Updated Crew NPS

Here is an update to my ongoing Net Promoter Scores (NPS) for Crew players. You can see previous entries HERE and HERE.

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Good performances can be a little random and a little lucky so one thing I like to look at, particularly in MLS, is which players are having either really good outings or really bad ones while discounting the middle/average results. This is similar to the way a lot of survey companies look at data. It's also how some companies calculate customer satisfaction scores (or Net Promoter Scores).

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors (or bad performances) from the percentage of customers who are Promoters (outstanding performances). For purposes of calculating a Net Promoter Score, Passives (average performances) count toward the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters and pushing the net score toward 0.

What this math results in is a range from +100 to -100. Anything over +50 is great (+70 is outstanding, but no Crew players there). 0 to +50 is fine. Anything in the negative is bad.

Outstanding performances = 7.00 and up. Bad Performance is 6.00 and below.

NPS : Name : Games

50% : Pedro Santos : 26

32% : Gyasi Zardes : 22
29% : Federico Hi : 14
24% : Waylon Fran : 17
21% : Robinho : 19
20% : Romario Wil : 5
17% : Aboubacar K : 6
15% : Josh Willia : 13
14% : Ricardo Cla : 7
14% : Wil Trapp : 22

9% : Artur : 23
8% : David Accam : 12
7% : Gastón Saur : 15
7% : Harrison Af : 15
6% : Luis Argudo : 16
4% : Héctor Jimé : 23

0% : Zack Steffe : 13
0% : Luis Díaz : 6
0% : Connor Malo : 3
0% : Youness Mok : 2
0% : Lalas Abuba : 1

-6% : Jonathan Me : 18

-11% : Alex Crogna : 9
-11% : Justin Mera : 9
-27% : David Guzmá : 11
-29% : Eduardo Sos : 7
-29% : J.J. Willia : 7
-33% : Patrick Mul : 9
-40% : Eloy Room : 5
-44% : Niko Hansen : 9
-50% : Joe Bendik : 6
-67% : Jon Kempin : 3

It's an overall improvement from the last time I took a look at things as most of the regular starters are finally on the plus side of things.

Mensah continues to hang around in the negative, but when you pull out the last six games it looks better (Crew unbeaten run). A great callout here is Luis Argudo. He's been a major contributor to this latest run of mostly positive results.

100% : Ricardo Clark (1 app)
100% : Waylon Franis (1 app)

83% : Pedro Santos

50% : Josh Willia
50% : Luis Argudo
50% : Gyasi Zarde
33% : Jonathan Me
25% : Aboubacar K
20% : Romario Wil
17% : David Accam
17% : Harrison Af
17% : Wil Trapp

0% : Alex Crogna
0% : Artur
0% : Connor Malo
0% : David Guzmá
0% : Eduardo Sos
0% : Héctor Jimé
0% : Joe Bendik
0% : Youness Mok
0% : Luis Díaz

-40% : Eloy Room 3

Top Performer of '19: Santos

Pedro Santos recorded the highest rated game of any Columbus Crew player last weekend in his first time out in injured Federico Higuain's number 10 position.

His performance was energetic, fast and direct - a stark contrast to Higuain's more methodical approach. Neither approach is right or wrong, per se, but you have to be incredibly good at what you do to take a more surgical approach. Santos' direct and fast approach gets attention because it is exciting! And he almost won the game for the team, to boot.

There is a dark side to the way Higuain plays, however. Slow and methodical is a close cousin to old and slow.  Santos is no spring chicken either at 31 and we may not see that sort of outburst from him again now that he will likely be playing it week in / week out.

Who Scored gave him a 9.15 rating against NYCFC. That's impressive. Anything in the nines means it was a special night. No other player has recorded anything over 8.5 in Columbus.

TOP 5 RATINGS THIS SEASON
9.15 Pedro Santos (Week 16)
8.44 Zack Steffen (Week 2)
8.43 Federico Higuain (Week 12)
8.34 Robinho (Week 12)
8.29 Gaston Sauro (Week 3)

Good performances can be a little random and a little lucky so one thing I like to look at, particularly in MLS, is which players are having either really good outings or really bad ones while discounting the middle/average results. This is similar to the way a lot of survey companies look at data. It's also how some companies calculate customer satisfaction scores (or Net Promoter Scores).

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors (or bad performances) from the percentage of customers who are Promoters (outstanding performances). For purposes of calculating a Net Promoter Score, Passives (average performances) count toward the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters and pushing the net score toward 0.

What this math results in is a range from +100 to -100. Anything over +50 is great (+70 is outstanding, but no Crew players there). 0 to +50 is fine. Anything in the negative is bad.

