Orlando City’s Playoff Offense Needs to Match Its Prolific Defense

A few weeks ago I wrote about the final four NWSL teams and what the Pride would need to do to be the last team standing, and two weeks later the Pride won the NWSL Championship. I am not saying that there is a direct explicit cause-and-effect connection between the two, and that the sole reason the Pride won was because of me and what I wrote, but I am not not saying it either.

I am absolutely not saying that. Out loud.

Seriously though, congratulations to the Pride. What an amazing season they had and they thoroughly deserve to call themselves champions. As my colleague Sam Denker wrote, they have built something special and sustainable.

Staying in the same stadium and color, but moving to MLS, Orlando City has reached the same place the Pride were two weekends ago — the final four of its league playoffs. In contrast to the NWSL, where the top four teams during the regular season made the final four, on the MLS side, it is the teams ranked fourth (LA Galaxy), seventh (Seattle), ninth (Orlando City) and 14th (the New York Red Bulls). There is a Wicked joke in here somewhere about Inter Miami getting splashed with cold water in the first round of the playoffs and melting away, but I will leave it at that and move on to focusing on the best MLS team in Florida, a team that actually advanced not once, but twice in the playoffs.

Orlando City has technically won three of its four games in these playoffs, as MLS counts penalty kick shootout wins as full game wins in the best-of-three, first-round matchups, but it has not been pretty. The offense that was averaging nearly 2.5 goals scored per game from July through the end of the regular season is averaging a paltry 1.0 goals per game in the playoffs, and while that has been enough for the Lions to squeeze through and advance to the conference finals, it would be a whole lot nicer if Orlando City’s offense was performing more like, say, the LA Galaxy, who are averaging a cool 5.0 goals per game in the playoffs (yes, you read that correctly).

Perhaps the Lions will score the required 21 goals against the Red Bulls to lift their playoff average from 1.0 to 5.0, but probably not, and at this point I would be happy with a two-goal game and would be extremely thankful (timely reference alert) for a three-goal game, especially considering how well the defense has been playing.

We will get to the defense, a positive story, in a moment, but before that I want to show a comparison between Orlando City’s performance during the full regular season, the regular season games from July on, and the four playoff games (own goals are excluded from these stats; all data is from fbref.com):

The Lions came into the playoffs extremely hot, but in their four playoff games they have looked like the Orlando City of the early season, which struggled to find the net with consistency. It is a small sample, and the competition is fiercer in the playoffs than the regular season, but what stands out to me is that the quality of the shot locations has decreased by nearly 20% (look at the decrease in npxG/Shot in the playoffs as compared to the games from July onward) and, probably unsurprisingly, the conversion rates have decreased as well. However, the Lions are not the only team experiencing a postseason decline, as evidenced by the chart showing the change in each statistic from the regular season to the playoffs:

If you look broadly at the last four teams, there is more green than red (first row), but as you can see from the subsequent two rows, it is really that the Galaxy have been full of shooting stars (see what I did there?) and the other three teams have performed worse in the playoffs than in the regular season. The good news is that Orlando City is not alone in having playoff struggles. The bad news is that every game in the playoffs is a must-win game, so the Lions need to figure this out right now.

Or do they?

Soccer is the rare game where a team can hold its opponent scoreless and still get knocked out of the playoffs, but giving up zero goals guarantees at least a chance in a shootout, and when you have Pedro Gallese and Rodrigo Schlegel, your chances are good that you can win that shootout. Orlando City has posted shutouts in three of the four playoff games, and while the team’s offense has slipped in productivity, the defense has made up for it by giving up just one goal in 360 minutes of playoff action (plus stoppage time). If we look at the same type of stats for Orlando City’s opponents that we did for the Lions’ own attackers, we can see that while the offense slipped from scoring 1.65 goals per game during the regular season to a flat 1.00, a 39% decline, the defense has more than made up for it:

The comparative for Orlando City’s opponents is an 83% decrease in goals scored per game, an astounding decline and one that is a testament to the the whole team on how the Lions are limiting the opposing offenses. Atlanta United did not even get one shot on target all game, and while Charlotte did actually put the ball in the net, it only did so once in 270 minutes. Orlando City is limiting opponents to fewer shots per game, and the shots allowed are from locations that have historically produced fewer goals — an excellent combination.

As the Lions enter their first-ever MLS Eastern Conference final, the offense is chugging along while the defense is going full throttle, but I think a breakout is coming for the offense. This group has started nearly every game together for months, and I think the players will use their familiarity to break out of their mini slump and return to their high flying ways in the most important MLS game in the club’s history. Thus far this season, Orlando City has lost and drawn its two games with the Red Bulls, with both of those matches coming before the July turnaround, and I believe the Lions will complete the full results set and win the third one at Inter&Co Stadium this weekend.

My daughter is 3-0-0 in the three games she has ever attended , and she will be there in the stands, cheering on the Lions Saturday night. I am not saying that her attendance is the only reason that Orlando City will win, but I am not not saying it either.

Vamos Orlando!