Okay, soccer fans, lots of quick hits this time around. The first number of interest is 13, which is the number of different Fire players who have hit the back of the net this year.
You may recall a point I made last year around this time, when only five guys had scored goals for the Men in Red. Only 10 players scored all season. This is a large part of why the team struggled last season, because if one of those five stopped producing, there weren't goals coming from anywhere else. This year, there are.
On ESPN a few weeks ago, analyst and former Fire forward Eric Wynalda said he thought this was a bad thing, and while I understand that teams can use a real "go-to guy" in the attack, I think balance, especially compared to last year, may be just as important.
Also of importance is the total number of goals coming from behind the forward line. Last year at this time, it was a lone goal from Justin Mapp. This year, that number is up to a staggering 10. You don't have to work with numbers for a living to know that's a significant difference.
Perhaps as crucial as where the goals are coming from on the field is from whom, which brings us to the number six. Six of the 13 goal scorers for the Fire this year were not on the team last year, and you could say five-and-a-half when you consider Andy Herron only played a handful of matches. I'd be really curious to see what other teams' goal-scoring distribution look like in this regard the year after they miss the playoffs. I suspect it's not quite as dramatic.
Before we uncork the champagne for a successful turnaround, keep in mind that the first third of the season last year had the Fire battling it out for first place until the MetroStars started to put some distance between the two clubs starting in June. There are still lots of games to go before we can say with certainty that general manager Peter Wilt and head coach Dave Sarachan have righted the ship. But it's certainly starting to look that way.
Finally, we have the number three, which is both the draft pick that got us striker Nate Jaqua in the 2003 draft and the number of goals in a hat trick, which Nate notched for the first time against Chivas USA. Don't think that wasn't the best birthday gift coach Sarachan ever got.
Nate gets picked on a lot, at least on some notorious online message boards, and I think a good portion of it is unfair. From the SuperDraft class of 2003, Jaqua holds the second-highest average number of goals per game, behind New England's Pat Noonan.
If you look at goals scored per game for all 2003 picks over their entire career, Jaqua currently ranks fifth. The four guys in front of him are Noonan, Alecko Eskandarian, Damani Ralph and Eddie Gaven. Which means that, when you consider the alternatives available from the draft, the Fire couldn't have picked two of them - Eskandarian because he was picked first, and Gaven because MLS tends to "assign" its youngest draftees to their local teams - and did pick another (Ralph).
You can quibble and say the Fire maybe should have taken Noonan with that third pick in 2003, sure, but then New England might have taken Damani Ralph and it would be a wash.
If you include SuperDraft picks from 2004, Clint Dempsey joins the club. So when you compare Jaqua to other goal scorers who came through the draft, he's in pretty good company.
