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The Union are next to last in PDO!

What's PDO? Why is that bad? Why is that good? How can something be bad and good all at once?

Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports

The Philadelphia Union are next to last in the league in a statistic called PDO, and looking forward, that's a good thing. PDO is simply the addition of a team's save percentage and their shooting percentage. The shooting percentage is a percentage of shots on target, so that the PDO will be 100% when looking across an entire league. Tom Worville from American Soccer Analysis compiled the scores for each MLS team and published them on Thursday.

The Union have a score of 960 (the percentage is multiplied by 1,000 for some reason) which means their save rate plus their finishing rate is very low. That's really bad. So why is that good?!

This is good because this metric has been shown to fairly quickly regress to the mean of 1,000. James Grayson created this graph showing how it happens in the EPL. And it's been shown to work in hockey as well. Consider it a bonafide fact - the Union will improve in save percentage and shooting percentage.

James Grayson chart

source: James Grayson 2011

Change is coming Unionland in the form of good old fashioned luck, or answered prayers, or whatever phenomenon you'd like to apply to PDO. That change will come in the form of more saves and more goals and presumably, gulp, more points.