It's late and I have no intention of staying up past midnight for another night only to be woken by my darling, love-of-my-life, three year old at 6 o'clock wanting to play angry birds.
That all said, I have been messing around with collecting various Opta data on Deshorn Brown and DeAndre Yedlin for our upcoming Saturday podcast that is going to talk specifically about limited data analysis and cross positional rankings. Without giving away too much, it gave me an idea for a plus-minus system that could potentially work if balanced correctly.
There are basic good things and bad things that occur on the pitch during the 90. Most of those things, those that involve the ball, are recorded by Opta. If you could somehow weight those events and come up with a system that associates a value to them, then you could potentially have a system that inherently grades players for how they perform on the ball across the board.
What if you associated a key pass being worth a one-third what a goal is worth, being that a third of key passes lead to goals. Maybe a clearance or block is worth---whatever that associated average is with preventing goals from being scored.
Somewhere there could be a point scale that is attributed based upon how many times those events occur on average between goal scoring events and in game states.
Matty has a nice little utility that he'll be presenting soon in regards game states. It should, to undersell it a bit, be grand and possibly allow for these events to be contextualized and valued in a more meaningful capacity.
I don't know--maybe I'm drunk with coffee and in need of sleep.
