Pride Must Finish More Chances

There are a lot of nice things about the NWSL’s expansion from a 26-game regular season to a 30-game regular season, but one in particular is that it is much easier to break the season out into definable percentages. Every three games is 10% of a 30-game season, so the Pride are a nice, even, 20% of the way through the 2026 season. Last season’s total of 26 games does not divide well, aside from splitting it in half into 13-game segments, and with some obvious exceptions like Duncan McGuire and Jacquie Ovalle, most people tend toward being triskaidekaphobiacs.

And now that we are done with gratuitous word choices, let’s focus on the Orlando Pride’s first 20% of the season.

In this week’s TML membership newsletter, UpRoar, which you can sign up for by clicking this hyperlink, Michael Citro wrote about some of the Pride’s defensive issues through six games and how opposing teams are converting a high percentage of their shots on goal into goals. Not great. The Pride are doing a little better on the offensive side of the ball, and offense is generally more fun to write about anyway, so let’s dive into the numbers on the Pride’s attack.

The good news for the Pride is that they have been working hard, though not so hard that the attack is going to give themselves a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack (timely Billy Joel reference), and through the first six games they are averaging 1.5 goals scored per game. At first glance I did not think that 1.50 was very good at all, but then I took a look at Opta’s top-ranked women’s leagues around the world and found the following:

• * I did not include Sweden’s Damallsvenskan because that league’s season just started

In every league except the German league, 1.5 goals scored per game would at least be in the top half of the league. If we focus just on the NWSL, 1.5 goals scored per game ranks sixth currently and is tied for 44th all-time out of 142 total team-seasons, which puts it just inside the top third.

The eye test says that the Pride probably should be doing even better than 1.5 goals per game, however, and the data backs that up. According to Opta’s tracking on fotmob.com, the Pride’s expected goals (xG) tally is 10.7, so with only nine goals scored they are underperforming in that metric. That metric is always a hotly contested one, but what is not contested is that Orlando leads the league in shots taken, averaging 17 per game (34% higher than the league average) and is putting 39% of its shots on target, which ranks third in the league. Unlike the Pride’s opponents, who are scoring on nearly half of the shots they put on target, the Pride are only converting on 23% of their shots on target, which ranks 12th among the 16 offenses.

This is now a two-year trend for Orlando, as it ranked last in the league in goal conversion for shots on target in 2025 at 21%. Absent that trend, one would expect some positive regression to the mean for the conversion rate, but this might just be the reality for this Pride attacking group, most of whom were also on the team last season. They are quite good at getting shots off, and even putting them in between the posts, but they are not great at putting them into the back of the net. There is so much goal and so little goalkeeper, perhaps they need to try to hit the goalkeeper instead, and take advantage of missing that target.

With a low conversion rate, the onus then becomes on creating chances, and in particular big chances. The table below shows Opta’s tracking for how the Pride are doing at chance creation among the 192 players who have played at least 100 minutes and created at least one chance thus far this season:

It is not too surprising to see a lot of Pride players in the top segments of these categories, as the team leads the league in shots taken. An issue, however, is that Ovalle has been the top creator on a per-90-minute basis, and she is out for a still yet-to-be-announced period of time. Marta is back and played nearly 60 minutes in the game against Racing Louisville, but she did not look fully healthy and still might not be for the Washington Spirit game this weekend. Seven Castain, Solai Washington, and Summer Yates need to match the first letter of their names (a la a certain superhero) by helping set their teammates up for super goal scoring opportunities, especially if Ovalle is going to be out for a while.

The teammate they of course will primarily, secondarily, and tertiarily be looking for is Barbra Banda, the current league leader in goals and the league’s second-leading goal scorer since she arrived in 2024. Banda is once again Wonder Woman for the Pride, as she leads the team in both goals scored and chances created and is the only player in the league who is in the top five leaguewide in both categories. Banda is outperforming her expected goals, with five actual goals as compared to an expected 3.5, and she is probably the single-most game-planned-against player in all of NWSL. That is partly a testament to her skill, but also to the Pride’s reliance on her for their offense, especially since they still have yet to be able to roll out a lineup featuring Banda, Marta, and Ovalle.

Orlando dominated the box score against Louisville, but its season-long issues with finishing left them short on the scoreboard at the final whistle. Washington has several gifted offensive players, chief among them Trinity Rodman and Leicy Santos, and Orlando will need to continue to create a high number of chances and improve its finishing in order to protect its home turf and pick up all three points.

The Pride have the talent and the personnel to make it happen, and like it has so many times in her career, it will probably come down to Banda and her ability to convert her chances. Thus far this season she has scored three goals on the road and two at home, and I recommend that she at least equalize those numbers, if not flip the home tally to be leading the road tally by the end of the game on Saturday. Since I quoted Billy Joel earlier, I might as well once again, and ask Banda to take advantage of the white hot spotlight and be Big Shot Banda. Hopefully she will start the fire.

Vamos Orlando!