SEATTLE — If you’ve been paying close attention, you may have heard about something the Seattle Sounders call the “optimal assist zone.” Sounder at Heart wrote about it a bit last year and Matt Pentz had a bit of a deeper look, too. Essentially, these are either cutback passes from the endline toward the penalty spot or early crosses that force defenders to play facing the goal.
The statisticians absolutely love these sort of passes as they lead to goal-scoring opportunities at a rate far higher than normal crossing, and there’s an intuitiveness that probably helps the players buy in to the idea of foregoing a far simpler move for something with a higher chance of payoff.