MLS Team of the Week(s)

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Here are the players who have made the MLSsoccer.com Team of the Week the most in 2012 so far.
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5 : Chris Wondolowski
4 : Brad Davis
4 : Lee Nguyen
4 : Kyle Beckerman
4 : Álvaro Saborío
4 : Kei Kamara

The official Major League Soccer website has a weekly post on the best performing players the previous week and compile a starting 11 from it. I thought it would be interesting to pull all those teams and see what I could find. Above are the only players that have made the team more than 3 times.

MLSsoccer.com has listed 19 Team of the Weeks (TotW) this year to date. It started week 2 and was posted each week till the summer break. From there, weeks 13-15 were combined (not all games stopped, but most did?) and we are back to weekly since then. Ergo, 19 TotWs.

So... 19 TotWs (plus a manager) = 228 possible selection spots. 145 different players fill that up.

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Here are the Managers that have made the list more than once.
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2 : Robert Warzycha (CLB)
2 : John Hackworth (PHI)
2 : Frank Yallop (SJE)
2 : Paul Mariner (TFC)

Honorable Mentions: It's pretty reasonable to have a starting 11 + 7 or so guys to round out your weekly best but MLS adds 15-20 players each week under the Honorable Mentions category. So on any given week you'll see ~20 players listed under the TotW feature. That's about 10% of all players getting minutes week to week.

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Here are the guys who have been honorably mentioned the most but as of yet made the starting TotW 11.
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5 : Sebastian Grazzini (CHI)
4 : Chad Marshall (CLB)
4 : Josh Williams (CLB)
4 : Zac MacMath (PHI)

Seems excessive but what it does is give us another tool of which to measure player performance. Remember, never use just one to gauge a players value.

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Here is the count of unique names that have made the TotW starting 11 by team.
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11 : San Jose Earthquakes
9 : New England Revolution
8 : Vancouver Whitecaps
8 : Houston Dynamo
8 : New York Red Bulls
7 : Chivas USA
7 : FC Dallas
7 : Seattle Sounders
7 : D.C. United
7 : Montreal Impact
6 : Philadelphia Union
6 : Toronto FC
6 : Sporting Kansas City
6 : LA Galaxy
5 : Colorado Rapids
5 : Chicago Fire
4 : Portland Timbers
4 : Columbus Crew

Yikes, lots of love for the Revs and 'Caps and hateful toward Crew, Fire and KC. It's not enough to throw out the TotW as a measurement device... yet.

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Here are those Crew players that have made the TotW starting 11.
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3 : Andy Gruenebaum
2 : Eddie Gaven
1 : Emilio Rentería
1 : Jairo Arrieta

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Here are the players picked for TotW starting 11 + Honorable Mention on the Crew.
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7 : Andy Gruenebaum
4 : Chad Marshall
4 : Josh Williams
3 : Eddie Gaven
2 : Justin Meram
2 : Shaun Francis
2 : Emilio Rentería
2 : Jairo Arrieta
1 : Aaron Schoenfeld
1 : Chris Birchall
1 : Danny O'Rourke
1 : Sebastian Miranda
1 : Tony Tchani

Columbus is good for 2nd in the league in Honorable Mentions! SJE 1st with 34, CLB has 24.

I don't have any major conclusions here other than it's interesting to see what the league thinks of it's own players. In a way it's like a self evaluation, or a "on-the-spot reward" type program. The league owns these guys after all.

How about I end this with combined starting 11 and Honorable mentions for the players league wide:

9 : Landon Donovan
7 : Chris Wondolowski
7 : Brad Davis
7 : Andy Gruenebaum
7 : Marvin Chávez
6 : Kyle Beckerman
6 : Chris Pontius
6 : Eddie Johnson
6 : Dan Kennedy
6 : Robbie Keane
6 : Felipe Martins
6 : Alan Gordon

That's some pretty good company Mr. Gruenebaum.


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Hope you enjoyed the post and thanks for reading. MLSsoccer.com is a little messy with this feature. Names are misspelled or shortened or have a tilde sometimes or not, etc. To my knowledge, MLS does not sum all this up so I put this together and took it as far as I care to (spreadsheet fatigue). Questions? you can email me at ljbaby654@gmail.com ... you can find my full spreadsheet file HERE and generate your own conclusions.