A Temperature Check on Orlando City B’s Player Performance Through June

With the flipping of the calendar to July, we are now into the second half of the year, and all across the United States the temperatures are in orange and red as summer time is here. My parents and brother are in New Hampshire, where the summers are usually milder than those here in central Florida, but the temperatures up north have everyone breaking out their record collections to play “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas, and not just because the pop culture preferences in the Granite State tend to run, oh, a few decades behind those in the rest of the country (I’ve spent many summers in New Hampshire).

On the more contemporary front, the British band Glass Animals released the Billboard chart-topping “Heat Waves” in 2020, with opening lyrics of “sometimes all I think about is you, late nights in the middle of June.” I do not think they were referring to soccer teams in Orlando in that song, but these lyrics often fit for me as it relates to our three professional squads, and on late nights in more months than just June.

Orlando City is back in training but still weeks away from its next match, but the Pride are (finally) back on Friday, and of course, Orlando City B (OCB) and MLS NEXT Pro listened closely to Rihanna and adhered to her request to not stop the music, continuing its season throughout the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

OCB had been on its own heat wave through the end of May and those late nights in the middle of June, but in recent weeks it hit a cold snap, losing to Philadelphia Union II in regulation and then Columbus Crew 2 in penalties. With OCB’s hot and cold performances, plus the recent return of HBO’s House of the Dragon reminding everyone of the incredible writing in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire book series, I thought it would be a good time to look at some heatmaps for the Young Lions, using data from American Soccer Analysis (ASA).

As a quick reminder, ASA uses the following categorizations to create an overall “goals added” per player per game, with some actions adding value and others removing value, with every action throughout the game being assigned a value. The full explanation can be found here, but at a high level, here are the category breakdowns:

• Shooting: Shots
• Receiving: Receptions
• Passing: Passes
• Dribbling: Carries, Take-Ons, Miscontrols, Dispossessions
• Interrupting: Tackles, Interceptions, Blocks, Clearances, Recoveries, Contested Headers
• Fouling: Fouls Committed, Fouls Received

For the heatmap below, I only included field players who have played at least 250 minutes this season, including stoppage time. The players are listed at the position assigned to them by ASA, and the column “Qualified Players” is the count of MLS NEXT Pro players who have played at least 250 minutes at that specific position. The percentages indicate where each player ranks in that category at their position, meaning that center back Landon Okonski’s 92% in the shooting category indicates that his shooting performance this season ranks better than 92% of the 118 center backs who have played at least 250 minutes. Red is good, blue is not. Hopefully no Crips read this article.

CB = center back, FB = fullback, DM = defensive midfielder, W = winger, AM = attacking midfielder, ST = striker; CM is also a possible position but ASA did not assign any OCB players to the central midfielder position.

We do not want to exclude the goalkeepers, so the chart below is a similar one with goalkeeping metrics instead of field player metrics. For this heatmap, there are 73 qualified goalkeepers (I used 195 minutes played as the qualification cutoff, in order to include OCB’s Luca Maxim):

Unsurprisingly for a team that ranks near the top of the league in goals scored and near the bottom in goals allowed, the OCB players playing offensive positions tend to have more items in red (reminder that red is good) than the defenders.

OCB’s players in particular are very good dribblers as compared to others who play the same position, with Harvey Sarajian ranked as the number one dribbler across all 103 wingers (and actually also across all 539 players as a whole), and as a team, OCB ranks number one in the league in ASA’s dribbling metric.

Anyone who has watched OCB play is well aware of this, as while the Young Lions have many excellent dribblers, they turn the ball over often on the dribble by attempting to take on one too many defenders. Still, the team ranks first in dribbling and second in shooting, with Justin Ellis and Ignacio Gómez ranking first and second at their respective positions (Ellis was having a tremendous overall season in MLS NEXT Pro, but we will have to wait and see how he is used after Antoine Griezmann is inserted in the Orlando City lineup to see if the club keeps him solely at the senior level).

On the negative side, the defenders show far more blue than red, especially in the final column of overall goals added, where most of the center backs rank in the bottom 20% and the fullbacks rank in the bottom 33%. The team’s primary goalkeeper, Tristan Himes, is just above the bottom 10% of goalkeepers in his overall goals added performance, and according to ASA’s measures, he has performed significantly worse than OCB’s other two goalkeepers. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that Juan Rojas started the most recent game against Columbus, but Himes will need to perform better if he wants to keep his spot and if the team is going to make a run in the back half of the season.

MLS NEXT Pro is a developmental league, so there are always questions about whether players are being fairly ranked based on if they are making their own playing decisions or if the club is asking them, or the team as a whole, to play a certain way or to try something different to see how they perform. That said, the cream usually rises to the top, and the heatmaps above reveal that the best performances by OCB players this year have been from Ellis, Sarajian, Gómez, and Dylan Judelson, all of whom rank in the top 11% at their respective positions.

The first three players have all played for the senior team this season, with Ellis carving out a starting role, and Judelson is only 18, yet already has appeared eight times for the Canadian U-20 team, including starting and playing the full 90 minutes in its most recent match against Portugal’s U-20 team (Canada was savagely beaten 6-1, but still). Justin Hylton (18), Gustavo Caraballo (17), and Jacob Ramirez (16) also have performed in the top 20% for their respective positions at relatively young ages, and Dominik Baczewski (18) is in the top 30%.

With busy months ahead at the senior level, some of these high performing young players may get a chance to see some minutes for Orlando City, and we will see if they can step up their games from MLS NEXT Pro to the big show.

These players are all young and playing in the south, so hopefully they can take their inspiration from southern rap icon Juvenile and create future heatmaps that look 400 Degreez.

Vamos Orlando!