Crunching Numbers: RSL scoring earlier than ever under Jeff Cassar

Real Salt Lake has undergone a transformation under coach Jeff Cassar. It's not the most complicated, and it's certainly not one that captivates tactical minds across the league terribly often.

But we've seen this season a marked shift in when RSL's been scoring goals this season. It's something Cassar's talked about, and we can see it in statistics. In fact, go ahead and play with the visualization at the bottom of the page. It should prove interesting.

So far in 2014, we've scored 22 percent of our goals in the first 15 minutes of the game. We're not scoring quite as many goals per game (1.5 instead of 1.6) but we're getting them out there earlier.

This has a few knock-on effects: As a result, maybe we've spent more time in a match on the back foot, but we're also giving ourselves more opportunities to control the match. It goes some way to explain the transitionary states at the beginning of the season, when the team looked a little unsure how to cope later in matches. (Maybe that's reading too much into it. It's hard to be certain.)

It's something we've seen improvements on, but there are more peaks and valleys to our scoring intervals. What does that say about team consistency? Is it consequential to that effort?

Without too much further ado, explore the numbers a bit. There's something interesting for every team.

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