Outstanding performances = 7.00 and up. Bad Performance is 6.00 and below.

NPS Score

+53 : Pedro Santos

+33 : Gyasi Zardes
+29 : Federico Higuain
+27 : Waylon Francis
+20 : Harrison Afful
+19 : Robinho
+15 : Artur
+13 : Wil Trapp
+11 : Josh Williams
+9 : Gastón Sauro
+7 : Héctor Jimenez

0 : Zack Steffen
0 : Connor Maloney
0 : Jon Kempin
0 : Lalas Abubakar
0 : Ricardo Clark

-11 : Justin Meram
-13 : Jonathan Mensah
-20 : David Accam
-25 : David Guzman
-33 : Eduardo Sosa
-40 : Luis Argudo
-43 : Niko Hansen
-50 : Patrick Mullins
-67 : J.J. Williams
-100 : Joe Bendik

Highlighted above are three regular starters that are performing not all that well. Interestingly enough, two of Porter's guys. I also called out Artur and Trapp. Both don't appear to be hurting the team but the interesting thing is that Artur was the one benched when maybe they should just split time. Trapp being captain (and the face of the team) prevents that, but a good benching might not be the worst thing for him right now.

One last thing about Santos. I think it is pretty remarkable that he is improving the way he is. This isn't to say he was as bad as prominent Crew fans (Twitter, Big Soccer, Reddit) would have you think. He came on to the team as a good player and played well. He's growing into the league and team. Something a lot of good/great players never seem to be able to do (or care to). I believe that a good chunk of this has to do with Federico Higuain and the culture he brings with him.

We shall see where this takes the team. They still have a ways to go this year. I'll consider a 10 goal, 10 assist year for Santos a huge win. He has it in him.

Top NPS Performer, LAFC: Vela

After yesterday's look at Columbus Crew players using what's called a Net Promoter Score, I decided to take a look at the best team in the league and apply the same math to their players. Here's what happened.

Net Promoter Score : Player Name

+94 : Carlos Vela
+87 : Eduard Atuesta

+63 : Diego Rossi
+56 : Latif Blessing
+50 : Mark-Anthony Kaye

+47 : Walker Zimmerman
+45 : Steven Beitashour
+38 : Eddie Segura
+33 : Adama Diomande
+33 : Danilo Silva
+33 : Tristan Blackmon
+29 : Jordan Harvey
+14 : Christian Ramirez
+6 : Tyler Miller

0 : Javier Pérez
0 : Mohamed El-Munir
0 : Niko Hämälainen
0 : Peter-Lee Vassell
0 : Shaft Brewer

-14 Lee Nguyen
-17 Adrien Pérez
-20 André Horta
-50 Josh Pérez

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Some quick callouts:

1. Columbus didn't have any players above +53 (Pedro Santos).

2. When looking at individual game performances, LAFC has 17 of the top 20 spots (8 are Carlos Vela).

3. 16% of all individual Crew player performances have resulted in a badly rated game. That number is only 7% for LAFC.

4. Crew have 10 players in the negative, LAFC only 4.

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I'll run this by a few more teams, but it's looking like a solid way to measure player performance once the season gets going. Again, I love this metric because it tells me who is having bad outings. In retail, it told me what products were performing poorly with customers in the same way. It got to where I wanted, quickly. From there I can spend valuable time on those, instead of chasing one or two bad reviews/customer experiences.

Same thing with players. It's the old "you're only as strong as your weakest link" line. Columbus, thus far in 2019, just have too many players getting outplayed. That doesn't always mean it is the player's fault, but it is concerning for them.

Crew Net Promoter Scores

Following up on yesterday's player ratings/evaluations (via WhoScored) we have my Net Promoter Scores (NPS). I used it last year and it told a good story. NPS is a measurement often used in retail environments. It's where you only look at bad customer reviews and the good while throwing out the middle bunch. It's very effective at getting you where you want to be and prevents you from wasting your time on meaningless things.

I've used it a few times over the years. Last year you can find it HERE. 

For WhoScored ratings, I use <6.00 as a BAD GAME. and >7.00 as a GOOD GAME. The basic math is 

BAD GAME / TOTAL GAMES = % BAD

GOOD GAME / TOTAL GAMES = % GOOD

% BAD - % GOOD = NPS

What that gives you a score between -100 and +100. In retail environments you want things to be +80. For the way I'm using it here, +50 or so is good enough.

