OK, I won't address all of this as I've already covered most in other posts, But...If you want to talk about outliers, then I don't feel that this season can be described as Nunez "running cold", as this is how Nunez has been in every season but one of his professional career. His second season at Benfica is the actual outlier. The rest of the time he's been pretty much like what we're seeing now. Time will tell and I do genuinely want Darwin to succeed, but in my opinion it's quite likely that we're just going to be getting more of the same going forward and what you perceive as running cold is simply his normal level across a season.
This season is not an really that much of an outlier for how clinical Jota has been either. He's outperformed his xG for three of the past four years, falling marginally under it in the other season (21/22). He's had more chances,so perhaps his positioning has improved or maybe that aspect is just dumb luck. In terms of how clinical he has been though, it's been pretty much 'par for the course' as it were.
Of course it's an outlier. He's doubled his xG. So it absolutely hasn't been par for the course. Re Nunez, I just don't buy the idea that one season is an outlier but the others are 'him'. The reality is that players underperform and over perform their xG in different seasons but it mostly reverts to the mean. So it's best to take the largest sample size possible as representative. And if his one season of overperforming his xG is enough to cause him to be basically hitting his xG over his career guess what, he's not undershooting his xG by very much. And of course, even if you think he's mostly going to shoot under his xG you still need to accept natural variance and luck - see the number of times he's hit the woodwork this season and reckon with the possibility that he might overperform in future seasons, as he over performed in a past season.
People just need to stop under emphasising the ability to get high value shots and over emphasising finishing ability and we'll all be a lot closer to agreement. I doubt we'll agree in every particular but at least we won't have insane ideas about Nunez being rubbish in the face of actual production, which is genuinely really good even with his bad (and unlucky) finishing.
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