Following up on the previous post that delved into the passing network for the Portland Thorns’ 2016 season, now it’s time for the Seattle Reign. Same approach as last time, and the Seattle Reign’s passing networks as an Excel workbook can be downloaded here from the WoSo Stats GitHub repo.

I’ll also look at how the numbers compare to the Portland Thorns’ passing network, although as I write more of these for every team it’s going to be harder to keep these comparisons within the scope of one blog post.

First things first, the first sheet in the Excel workbook, and explanations again for what we’re looking at.

The rows are players passing the ball and the columns are players receiving a completed pass. The cell in the bottom-left area where the “Yanez” coumn meets the “Barnes” column, then, is the total number of passes that Yanez completed to Barnes throughout the 2016 NWSL season.

Each cell only represents completed passes. This is extremely important, because we’re missing out on data about how many times a player was actually targeted by another teammate. This data is missing because, well, it can get extremely hard, if not outright impossible, to determine both from looking at the match spreadsheet and even during a match where a missed/blocked/cleared/intercepted pass was supposed to go. Maybe in the future we, or someone else, can go back through all these matches or future matches and figure out how to do that, but for now we’re going to have to go without that. But at the very least understand that these passing numbers only represent completed passes

The darker the green, the higher the value of the cell. The whiter the cell, the closer it is to zero.

These are raw numbers for the entire season, and they don’t take into account how many minutes each player combo was actually on the field. The table below does, with each cell now representing passes completed per 90 minutes on the field that player combo was on the field.

As was done with the previous post, I hid the columns for players who never were on the field with any teammates for 270 or more minutes to exclude any extremely high passing per 90 numbers that may show up merely because a few passes were exchanged during very limited minutes.

Despite that, there are two player relationships with extremely higher completed passes per 90 than anyone else – Reed-to-Kawasumi (17.1) and Solo-to-Corsie (13.0) Outside of those two, there’s a concentration of passing relationship with relatively high numbers in the upper left portion of the spreadsheet, with a few more darkly-shaded cells further down the defender columns and defender rows.

Compared to the Portland Thorn’s per 90 passing network, where that upper-left region of the spreadsheet is lighter, a greater proportion of Seattle’s completed passes were coming from defenders or going to defenders. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Seattle’s midfielders or forwards were doing less. If you look at the raw numbers in the area for midfielders-to-midfielders and midfielders-to-forwards, it actually looks like Seattle had more completed passes per 90 going on – there was just even more passing going on in the back.

Below is the same spreadsheet, but with each row (each passer’s recipient) highlighted individually.

This table makes more sense if you look at the columns and look for players with a high number of very dark cells, indicating that they’re a top completed passing target for several players.

With that in mind, Barnes and Fishlock stand out. Barnes was the #1 or #2 target for the most completed passes per 90 for six different players – Kopmeyer, Fletcher, Pickett, Fishlock, Utsugi, and Winters. Fishlock was the #1 and #2 for four different players – Barnes, Corsie, Little, and Solaun.

As for the forwards, the two biggest targets appear to have been Kawasumi and Yanez, with a relatively high number of passes per 90 going her way from the midfield, other forwards, and the defense.

Below, the highlighting is flipped around and each column’s highest values are highlighted.

Now, look at which rows have a higher number of darker cells, indicating that they’re a top origin for completed passes per 90 for several players.

Defenders stand out as a top origin for completed passes, as opposed to the Thorns’ passing network where those columns were a lighter shade. The Reign in general appear to have some pretty extreme differences throughout this spreadsheet, with players like Utsugi, Fishlock, and Kawasumi passing to certain teammates way more than anyone else.