+67% Lucas Zelar
+64% Darlington
+59% Pedro Santo
+50% Harrison Af
+50% Derrick Eti
+50% Héctor Jimé
+50% Vito Wormgo

+44% Gyasi Zarde
+41% Artur
+40% Aboubacar K
+33% Sebastian B
+30% Josh Willia
+29% Milton Vale
+28% Jonathan Me
+27% Eloy Room
+25% Luis Díaz
+18% Youness Mok

0% Chris Cadde
0% Aidan Morri
0% Fanendo Adi
0% Emmanuel Bo

-17% Andrew Tarb
-25% Fatai Alash

This is quite an improvement over last year where there were TEN players in the negative. None of the outfield players here are still with the team (GK's score a bit lower in general).

-11% : Alex Crogna : 9

-11% : Justin Mera : 9

-27% : David Guzmá : 11

-29% : Eduardo Sos : 7

-29% : J.J. Willia : 7

-33% : Patrick Mul : 9

-40% : Eloy Room : 5

-44% : Niko Hansen : 9

-50% : Joe Bendik : 6

-67% : Jon Kempin : 3

The Guldan Rating, SB Nation

Patrick Guldan is the Managing Editor of SB Nation's "Columbus Crew community". After most Crew matches he posts a Notes and Grades summary of the previous game. In it he rates the Crew side of the match using the following system (in Mr. Guldan's words):

"Note on Grades: I have set 5 as an average performance. The player had both good and bad events on the field. Under 5 is a disappointing performance. Above 5 is a notable performance."

I've come to enjoy this feature over the past couple seasons as I like that he grounds player performance on average and works off that. A lot of player ratings out there (I see them most often with USMNT) use a 1-10 scale with no indication of average performance.

**I'm going to cut to the chase than explain lower down the post.**

What I did was take the number of times a player rated a 7 and above and divided that by total number of times rated.

RATING : NAME : TIMES RATED

55.6% : Federico Higuain : 9
46.2% : Jairo Arrieta : 13
35.3% : Danny O'Rourke : 17
33.3% : Andy Gruenebaum : 27
33.3% : Matt Lampson : 3
32.1% : Eddie Gaven : 28
30.0% : Milovan Mirosevic : 20
21.7% : Josh Williams : 23
21.4% : Dilly Duka : 14
20.0% : Kevan George : 5

17.9% : TEAM

16.7% : Chad Marshall : 18
16.7% : Chris Birchall : 12
15.4% : Sebastian Miranda : 26
12.5% : Cole Grossman : 8
11.1% : Justin Meram : 18
10.0% : Olman Vargas : 10
10.0% : Carlos Mendes : 10
9.1% : Emilio Rentería : 22
9.1% : Eric Gehrig : 11
9.1% : Nemanja Vukovic : 11
7.1% : Coaching : 28
5.6% : Tony Tchani : 18

0.0% : Bernardo Anor : 10
0.0% : Shaun Francis : 7
0.0% : Ethan Finlay : 11
0.0% : Kirk Urso : 5
0.0% : Aaron Schoenfeld : 8
0.0% : Julius James : 9
0.0% : Ben Speas : 1

WHY DID I DO IT THIS WAY

Another thing I like about Guldan's system is that in the description it doesn't indicate if "10" is even the highest number or even if 1 is the lowest. Up until recently I'd never seen even an "8" given out by Guldan (I talked about that earlier this year).

29 total Crew players were rated 402 times (on average, about 14x a player). Plenty of times to draw valuable information out. Here's how the score distribution looked. On the left is his rating (LOW is bad, like - a 2; High is good, 9): On the right is the number of times that Score was handed out.

2 : 2
3 : 18
4 : 50
5 : 99
6 : 161
7 : 64
8 : 5
9 : 3

No "1" or "10" this year. Again, Guldan's system pivots off a 5 as average rating. What this reminds me of is a Net Promoter Score (NPS). It's a system that simply asks the question "Would you recommend this product to a friend". In the Net Promoter system average scores are thrown out. Which is exactly what I did. The reason being is to eliminate the 'passive' ratings. In the retail / maufacturing world 'passive' customers can be seen as the enemy. Why? I doesn't give you any actionable items. Without actionable tasks you waste a lot of time on nada.

If you have a customer nailing your ass to the wall... you want to focus on that. NOT the folks in the middle, NPS treats that as noise. Same goes for the higher ratings. Growing your company, you want to figure out what works. NPS can be valuable in this way.

What I did to derive a usable number from Guldan's rating system is take the total number of times a player scores a 7 and above and divide that by the total number of times the player was rated. I feel that shows best what Patrick Guldan views as quality.

