Visitors to the King of No Pants since the last post may notice a new template. White text on dark backgrounds isn't as easily readable as dark text on light, plus these colors reflect the primary colors of the teams the King covers.

The latest D.C. United match report is posted at DC Sports Box: Emilio Leads D.C. to U.S. Open Cup Final. There are also a quite a few other game reports, which you can suss out at DC Sports Box if you so choose.

Regarding Caps coverage, I wrote a draft day 1 recap a few days after the draft ended: Caps Trade Up to Nab Gustaffson, Carlson. A succession of vacations by myself and the other Caps beat write, the Beltway Sports Beat, has prevented us from working on any in-depth articles or podcasts in detail. Rest assured, some quality content is forthcoming before the season begins.

I did want to touch on one thought related to a game recap from a few D.C. United matches prior, Finally, a Shut Out: Wells Perfect as DC Wins 2-0. The lead-off of that story argues that the big story of the win was Wells shutout, his first of the season. By comparison, a few of the MLS goalie leaders were at 6 or 7 shutouts on the season at the same point. A much bigger DCU blog presence, DCenters, who posts a recap not only of each game but of the media coverage thereof. He took umbrage at my insinuation that the big story was Wells' shutout, rather than the play of several new additions to the United roster and the success of Tom Soehn's "Win Ugly" style.

I still stand by my statement, but admittedly I didn't explain it as well as hoped. The big deal about the shutout was not Wells' personal stats, but the fact that DC did not need to score 2 goals to earn a point from the game (though they did). Through 18 games D.C. is scoring 1.72 goals/game, but allowing 1.77 goals/game. More importantly, D.C. has not earned a single point in games in which they didn't score at least 2 goals. In a traditionally low-scoring sport, the fact that D.C. has needed to put at least 2 in the net to earn a point has put the team at a disadvantage to teams like Kansas City (1.05 goals/game) and New York (1.2 goals/game) who are tied with D.C. at 25 points because they have 7 ties each.

Not that it's a horrible thing that D.C. puts enough balls in the net to have won 8 games so far, goals allowed be damned, but sooner or later United is going to have to win a close game and to date they've only been able to lose those.