NWSL Playoff Scenarios Are Chaos — And We Have A Chart to Prove It
We simulated the rest of the NWSL regular season schedule 10,000 times to track who still has a shot at the postseason (hint: it’s everybody)
At this point in the NWSL season — with just three regular season games remaining per team — we have historically had a pretty good idea of how the playoff picture was shaping up.
But not this year.
In a format where the top six of 12 squads make the postseason, only four points separate the No. 2 seed San Diego Wave from the No. 6 Washington Spirit. And among teams currently on the outside looking in, only four points stand between the No. 7 Orlando Pride and the No. 12 Chicago Red Stars. No teams have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet, nor has any team technically clinched a spot. The table is as bunched-up as you could imagine this late in the season.
Talk about NWSL chaos.
To help make sense of the various playoff scenarios, we created power ratings (inspired by Pro-Football-Reference’s Simple Rating System) for each team based on a combination of their actual and expected goals scored and allowed, including Challenge Cup matches. (It’s a matter of debate whether this introduces too many games, especially given much of the Challenge Cup was played when stars were away at the World Cup, but we decided a larger sample size was better.)
The result is a rating that measures how many goals per game a team would be expected to score or allow relative to the league average, adjusted for match locations and the strength of opponents faced. According to this method, here are the best teams in the NWSL through Matchweek 19:
⚽ 2023 NWSL Power Rankings 📈
Using these team ratings, we can also generate predictions for the number of goals a team will score or allow versus any opponent. That comes in handy when you want to run 10,000 simulations of the rest of the 2023 season and track the likelihood of each team making the playoffs and/or finishing in each seeding position (which, obviously, we did). Here are the results from that exercise:
That cloud of probabilities floating around the playoff cutline illustrates just how much is still to be decided in the regular season’s stretch run.
Five teams — the Portland Thorns (>99% chance of making the playoffs), Gotham FC (99%), San Diego Wave (91%), North Carolina Courage (87%) and OL Reign (87%) — are all in solid playoff shape, although only the Thorns have more than a 29% probability of landing in any given seeding slot. (The Wave, Courage and Reign all have at least a 10% chance of finishing in each seed between Nos. 2 and 6 by regular season’s end.) This matters a lot because the playoffs give first-round byes to the top 2 seeds, and right now there is huge uncertainty about who will grab at least one of those slots alongside what is likely to be the Thorns (Portland has a 90% shot at a top-2 seed).
So even among confident playoff hopefuls, there’s a great deal of shuffling potentially left in the season. And then we get into the next tier of teams — Racing Louisville (40% chance of making the playoffs), the Washington Spirit (34%), Angel City FC (32%) and the Orlando Pride (24%) — all of whom have some decent claim to potentially make the playoffs. For those keeping track at home, that’s a group of four squads with between 20% and 40% playoff odds, fighting over one single postseason spot. It’s also interesting that Louisville has the best chance of the group, despite having the worst record (5-9-5). This is because the power ratings consider Louisville to be a pretty good team — particularly on defense, where they rank third in the NWSL — that has gotten unlucky in its results, with a favorable remaining schedule to boot.
Finally, looking beyond that group to the very bottom of the standings, the Kansas City Current (4%), Houston Dash (4%) and even the Chicago Red Stars (0.17%) each have at least some postseason hope remaining. It’s improbable — this only happened 523 times (5.2%) in our 10,000 simulations — but if the Current win out across their remaining matches, they actually have a 63% chance to make the playoffs. The Dash are even less likely (0.95%) to pull off that feat and run the table, but they made the playoffs in every single one of the simulations where they finished the season 8-8-6. And the ultimate long shot belongs to the Red Stars, who sit last in both the standings and our power ratings. They won out only 59 times in 10,000 simulations (0.59%), but in those simulated universes Chicago also made the playoffs 17 times — meaning there’s a 29% chance the Red Stars can sneak into the postseason — so long as they win every game the rest of the way. That's not too tall a task, right?
What that basically means is that nearly every NWSL team controls its own destiny to some degree over the final three weeks of play. That makes for a dizzying playoff picture and a logistical nightmare for team staff looking to assemble travel itineraries and fill out marketing plans.
But the diverging possibilities — and the NWSL’s first ever Decision Day — should make for a thrilling end to the regular season.
Bring on the chaos.
NWSL Schedule and Clinching Scenarios: Matchweek 20
Saturday, Sept. 30:
Kansas City Current at Washington Spirit, 7:00 p.m. ET (Paramount+)
Racing Louisville FC at Chicago Red Stars, 8:00 p.m. ET (Paramount+)
San Diego Wave FC at Portland Thorns FC, 10:30 p.m. ET (Paramount+)
Sunday, Oct. 1:
Houston Dash at NJ/NY Gotham FC, 6:30 p.m. ET (Paramount+)
North Carolina Courage at OL Reign, 8:00 p.m. ET (Paramount+)
Monday, Oct. 2:
Orlando Pride at Angel City FC, 10:00 p.m. ET (CBS Sports Network)
2023 NWSL Playoffs: Clinching Scenarios
Heading into the matchweek 20, three teams (the Portland Thorns, San Diego Wave and Gotham FC) have the potential to clinch a spot in the 2023 NWSL playoffs. Here are the various scenarios:
The Portland Thorns will clinch a playoff spot with:
A win
A draw AND a draw/win from Orlando
A draw AND a loss from Washington and a draw/loss from Louisville
The San Diego Wave will clinch a playoff spot with:
A win AND a draw/win from Orlando
A win AND a loss from Washington AND a draw/loss from Louisville
NJ/NY Gotham FC will clinch a playoff spot with:
A win AND a draw/win from Orlando
A win AND a loss from Washington AND a draw/loss from Louisville
Alex Azzi contributed editing.
Filed under: Soccer