MLS Off-Season Weekly: How MLS Cup Made Me Fear the Future, The U.S. Men, the Goodwill Bins Lottery

A depiction of how I relate to players. (Also, worlds collide.)

After a…was MLS Cup just last weekend, or is time running like those weird traffic patterns where it tightens and loosens for no obvious reason? For a visual, think what happens on I-5 around Nisqually sometimes – that’s as opposed to Tacoma, because the cause there is plain as day – but, to take today’s points chronologically, I’ll start with brief notes on MLS Cup…

I’m Worried About the Future, Barbara
Whilst live-tweeting MLS Cup, my partisan fever boiled over after the Seattle Sounders bounced an own-goal off Toronto’s Justin Morrow. “THEY DESERVE NOTHING,” I tweeted, or something to that effect, not least because TFC had looked better to that point, especially with the moments of tricky dribbling that forced shifts in Seattle’s defensive shape in midfield; Alejandro Pozuelo and Nicolas Benezet, in particular (plus a shout for Marky Delgado), kept Seattle within one mistake of giving up a goal for the first 60 minutes.

I hereby revise that tweet to say Kelvin Leerdamn did not deserve his goal (and that MLS’s website should fix it). The Sounders took over the game from that goal forward. Toronto never forced a telling mistake in Seattle’s defense, Stefan Frei stuffed the half-chances that came his way, and, as Seattle pushed its line of confrontation further up the field, Toronto’s attacks started to fail further from Seattle’s goal. The game ended when Seattle scored a deserved, and rather pretty, second goal. They'd score again, Toronto would salvage a little pride, but the 3-1 final score fairly reflected what happened out there.

Here, I have to raise my hand as one of the many self-appointed pundits who wrote Seattle off when Chad Marshall took his concussions and went home. The fact that they never put together an impressive run during the regular season obscured the strength of the Sounders’ homely-but-effective system, but, when you want to win a succession of one-off games, having a solid spine and an organized defense gets you over halfway there – and Seattle has enough talent to push that percentage past halfway.

Seattle will return that same line-up/homely system in 2020, so I expect them to be in the mix. The Portland Timbers, meanwhile, have all kinds of issues, whether it’s Diego Valeri’s contract situation (more below), or the very expensive lemon of a forward that just turned sour in their mouths. I understand there will be…26 teams in MLS next season, but Seattle and Portland play a season within every season and every contest in that – whether winning the head-to-head match-ups, finishing higher in the standings, or (damn you all to hell), getting a leg up in the race for trophies – gives one fan-base an occasion to shit all over the other one. Good, clean fun, people…

…and I don’t like Portland’s chances to win many of those battles in 2020. Hold me, Barbara.

Like One of Those 3-D Dot Pictures
Anyone who cares to already knows that the U.S. Men’s National Team beat Canada 4-1 last night in CONCACAF’s latest Potemkin tournament, the Nations League or whatever they’re calling the silly thing. I don’t watch the U.S. Men often enough to hold a strong opinion on what happened – and I didn’t watch the loss in Canada either, so I don’t have that for comparison – but I’m often struck by how readily the narratives turn in the international game, or just when Americans stare at their team.

In other words, how do we get from 10 Questions about Gregggg Berhalter’s rigidity to declaring Berhalter can change in just a few days? (Yesssss) I know those are different authors (maybe Jeff Carlisle still has eight of those questions, maybe he has 10), and the boxscores for each game (Canada’s win and the U.S. win) speak to a different approaches between the games, but the weirdest possible thing that could have happened would be Berhalter trying the same system twice. I don’t think anyone’s that stupid, for one, and so long as you accept the premise of superior American talent, the U.S. had (fucking) better win the second leg when these two teams play – especially in the States. And they did, but that doesn't mean people won't be wailing about the way Berhalter lines up his team for the next game (in other words, sure, he can change, but will he?), or that we all now need to accept the premise the Gyasi Zardes is an international forward in anything but name. It's the same team and the same coach, only they beat the same team in the most favorable possible conditions, so...

