The past couple of days have been spent gathering data on all of our players, plugging it all into the computer, and telling it to figure out how everybody is going to do this season. I've talked about goals created a few times, which works on the assumption that each goal can be credited half to the goal scorer, and half to playmaking. Not all goals are set up by a second player, so this actually ends up being a little more than half of a players goals + assists, and differs from team to team. Another nice thing about this stat is that it allows us tp pull one player from one team, drop him in a new team, and determine how much better a player is in attack than another. For example, a weighted average of Bobby Zamora's last three seasons would project him at 1448 minutes this season with just over 4 goals created. The player he replaced, Brian McBride, created 2 goals in 1206 minutes. If you put each player in a vacuum (meaning that playing time is determined by only the player himself, and not the team's depth chart, squad rotation, etc.), this would indicate that Zamora is a two goal improvement over last season's version of McBride.

If I project all of our new signings the same way, and subtract the players we have lost, we're left with a net gain of about 7 goals. The raw numbers were actually higher than that, but I adjusted for minutes played - the Ins were projected to play quite a bit more than the Outs. Compared to last season, that would put us at 45 goals. In addition, several players underperformed in 07/08 and could bounce back somewhat. Danny Murphy, despite his late season heroics, was better in each of his previous two seasons. Jimmy Bullard missed at least half the year. David Healy, Paul Konchesky, Steven Davis, Seol Ki-Hyeon, and Collins John were also below their normal levels. Simon Davies and Diomansy Kamara, unfortuntely, are candidates to regress slightly. All in all, though, we should expect a slight improvement overall from our existing squad. My projection is 3 extra goals from our remaining 07/08 players, putting us up to 48 total.

Just for fun, I broke down every player's predicted GC into goals and assists. To do this, I used a league average goals/assist ratio, and determined that a 48 goal scoring team should pick up around 33 assists total. Then, I took each player's individual G/A ratio and broke down their GCs into goals and assists. Here's what I came up with:

Some might be surprised to see our top two striker's goal totals so low. My numbers suggest that Andy Johnson is going to play quite well for us, but his projected playing time is on the conservative side. A few things went into determining this - first, Johnson has had some injuries that limited his minutes at Everton. Second, recent Fulham teams have rotated their strikers quite a bit. Last season, none of them (aside from Dempsey, who also played in the midfield) saw more than 2000 minutes. I went into a bit more detail about Zamora yesterday, but the biggest issue with him is that he simply wasn't all that good last year. What the calculator doesn't see, however, is that injuries played a big part of that. If Zamora is fit to start 30 games this season, he could be our best player. Between those two and Erik Nevland, that does not leave a whole lot of playing time for Healy, Eddie Johnson, and Collins John. Diomansy Kamara is scheduled to resume training in December, which would likely put him back on the pitch by January.

No big surprises in the midfield. Bullard, Murphy and Davies are our best attacking options, and Zoltan Gera is not far behind. It may prove difficult to fit all four into the lineup at the same time, but we will try. Davies and Gera will see the most minutes, as they can play on the wings, with Bullard and Murphy being replaced at times by the more defensive players Andreasen, Andranik and Smertin.

Obviously, this table doesn't tell us a whole lot about defenders. The fullbacks can be expected to pick up a few assists on crosses, but these players generally aren't expected to attack much. Their real contribution is in how many goals they can prevent. Our friend Rich expects a 6 goal improvement over last season, and I think he's right. LB and one of the CBs is unchanged. We should see some improvement with a full year of Brede Hangeland in the other CB slot. Fredrik Stoor and John Paintsil are probably an improvement over first-half RB Chris Baird, but might not play quite as well as January loan signing Paul Stalteri. We don't know a whole lot about the new RBs, but it is safe to say that they should be at least equal to last season's players as a whole.

That's it for now! My current mission in life is to squeeze all of our defensive metrics into a quantifiable number of number of goals prevented, much like we have done already with goals created. Until then, we have our educated guesses. 48 goals scored and 54 conceded should leave us in a comfortable mid-table position. With a bit of luck on our side, this could push us up into Europe, or with luck working against us, back into another relegation fight. It all begins tomorrow at Hull, and I know I'm not the only one looking forward to it.