I was reading the review of Portland's 2012 season posted on the MLS website and saw they had a look at the Opta stats. In the Opta stats article they had a link to download the Timbers' passing matrix, and so I did. I wanted to show you some observations I found and see what everyone else thought about the matrix.

Passing Matrix:

* I am not sure what the numbers in the parenthesis mean and I am trying to track down an answer

Observations

• Diego Chara really likes passing to Darlington Nagbe and together they passed it to each other 276 times. Out of all of Chara's successful passes, the passes to Nagbe account for 14.6%.
• Also of note, Diego passed it backwards (to keepers and Defenders) 40.2% (432/1072), forward or square (to midfielders) 52.4% (562/1072) and far forward 7.2% (78/1072)
• Donovan Ricketts had a 44.9% passing accuracy (109/243) while Troy Perkins had a 51.2% passing accuracy (361/704)
• The defenders all used Troy Perkins as a safety valve but did not pass it as often to Donovan Ricketts. Of course this could be skewed by the smaller amount of games Ricketts played compared to Perkins.
• The field players who had below 70% passing accuracy were Freddie Braun, Sal Zizzo, Brent Richards, Bright Dike, and Kris Boyd.
• The highest passing accuracy belonged to Darlington Nagbe at 87.25%, followed by Diego Chara at 86.04%
• The overall team passing accuracy was 73.48%