Pat Noonan signed by Columbus

By: James | August 6th, 2008

MLS announced today that Pat Noonan was signed to New England and traded to Columbus.
From MLSNet.com:

“At this point he’s probably more inclined to play wide midfield for us while Robbie and Ekpo are gone,” [Sigi] said. “He can play Alejandro’s position in a pinch. He can play Guillermo’s position and he can certainly play both flank positions. He helps us with his versatility and at the end of the day it’s going to be competition and who’s playing best will be out there.”

The Crew traded a first round draft pick and swapping allocation table slots with New England. New England moves to third in the allocation table, Columbus to tenth. There’s a lot of talk about whether it was a good deal, especially trying to value the allocation swap. Allocation awarded McBride to Toronto, but they didn’t end up with McBride. Chad Barrett’s a nice consolation prize, but I think it shows the relatively weak value of the allocation spot.

Whether or not New England did us a solid probably depends on what you think Pat Noonan is worth. The Revolution have a solid offense that Noonan wouldn’t break into any time soon. And, there are some concerns with his ability to stay healthy. It looks to me like his injury risk isn’t any higher than any other 28-year-old.

To assess his potential value to the Crew I reviewed his overall MLS stats. I chose 15 forwards currently playing around the league to compare with Noonan. This will be his sixth season playing in MLS. I chose forwards with as few as 3 seasons and as many as 13. I chose mostly impact players, but there are no DPs. This is a good sampling of experienced league forwards in MLS. Noonan compares favorable with the forwards finding success in MLS this year.

I pulled the regular season stats for each player in the sample from this MLS site.
Finally, I compiled them in a spreadsheet I’ve published here. (The number after each name is years in MLS.)

Here’s how Noonan stacks up in goals per game:

Assists per game:

Shots on Goal per game:

So there it is, ahead of Dwayne De Rosario in goals, third in assists with only Jaime Moreno and Landon Donovan ahead. He’s right in the running in shots on goal as well.

This last table gives an idea of the overall strength of the acquisition. I used the point system from MLS Fantasy Challenge to give a strength rating. Fantasy rules give 10 points per goal, 5 points per assist, and 2 points per shot on goal. I did the multiplication and got this career points per game rating.
MLS Fantasy Strength Rating