Denver's Strikers Have Combined for 5 Goals From 7.32 Expected. It's Not the Whole Attack — It's the Position.

A sharp comment on Reddit sent me down a rabbit hole this week. The numbers split by position in a way I did not see coming.

Denver, Colorado — Olivia Thomas has 1.40 expected goals this season. She has zero actual goals.

That number alone is a headline. It's not alone, though. Ally Watt (still shows up as Brazier in some box scores) has one goal from 2.07 xG. Melissa Kössler's line looks fine on the surface — four goals from 3.85 xG — until you check when those goals actually happened. She hasn't scored in NWSL play since May. Her last several appearances are all zeroes.

Add the three strikers together: five goals on 7.32 expected. That's a real gap, not noise.

Now go look at Yazmeen Ryan, who plays wide instead of through the middle. Three goals on 3.33 xG. Basically dead neutral. Not hot, not cold, right where the model says she should be.

Where this came from

Someone in the comments last week made the case that Denver's attackers were underperforming across the board, and used the Thomas-Kössler gap as the proof. Good instinct. I went and pulled the actual numbers to check it, and honestly, what I found was narrower than what I expected walking in.

If this were a whole-attack problem — bad service from deep, nobody finding anybody, the kind of thing that shows up everywhere — I'd expect it to hit everyone about the same. It doesn't. Ryan's fine. Every player who's spent real time at center forward is cold, whether that shows up in this season's raw numbers (Thomas, Watt) or is hiding inside a season average that's blending an early hot stretch with a long recent drought (Kössler).

That's a specific problem, not a general one. It's about what happens when the ball actually gets to the nine. Three different players, three different skill sets, same result. That usually points at the role. Not the player.

Sunday backs this up

Washington fits right into this. Denver had 35 touches in the box that night. Heavy presence. And exactly one shot on target the whole game, from Thomas. Seventeen shots total, doubled the league leader's xG, lost 1-0 anyway. Volume without quality is exactly what the season numbers already told us to expect.

Kaleigh Kurtz talked about the bigger version of this after the game, and her read holds up against the numbers instead of excusing them: "Goal-scoring is one of the hardest things to do in soccer, especially as a new franchise. You have to continue to figure out what works best — what combinations of people, what combinations of passes that we need to string along, getting the relationships built." Nick Cushing said something similar postgame — a team that's good enough to create these moments, still learning how to finish them.

What I can't tell you yet

I'm not going to sit here and say this proves a service problem. It might. It might not. There are two things that could be going on and they're genuinely different problems with genuinely different fixes.

One: the strikers are getting worse chances than Ryan is. Different angles, more bodies around them, less time on the ball. Two: they're getting comparable chances and just aren't finishing them the way an average striker would, which is a reps-and-development story more than a system story — and that would mean something very different for a rookie like Thomas than it would for Watt or Kössler.

The season totals can't separate those two stories. Shot location and shot type by player can. That's the next thing I want to pull, and I'd rather do it right than guess out loud.

The verdict

This isn't "Denver can't score." Denver can't score from the one spot that's specifically built to score. Three strikers, three different roads to the same number, and a winger sitting exactly where she should be the entire time. Whatever's actually broken here is a position problem before it's a personnel problem — and that's a very different fix than benching somebody.