ExiledAjax

If Fam stays this summer, stays fit, and doesn't "spit" on anyone else then he'll get to 50 next season. Should be on at least 40 by the end of this season

Yeh this'll be a contractual obligation related to whatever deal was done around last summer's Tampa pre-season tour.

Cheers. As a bloke who's as tall as these lads I'm always impressed at how they move so quickly. They must all be 15 stone or more.

What's the prediction. Also, I had a read around the competition - would it be fair to compare the BBL Cup to the League Cup in Football? Seems like there is another, older, knock out competition called the BBL Trophy that I presume is more prestigious?

We never realised how many ITKers were in the crowd chanting the future. This has made me strangely happy today.

With full credit to @Davefevs and his wyscout account - you can clearly see that Fam is converting at a decent enough rate, just shy of 18%. It's not bad but it's some way off the guys at the top of the goalscoring charts. Weimann is a couple of points lower at 16%. However look at their respective xG figures and you can see that Weimann has scored slightly more goals than you might expect him to given the quality of chances he's taken, and Fam has cored ever so slightly fewer. But it's marginal. Neither of them look drastically worse than the others on this list. Have a gander at Bamford's figures if you want to see a bloke having a terrible season.

The conversion rate and Bentley's save rate are actually both quite unremarkable. I'd suggest it's more than possible that we'll maintain both for the rest of the season. what needs to improve is shutting down the raw quantity of shots we allow. As @BTRFTG alludes to further up - there's no point Bentley having the highest number of saves if he's also faced the most shots. The bloke is good but to parody LJ if he was brilliant he wouldn't be with us - he'd be in the prem. Make his job easier - that starts in midfield with an effective screening of the defence.

To be fair to him it seems to be working. We've scored a decent number of goals. The worry is that we still allow the opposition to take pot shots form anywhere they fancy. On the clinical side of things - @Davefevs put some nice stats on the Benik Afobe thread showing that both Fam and Andi are scoring at a rate consistent with the quality of shots they are taking. Weimann's expected rate is lower than Diedhiou's; about 1 in 4 compared to Diedhiou's just about 1 in 2.8, but neither are massively underperforming (across the season as a whole - recent form may be a different matter). However both take far, far fewer shots than the other top strikers playing for top teams.

You can't, he's been dealt the hand he has. Man Utd are not the first great club from the 90's/00's to fall. Overconfidence is a slow, and insidious killer. Things. You. Love. To. See.

Yes Mate. So basically he's had a mad season of massively outperforming both his own xG and the average xG of strikers in this division (haven't calculated it but it looks like it's around 0.35-0.4 goals per 90). So even if he was going along at his expected rate of 0.41 he'd still be an above average striker, and would still be expected to score more per 90 than Weimann. Interestingly about the same as you'd expect Fam to score - and that's where we see the limitations of stats. Tell you what though - that Afobe lad at the bottom of your list...I know its a small sample size but .5 xG and .5 goals per 90...phwoar - hope we're scouting him. @Davefevs Painful seeing how few shots Fam and Andi take as well - both around 2 per 90. Compare that to the top strikers, and those that play for top teams and all are well above 2 with some clearing 3 per 90. might not sound like a huge difference but %wise it's massive. Grabban the only one with 10 goals but a shot rate of less than 2 per 90. Look at that next to their conversion rates and i think it's a blatant indicator that LJ is compensating for poor finishing ability by telling them to only shoot from very good positions. Personally I think this hampers Fam - I'd be telling him to be a little more trigger happy. Harry, I use stats to tell me whether my eyes are deceiving me or not. Analyse with your eyes, form your hypothesis, then see if the stats support you or not. Keeps me sane when we're in the midst of an LJ streak (either good or bad). Edit: we've strayed miles off topic. Get well soon Benik, and fyi everyone the stairs charity team smashed their goal and so far are well over the 2 grand mark.

Yeh, we really are. It's been the one glimmer of hope in the performances so far. Anomalous games aside we finish our dinner in front of goal - shame we take so few helpings.

Agree...although the counter argument could be that he's just had a massive purple patch. Is he converting at a rate way above the average for strikers in our division? If so then it's very possible, even likely, that he'll drop off that rate and return to the average xG rate of 7 - 8 goals.But would you take a (late) January signing scoring 7 - 8 goals? Yes you would. Edit: although that's presumable 7.65 goals across 1693 minutes - equivalent to 0.4 goals per 90. Assume (if he signs at all - must remember he's not our player) he signs on 31 Jan. That's 17 matches remaining so 6-7 goals reasonably expected if he played the full 90 of every game...yeh I'd take that.

So going from Fam who essentially scores 1 in 3 to Wells who is a 1 in (less than) 2 player. It's a big upgrade based on those figures. He's quite frankly better in most areas. Shots on target % of nearly 60%? Yes please. You might need to dig deeper and see if he's getting incredibly easy chances - but then again we have very high xG per shot on target stats this season which means we are creating "easy" chances already. Get a bloke who hits the target 60% of the time taking shots that have a near 40% chance of going in anyway and I'd humbly expect to see a serious up tick in the number of goals scored column. Could that offset the leaky defence? Maybe. Defensively his stats are worse but that could easily be down to how he's been deployed and what he's asked to do at QPR. I don't watch them enough to really know.

I volunteer two of my monthly patreon subscriptions to help you get purple on here.

Having experienced a December in Kerry I think the Irish might have something to say about this. But the point is a good one.