No Dice: Fire's Postseason Drought More Than Bad Luck

With the Fire’s 2-0 loss to Charlotte last Saturday, the Fire are back in a familiar place: on the outside looking in at MLS Cup playoff spots. If the Fire do not secure a postseason position on Decision Day, the team’s playoff drought will stretch to six seasons, giving the team sole possession of the second-longest playoff drought in league history after Toronto FC’s eight-season stretch from 2007 to 2014... and the longest active drought in the league, as Houston broke their own five-year duck this fall.

To be clear, the Fire still very much have a chance at making it into the postseason, if they win and get some help, as both the New York Red Bulls and Charlotte sit outside of postseason spots and have the ability to shut the door completely for the Fire. It’s an unenviable place to be, particularly considering how familiar it is.

Certainly, the results fall short of the team’s stated expectations, as articulated by Sporting Director Georg Heitz, who told The Athletic during this year’s preseason that “Every year, I tell you we want to make the playoffs,” after making similar affirmations each year since his arrival in late 2019.

The obvious question is, what has been keeping the team from reaching the postseason? Is it simply a case of bad luck?

Imagine, if you will, a world where making the playoffs is totally random. In this world, the smooth playmaking of Brian Gutiérrez, the power of Xherdan Shaqiri’s shot, the poise of Chris Brady saving the ball, let alone the fact that the Fire have one of the highest payrolls in the league – none of it matters.

Instead, in this alternate reality, the Fire’s final position in the 15-team Eastern Conference standings is determined simply by the roll of a 15-sided die. Whatever number is rolled – perhaps by Technical Director Georg Heitz, LARPing as the one responsible for the team’s fate – is where the team lands in the standings at the end of the season.

If he rolls a one through four, the team makes the playoffs with home-field advantage in the first round. Five, six or seven? The team is guaranteed a best-of-three-game first-round series. Eight or nine, the team has a “play in” game to make it to the first round of the playoffs proper. Ten or higher, and the team is out of the postseason.

In this world, the team has a 60% chance of making the postseason (playoff or play-in) in the Eastern Conference. That’s considerably lower than the roughly 80% chance the team had after their win against Miami on October 4th, but considerably higher than the roughly one-in-four chance the team has now. Last season and in 2021, when the Conference had 14 teams and only seven made the postseason, the “dumb” odds were an even 50%. In 2020, when the league expanded the playoff bracket due to the COVID-shortened season, chances were 71%.

If we treated each season’s final position as a role of a die – sheer luck– where making the postseason meant rolling a nine or lower a 15-sided die this year (due to there being 15 teams in the conference), seven or lower on a 14-sided die last year (when there were 14 teams in the conference and fewer made the playoffs), going back to 2020, Georg Heitz’s first season with the club, and add them all together, want to guess the Fire’s chances of not making the postseason in this span?

2.9%. That’s not a typo (though actually, the number is about 2.857%) - the “dumb luck” chances of making the MLS Cup playoffs at least once over the past four years are over 97%.

Put another way, the Fire’s chances of missing the playoffs are roughly the same as the chances of rolling a normal six-sided die 20 times and none coming up a six (the odds of that are 2.6%).

Let that sink in.

The only reason the Fire are still in contention for the postseason is thanks to the expanded format: Under the seven-team format of last season, the Fire would have been eliminated after their loss to Charlotte. Even with a victory in that match, their chances would be incredibly slim — they would have needed Nashville to lose their final two games and overcome a massive goal deficit against that club to steal the 7th and final playoff spot on Decision Day.

Before hiring Georg Heitz in the final weeks of 2019, the team cleaned house – only 17 players were under contract, including a number of homegrowns that weren’t anticipated to see significant playing time. Today, every single player on the Fire's roster apart from Fabian Herbers was signed by Heitz. Some, like Gastón Giménez, have both been signed and given multiple new contracts by the Sporting Director.

Even if the Fire do manage to make a play-in spot on Decision Day, to push themselves up and achieve something that straight statistics say the team has had a 97% chance of doing under Heitz’s tenure, do we give credit to luck, to sheer probabilities, or does the credit the man who, as recently as May, said “I really think that we have a team that should make the playoffs” in a call with reporters after firing his second hand-picked head coach?

The answer to that question – which cannot be solved with mathematics – is left to the reader.