EXAMPLE: DILLY DUKA
Duka was rated a total of 14 times by Patrick Guldan. He (Duka) got rated 4 twice, a 5 four times, a 6 five times and a 7 three times. It looks like this:

GULDAN SCORE : # OF TIMES RATED
4 : 2
5 : 4
6 : 5
7 : 3

Dilly didn't recieve any ratings others than those above. What I'm going to do is throw out the anything below 7... take the 3x at a "7" and divide it by total number of times rated, 14.

3 / 14 = 21.4% : Duka

Taking out the "detractors" pulls my number away from true NPS. I did this, in part, because Guldan's rating isn't on a 1-10 scale. Also, NPS has many critics, including me.

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Taking the "average" rating of players leaves almost all at around 5 or 6. Removing the middle ground gives me more to go off of. Had a brief Twitter conversation with the great Steve Sirk (@stevesirk) about how the Crew players with the most time naturally find the middle of the road (Team averages). A NPS type score is a simple way of discounting average and bringing important items into focus.

Of course Guldan's rating system isn't the only thing to go off of, nor is only using "NPS" if you are a retail company. Guldan's ratings are an "outsider but almost insider" type rating that should only be taken as such. Meaning, he has contact with team officials and players but isn't part of the payroll. There are hints of favoritism here and there but generally his scores are honest. I'll post this on the right side blog though so you, dear informed reader, can make your own conclusions about things.

If you want to mess with Patrick Guldan's player ratings you can find them HERE. Mr. Guldan didn't rate every week (that I could find) but I pulled as much as there was available on his SB Nation Crew blog. Statistically; it's enough to evaluate how he views the performance of the players this year.

I'm posting it as part of my ongoing evaluation of Crew players.

I appreciate Patrick Guldan's player ratings and look forward to them again next year.

Some WhoScored Crew Analysis

Who Scored is one of the only places (if not the only place) that rates each MLS player each game, all season. They also rate another 10+ leagues that span the globe. Just like anything, it isn't perfect but it does give us a general indication of which players are doing well.

I like tracking such things but often times things like a game by game player rating might get over looked because of another story or just not enough time to put together a coherent thought.

What I've done here is take each player's rating when they started and broken each out into one of three categories.

1. EXCEPTIONAL
This is any score above the best median player score on the year (Chad Marshall's 7.36, which was good enough for WhoScored's 2013 Best XI). The % in the chart is out of total number of player starts. I should indicate it on the chart but it's the holidays. Alright, I'll get to it soon.

2. ABOVE AVERAGE
This is the middle column. It's the percentage of times the player performed above the median starter's rating for all Crew players.

3. NPS (SOLID START)
I work in the retail industry where a metric called NPS (Net Promoter Score) is very important. What it does is throw out the average scores and only look at the best and worst. I like looking at NPS with player ratings because you can really waste a lot of time dissecting average performances (or players). For this quick exersize I decided a 'top' Crew performance was 7.17 and above. A poor performance was 6.49 and below.

For all three above, the higher the better. I've sorted by the aggregate of all three.

One of the reasons this doesn't get a more serious look is because I don't have enough time to fairly compare it to the rest of the league. This just tells me which Crew players performed the best vs. other Crew players.

That said, I'm familiar with their ratings to say that a MLS level player should have a 'Net Promoter' above 50% if they have over five starts (George, Finlay, Finley, Warzycha, Schoenfeld are light).

"We Had a Chance to Win" - Every Coach in History

Crew Head Coach (and Sporting Director, because it seems we must say that) Gregg Berhalter recently stated something of the curious kind that Mr. Adam Jardy rightly and keenly picked up on in his "Covering the Crew" blog over at Dispatch.com.

“There are very few games – actually I can’t think of one game where we didn’t have a chance to win the game,” Berhalter said after Monday’s training session at the Crew’s facility in Obetz.

Not sure if Berhalter is a mad genius or more just a thinker of a man with recording device in front of him. There's probably only a few people that have actually watched each Crew match this year and fewer still that know enough about the sport to say, "hey dude, yer wrong"

Looking at it that way, he's a mad genius.

For me, the Jury is deliberating on the the genius part, but what is undeniable to me is the Berhalter the Thinker side of things. Has the Crew been in most games this year? Yeah, okay. Sure they have. But you could also say that about Robert Warzycha coached teams the past few years as well.

Did you know that only three teams have lost more than half their games by more than one goal this year? I guess now that I write that, it seems pretty abstract. Even still. That'd be New England, Chivas USA and the godawful Houston Dynamo. Everyone else keeps it pretty close (which is the point of bringing up the abstract).

