MLS Off-Season Weekly: Comings, Goings, Expansion

A statement on one team I follow...

“If you take the best part of Europe and the best part of North America, you’re arriving in Montreal.”
- Thierry Henry

I think I spoke my little piece about Henry coming to coach L’Impact Montreal (wait, see, and hope for the best), but the man knows how to work a crowd. For what it’s worth, seeing Montreal pick up Ignacio Piatti’s option for another year, at age 35 (come April) and after he limped all the way through 2019.

That, of course, was one of hundreds, even millions of moves in a week that started with the Expansion Draft and ended with roster deadline day. Teams across Major League Soccer protected the players they wanted to keep and sent the rest out to play in the rain for a while where strangers can line up to gawk at them, maybe even make an indecent proposal or two. Some trades went on under all that, and some players stepped into the square work-force (aka, retired). I’ll touch on some big picture stuff at the end – e.g., notes on the first drafts turned in by Nashville SC and Inter Miami CF, then some stray notes about the house-cleaning, etc. – but the balance of this will talk about the two teams I follow, FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers. I’m going to start with Portland, because the tea leaves around Cincinnati all over the goddamn place, even outside the damn tea cup.

Before getting to that, I want to restate/rename a personal rule that I try to follow when new players come into a team: you cannot know how well or poorly any new player will do in MLS until they do it, and that’s regardless of how much your team paid for the player, or where that player was before. I hereby rename this the "Brian Fernandez Rule." Got it? Good. Time to dig in.

Timbers: Special Friends, Coming and Going
First, the Timbers signed a 27-year-old Croatian centerback named Dario Zuparic, and they might sign a 20-year-old Venezuelan right back named Pablo Bonilla. I predict neither success nor failure for either player (two Brian Fernandezes), but I will say that I expect more of Zuparic. He’s actually signed, obviously, but Portland needs either stability or an upgrade at his position (please?) and it’s always encouraging to see a steady history of deployment (e.g., 88 starts, 97 appearances, out of ~152+ games for Pescara). If the Timbers do sign Bonilla, I’d set expectations to emotional self-preservation – especially for 2020 – because the youth revolution rolls slowly in Portland. Still, he’d fulfill a need as well…let the mourning begin…

As every Timbers fan knows, the team lost Zarek Valentin first to the Expansion Draft, then to the Houston Dynamo (and I want to believe they took his current profile pic an hour after he heard the news; has he always looked that dazed?). And I…just didn’t see it coming. He doesn’t come up as league-elite at his position(s) in any conversation I’ve heard and he could get rolled now and then. All the same, the chatter around Valentin always remained very positive, he presented as a good organizer on the field, and the Timbers knew what they’d get out of him, and used him accordingly. To phrase a compliment that sounds like the opposite, Zarek served as a kind of floor for the Timbers defense; so long as he was out there, you could trust that things would not get any worse. It was the most straightforward reliability, but I appreciated it and will miss it.

And, of course, all eyes remain fixed on Diego Valeri’s contract situation. As I’ve either tweeted or stated elsewhere – and as others have pointed out - the best-case scenario would see Portland keep Valeri and hold two DP spots at the same time. That means Valeri’s status/paycheck takes a hit, but the future is now for the team’s best possible chance to transition to the post-Valeri era without hiccups. You’d assume that Fernandez’s tragic implosion strengthened Valeri’s position – i.e., replacing him and Fernandez became the difference between adding an attacking piece versus basically rebuilding the attack – but nothing I’ve seen suggests that happened. Like a lot of people, I hope Giovanni Savarese manages Valeri’s time a little better in 2020 – which, at this point, would mean giving more minutes to the young guys. All the above said, I anxious enough about getting even 3/4 of a Diego Valeri back to be indifferent about how he comes back – e.g., DP or TAM, it’s Merritt Paulson’s money, not mine.

At any rate, and with a sad bow to the vacant spot where Zarek once stood, it looks like the Timbers will return largely the same team from 2019 – assuming, that is, negotiations with Valeri, Steve Clark, and Cristhian Paredes come off – though that would put the team at just 23 players from 30 available. Of all the players they shed outright – Jadama Modou, Kendall McIntosh, Foster Langsdorf, and Claude Dielna – only Dielna got regular first-team minutes, so there’s not a lot of loss. An improved defense (c’mon, Zuparic…) and one more high-end attacking player should keep them competitive in 2020. And if those assumptions fall apart…well, there’s always backing into the playoffs one more time.

FC Cincinnati: Picking a Piece from a Collapsed Jenga Pile
I assumed no team would want to take anything out of the flaming wreckage of Cincinnati’s 2019 season, and never expected Alvas Powell to be what a team rescued, never mind kept on its books, but Miami did it. I say this with personal fondness for Alvas…but I can’t imagine any Cincinnati fans shedding a tear at his departure.

