It’s still early. The panic button is still packed away in the attic. But it won’t stay that way for much longer.
Eventually, the Sounders will need a consistent run of form to vault themselves north of the thick red line in the standings below sixth place and into playoff positioning.
It’s never too early to put some of the team’s woes under the microscope and tinker with them. Current Leicester City boss Claudio Ranieri was long known as the Tinkerman for his penchant to mix and match his lineups to find the right blend. That certainly looks like Seattle manager Sigi Schmid at the moment.
The defense, while hardly perfect, is actually in relatively good stead. Stefan Frei has already made a handful of brilliant saves. Now that Joevin Jones has settled in on the left, the fullbacks are both comfortable pushing tempo on the wings. And Chad Marshall and Brad Evans have developed a comfortable rapport with one another.
The bigger issue is shot selection, and specifically, shot conversion.
In 2015, no team in MLS sported a better shot conversion percentage than Seattle. What that essentially means is that no team in MLS did better with its chances. Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins combined for 25 goals and 16 assists in 41 combined games, and Seattle as a team converted on 16.15 percent of its shots en route to the playoffs. That was a full three shots higher than the league average and beat out the second-place LA Galaxy. Fittingly, Seattle out-scored LA 3-2 in the postseason to end the Galaxy’s season.
Things, to put it mildly, are a bit different this year.
It’s still early (there’s that mantra again), but Seattle’s shot conversion percentage has dropped precipitously since last year, albeit with a smaller sample size. Through its first 10 games of the season, Seattle is converting at an anemic clip of 9.8 percent. That’s the second lowest rate of return on shots in the league this season, above only Sporting Kansas City.
You don’t need a math degree to know the Sounders are struggling in front of goal right now. Only the Chicago Fire have fewer than Seattle’s 10 goals in 10 games, and the team’s leading scorer is rookie Jordan Morris, who has yet to settle on a consistent position along the front line. Dempsey, meanwhile, is still adjusting to life after Martins. To date he has as many goals (two) as Marshall.
Dempsey and Martins together combined for nearly 60 percent of the team’s goals, and they did it with a style that isn’t all that tenable right now. There are some issues - like the fall of Rome - too broad for a single talking point, and that’s the case here. There are a number of factors that’ve contributed to the current dearth of goals. But the fluctuation in style required by Martins’ departure is maybe the biggest.
The relationship between Martins and Dempsey was unique. There’s a veritable cornucopia of examples of times the two played off one another with rabbit-quick one-twos to free space in the box, and they were deadly effective. Dempsey doesn’t have the same rapport with Morris, who’s not a back-to-goal player and is much more comfortable galloping free in space rather than tucking in to pass through center backs. Dempsey is still shooting - he’s eighth in the league in shots per game - but he isn’t getting the same looks.
That’s a major factor why a staggering 46 percent of the Sounders’ shots are coming from outside the box so far this season. Whether through lack of incisiveness through the midfield or simple disconnectedness among the forwards, the Sounders simply aren’t playing themselves into the box for dangerous opportunities nearly enough. And even when they do, they aren’t finishing with anything approaching regularity.
To catch a glimpse at a team doing the exact opposite right now, you need only head southward down the Pacific coast. To Southern California.
The Galaxy are well on their way to making history. They currently lead MLS with a staggering shot conversion rate just north of 22. If that holds - it most likely will not - that’d be the league’s best total since the Wild West years of MLS’s early days. LA has clearly captured something, and it behooves the rest of the league to figure out what it is.
In the Galaxy’s case, it all starts with Giovani Dos Santos.
LA’s problem in 2015 was a lack of cohesion between Dos Santos and Robbie Keane, both of whom were dropping second forwards. To play into that strength, the Galaxy invested heavily in open play continuity in the offseason, and as a result they have more goals from the run of play (16) than any team in MLS this year. And it isn’t as though they’re simply popping off at any opportunity. They take almost the exact same number of shots and shots on target per game as the Sounders do. They just take a staggering number of shots in the box.
If Seattle can learn anything from the Galaxy this year, it’s in Dos Santos’s activation. He’s essentially cut himself out of builds, focusing almost entirely on positioning in the final third while his teammates look to spring him into the box. Dos Santos is 62nd in MLS in shots per game, completes almost zero dribbles and averages an incredibly low 17.9 passes per game. And yet he has five goals and five assists in his last five games.
Seattle won’t use Dempsey the same way, but it can take a few cues. Whenever Dempsey drops off too deeply, the attack suffers. When he becomes too detached from the forward line, as he was in the team’s 2-0 loss to FC Dallas last weekend, the attack suffers. Allowing him to be a sort of attacking libero and picking his spots without the burden of chance creation should increase his shot opportunity as well as his proximity to goal.
And don’t forget, while Dempsey is hardly a creative No. 10, he had 20 total assists in the 2014 and 2015 seasons. When he’s in the right place, good things happen.
Because while attacking pieces continue to rotate into place around him, the Sounders still go as Dempsey goes. Jump-starting his season will go a long way toward getting the attack back on track.