I have never seen the level of the-sky-is-falling-rage that I saw after the loss to Canada, but that wasn’t the only incident of shit-losing over the past…decade? I can’t imagine that last night’s win raised confidence higher than a level of skepticism that will give way to another, more violent bout of shit-losing at the next result that insults collective expectations. My money’s on some time during the Gold Cup, but, beyond that, I honestly don’t know what to expect. To float a personal theory, I put some of this down to growing pains, a period of American player culture grafting today’s improved understanding of the game on top of yester-year’s combination of speed, effort and aggression. I don’t know how long that will take – and I’m not remotely sold on Berhalter as the coach to make that transition happen – but I also never believed in a permanent improvement curve for this team and, yeah, sometimes you’ll get a crap player pool. I wouldn’t call this one “crap,” but I do believe it’s limited – especially at forward…

…I guess that’s the long way of saying that the thing that would surprise me most in the near future for the U.S. Men is, say, reaching the quarterfinals in World Cup 2022. I’d be less surprised to see them miss the whole thing all together, honestly. Right, back to the domestic stuff, specifically…

The Goodwill Bins Lottery
Yes, it’s time for another MLS Expansion Draft, aka, that time when the new teams coming into the league get to pick up the players the current teams don’t want – or don’t want badly enough to protect. I have only two things in mind for this section: 1) weighing the wisdom of the players the two teams I follow – i.e., Portland and FC Cincinnati – left exposed; and 2) naming the five players I’d take out of the ones left unprotected by teams across the league. Starting with No. 1:

Portland Timbers
The most compelling commentary I’ve seen on Timbers twitter, 1) took the absence of Valeri’s name among the unprotected as a positive, and 2) asked what kind of a madman would protect a danger-prone defender like Julio Cascante, while exposing a sum of our hopes attacking player like Tomas Conechny. I think only the second point needs answering, and that comes in two parts. First, I’d call holding Cascante a “bird-in-the-hand” decision by a team that’s short on defenders – i.e., he’s decent, so why not hold him till you’re confident you can do better. The second and larger point is that I don’t see either Nashville or Inter Miami CF taking the players left exposed – i.e., I don’t see either relieving Portland of dodgy signings like Andy Polo or Claude Dielna. In other words, the Timbers remain poised in front of a drawing board that won't change...but please take Polo...

FC Cincinnati
Can FC Cincy kindly get Victor Ulloa off the damn roster? (And didn't they waive Derrick Etienne, Jr.? Clarity, people.) At any rate, a season that shitty doesn’t leave a lot of “untouchable” players on the roster, but I do see a couple surprises among the protected – e.g., Nick Hagglund (hometown bias?) and Rashawn Dally. Going the other way, exposing Emmanuel Ledesma surprises me a bit…and that’s literally it. Still, I can see one of those teams picking off Ledesma, something that would leave Cincy with still more work to build their attack in 2020, so, even while understanding Ledesma isn’t good enough to build around in MLS, I don’t get that decision. That said, I saw Matt Doyle raise a bigger issue in his recap of Cincinnati’s 2019 (which reviewed seven other teams, btw):

“Will they develop the young players, or figure out which of Bertone or Caleb Stanko is the right No. 6?”

