Portland Timbers 1-1 Los Angeles Galaxy: Something I'm Choosing to See the (or Some) Good in + a MLS Week 5 Recap

Me, before they even leave The Shire.

Welcome to another week of me triangulating toward what’s possible between time and other ambitions. Dreams of putting in long shifts on several games have shrunk to watching the Portland Timbers game, scouting the team they play next for 60-plus minutes, spending about the same amount of time on, literally, just one other game, plus going through as many highlights as I can get to. The plan is to tighten things up on the content side, but I've been dreaming that same dream since the late 2000s and yet what did I do but top the Director's Cut of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with commentary and all the songs from The Hobbit (plus commentary on the songs). My therapist told me that not working on my problems is the worst thing I can do, so here we are. Something else I learned about myself this past weekend: I will not sit through ten minutes of a game when neither team scored and I know the result. With that in mind, I need to revamp one of the regular sections a little:

Results That Surprised Me (This section will be removed going forward)
Charlotte FC 6-1 Red Bull New York (wait for it...)
Sporting Kansas City 1-4 Colorado Rapids (didn't think SKC was this bad; don't trust a word I type)
Vancouver Whitecaps 0-1 San Jose Earthquakes (though maybe it shouldn’t have; more later)
San Diego FC 2-2 Real Salt Lake (maybe less “surprised” than notice taken?)

Results I Ignored (no surprises here; but also links provided!)
Atlanta United FC 0-0 DC United (but Atlanta should feel very disappointed)
St. Louis CITY FC 3-1 New England Revolution (expected it enough, and good for St. Louis)
Austin FC 0-0 LAFC (don’t think this was good for anyone, but see below)
FC Cincinnati 4-3 Club du Foot Montreal (Cincy dodged a bullet that shouldn’t be sighting them)
New York City FC 2-3 Inter Miami CF (they’re both good teams; didn’t feel educational)
Minnesota United FC 0-0 Seattle Sounders (see note on Austin v LAFC and below)

I’m tracking results/opposition for all teams, for what it’s worth – and fuck The Mothership for letting the Form Guide cut off at Week 23 and not including anything to scroll over (they don't add one later; I check) – and that gives me big-picture perspective on some of the results I’m ignoring. For instance, LAFC’s goal-less draw at Austin looks different than, say, Minnesota's goal-less home draw versus Seattle: the context for LAFC's result includes a road game, sitting atop MLS’s Western Conference and not a goal allowed all season; the context for Minnesota’s is them scoring less than one goal per game (0.8/game, fwiw) and allowing 11 (2.2/game, fwiw, though most of that happened at Vancouver) and just generally presenting as a team running through mud. With those games dismissed (I'll do this better/deeper in the copy next week, promise), let's turn to The Main Event:

Houston Dynamo FC 3-2 Portland Timbers & MLS Week 4 in Review: Of Daggers and DPs

Don't google images of Underoos 

Major League Soccer’s Week 4 handed me a tidy little theme and for that I am thankful. That could be me trying to squeeze a big idea into the Underoos I wore as a wee man, but I’m guessing it will resonate in both directions and in a tone that every MLS fanbase will hear and appreciate it. Unbelievably, that’s it for the preamble. Maybe I should start saying yes to every home improvement project, if only to spare everyone who finds this site from reading an Adrien Brody speech every time they click through to this site. (Anyone else watch The Oscars tonight? If so, please leave the good speeches in the comments; my wife and I yell over the entire show.)

