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Widgets going into the 2018 NCAA/NWSL draft

Chris Henderson at All White Kit has put together a useful little matrix showing his ranking of the attacking players in the 2017 NCAA season here. It's worth a look for a couple of reasons. First, because of the way it does a pretty good job of showing how thin this season's draft really is. Of the attacking players on the list - there's 71 - only 15 have declared themselves eligible for the draft. Of those 15, only 4 are in the top half of the table. Second, because how well it highlights those players strengths and weaknesses. Example; the highest of Top Drawer soccer's top 100 ranked NCAA players on the list is Imani Dorsey, ranked by TDS at #13 overall. Henderson's table does a good job of picking out that, yes, she scored a lot of goals against good teams - 8 against the RPI Top 50, and that she's also hideously inefficient - she took a little more than 6 shots per game, put only about half on target, and took more than three and a third shots to convert, putting her almost in the bottom 10% of the group. So an NWSL team looking hard at the draft class might well decide that, say, Kayla Adamek from UCF is the better pick despite having played at a lower level of competition overall. Mind you, I think that the addition of Foord and the wealth of attacking talent already available (assuming they've actually SIGNED - hint, hint!) means that the Thorns are unlikely to use a pick on another attacker this week. But Henderson's little table still makes for some fun speculation.

This FanPost was written by a Stumptown Footy community member and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the site or its staff.

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