Predicting the Final Standings

So today I totally geeked out. I was looking this awesome website that predicts the play-off chances for all of the MLS. I know I have shared it before but I was looking at it a little more in depth and it has the Portland Timbers chances at 76%. Compared to the other expansion team, Vancouver Whitecaps at 6.4%, I really think the Timbers are really exceeding some expectations.

What really got me to geek out was the fact that I started thinking about where Portland might fall in the standings. I knew there was only one way to predict that and it was by using points per game. Which then led me to think about the difference between Portland on the road and Portland at home. Is straight points per game a good metric or should I factor in road vs home points per game? I decided to totally geek out and calculate them all.

So find out what I found out after the jump.

So to get the calculations I am going to share with you I did some simple spreadsheet math. First I calculated the points per game based on total game played and points. I did this by dividing the points by the total games played. Then I took that number and multiplied by the remaining number of games each team had. Once I found out how many points, given their form over the first quarter of the season, they would earn and added it to the points they currently have.

Here is what I got(The order of the teams is the current standings order):

West:

East

As you can see the East will shake out about the same but the West will look differently than the current standings. Especially if Real Salt Lake can keep up the 2.2 ppg they are currently getting, I really doubt they can I think they will fall back to earth with a 1.6 or 1.7 ppg. If these standings are what the final standing would look like the Play-off teams would be LA Galaxy, RSL, Seattle Sounders, Colorado Rapids, Portland Timbers, FC Dallas, New York Redbulls, Philadelphia Union, Columbus Crew and Houston Dynamo.

If you take a look at the East leading Union you can see even they rarely win on the road, with a 1-3-0 record. So the question is what if we separate the home and away games and calculate them separately for points per game. I used the same calculations as I used for overall points per game only for home and away games.

West

East (I know Sporting Kansas City is the one outlier, so what I did was took a league average of 1.87 ppg and subtracted .5 from it just cause that sounded good. I can't quite figure a way out to give the a number for home ppg)

As you can see it does change the amount of points each team receives. Here they are side by side:

West

East

Surprisingly the Timbers total points don't change at all, of course the home and away has the away ppg at 3 which means Portland only picked up 7 points on the road. Also the only difference between the play-off bound teams is that Chivas USA swaps with the Dynamo.

Either way I think the only Cascadia team not in the play-offs is the our friends to the far north. Seattle and Portland look destined to be right next to each other in the standings.