Tuning in, now, to regular programming…

Results That Surprised Me (yeah, I have links for all of these; see below)
Atlanta United FC 3-1 Philadelphia Union (sunny no longer)
Chicago Fire FC 1-2 DC United (I rate DC highly as I.H.O.P. coffee)
FC Dallas 3-3 San Diego FC (weeeeeee!!)
New England Revolution 6-1 FC Cincinnati (Cincy leaping, not stepping, backward?)
Vancouver Whitecaps 6-0 Minnesota United FC (see, goal differential, Minnesota, uncharted)

I call that a good weekend, all in all, at least for anyone who tunes in for spills, chills, thrills and the odd face-plant. Even if the wild start to 2026 doesn’t continue, I doubt you could find even one MLS fan who would have predicted that the bottom three in the East for any week in the MLS 2026 regular season would include (bottom to “top”) Philadelphia, Columbus, and Orlando. The West has at least one surprise – who saw Minnesota looking up at 12 teams at any point this season? – but seeing the teams on either side of Missouri (e.g., SKC and St. Louis) tracks. There is one more team down there in sewers of the West, paddling amid the refuse, one I expected to see and feared to behold at once. Let’s turn to how they arrive at such a lowly station. Our story begins with a man named Philip...

The Unmentionable Thing Vancouver Did the Portland & an MLS Week 3 Wrap Up

You're not sinking, you're thriving. MENTALITY!

Major League Soccer Week 3 went into the books a few days ago, fucking up a narrative or two as it passed through. I’ll get to that, but let’s start with the usual editorial notes.

Responsibilities around home improvement forced some adjustments to The Plan. That was noted in last week’s post, but in light of the abandonment of The Plan, I shall not reference it further. The only plan is that The Plan will evolve with one exception: I will watch a minimum of 60 minutes of the game played by the Timbers’ next opponent every week they have one. That went out the window this what with the New England Revolution getting a reprie…er, having their game against Houston Dynamo FC cancelled for reasons I couldn’t easily find and don’t care to find out.

Further minor adjustments shall also go unmentioned as I think even careful readers won’t miss them. With that, let’s get to the good stuff, starting with…

Results That Surprised Me (both expanded on below)
Colorado Rapids 4-1 Los Angeles Galaxy
Red Bull New York 0-3 Club du Foot Montreal (also, congrats Montreal! Thought y’all were cooked)

Mild shocks aside – e.g., the final score on Nashville’s win over Minnesota and the weight of the hurt New York City FC dropped on Orlando (both also noted below) - every other result tracked well enough for me. Moving on, now, to this week’s main event…and I see you, Orlando fans.

Colorado Rapids 2-0 Portland Timbers & a Mini-Parade of Disasters from MLS Week 2

Mistakes were made, weight was lost. Or gained.

Welcome to the Week 2 wrap, both for Major League Soccer as a whole and my Portland Timbers! The first shall be firste (though they were seconde above), but I want to start this post with some programming notes that hit like revelations. (Not really, but hype is the coin of the realm in the 21st century.)

Between my wife’s unfortunate illness (the very same one that derailed the “Level Set” series) and the resultant too much time on my hands, this week’s review got a little out of hand. That’s to say, I consumed more soccer than I either want to digest or (ewww) send back up the other way. That same experience led me to the research concept for MLS Week 3 and, ideally for every week going forward:

Watching the full 90 of every Portland Timbers game, plus the full 90 (or 60 minutes, at a minimum) of the team that Portland plays the following weekend, plus 45 minutes each of two more games – both with at least one Eastern Conference team, tentatively – then a maximum (get it together, man!) of four…or five of the 10+-minute highlight reels that Apple TV appears to have embraced for the 2026 season. [Ed. - It will be just four; gotta tighten this shit up.] If that doesn’t get my eyes on enough teams to stay current with Major League Soccer week in and out…well, I can’t say I give a shit, because that feels ample to me. That will leave some blind-spots, of course, particularly around teams that bore me, but fuck it.

With that, let’s get to this week’s notes, comments, and appreciations. To kick things off, enjoy this...

Stupid Thought for the Week
I appreciate that the offside rule must be called by the letter of the law instead of its spirit, but I will never stop resenting that reality. Seeing an attacking player get called offside for having the tip of his knee ahead of the last defender’s will never strike me as anything but a violation of the spirit of fair play, but if there’s a slipper slope in soccer officiating, this is it.

Moving on to the meat…

Portland Timbers 3-2 Columbus Crew, Plus MLS Week 1 Notes/Theories/Bullshit

No, seriously. Buffets are almost always bad.

