By Evan Davis

Today is the day! We’ve got our NWSL awards finalists in place, and fan voting is open until 8pm ET on Wednesday November 11th. Every race is pretty tight, and no clear favorites exist. Ballots can be found here.

How will you vote? I can’t know that. I’m not your conscience. I am a voting member of the NWSL media, however, so I can at least share how I put together my ballot. 

It’s that time of year. Decision day has come and gone, the playoff matchups are set. It’s awards time. Here is our ballot at ASA.

By Nate Gilman

Without publicly available pressing data (RIP pressing data on FBref), understanding how much and where teams pressured opponents has become more and more difficult. We’re left with less precise measures like the raw counts of standard defensive actions in the final third, PPDA (passes per defensive action), and the average height of defensive actions, to try to piece together a more complete picture of how much teams are pressing. All of these metrics can inform how we analyze pressing and pressure, but is there a better way to quantify it?

For reasons unbeknownst to me, the algorithm decided to surface a lot of people talking about the upcoming change in the MLS schedule for the 2027/28 season. Maybe it’s the crisp fall air, the departure from the hottest summer I’ve ever experienced, people excited for a super El Nino, I don’t know.

By Kieran Doyle

Finishing is a fairly contentious topic when it comes to the world of soccer analytics. The somewhat mainstream analytics practitioner opinion can be summed up as follows: finishing is objectively a skill that exists, but the majority of players possess a skill level that impacts the underlying finishing rate to a much smaller degree than the random noise of sometimes ball go in. This is the thing with soccer as a sport as a whole. Feet are just so much worse than hands. One topic that this has made me think about is the whole hot hand fallacy. Do feet, which are much less good at manipulating balls than hands, get hot? I’m going to try and avoid being too academic and stiff here, but bear with me.