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...

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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.

Getting Reacquainted with the Colorado Rapids, MLS's Bargain-Shopping Wild Cards

That's what Dawson's Creek was about, yeah?

[Standing Disclaimer: While I have watched…just a stupid amount of MLS over the years, I don’t watch the vast majority of games, never mind all of them. As such, it’s fair to take anything below that isn’t a hard number or a physical trophy as an impression, a couple steps removed.]

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What’s the most surprising thing I can say about MLS’s most surprising team, the Colorado Rapids? Is it the fact they hoisted an MLS Cup in 2010, that they played one of those great, early and unstoppable DC United teams to a valiant loss in MLS Cup 1997, or that they “won” MLS’s first-ever Wooden Spoon in the inaugural season? Never mind…that last one is probably less surprising than the fact they haven’t got slapped by the Wooden Spoon since.

I haven’t conducted the survey to back this up, but I’m guessing the Rapids top the list of teams most often forgotten by fans of other teams not named Real Salt Lake; even if they don’t top it, I’d still wager they hover near the top. (This doesn’t happen for me, as I’m mildly obsessed with Colorado in a pretty-girl-you-left-behind-in-your-small-hometown kind of way.) Colorado misses the MLS playoffs nearly as often as they make them – 13 times versus 15, respectively – and they have a wholly-earned their reputation as one of the most miserly teams in the league (listen carefully and you can hear the screams of pennies echoing over the Rockies…or is that just their fans?). For reference, the $3 million transfer they paid for Djordje Mihailovic this off-season made him Colorado’s record signing. As an organization, they find talent the same way bargain shoppers find steals (or hope to) in the bins at the local Goodwill – e.g., lots of internal transfers, some of them manifestly non-sensical (see, Cabral, Kevin) – and yet going all in on the Moneyball method has seen them finish second overall twice in the past decade (2016 and 2021)…they’ve also missed the playoffs (checks notes) seven times across the same decade, so there’s that…

Best Season(s)

It’s gotta be the 2010 MLS Cup-winning season, there’s something about that second-place finish in 2021 that makes a body believe in the miracle of Moneyball. To plumb one more alternative, I ruled out the 1997 MLS Cup runner-up run because it looks like, and almost certainly was, a crap-shoot – i.e., a testament to the limits of available talent, an odd, yet still logical result of competing in a 10-team league in just its second season, etc.. It was still pretty damn outlandish seeing Colorado’s “Marquee Players,” Paul Bravo and Marcelo Balboa, square off against DC/MLS legends like Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno. The point is, when you look at the Rapids’ roster for MLS Cup 2010, you can see that team reaching/winning a final. The 1997 team, not so much.