Orlando City, Pride, and OCB Players Who Have Been On Fire Early in 2026

The calendar turned to April last week, bringing to mind the famous proverb “April showers bring May flowers.” It has been a pretty rough opening stretch of the season for Orlando City, and since our Sean Rollins covered a lot of those ghastly details in his article on Monday, I want to go the other way, channeling my inner James Taylor and showering the teams I love with love by taking a look at the individual players on all three Orlando teams who are off to excellent starts this season.

One of the three Orlando teams will be featured far less than the other two, and unless you are an April fool or only found this article because you have Google alerts set for (Sweet Baby) James Taylor references, I think you have a pretty good idea which team that will be.

I am a big fan of the metric that American Soccer Analysis created called goals added (g+), as it wraps up all of a player’s contributions into a measure of how they contributed to a team’s goal differential compared to other players who play the same position. These g+ values are not tied to a team’s actual goal differential, otherwise everyone on Orlando City would have deeply negative values, but g+ is calculated by looking at every play made and calculating whether that play contributed positively or negatively towards a team’s chance of scoring or conceding a goal.

I took the data from all three leagues (MLS, MLS NEXT Pro, and the NWSL) and filtered it down to only players who have played at least 135 minutes so far. I felt like a game and a half was a good measure, considering every team except one across all three leagues has played four to six total games. Then, with what was left, I used the positional rankings to see where Orlando players ranked among all of the players in those positional groups. As a note, American Soccer Analysis includes stoppage time minutes in their models, which I believe is actually a better measure of minutes played than what the leagues track on their own websites.

Let’s start with the league with the most qualified players, Major League Soccer. As a quick note on the positions below, these are American Soccer Analysis‘ classifications for the positions on the field. They code dozens of games across different leagues every weekend and classify players into GK (goalkeeper), FB (fullback), CB (center back), DM (defensive midfielder), CM (center midfielder, mostly used by teams that play a 4-3-3 or a flat 4-4-2), W (winger), AM (attacking midfielder), and ST (striker). The classifications are not perfect, especially for players who play multiple positions but are listed only in one or for teams who go with different formations based on the opponent, but this data reflects the positional coding as of this week.

*I am using the positions listed by American Soccer Analysis’ analysts, though they listed Tahir Reid-Brown as a center back and he should have been a fullback.

This section will be short and unsweet, because not a single Orlando City player is ranked in the top quarter of MLS players at their position through six games. The highest ranked Lions are Martín Ojeda (seventh among attacking midfielders, just missing out on the top 25%), Javier Otero (15th among goalkeepers), and Tiago (17th among strikers). I think we should move on.

MLS NEXT Pro is next, and thankfully the story here is more enjoyable.

MLS NEXT Pro has 32 teams, so there are the most players among the three leagues. However, most teams have only played four or five games, so the 135-minute threshold was met by fewer players than in MLS. Even so, it is still difficult to be among the top 10% of players at a position, and there are two Young Lions who reached that lofty rank: Harvey Sarajian as the No. 3 winger and Justin Ellis as the best attacking midfielder. Gustavo Caraballo (No. 11 winger) and Bernardo Rhein (No. 9 fullback, one spot outside the top 10%) also are in the top 25% at their respective positions.

I am interested to see who is with OCB for its game on Saturday night at Chattanooga FC. Orlando City plays on Sunday night at Columbus, so in theory, most players will be available, but depending on Orlando City’s injury situation, the senior club may need to hold players out of playing with OCB to keep them available for the game against the Crew. This may give some other OCB players the chance to show what they can do and to work their way up the depth chart and the positional rankings.

Lastly, let’s flip over to the women’s game and take a look at how the Pride’s players are doing.

The Pride match OCB with two players in the top 10% at their positions, but my guess is that few people would successfully guess both players on the first attempt. The first is easy. Barbra Banda is not only the top-ranked striker but is also the best player in the league at her respective position and at all positions, as in only five games she is already at a towering +2.94 goals added as compared to the average striker. The next highest goals added at any position is +1.09 by center back Tara Rudd of the Washington Spirit, and those are the only two NWSL players who currently are more than +1.00 goals added better than the average player at any position, with Banda adding nearly two more goals than Rudd. She has been outstanding.

The other player who is in the top 10 at her position is — and if you guessed this then you need to come join our staff and teach me your ways — center back Hannah Anderson. The former Chicago Star is likely up in that top 10 because center backs do not score a lot of goals, but she did score one, and she is among the league leaders for touches in the opposition box by center backs. She is probably not going to displace Rafaelle or Hailie Mace in the starting lineup, and thus may not play enough minutes to continue to qualify for the rankings, but Anderson has played well during her minutes this season and is one of only four Pride players who have scored a goal.

Aside from Anderson and Banda, a few other Pride players nearly cracked the top 25% at their positions but fell just shy. Oihane, Ally Lemos, and Summer Yates all were within the top third at their positions (fullback, defensive midfielder, and attacking midfielder, respectively), and Rafaelle (center back) and Jacquie Ovalle (winger) were right at the top 35% mark. Despite her two goals, (usual) defensive midfielder Haley McCutcheon did not crack the top half of attacking midfielders, but that is a loaded position in the NWSL, and Yates may be getting a boost because she has played limited minutes, so her extrapolated numbers look better than McCutcheon’s, who has played every minute thus far this season.

None of the three Orlando teams are off to blazing starts this season, with Orlando City in 14th in the Eastern Conference, OCB fifth in the Eastern Conference, and the Pride sixth in the NWSL standings. Several players are off to excellent starts though, and based on how they have earned their way to the top of their respective league’s positional rankings they will probably be in the mix to stay there all season. Other top players (Wilder Cartagena, Robin Jansson, Marta, a certain striker from France) still have yet to play any significant minutes, but all are capable of playing well enough to end up high in the positional rankings once they get on the field.

Due to an international break, the Pride have one game remaining in April, but OCB has three more games and Orlando City four (plus a U.S. Open Cup match) before the month ends. Hopefully, a little April showering of love on the leading Orlando players will lead not only to May flowers but also June flowers, July flowers, August flowers, September flowers…I think you get where I am going, and sorry James Taylor, but this time I’m not quoting you, because I am not going to Carolina in my mind.

Here at The Mane Land it is all City Beautiful — winter, spring, summer, or fall.

Vamos Orlando!