After that, Cincinnati returned the same roster from the end of 2020, plus one Brandon Vazquez, but minus the following:

Corben Bone, Justin Hoyte, Roland Lamah, Forrest Lasso, Emmanuel Ledesma, Jimmy McLaughlin

The team appears to be in negotiations with Ledesma and McLaughlin (and I’m deeply fascinated by the latter, because he always struck me as a marginal player). Assuming both those players re-sign, that would leave Cincy with…26 players…under contract…really? (And why is Powell still showing on the roster deadline page?) For a team that died as violently as that poor personal assistant to Bryce Howard in Jurassic World, that’s mildly astonishing at a minimum. As much as the defense improved down stretch, they couldn’t actually beat other teams (just one win in the last 14 games of 2019), and I don’t see a single Brandon Vazquez changing that.

Given that, I assume there’s some urgency to holding onto Ledesma, but adding additional attacking players has to be a given (right?). Until those pieces arrive and get acquainted with the team, there’s simply not a lot to talk about with Cincinnati. So let’s move on to teams/situations that give me something to work with.

Expanding on the Expansion Draft
Of the few people I saw who declared a winner in the Expansion Draft, all three (or four, maybe five) declared Miami the winner. To refresh memories, here’s who are the players each team selected:

Miami: Ben Sweat, Alvas Powell, Lee Nguyen, Luis Argudo, Bryan Meredith
Nashville: Abu Danladi, Joe Willis*, Jalil Anibaba, $$, Jimmy Medranda
(* Again, Nashville picked Zarek, but traded with Houston for ‘keeper, Joe Willis)
($$ - Nashville traded Vazquez to Cincy for $150K of TAM.)

Count me a dissenting vote in all that – even before Nashville’s horse-trading. I’ve got no reason to think they’ll get much out of Danladi, but Anibaba and Willis give them solid pros and Medranda some real potential upside. As for Miami, I think Sweat was a solid pick and Argudo is probably…fine, but I’d argue Nguyen is past his best (and…wow, he’s 33?) and Powell’s potential has inverted for the past couple of years, so that’s two clear leaps of faith for me.

That said, working the Expansion Draft isn’t exactly panning for gold – i.e., it’s not where you shop for game-winning starters – and Miami looks better from that angle, at least on paper. Per the Brian Fernandez Rule, I don’t know what to expect from Matias Pellegrini (MF), Jerome Kiesewetter (F), and Christian Makoun, but they come into the team on the promise they will be solutions. Against that, Miami has a lot of roster spots left to fill – they currently show just 14 players – and most of those come on the defensive side. Given Miami’s reputation, I don’t think they’ll struggle to attract players over time, but they’ve got (again) a lot of work to do and, if I’m not mistaken, Miami is building its inaugural team from scratch – i.e., they don’t have a USL foundation on which to build.

Nashville, on the other hand, has that foundation. Moreover, the players either carried over or added – e.g., Dax McCarty, Ken Tribbett, Willis and Anibal Godoy – have the makings of the kind of sturdy team that should hold up fairly well while the attacking side finds its feet. And I think that’s where my concerns around this team reside: David Accam can produce, but doesn’t always and Danladi has yet to make his potential count, and that leaves you wondering who Hany Muhktar will feed in the attack, or if he’ll function like, say, a 2017 Valeri, etc. They also have plenty of blank spaces on the roster, and I’m confident that’s where they’ll focus. With the entire planet serving as the bazaar, God knows the players are out there.

Long story short, I’d rather have Nashville’s problems at this point.

I’d hoped to go a little deeper on some other cuts, but (full disclosure), I’ve got a dinner party to host, so it’s now or never to post this. I’d planned on picking through the list of players available for Re-Entry, free agency and whatever the hell waivers are (fuck it; don’t need to know this stuff), but it feels wiser to wait to see which players come off that list when teams rescue them from waivers and free agency starting Monday, and when the Re-Entry Draft opens on Tuesday.

I’ll close with one detail I picked out of one of the several reviews I read after roster deadline day. Both Orlando City SC and the Chicago Fire (along with, arguably, the Seattle Sounders) blew up their rosters, as they say, real good. That caught my eye because one team tried something similar going into 2019 - the Vancouver Whitecaps – and, no, it did not go well, not at all. That’s why, when I read those notes, my first thought was, “whoa, they’re pulling a Vancouver.”

I guess they’ve got to try something, but given Orlando’s history and Chicago’s recent history…yeah.

That’s all for this week. I’ll be back with more either next weekend, or after the various drafts and goings on early next week.