I’d call that a decent opening weekend. This post looks to recap portions of that, but it also doubles as a first step in to a different, still unsettled approach to digesting a reasonable amount of the never-ending buffet that the average Major League Soccer matchday has become in the 30-team era.

Still working on the model for that, but to get the main programming note out of the way, I noticed that the recaps offered through Apple TV all appear to have come in at around 10 minutes so far. Assuming that holds, MLS Wrap Up is dead to me. Some non-trivial number of fans seemed turned off by MLS’s in-house talent – aka, Sacha Kljestan, Dax McCarty, Bradley Wright-Phillips, Kaylyn Kyle and (for me, the insufferable) Kevin Egan – which, here, means they actively hated them, so it looks like they’ve turned that into a loose narrative told over a bundle of short highlight clips. Sure, the in-house talent said some stupid shit, and I may be alone in missing the banter, but all those people still said something amidst the blah-blah-blah and you simply lose all of that in a two-minute clip of disconnected highlights.

Ten minutes, on the other hand, gives a fella something to work with. For as long as (the notoriously cheap and unreliable) Apple TV keeps that up, the plan going forward will be to: 1) watch and report on my Portland Timbers every week and whomever they played; 2) watch 45 minutes of three other games, one more involving a Western Conference team and two involving at least one Eastern Conference team, plus 3) tentatively going with five 10-minute recaps for the other games that interest me…

…while it would be a little harsh to say the rest of the games can gently fuck off, I’m also not not saying that. With that, lets get to this week’s results starting with a section I intend to use as framing:

Level Set 2026, the Portland Timbers: Where Things Stand as We Wait for the Whistle to Blow

Hello, 2012.

[Ed. - Factually, yes, I did post a “farewell post” for this blog late last year – and it wasn’t the first time. I very much meant it at the time, but please see the bottom of this post where I mumble some excuses for what will change going forward and why the farewell holds up, if in the most sorta kinda way possible.]

What follows is a brief history of the Portland Timbers, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed in between those two sections and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., less than one week before First Kick 2026. I saw an Adam Sussman skeet telling me that Merritt Paulson told him to expect a couple more signings before then, so it's likely that not everything below is final…and yet, I’m not going to hold my breath for greatness or anything.

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...

…for obvious reasons, this one’s going to go on a bit longer than the others in the series…

Thumbnail History
In my head, I knew the Portland Timbers had some lean seasons before they won MLS Cup 2015. That datapoint receded to where it felt like some other team’s history until I picked through Wikipedia posts about those early seasons, as if thumbing through a yearbook. I also remember the 2015 season through a very specific lens, but I’ll get to that. Starting at the beginning…

Level Set 23, Charlotte FC: It Was Just Another Tuesday, And Then...

Does the job. A job.

What follows is a brief history of Charlotte FC, 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
I have a nasty habit of picturing Charlotte FC as a team wholly composed of Brandt Bronicos, but that’s a personal hangup, not history. Charlotte only joined MLS in 2022, but they’ve been a reasonably successful, if conservative start-up. One could make a case that they’ve improved season-on-season – e.g., no playoffs in 2022, then qualifying as a wild card in 2023, then qualifying for the playoffs clean in 2024 on the back of a lofty fifth-place finish in the East (then in 2025…wait for it) – but they also have yet to hit that prized gallop on the road to progress. instance, Charlotte struggled with scoring from the jump – e.g., partial to/stuck in the mid-40s (e.g., 45 goals in 2022, 44 in 2023, 46 in 2024) – and, if memory serves, they’ve never been good on the road. The sole reason Charlotte landed the wild card in 2023? MLS expanded the number of teams that qualified for the playoffs from a (half-)sensible 14 in 2022 to a comically expansive 18 in 2023 (which tracked as an insurance policy in the event Miami struggled). Most of the spicy stuff happens on the player side with this team – e.g., the failed star experiment that was DP forward Enzo Copetti, the low-simmering drama around Polish forward/(still) all-time leading scorer Karol Swiderski – but a kind of “Charlotte FC is a team that plays in MLS” level of buzz around the team remains. So far, think capable to a fault.