An Orlando Pride Midseason Temperature Check

During the last week or so, I have been watching the Apple TV show Stick, so Owen Wilson has been on my screens quite a bit. Whenever I see him, I often immediately think back to one of my favorite movies, Zoolander, when he played Hansel, the male model who was “so hot right now.” That leads me a to a quick game of hot or not.

The city of Orlando? Hot. Swelteringly hot. Orlando City? Hot. The Lions are on two wins in a row, and as mentioned in Tuesday’s Lion Links, four players and Óscar Pareja all were named to the most recent MLS Team of the Matchday. Orlando City B? Not hot. Frigid. The OCB minute on Tuesday’s PawedCast was barely 30 seconds long, and even that was too much. The Orlando Pride? Well, here’s the thing, we do not know, because they have not played since June 20!

Our Sean Rollins provided a recap of the Pride players who spent time playing in international tournaments during the long break, but we have not seen the rest of the team in uniform for more than 40 days and 40 nights, so who Noahs how they are doing.

You got that reference, right? Feel free to make the comments rain with complaints if you did not.

When the Pride take the field again on Aug. 3, it will have been six weeks since their last game, and they will commence the second half of the season by hosting Utah, the league’s worst team with only one win thus far this season. Hot. Let’s quickly recap the first half of the season as a primer for what we will be a packed few months of soccer for the reigning NWSL champions.

At the halfway point of the season, the Pride are second in the standings, but they trail Kansas City by a hefty eight-point margin. Second place is great, but the Pride are only three points away from fifth place, so they will need to stack up a lot of wins in the second half or they will find themselves looking at needing to go on the road in one or both of the first two rounds of the playoffs.

The Pride may be in second place, but it has not been because of their offense, which has been middling at best. The table below is sourced from fbref.com and fotmob.com and shows Opta’s tracking for the first 13 games. While the Pride are among the league’s best at taking shots and putting them on target, they are nearly the worst at scoring goals on those shots on target. Not hot.

The 17 goals that the Pride have scored with their offense (i.e. excluding own goals by the opposition) give the team an average of 1.31 goals scored per 90 minutes, a 21% decline from their 1.65 goals scored per 90 minutes during the 2024 regular season. And in the final games before the break it was even worse, with the team scoring six goals in its final seven games, half of which came against Utah and two of the other three were scored deep in second half stoppage time.

There is no bonus for scoring early as opposed to late, but the larger point is that the offense has really struggled. The Pride scored half of their 20 goals during the first three games of the season, and then in the 10 games after that they were shut out four times.

Thankfully for the Pride, the defense has been quite good thus far this season. Even with a heavy rotation of back line personnel they are tied for the league lead in goals allowed.

The Pride are doing a great job keeping the ball out of the net, the most important defensive metric in the sport, and the other metrics show a lot of the reasons for why that is. The Pride are among the top teams in the league in limiting shots, and the shots they are allowing are not from areas where goals are often scored from, hence the low expected goals allowed per shot and shots on target percentage.

The Pride’s goalkeepers (primarily Anna Moorhouse, but McKinley Crone did play most of the second half against Portland) have also kept out 3.5 more goals than Opta’s analysts “expected,” based on the location of the shot and how well it was struck by the opponent.

I mentioned the heavy rotation of the back line. By my tracking, the Pride played four different back lines for at least 100 minutes during the first half of the season, with the most frequently used back line only playing approximately 30% of the minutes.

By contrast, Orlando City’s most frequently used back line has played 48% of the available MLS minutes together, but the situations are much different. The Pride’s rotations were more about an abundance of talented players combined with (yet another) Rafaelle injury, and with a congested schedule facing the team during the next three months (five games in August, seven in September, and four during the first 18 days of October) due to the Concacaf W Champions Cup kicking off, the defensive rotations will probably continue.

Going back to the offense, Orlando’s rotations will also likely continue, because the Pride have yet to find a group that they can count on to produce goals. Among the top five most played attacking groups, three are scoreless and the other two only average 1.13 and 1.38 goals scored per 90 minutes (excluding own goals scored by the opposition).

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. It is true that the rarely used lineups are much more productive than the commonly used lineups. The Pride scored nine of their goals after the 57th minute, which means that they had frequently made changes to the starting lineup by the time they scored their goal. Of the 35 “Other Attacking Groups,” 29 played fewer than 20 minutes together, so while the aggregation of all those groups may have been more productive than the starting groups, clearly the coaching staff, at least thus far, believed that none of those lineups deserved more minutes on the field together.

The coaching staff and front office have had plenty of time to review the first half of the season and game plan out the upcoming months, and we will see pretty quickly if they go with more of the same lineups, thinking that the offense will positively regress to the mean, or if there are going to be changes afoot for the second half of the season.

The club has not announced any recent personnel moves, but Simone Charley, Luana, and Rafaelle could all return from their injuries in the upcoming weeks, offering additional looks that the Pride could use as they build toward the playoffs and the Concacaf W Champions Cup.

Due to the Copa América Feminina championship game on Aug. 2, Angelina and Marta will likely miss the Pride’s game on Aug. 3, but they will return after that, and with the NWSL Transfer Window open until Aug. 25, there is also still plenty of time left for the Pride to add reinforcements, if the front office believes they are necessary.

The Pride are the defending champions and in second place in the league, so a complete overhaul is definitely not needed, but as noted earlier, the offense has been inconsistent and I think either needs a different strategic plan, different personnel, or both. While Kansas City is way ahead in the standings, the Current are not unbeatable, and the Pride’s roster is still full of players who know what it takes to win a championship.

The Pride open the second half of the season with Utah, Louisville, and Kansas City, and those three games — the first against the team at the bottom of the standings, the next a revenge game from a 2-0 loss in June, and the third against the team at the top of the standings — will give a strong indication of whether the team figured out some of its issues from the first half of the season.

Here’s hoping that after these next three games, when people talk about Orlando being hot in August, they are talking about both the weather and the Pride.