After a torturous three weeks, my computer connects to the internet again, so I can finally post some A-league statistics that nobody will care about. First, team-by-team breakdowns of nationality by minutes played. I just separated things into two groups, national players and foreign players, since whether a team is fielding Nigerians or Brazilians isn't really important to me - here's the list:
Domestic Foreign Win%
Virginia Beach 86.4 13.6 0.45
Richmond 84.0 16.0 0.66
Vancouver 79.8 20.2 0.59
Minnesota 77.9 22.1 0.57
Rochester 73.6 26.4 0.59
Portland 73.5 26.5 0.70
Edmonton 70.4 29.6 0.25
Seattle 69.8 30.2 0.54
Charleston 69.3 30.7 0.36
Milwaukee 68.8 31.2 0.50
Syracuse 67.4 32.6 0.63
Montreal 65.4 34.6 0.70
Toronto 62.9 37.1 0.39
Atlanta 52.8 47.2 0.55
Puerto Rico 53.5 46.5 0.29
Calgary 52.1 47.9 0.25
Average 69.2 30.8 0.5
Median 69.6 30.4 0.5
Puerto RicoB 29.9 70.1 0.29
Obviously, Americans were counted as domestic for American teams, Canadians for Canadian teams (and not Americans). For Puerto Rico, I counted Americans and Puerto Ricans as domestic, but the alternate figure counts just Puerto Ricans. Canadian teams averaged 66.1% domestic, US teams averaged 72.4%.
We see a rather high correlation between having more domestic players and win percentage - .44 - but that drops to a very weak .11 if we exclude expansion teams Edmonton, Calgary, and Puerto Rico. I would have expected that teams with more domestics would probably at least represent better run clubs who weren't scouring the globe for competent, dirt-cheap players, but apparently that's not the case.
Unfortunately, the discussion-boardness of this forum makes it hard to find or remember old threads - have we ever discussed team shooting percentages before? Because, and this is a pretty preliminary judgment, and probably has a lot of causes, but they seem pretty hugely important in the A-league.
Players in the A-league show a significantly wider range of shooting percentages than do players in MLS - for the last several years, numerous players have managed to shoot around 30%, which simply doesn't happen in MLS. This may be because of different scorekeeping behavior, but I suspect it's because of a wider range of talent, etc. etc.
Anyway, I was looking at some numbers, and was surprised to see that abysmal Puerto Rico was near the top of the league in terms of shots taken. So I thought I'd break out my one statistical tool, the Pearson Correlation, and compare the effects of shots and of shot percentage on winning. And, it turns out, that shot percentage looks to be a great deal more indicative of both goal-scoring and win percentage than is raw shots taken.
By team:
Goals Shots Shot % Win %
Portland 57 300 19.0 0.696
Syracuse 43 296 14.5 0.625
Atlanta 40 285 14.0 0.554
Milwaukee 44 334 13.2 0.500
Virginia Beach 41 319 12.9 0.446
Rochester 36 284 12.7 0.589
Seattle 39 313 12.5 0.536
Montreal 36 296 12.2 0.696
Calgary 29 240 12.1 0.250
Richmond 42 370 11.4 0.661
Vancouver 38 343 11.1 0.589
Toronto 35 322 10.9 0.393
Minnesota 33 332 9.9 0.571
Charleston 28 350 8.0 0.357
Edmonton 19 240 7.9 0.250
Puerto Rico 22 334 6.6 0.286
Cute little table:
r Goals Win %
Shots 0.24 0.32
Shot % 0.91 0.65
So I suspect that some of this is a product of style of play - Minnesota presumably had such a low shot percentage partially because they were a more defensively-oriented team (although they also didn't have the forwards of Portland). Nevertheless, it seems a pretty clear indication that quality-of-shot is more important than simply managing to get one off.
Sorry I don't have more to say about this.
Unfortunately, the discussion-boardness of this forum makes it hard to find or remember old threads - have we ever discussed team shooting percentages before? Because, and this is a pretty preliminary judgment, and probably has a lot of causes, but they seem pretty hugely important in the A-league.
You can try a search on the main page.
 Walking/Running Puppy - Advise needed
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A-league team demographics