Hi. Evan from Expected Own Goals here. The NWSL regular season becomes past tense after this weekend, and with most players’ seasons more or less fully formed, we thought it was the perfect time to lay down our marker for the annual player awards.

We love all the fancy stats that ASA grinds out each and every day, but for maybe the first time ever, the numbers and the voters will almost certainly sing with one voice for just about all of them. Sometimes, you get levels of dominance that reimagine what is possible in the most competitive women’s soccer league in the world. That is exactly what 2024 gave us. You want record-breaking goalscoring? You got it. You want a rookie with a torn meniscus to be the best attacking midfielder in the league? Let me show you to your table. You want a 30-something has-been German keeper decide to get win her team an Olympics bronze medal, and put up one of the most ironclad shotstopping seasons the league has ever seen? Welcome, this is a safe space.

Everybody who watches the NWSL knows who these players are. Whether you build player tracking algorithms for funsies or you assume that possession value is something they discuss on Pawn Stars, these players are no-doubters for their respective trophies. So let’s celebrate them, and then dig a little deeper on the two awards that may offer some grist for the discourse mill.

MOST VALUABLE PLAYER
Temwa Chawinga, Kansas City Current
Minutes: 2469
Goals: 20 (1st all-time)
Assists: 3
npxG/96: 0.79 (t-1st all-time)
xA/96: 0.13
Net g+/96: 0.49 (1st all-time)

Chawinga is the greatest goalscorer the NWSL has ever seen. She is one of the greatest goalscorers women’s soccer has ever seen. When I expressed uncertainty about what her 63 goals across all competitions in 2023 meant, I wasn’t wrong to do so. The competition Chawinga faced with Wuhan Jianghan and Malawi did not compare even with the weakest NWSL defenses. What could 63 goals in a calendar year really mean, then?

A lot, it turns out! Even when I wondered if defenses would start to figure Chawinga out, they emphatically did not. Chawinga isn’t simply power and pace, though she has both in bucketfuls. Rather, she is one of the most intelligent off-ball runners you will ever see in a winger. She is arguably one of the few players whose dribbling skills aren’t just for show. The moments when she slows down are just as important as the moment she runs faster than any soccer player has any right to. And she is a tenacious from-the-front defender whose Defensive Net g+/96 score sits fifth among 276 forwards since 2016 with at least 1,000 minutes. (The four above her didn’t come close to logging the minutes she did across the first 25 games of the season.)

The unpredictability of her running and her gifts of winning the ball on the counterpress has helped her teammates thrive, too. Debinha’s rejection from the Brazilian Olympics squad looks stupider by the day. Michelle Cooper is reversing her freshman jitters. Vanessa DiBernardo apparently can ball the f— out at her age. The brief time Chawinga spent with Bia Zaneratto in China has developed into one of the deadliest strike partnerships we’ve ever seen. (It’s a shame Bia hasn’t managed to stay healthy to truly let the partnership flower.) The Kansas City attack is a gegenpressing marvel, and Chawinga contributes as much via her teammates as she does on her own.

What makes 2024 so wonderfully maddening is that Barbra Banda likely would have set all the records Chawinga did, if Chawinga didn’t exist. Two players from small African nations have shifted the paradigm of professional women’s soccer in America. It’s a shame that both can’t share this award, but Chawinga, through her consistency and sheer, overwhelming talent, should win it fair and square. If you see anyone who disagrees, then you have our permission to never listen to anything they say ever again.

ROOKIE OF THE YEAR
Croix Bethune, Washington Spirit
Minutes: 1569
Assists: 8 (1st in NWSL, 2024)
xA/96: 0.30 (3rd in NWSL, 2024)
Net g+/96: 0.19 (t-2nd all-time among NWSL rookies)

There is almost always somebody who questions the validity of an award winner who doesn’t play the full season. How can you judge a player if they were only called up late on, they say? How can they be the best if they incurred a long-term injury, they say? Bethune’s 2024 was so bullet-proof, she missed the final nine games of the season and nobody else from this year’s rookie class came even close to catching her. No, this is Bethune’s to lose, despite the stupidest torn meniscus in sports history.

GOALKEEPER OF THE YEAR
Ann-Katrin Berger, NJ/NY Gotham FC
Minutes: 2215
G/PSxG Shotstopping: 0.79 (4th all-time)
g+a/96: 0.22 (1st in NWSL, 2024)

While the Berlin wall fell, the goppingen wall was born

Berger’s year started a lot differently than how it’s going to end. Chelsea head coach Emma Hayes had benched her. Then, she wanted to sell her on. At 33, Berger’s options felt limited. She still wasn’t close to the No. 1 job with Germany, since her caps total was still in the single digits.

But, as with all of New Jersey’s favorite sons and daughters, she found new life mere miles from the Meadowlands. Berger has not only put up one of the best shotstopping campaigns in league history, but she is the only keeper to put up positive values in every single goalkeeping g+ component this year. Gotham may be a touch overrated on both sides of the ball, but Berger’s gifts could help them overperform their way to a second consecutive title.

DEFENDER OF THE YEAR
Casey Krueger, Washington Spirit
Minutes: 1865
Defensive Net g+/96: 0.07 (t-3rd among NWSL defenders, 2024)

You really need the net on this one to see just how good she was

Krueger turned 34 in August. She has played as a left back all season for Washington. How on earth did she manage to have what might be her best defensive season ever?

