I'm working on a much longer 2008/09 projections post, but I wanted to share something interesting. Specifically, how good Bobby Zamora was prior to last season. You can see Fulham's Goals Created leaders for last season on the right-side of this page. This gives a good picture of the attacking contribution, essentially assigning credit for each of the team's goals to individual players based on goals scored and goals assisted. Thus, adding up the total GC for each player on the team will always equal the team's goal total.

In projecting Bobby Zamora's 08/09 season, I found that he led West Ham in goals created over the 05/06 and 06/07 seasons. He was better than Yossi Benayoun and Nigel Reo-Coker in the same period, better than Carlos Tevez in 06/07, and also more productive than Dean Ashton and Carlton Cole's 2007/08, the season in which these two players surpassed Zamora on West Ham's depth chart. GC is a counting stat, so perhaps even more impressive is that Zamora did this in somewhat limited playing time.

Zamora's 7.138 and 7.833 GC in those two seasons would be good enough to place him right behind Simon Davies at #2. I had to include the fitness concerns in my final projection (which I hope to be posting today or tomorrow), so they may not look impressive, but my gut feeling is that he's going to outperform and surprise us.