyone else. Portland have a DGW in 6, 8, and 10 with a bye in week 7. I wouldn’t grab more than 2 Portland players (Valeri and Adi are must-own for these DGWs) for week 6, but could go up to 3 or maybe even 4 for week 8.

Looking at the other teams who score a lot of attacking bonus (Columbus, LA, NYCFC) seems to point to one common thread: they want to keep the ball. They’re all in the top third of the league for possession, along with SKC, NYRB, and Colorado (wait, what!? Is Colorado not as big of a tire fire as we thought they’d be? I’ll have to give it the eye test.). There’s a somewhat strong .62 correlation between possession percentage and attacking bonus points. A word of caution that I think SKC’s possession and attacking bonus stats are inflated due to playing up a man for such a large portion of the season. Similarly, Vancouver’s is underinflated because they’ve played so much down a man.

Defensive Bonus Points

Finding obvious patterns in the defensive bonus points is a bit trickier. Teams near the top (San Jose,  RSL, Toronto, DC, Dallas, LA) tend to have their line of confrontation a bit deeper and play a deeper back line than teams near the bottom (SKC, Chicago, Portland, NYRB). NYCFC is a bit of an anomaly, and some people might try to explain it by pointing to the Yankee Stadium boost (basically the field is small, so the play is faster). While I do think there is some truth in that, I think NYCFC’s style of play also leads to an increase in bonus point production for both themselves and their opponents.

Random Observations

Defending bonus points are about evenly split home vs away. Attacking bonus points are 60/40 split home and away.

Seattle have just 1 BCC, which they got after 349 minutes played on the season. I’m not expecting a huge resurgence in Seattle and their attackers are safe to drop.

72% of shots also have a KP. Montreal leads the league with 86%. Seattle is last with just 61%

PP90 for round 4 was 4.93, which seems to be just about average for what we can expect for the season.