We can’t completely detangle teammates and system from her defensive data. g-, ASA’s off-ball defensive stat, comprises the majority of Krueger’s defensive value. The loud defending of Hal Hershfelt has certainly taken the pressure off of Krueger to do it all herself on the left flank, and the recent addition of Rosemonde Kouassi has ensured that the left wing has a backline-stretching tool that will continue to relieve Krueger’s attacking burden, as had Bethune and Ashley Hatch done in the first half of the season.

To much of this I say, I don’t care. We know that defensive possession value metrics aren’t the stickiest from season to season, and they carry with them a ton of teammate/tactics noise. But consider these facts:

There isn’t much overlap regarding the locations of Krueger’s touches relative to Washington’s left-sided center backs (first Anaig Butel, now Esme Morgan). Similarly, Hershfelt doesn’t win balls on the touchline very much.
Though Krueger’s g- drives much of her defensive value, her 0.06 g-/96 is twice that of the next-highest among Washington’s everyday players. Can her teammates, or head coach Jonatan Giráldez’s tactical instructions, really be driving so much of that value?
Scoot on over to ASA’s public app and take a gander at team g+ allowed per 96 minutes in the left back zones—zones 16, 21, and 26, respectively. Washington has been pretty average on allowing high-quality offense on their defensive left flank. But it’s important to remember that Krueger didn’t start (or play into the second half of) 10 games at left back. That average team g+ allowed figure in the left back zone is in part driven by Gabby Carle’s time at that spot, and her 0.01 g-/96 overall would tell me that in spite of good teammates and smart defensive tactics, Krueger helped ensure that opposing right wingers had to look elsewhere if they wanted to attack the final third.

Stick your finger in the air and you’ll find that the wind is blowing toward Emily Sams of the Orlando Pride to take home the price. I wouldn’t argue her victory all that vociferously. After all, she has been excellent for two years running in Orlando, and earned herself her first USWNT caps over the past week. What’s more, only one fullback has ever won Defender of the Year. Voters tend to assume that fullbacks are there to join the attack, and aren’t even allowed to consider defensive midfielders for the trophy.

This strikes me as a distinctly unimaginative approach to the award. Krueger is an Olympics gold medalist and played in an NWSL Championship game. She has nothing to prove to anybody. Which is why voters must, no matter how imperfect the numbers are, try to go on more than vibes when bestowing this award. You can’t quibble with too many of the winners over the last decade-plus; but seriously, fullbacks deserve love, too.

COACH OF THE YEAR
Seb Hines, Orlando Pride
Team Points Per Game: 2.3 (1st in NWSL 2024)
Team xPoints Per Game: 1.78 (2nd in NWSL, 2024)
Team PPG Improvement, 2023-2024: +0.87 (2nd in NWSL)
Team xPPG Improvement, 2023-2024: 0.36 (2nd in NWSL)

Much like others at ASA, we are of the belief that the talent spread between head coaches is a lot smaller than most generally assume, and that the majority of a team’s performance comes down to the players. However, a head coach’s net value isn’t negative, and people seem to think this is an important award to dole out, so here we are.

Lots of people use the improvement of a team from one season to the next as their Coach of the Year benchmark, as though that comes down solely to the head coach. This benchmark would award the trophy to Kansas City Current gaffer Vlatko Andonovski, whose team edges the Pride on year-to-year results improvement, and blows them out of the water on measured performance improvement.

But the voters are almost certainly giving it to Hines, and absent any conclusive argument otherwise, we can approve this decision. The award would be for the body of Hines’s work with the Pride. He took charge of one of the most moribund NWSL franchises, amid a workplace abuse scandal that saw Amanda Cromwell fired midesason in 2022. Hines hadn’t expected to be head coach, but two-and-a-half years later, the Pride don’t feel like they could be coached by anyone else.

We suppose that a feather in Hines’s cap is that he took a bunch of players who werent’ superstars and built a tactical system to get the absolute most out of them. The Pride obviously have superstars—look no further than Banda, Adriana, and Carson Pickett—but they also have players with smaller pedigrees like Sams, who now trains at USWNT camps. Veterans like Kylie Strom and Haley McCutcheon have found new life in Hines’s system. Young players like Summer Yates, Julie Doyle, and Kerry Abello are better players now than they were ever expected to be when they entered the league. When players like Rafaelle and Megan Montefusco and Luana get injured, the next player up manages to contribute. Anna Moorhouse is now challenging Mary Earps for the England No. 1 because of how well she’s done under Hines over the past two years.

Is all of this because of Hines? Certainly not. But with this much smoke around the senior development of players needed to fill the spots not occupied by Banda and Adriana, you have to suspect that there’s fire. Inasmuch as anyone deserves to be named Coach of the Year, Hines deserves it.

Net g+ Best 11

Last but not least, the Net g+ Best XI! Quibble with the metric itself as you please, but these 11 players are the ones it thought produced the most at their respective positions. This lineup could probably sleepwalk their way to an NWSL title, particularly with Hines on the touchline.

Editor’s Note: Evan and Eric have been a really wonderful addition to us here at ASA, in a season where we’ve had more NWSL/USWNT content on the site than any season ever before. If you want to support them, check out the Expected Own Goals podcast on the ASA feed, and their Patreon here.