Orlando City’s Offense Has Been Shooting Like Stars During MLS Play

One of the perils of writing about a team playing in multiple competitions is that this article, which is focused on Orlando City’s performance in MLS play, may look silly when it comes out as the most recent game played will be Wednesday evening’s Leagues Cup game against Liga MX opponent Toluca. As I do not own a sports almanac from the future, à la Biff Tannen in Back to the Future Part II, I do not know how the game will turn out as of this writing, but just know that the trends and data points in this article are all solely based on Orlando City’s MLS games, and do not take into account the U.S Open Cup or Leagues Cup performances.

Enough with the disclaimer, let’s get going.

You may have read that last week Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas made an unsolicited $34.5 billion dollar bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser. While being interviewed by the New York Times as to why he made that bid, he paraphrased one of the most famous quotes in sports, saying, “You lose 100% of the shots you don’t take,” which is similar to the quote originally stated by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

As you expected when clicking on this article, quotes from a Silicon Valley CEO and NHL legend.

Orlando City has taken this motto to heart thus far this season, as a quick glance at the MLS leaderboards shows the following (all data from Opta’s tracking and found on fbref.com; goals, shots, and shots on target are per 90 minutes):

Much like in golf, low numbers in the MLS Rank column are better, and the Orlando City offense is clearly taking its Orlando Health sponsorship to heart and playing like Arnold Palmer. For those who do not live in Orlando, that’s a reference to Arnold Palmer Hospital in the Orlando Health hospital system. When you have to explain the reference, that might be a sign that you need a mulligan. Let’s move on.

The Lions are one of only nine teams in the league performing better than the MLS average in both shots per 90 minutes and goal conversion per shots on target, and considering they lead the league in shots on target per 90 minutes, it is no surprise that they are tied for the lead in overall goals scored, with 53, and are second in the league in goals per 90 minutes, trailing only some team that wears pink but that also knows that Florida is purple.

The scatterplot below shows the locations of every team for its shots per 90 minutes (x-axis) and goal conversion rate (y-axis), and Orlando City is comfortably in the green quadrant (above average on both metrics) and is the closest team to the ideal location, which would be the upper right corner, indicating a team taking a high number of shots and converting a high percentage of its shots on target into goals.

Orlando City’s offensive prowess has been driven by a few players, and to demonstrate this we are going to harken back all the way to what I wrote about last week — the metric called goals added, or g+.

I mentioned in that article that a field player’s total g+ came from the aggregation of their performance in six different categories, with one of those six being shooting. Taking shots from dangerous locations, striking them well, and putting them on target are the sub-components of the shooting portion of g+, and Orlando City has several players who have been elite this season, as can be seen in the chart below (all data from americansocceranalysis.com):

Orlando City has five players in the top 75 in the shooting component of g+, and as a reminder, with 30 teams in the league, the expected number for each team would be to have 2.5 players in the top 75. The Lions have twice that. They and Charlotte are the only teams with five players in the top 75, and they and Chicago are the only teams with three players in the top 33.

As a quick aside, I enjoy how the sites I use the most for data — fbref.com and americansocceranalysis.com — both list out Orlando City’s right back as Alexander Freeman instead of Alex Freeman. It makes sense, as he is great.

In last week’s article I also expressed my surprise that Ojeda was not in the top 10 in g+. One game later he took care of that and he now ranks ninth overall and is nipping at the gils heels of Carles Gil in eighth.

The Lions have those five players in the top 75, and if you look at every team’s combined goals added by shooting, they rank first overall, 30% better than the league average . The three Designated Players lead the way, but it takes a team effort to rank first overall. You will likely not be surprised to learn that Lionel Messi ranks first in goals added by shooting, but even with him as the league leader, the Herons rank 12th as a team — just slightly about the league average.

Orlando City’s defense has not been bad this season, but it’s been the offense that has driven the team’s recent success, and with one of the league’s most difficult remaining schedules, the Lions will need the offense to remain prolific to finish strong in the regular season, as Óscar Pareja teams usually do, and make a deep run in the playoffs.

To paraphrase another great quote about shooting, from one Marshall Mathers (better known as Eminem), they have one shot to seize everything they ever wanted this season. Will they capture it or just let it slip?

I believe they are going to capture it. I am calling their shot.

Vamos Orlando!