On Saturday night, Federico Higuain tied Robert Warzycha’s Columbus Crew record for career assists in league play, so in addition to the story I wrote, I thought it would be fun to jointly celebrate the two Crew legends by looking at their shared record while it is still shared.

First, some basics.

Higuain has the edge in primary assists, go-ahead assists, and assists on game-winning goals, but amazingly, both players have an identical ration of home assists to away assists.

Higuain has assists in more games because Warzycha had more two-assist games. Each player had one assist hat-trick and they each did it against the same club. Warzycha dished three assists on August 18, 1999, in a 4-2 win at the Meadowlands against the MetroStars. Higuain’s three assist game took place on September 23, 2017, at home against the former MetroStars, the New York Red Bulls. The Crew won that game 3-2.

Here’s how their assists break down by wins, losses, and ties. NOTE: For apples-to-apples comparisons, all shootout results are counted as ties in the breakdown below.

Kinda crazy that the Crew have lost only four games in which Pipa has had an assist. Those games were a 3-2 loss at D.C. United on October 20, 2012; a 3-2 loss at Kansas City on June 29, 2013; a 2-1 loss at LA Galaxy on July 4, 2013; and a 2-1 loss vs. Portland on September 26, 2015.

Moving on, here are their assists by interval. This is a fun one because Warzycha came roaring out of the gates at the beginning of each half– ten of Warzycha’s career assists came before the 10th minute!– whereas Higuain was spread out more across the first half. Then, at the end of games, they put up identical numbers in the final two intervals.

I also love the Higuain’s earliest and latest assists occurred within one week of each other.

And lastly, here’s a breakdown by goal scorers and opponents. Amazingly, both Higuain and Warzycha have assisted on goals by 22 different goal scorers.

We’ll conclude this with a breakdown of those 22 goals scorers and their 61 goals.

GOAL SCORERS FOR ROBERT WARZYCHA’S 61 ASSISTS:

13: Brian McBride
11: Stern John
5: Jason Farrell, Dante Washington
4: Pete Marino
3: Brian Maisonneuve
2: Paul Caligiuri, Jeff Cunningham, Ansil Elcock, Miles Joseph
1: Edson Buddle, Marcelo Carrera, Mike Clark, John DeBrito, Thomas Dooley, Mike Duhaney, Mario Gori, Ricardo Iribarren, Doctor Khumalo, Rob Smith, A.J. Wood, Todd Yeagley

GOAL SCORERS FOR FEDERICO HIGUAIN’S 61 ASSISTS:

7: Ola Kamara, Justin Meram
6: Josh Williams, Gyasi Zardes
5: Ethan Finlay
4: Bernardo Anor, Kei Kamara
3: Jairo Arrieta, Eddie Gaven
2: Chad Marshall, Jonathan Mensah, Dominic Oduro
1: Lalas Abubakar, Harrison Afful, Ricardo Clark, Glauber, Giancarlo Gonzalez,  Emilio Renteria, Pedro Santos, Gaston Sauro, Aaron Schoenfeld, Tony Tchani

*****

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