Major League Soccer is designed to do just this, so no real surprises here. Does make it boring as shit though. This is something I've thought a lot about over the past few years. Do I really want things to be close every year? Do I want a Warzycha and McCullers to have a chance each year? For you NFL fans... do you want a Mangini or Shurmur with a shot each year? How about those Cavs fans out there and Mike Brown. Byron Scott? Are you willing to look past and accept failure because the happen to be coaching in the city you happen to live in?

It becomes more of an philosophical type question if you continue down this path. Do YOU - as a person whose identity is so wrapped up in city - want to believe you have a chance to win a championship year in and year out no matter the incompetence or do you want to see your favorite sport played at the highest possible level, excellence and hard work rewarded.

It's an argument that reminds me of the famous Jacques-Louis David painting "The Death of Socrates." I was learned (rightly or wrongly) that it was Socrates pointing to the Divine. All the gods, or singular god, that he believed in. It was meant to be defiant. Stating that the purpose in life was to that of something higher, something not of humankind and that striving for the divine was the purpose in life.

Continuing with art history course, with Raphael's "The School of Athens" you again see this theme as Aristotle walks with Plato, both trying to reason whether or not that greatness was with the divine and not as reasoned here on earth.

What isn't unanswered - is that most of what teams in MLS strive for - is not anywhere close to what Socrates, Aristotle or Plato wrote about. No. MLS is looking more to build the perfect cheap labor. That TV stand you find at Walmart or Target - because you are willing to settle.

From this standpoint, there is something that interests me. It is that this Walmart / Target model is based on your willingness to settle for crap products. High sales good. Low... bad. They also look at customer satisfaction, though. Can't sell things that fall apart, right?

NET PROMOTER SCORE

Or NPS. I like the idea. Throw out the average scores (close games) in favor of just the bad and good. In soccer I see it as the 1-0 or 0-1 or Draw type games. The close ones that Berhalter talks about. NPS tries to quantify that by just taking the low and high. Lose big, win big. Toss the rest. Let's look at who has done that then.

Who has won more by two or more than lost, per match played. I use a percentage as the "promoter". It's the percentage of more +2 games won as overall games played.

Team	2+ Loss	2+ Win	Diff in 2+	Games Played	"Promoter"
L.A. Galaxy	0	4	4	18	22.2%
DC United	1	5	4	19	21.1%
Colorado	2	5	3	20	15.0%
Sporting KC	1	4	3	21	14.3%
San Jose	0	2	2	18	11.1%
Toronto FC	1	3	2	18	11.1%
Seattle	2	4	2	19	10.5%
FC Dallas	1	3	2	21	9.5%
Real Salt Lake	2	3	1	20	5.0%
Philadelphia	2	3	1	21	4.8%
Portland	2	2	0	21	0.0%
New York RB	3	3	0	20	0.0%
Columbus	3	2	-1	21	-4.8%
Vancouver	2	1	-1	20	-5.0%
Chicago Fire	2	0	-2	19	-10.5%
New England	7	4	-3	20	-15.0%
Montreal Impact	6	2	-4	20	-20.0%
Chivas USA	7	2	-5	20	-25.0%
Houston	10	2	-8	20	-40.0%

Not sure where this gets you, true reader (track it for yourself over here). Consider it the anti- "we are in most games" coach speak quote you always hear. This (like NPS metric) throws out those games and treats them as not important. The point is to be better than your opponent, not the same.

What is above are teams that win more by two goals then lose. Seems a good measurement of quality this far into the season, I guess. At least to me. Might not be Socrates, Aristotle or Plato but it's what we got here in Columbus.

Updated Crew Player NPS

Here's another update to Crew player's Net Promoter Score (NPS). I've been tracking this metric throughout the season. If you want to see previous scores you can go here, here or here.

NPS is a commonly used retail metric used in tracking product quality or customer satisfaction. Here, it takes the % of Great Games and subtracts the number of Bad Games. I used Who Scored to determine good/bad.

The philosophy behind this simple measurement is sound. It quickly creates actionable data instead of mulling over average products forever.

Here are how Crew players look over the last 10 games.

Grand Total	Name	Games
70%	Pedro Santos	10
67%	Josh Williams	3
56%	Gyasi Zardes	9
40%	Harrison Afful	10
40%	Luis Argudo	10
33%	Aboubacar K	6
33%	Jonathan Mensah	6
22%	Artur	9
20%	Luis Díaz	10
17%	Connor Maloney	6
14%	Romario Williams	7
11%	Wil Trapp	9
0%	Eloy Room	9
0%	Alex Crognale	8
0%	David Accam	8
0%	David Guzmán	4
0%	Héctor Jimé	4
-20%	Youness Mok	5

A couple quick notes:

- Only one player in the negative is good for the Crew
- I like what I'm seeing from Diaz