Why Sebastien Le Toux is MLS' most valuable player

I cast my votes for the various end-of-season awards across Major League Soccer yesterday afternoon. For the last few weeks, I had been planning to vote for Sebastien Le Toux as the league's Most Valuable Player, but San Jose striker Chris Wondolowski's epic goalscoring streak of late had changed my mind.

Just as I was about to put Wondolowski's name on the ballot, though, the Union's media relations staff put out a tweet that changed my vote back to Le Toux. You would expect a team to promote its own player for awards, but the information they had assembled had real substance and power behind it.

Between his 14 goals and 11 assists, Sebastien Le Toux had a role in a higher percentage of his team's overall goals than any other player in league history. Yes, really: no player in the entire 15-year existence of Major League Soccer ever had the kind of season Le Toux just wrapped up.

Not only that, he set the record by a considerable margin. Courtesy of the Union and the Elias Sports Bureau, here are the top six player-seasons in what we'll call "goals affected" in MLS history:

Soccer doesn't lend itself easily to being measured by statistics. That's part of its beauty, but it has also made the sportless easy to explain to Americans raised on baseball, football and basketball. You can quantify just about everything in those realms: batting average and UZR on the diamond, quarterback rating on the gridiron and offensive efficiency on the hardwood.

Statistics are slowly making their way into soccer, but it's still a pretty abstract sport overall. So what tangible methods can we use to determine a player's statistical value?

This "goals affected" figure is certainly a good measuring stick. In its early years, Major League Soccer awarded a hockey-style prize for points recorded in a season, counting goals for two and assists for one. That offended the soccer purists who wanted a traditional Golden Boot prize for the top goalscorer. MLS rightly listened and changed the award.

But assists are still an important part of the game, and deserve to be quantified by the record-keepers. A player who sets up lots of goals brings plenty of value to his (or her) club.

So how should we award a "most valuable player" prize in soccer? I'm the kind of person who believes that a most valuable player is one whose absence would be most missed were he not on the field. That is a different standard from a most outstanding player prize. If I were voting for that, I would go for Wondolowski or Los Angeles' Edson Buddle.

You can certainly make a case for Wondolowski's value to the Earthquakes. His 18 goals won this year's Golden Boot, but just as important was the high percentage of San Jose's goals that came from Wondolowski. He accounted for 52.5 percent of his team's overall tallies.

To put that number in context, Wondolowski is only the second Golden Boot winner in MLS history to score more than half his team's goals in a season:

But Wondolowski only recorded one assist this season, putting him behind Le Toux in the total "goals affected" category. So to me, that diminished his claim for MVP honors.

I put together a chart that I thinks brings everything together. I took the goals affected leaders from each MLS season and crunched a series of statistics to measure each player.

Here's the chart in chronological order. Note that the "Games" column reflects games in a season, not games played, as I think that is a truer reflection of value to a team. "GS %" is percentage of a team's goals scored, "A %" is percentage of a team's assists recorded, "GA #" is total number of goals affected and "GA %" is percentage of goals affected.

And here's the chart ranking the players by goals affected percentage:

What are your thoughts on how a Most Valuable Player prize should be awarded? I know a lot of you are Union fans, but even so, is Le Toux the most deserving candidate this year? Fire away in the comments.