Level Set 10, Colorado Rapids: Busted Clocks, Somehow Getting Less Reliable

Feel this really fits the theme.

What follows is a brief history of Colorado Rapids, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
MLS’s highest franchise, the Colorado Rapids, have just two trophies (that aren’t the Rocky Mountain Cup) in their trophy case after 30 seasons in the league - and yet, they’re weirdly successful in the grand scheme of MLS History, at least according the janky little scale noted above. Turns out, giving the right time just twice a day is all it takes to make that happen. Consider the following: they won MLS Cup once (2010; a weird one due to the seeding process) and have felt the shameful sting of the Wooden Spoon exactly one time, way back the league’s first season (1996), but they also won their one and only U.S. Open Cup the season immediately after. Virtually all of that follows from coming out of backside of absolutely nowhere and doing something wild and weird – e.g., reaching the Western Conference final in 2016 and 2021 – with a little jumping out of the bushes to swipe the Western Conference title thrown in (2021 again). The “backside of nowhere” applies because Colorado whiffs entirely on post-season play more often than not – e.g., 12 times over the past 20 season. Still, those rare, great seasons gives the Rapids a certain kind of superpower: they scramble expectations for every other Western Conference team, if mostly during the regular season. Moreover, they pull off that magic trick on a shoestring budget - e.g., paying (the now-departed; more later) Djordje Mihailovic $3 million going into 2023, a record signing that held until they bumped the record to (maybe) $3.5 million for Rafael Navarro in the middle of 2024 (great deal so far). Their most famous players used to be goalkeepers – e.g., Tim Howard, Zac Steffen(?) - defenders – e.g., Marcelo Balboa, Drew Moor, – or defensive midfielders – e.g., Pablo Mastroeni. A couple dozen players could squeeze onto the very short list above if one wanted to go deeper (see Colorado’s (gently-outdated) all-time roster and build your own!), but the Rapids have often been a spine of a team waiting for attacking legs and arms to make them complete and dangerous enough to make one of those semifinals runs. The most famous example was the attacking duo of Omar Cummings and Conor Casey, who led them to MLS Cup 2010. The relative absence of famous names on the Rapids’ other two, post-2010 “glory teams” – i.e., the one that mounted the 2016 semifinal run (Shkelzen Gashi? Dillon Powers? Axel Sjoberg?) or 2021’s Western Conference-winning roster (Jack Price? Danny Wilson? The season that sold everyone on Lalas Abubakar before…yeah) – goes back to the point I’m making about the Rapids franchise overall: there is no way to see their next good season coming, but that season will abruptly become a major obstacle standing between your local team and a shot at glory.

2025, Briefly
Rapids pulled off a weird little two-fer last season: they hung close enough to the playoff line to keep people from writing them entirely damn near till Decision Day, while also driving their fans fucking crazy (based on the two or so Rapids fans I follow, that crowd is restless). An atrocious road record (3-10-4) did most of the damage, particularly with outright losses in winnable games down the stretch (e.g., 0-3 loss at the Galaxy, a 2-4 loss at SKC and, with a couple pauses thrown in, a 1-3 loss at Dallas and a 0-1 loss at RSL; and how is this the first time I looked a road v. away?!); in fewer words, Colorado choked. Overall, the defense performed a little better than the offense (emphasis on a little), but the defense also cost less (one has to imagine) and had more injuries to manage – e.g., Andreas Maxso played nearly every game, as did Reggie Cannon (who posted no offensive numbers), but most of the rest of the identifiable defenders (e.g., Chidozie Awaziem, Ian Murphy, and Keegan Rosenberry) played just under two-thirds (Awaziem) or one third of a full season. Djordje Mihailovic posted decent numbers before pissing off to the greener (in monetary terms) pastures of Toronto and Rafael Navarro earned some grace by a couple more goals, but 1) they didn’t produce “star” numbers, which 2) wasted respectable contributions by supporting players like Darren Yapi (eight goals, two assists) and Calvin Harris (five goals, three assists). Taken together, it looks a lot like what it delivered: not enough.

Pile of shit not pictured; keeping it positive

Long-Term Tendencies v Recent Trends

Hope you’re sitting down for this, but the Rapids have a history of fielding subpar-to-crappy attacks. They have either matched the average for goals scored (8 times) or fell below it (4 times) – sometimes well below (8 times) – in 20 of 29 regular seasons (i.e., what in the name of Kevin Cabral is going on there?). On the rare occasions they have topped the goals-for average, they haven’t got over by much. A great defense could have rescued more Colorado seasons – as it did in 2016, when a stellar defense threw a crappy attack on its back and carried it to second place (Howard probably deserves his own sub-entry) – but Colorado fields average (2 times) or bad (14 times) overall defenses more often than not. So, yeah, the Rapids have a history of fielding crappy teams. And yet there’s that knack for finding a pony in a pile of shit every five to six seasons. That said, three of their past four season have been…just bad, with 2023 standing out as particularly gutting. It’s only against that backdrop that 2025 wasn’t so bad. Colorado fell on the wrong side of average on both offense and defense and still missed the playoffs (where, admittedly, they only would have made up the numbers before promptly dying) on the worst goal differential in a three-way tie for ninth with Real Salt Lake (the bastards!) and San Jose.

Players I Still Like/Additions So Far
The Rapids recalled Paxten Aaronson from somewhere cold in Europe to replace Mihailovic late last season and I’m still curious to see how that pans out. They’ve since added a couple players to the wait-and-see equation in forward Dante Sealy (who seems okay) and midfielder Hamzat Ojediran (who I know nothing about). They declined some options – Maxso jumps out, if only as minutes to replace – and I read some noise about Navarro maybe moving on, but that would still leave Yapi (who has moments) and Harris (who has fewer), plus whatever they can get out of Cole Bassett…wherever they decide to play him. Between all that and a lose impression that Teddy Ku-Dipietro underwhelmed, and unless Ojediran checks boxes of which I’m unaware, I have to think the Rapids still have work today. At time of writing, seeing them spring another surprise seems far-felched. No typo. I just miss the word “felch.”

Historical Success(/Hysterical Failure)

Total Joy Points: 12

How They Earned Them (& How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
MLS Cup: 2010
MLS Cup Runner-Up: 1997
MLS Playoffs Semifinals: 2002, 2005, 2006, 2016, 2021
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2011
Wooden Spoon: 1996
U.S. Open Cup: 1997
U.S. Open Cup Runner-Up: 1999