Denver Summit FC Created Zero Big Chances in 0-2 Loss to North Carolina Courage

Seventeen shots. Not one clear look at goal. For a team whose whole season has been a finishing problem, Wednesday night was something else entirely — and it extended a run that now stretches twenty days without a goal from open play.

Centennial, Colo. — Denver Summit FC lost 0-2 to the North Carolina Courage on Wednesday night in the first meeting between the two clubs, and the score line is the least interesting number that came out of it.

Denver took seventeen shots. Six were on target. Twenty-eight touches came inside the Courage box, six corners were won, and by the final whistle the expected goals sat at 1.11.

Big chances created: zero.

That is the story, and it is a different story than the one this club has been telling since March.

The problem changed shape

Denver Summit FC's season has been a finishing problem. That has been true since the spring and the numbers have never stopped saying it — twenty-two goals scored against 26.79 expected, nearly five goals left on the pitch across seventeen matches. The chances were always there. Somebody just had to bury one.

Wednesday, the chances weren't there.

Seventeen shots and zero big chances is an unusual combination. It means every attempt came from distance, or from a bad angle, or with a defender in the way, or in a hurry. Over ninety minutes at home, an attacking side usually stumbles into one clean look by accident. Denver didn't stumble into one.

Look at the last five matches and the collapse is a straight line. Six big chances against Houston. Five against Portland. Five in Washington. Two against Boston. Then none.

Tash Flint took seven of the seventeen shots herself, forty-one percent of the team's entire attacking output. Three were on target, more than anyone else managed, and she finished with the second-highest rating on the team. That is not a criticism of the striker. It is a description of a team that stopped getting her the ball anywhere useful, and of a night that started to look less like a plan and more like eleven players each deciding they had to fix it alone.

Two moments, and Denver had no answer for either

The first half was flat in a way Centennial Stadium hasn't seen much of. The Courage arrived unchanged from a 5-0 win over Orlando, made no adjustment for Denver at all, and were comfortable.

A minute into the second half, Eva Gaetino got tangled with Erica Parkinson inside the box. The referee pointed to the spot and Riley Jackson buried it in the forty-eighth minute, her second of the season.

The second came in the eighty-first. North Carolina switched the field in transition, the cross came in, and Ally Schlegel got there ahead of Janine Sonis. The first effort squeezed past Abby Smith, the ball spilled loose, and Schlegel ran onto it to tap in.

Schlegel is from Englewood, roughly fifteen minutes up the road. It is the second time this season a Colorado kid has come back and done damage in this building, after Sophia Wilson in July.

Strip out those two moments and North Carolina barely had a night. Denver did not get outplayed for ninety minutes. Denver conceded two moments and discovered there was no comeback gear.

Kailen Sheridan made six saves for a fifth clean sheet.

The number underneath the number

Denver has not scored a goal from open play since July 18.

That is three matches and twenty days. The one goal in that span came from the penalty spot — Sonis in the seventy-second minute against Boston on August 2, after Flint was pushed over in the box.

Take away one foul inside the eighteen-yard box and this team has gone three full matches without producing a goal from the run of play.

The loss dropped Denver to five wins, five draws and seven losses, twenty points from seventeen matches, and flipped the goal difference negative for the first time all season. Eleventh in the table, level on points with Boston, who have played one more. At 1.18 points per match with thirteen to play, that is not a playoff number.

Cushing points at the margins

Nick Cushing did not dodge it afterward.

"I think it's the story of our season, really, that we didn't get ahead," he said, before describing what follows — a soft penalty, a team handed something to hang onto, and a counter-attack that arrives with it.

He went further when he was asked for his read. He doesn't think it's falling for his team at the moment. He said PRO came to the club and apologized for the penalty Portland won a few weeks back. He brought up the goal Denver conceded off a goalkeeper's punt against Boston and said you won't see that many times in this league. His word for all of it was margins.

He's not wrong about Boston. He's not wrong that one point from six at home in a week where Denver dominated stretches of both matches is a cruel return.

But luck is a variable when a team is creating and not converting. That has been the honest description of Denver Summit FC for four months. Zero big chances is a different category. You cannot get unlucky with a chance that was never made.

Heaps is day to day, and the roster question is now official

Lindsey Heaps was named in the starting eleven and pulled from it hours before kickoff.

On Thursday at training, Cushing gave the first real detail. "She has a small issue with her knee that she's just managing some swelling," he said. She's being evaluated day to day, the issue surfaced on Wednesday afternoon, and she was out on the field while the team trained, present in the meetings. His phrase was that she's still the captain of the team on her match day plus one.

Whether her absence explains Wednesday is a separate question, and the answer is probably no. This team played three months without her — won at Gotham, drew in Orlando, won at Louisville, took eleven points off eight road games in the first half of an expansion season with a hole in the middle of the midfield. A side that looks like it has never met before when one player comes out has a deeper problem than that player's knee.

Which brings up the thing that got least attention on Wednesday and might matter most.

Asked about the roster, Cushing told the room there are two ways to accelerate the progress of a team, that Denver is lucky the window is open, and that from ownership through the front office and the general manager there is real determination. Bringing in players at the level the club wants is difficult, he said. "We are working, really working to try and make it happen. And I'm confident that we will."

Gemma Bonner arrived on August 1 and was an unused substitute Wednesday, alongside Carson Pickett and Natalie Means. Delanie Sheehan made her hundredth NWSL regular-season appearance on a night that deserved better.

Abby Smith made seven saves and posted the highest rating on the team, again. Sonis had eighty-seven touches, more than anyone on the field. Ally Brazier came on for the final thirty-six minutes and gave the match a pulse it hadn't had, which is now a pattern rather than a coincidence. And Ayooluwa Oke was the best thing Denver had all night, into everything, winning a shout for a penalty on contact that turned out to be a fraction outside the box.

Flint, asked afterward about the schedule, went somewhere else with the answer. "We do need to be more ruthless in front of goal," she said, stopping herself mid-sentence to make sure she got the phrasing right.

Eighteen hours later, at practice, Cushing used the same word.

When the head coach and the striker independently reach for ruthless, the diagnosis inside that building is settled. Nobody there needs to be told what the problem is.

Saturday is the test

Utah Royals arrive at Centennial on Saturday at 2 p.m. for the second leg of the Continental Divide Rivalry. Utah won the first one 2-1 in Sandy back in May.

Utah sit third on thirty-three points, and there is an opening in that. They rank sixth in the league on expected goal difference, running five and a half goals ahead of their underlying numbers. Denver sits eleventh on points and tenth on the same measure. On process, this is closer than the table suggests.

The part that doesn't argue away: Denver is worse at home than on the road. Eight home matches have produced two wins, a minus-three goal difference and 1.12 points per game. Nine away matches have produced three wins, a plus-two goal difference and 1.22 points per game. Utah's away record is identical to their home record. The venue isn't going to help.

And the gap that decides it — Denver has created forty-nine big chances this season and converted thirty-one percent. Utah has created forty-six and converted fifty-four. Nearly identical creation, a twenty-three-point conversion difference, worth roughly nine goals. That is most of the distance between third place and eleventh.

Thirteen matches left. One corner delivered to the near post with any conviction at all would be a start.

Full breakdown on this week's episode of The 5280 Pitch — including all the audio from both press conferences. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for the newsletter at 5280pitch.com.