If Cincy can’t get more dynamic in midfield in 2020, I expect them to be dire combination of dead in the water and unwatchable, and Ledesma can't paper that over any more than he did in 2019. Sigh…

Finally, My Personal Trip to the Candy Store
I’ll start by admitting my knowledge of the league degrades a little every time it expands. With that in mind, and without researching fairly crucial things like contract status (e.g., did the Philadelphia Union expose Haris Medunjanin for the same reason the LA Galaxy exposed Zlatan?), here are the five players I’d take if I was building a new team:

Medunjanin (obviously, one of MLS's finer metronomes)
Nico Gaitan (Chicago’s playmaker; also probably a contract status thing)
Tyler Miller (LAFC’s ‘keeper; again, feel like I’m missing something)
Victor Rodriguez (Sounders; see link to 2nd goal above)
Edgar Castillo (New England)

And that’s it for the general stuff for this first off-season weekly. I don’t expect future editions to be as long, but you never know (with me). Actually, I expect they’ll be whatever notes I have on FC Cincinnati and the Timbers, plus the kind of odds and ends – e.g., noteworthy news from around MLS – that follow here. Except the first one, which is kind of a big deal.

Sense and Sentimentality, Valeri and Fernandez
Portland’s list of unprotected players only forecloses on one way Diego Valeri might leave the Timbers, but fans know that saga ain’t over. I stated my position on that in my 2019 Timbers season review – e.g., I want him to stay around, I’m open to creative options, but none that involve keeping him as a DP – and I’ve seen people (Chris Rifer, specifically) make a good case for paying him a TAM-level salary and managing his minutes accordingly. Then the whole goddamn Brian Fernandez meltdown/lawsuit happened and probably, or rather almost certainly, boggled the terms of those negotiations, in that now the Timbers have two massive issues in the attack to resolve going into 2020.

Whether I missed it, or he simply never did so, Rifer didn’t complete one thought about the Valeri thing. Holding him at a DP contract contains two assumptions, and Rifer covered that one - e.g., the belief that the Timbers couldn’t find either a better player or a younger one than a 33-year-old Valeri ANYWHERE (this is a global market, after all). The second one, though, turns on the opportunity cost of delaying the inevitable transition from the Valeri era to the post-Valeri era. Finding that new DP to build around today should, with proper planning (and your faith in that should be shook), make for a brighter future. On that…look, I don’t get attached to players like a lot of fans seem to do: I see the coming and going of this player or that as a series of flings between sports fans and the teams they follow. I love Valeri as a player and, as a person, I admire him more than most of them, but the team (like me) has needs, and that makes sense of, 1) keeping things in a certain perspective, 2) rolling with the changes. With that in mind, here’s where I am:

I think the Timbers have to keep Valeri for the sake of stability and continuity, even if it means paying him more than they’d like to. Focus on getting the one player to either replace Fernandez (who I wish the best of luck to), or one who will let team move around players it now has into something effective. Even then, I think Portland needs to get serious about moving to the post-Valeri era early as the end of 2020…

…and the caveat in all of that is that I don’t know all the variables, specifically, budget realities on both sides of the table and what’s really motivating Valeri (stability? how hard he’s thinking about retirement, etc.), how the players see it, where the coaching staff sees things going, and so on. At any rate, on to the real odds and ends:

- Because I follow this Nashville fan on twitter, the flood of celebration that followed the signings of Dax McCarty and Dave Romney washed all over my twitter feed. It all struck me as over-the-top at first – and I still can’t see getting geeked up about Romney – but I’ve come around to the McCarty signing. He’s not going to win Nashville many games directly, but he will go some distance to giving them composure and direction, something invaluable to an expansion team. Depending on how the roster build continues, I’d credit Nashville for taking the smarter first step than FC Cincy at a similar time last year.

- I am excited about Thierry Henry as coach for L’Impact du Montreal, but mostly because he’s him, as opposed to anticipating greatness. I’ll be thrilled if he does it, but there’s not a lot on his CV that makes a clear case that he will.

- Watching Darwin Quintero go from Minnesota to the Houston Dynamo feels like a bigger deal on Minnesota’s end. While it won’t force a total rebuilding of the Loons’ attack, call it at least a partial lobotomy. As for Houston, I’m to where I believe that organization can mess up any player, but maybe that’ll change in the Tab Ramos era....

…I know a bunch of other stuff happened, but that’s enough for this week. Till next Saturday!