Gotham vs. Thorns: Playoff Preview
The Thorns enter the first round of the playoffs as big underdogs against a familiar opponent
In the NWSL’s brand-new playoff format, the top four seeds in the league are each hosting seeds 5-8 in a single-elimination game. When the league decided on this format, last offseason, they couldn’t have seen how the 2024 season would go. The big theme was, the top four teams were way ahead of everyone else. The 4th-seed Kansas City Current have 55 points. The next step down in the standings is actually a huge cavern: the 5th-seed North Carolina Courage have 39 points.
So, the 6th-seed Portland Thorns are traveling across the country, and facing the 3rd-seed Gotham FC, as major, major underdogs. That’s the bad news. The good news is, just about anything can happen in a single soccer game, and it usually does. In 2023, the point gaps between playoff teams weren’t quite so severe. But, Gotham FC was still an underdog as they had start the playoffs on the road in North Carolina, and then Portland. The New York team pitched a shutout in both of those games before moving on to San Diego, last year’s neutral site for the championship game, where they defeated the Seattle Reign 2-1, to win it all.
Here are the major questions that will define this game, before it kicks off at 12 pm noon, on Sunday, November 10, on ABC.
Where are the goals?
In one of the last games of the 2023 regular season, Hina Sugita did this:
The Thorns have played 336 minutes of soccer against Gotham FC since then, and they still haven’t scored another goal.
It’s not just Portland that Gotham is dominating. The New York team only allowed 21 goals all year, making them one of only two squads to allow under one goal per game, along with Orlando. Head coach Juan Carlos Amorós has all of his players bought into a tenacious, ball-tracking scheme that allows a league-low number of shots by opponents.
One of Portland’s best ways to respond is to make sure they do something that has been a surprising struggle all year: put all of their best players in the starting lineup.
Will Portland assemble their top goal-scorers?
The top four goal-scorers for the Thorns in 2024 were: Sophia Smith (12), Olivia Moultrie (5), Christine Sinclair (4), and Morgan Weaver (4). It is true that Weaver was only healthy for 14 games on the year, which took away a lot of chances for this quartet to play with one another.
But — this stat feels hard to believe — these four players have only been in the starting lineup together once. It was so hard to believe I looked it up twice. And it’s true: once out of 26 games! And, even crazier, that came on Game #1 of the entire season, the infamous 5-4 debacle in Kansas City. While the Portland defense got torn to shreds that game, it makes sense how this offensive group had the firepower to keep up.
Now that all four of these players are finally healthy, it’s not time to over-complicate things: they all need to be in the starting lineup.
Which team holds the ball where they want to?
Gotham’s defense is so good because they allow so few shots to the opponent. And, one of the reasons they allow so few shots to the opponent is: the Gotham offense constantly possesses the ball in dangerous areas. Out of all 14 NWSL teams, Gotham is last in total touches in their defensive third. And, at the same time, they are first in total touches in their offensive third.
While Gotham is a strong fourth overall in goals scored (the Thorns are fifth), it feels like they almost want to possess the ball offensively simply to keep it away from their own goal. In this game, which half of the field the ball is on will say a lot about who is winning the tactical battle.
Who is the keeper?
For the second straight year, the Thorns enter the playoffs with their goalkeeping situation up in the air. In mid-summer, the team was clearly uncomfortable with Shelby Hogan’s performance, and brought over Australian national team keeper Mackenzie Arnold.
Arnold took over the starting role immediately, and some of the advanced goalkeeping stats showed she was performing positively. But, a lot of the conventional stats shared a story of struggle: in five starts, Arnold saved 60% of shots, allowed two goals per game, and the Thorns had four losses and one draw.
An injury to Arnold put Hogan back in the starting lineup for the last four games of the regular season. And, in those games, Hogan continued the slow but steady improvement she has displayed for the entire year. In those four games, Hogan saved 82.3% of shots, allowed 0.75 goals per game, and had two shutout games.
Those last two clean sheets actually moved Hogan into second in the league in total clean sheets on the year, with nine. There were ten goalies in the NWSL who received more starts than Hogan, but only one of them — Anna Moorhouse of Orlando — achieved more shutouts.
The Hogan who is playing this autumn is dramatically different from the Hogan who started the year this spring. While a lot could happen at this position in the offseason, for this playoff game: Hogan is the Thorns’ most improved player of 2024, and would be my choice to play this game.
How long can Smith go? How long should Smith go?
Smith was the offensive engine of the last game against Angel City, scoring one goal on her own, and setting up another on a signature fast break. All that scoring happened in just the first half, before Smith got pulled off. Which is really efficient — but, it does open up the question of how long Smith is able to go. Smith’s last full, 90-minute game came back on September 13th. Since then, she has only played 30 minutes (October 19th), and then 45 minutes (November 1st).
It’s a shockingly similar situation to what happened last year. Smith played a full game on August 6th — and, that was the infamous penalty kick loss to Sweden in the World Cup, so it was a 120-minute game. And then, she didn’t play more than 45 minutes in a game all the way until Portland’s 2023 playoff contest against Gotham, when she went a full 120 minutes on November 5th.
Smith should be applauded for gritting through a tough injury to be there for her team. But, she was clearly not 100% healthy in that 2023 playoff game, performing well below career per-game career averages:
Passes completed
Smith career average: 9.9
Smith 2023 playoff: 4
Progressive carries
Smith career average: 4.52
Smith 2023 playoff: 2
Shots
Smith career average: 4.7
Smith 2023 playoff: 2
There doesn’t seem to be a great way out of this bind this week, as the team prepares for its playoff game. As mentioned above, the Thorns have had all their best goalscorers on the field on shockingly rare occasions — Smith needs to be in the starting lineup. With the potential for overtime and a penalty shootout in this elimination game, it feels impossible to pull Smith off in the middle of the second half — the team needs her, yet again.
The long-term solution is clearly to closely monitor Smith’s minutes in the first half of the season. It’s not something that the Thorns or the USWNT did very responsibly in 2024, just a few months after Smith’s late-season injury in 2023. (Thorn Town will be back this offseason to break down just how important this is.)
The rest of the playoffs
The winner of the contest between Portland and Gotham is going to play the winner of Washington Spirit (2-seed) hosting Bay FC (7). That game is going to take place immediately before the Thorns game on ABC, starting at 9:30 am, also on Sunday, November 10.
On the other side of the playoff bracket, we have these two games:
Chicago Red Stars (8) at Orlando Pride (1) - 5 pm, Friday 11/8, Prime
North Carolina Courage (5) at Kansas City Current (4) - 9 am, Saturday 11/9, CBS
If any of the four road teams win their games, it will be an absolutely major upset. But, that’s why the play the games!