MLS Off-Season Weekly (01.05.2020): On Rebuilds & Kicking the Tires on the New Chara

HAPPY AND CONTENT.

Right, time to slide back into the routine. (Who knows? Maybe it’ll help distract me from all the fucking idiots lighting the world on fire.) Welcome to the first MLS Weekly of 2020…by which time humanity should have become less stupid, not more…sorry, the routine, the routine. Deep breath…now, BIG SMILE!

This post includes with updates on the state of the two teams I follow – FC Cincinnati and the Portland Timbers – and then I’ll wrap up with some odds and ends. I’d intended to close with an unlikely attempt at rekindling the dying embers of my interest in the U.S. Men’s National Team, but then realized I don’t have anything more to say than, I’ll watch friendly against Costa Rica at the end of January camp and see what happens. Moving on to regularly scheduled programming…

FC Cincinnati
Have done nothing of interest since signing that Swedish defender, and that wasn’t all that interesting. More, please.

Portland Timbers: Faith in the People and the Process
With Timbers fans past the “Two Charas” buzz, it feels like a good time to soberly (or not) reflect on the sum of the decision to add Yimmi Chara to the roster. To start by sharing something nifty I found only yesterday, if you google “Yimmi Chara,” a list of his stats will appear on the right side of the screen and, if you hit “View All,” you can to tick through the numbers Yimmi put up in each of his past seasons. You’ll see numbers in there that would get Portland closer to the Promised Land – e.g., that 11 goal, 3 assist season with Junior F.C. in 2017, or maybe that 11 goal season with Deportes Tolima back in ’14, or even the seven assist output in 2018 – and those speak to something the Timbers need – e.g., second-banana level on-field production behind first bananas like Diego Valeri and Sebastian Blanco.

Where I’ve seen people squirm, however, comes with questions about the length and cost of Yimmi’s contract. Stumptown Footy’s(?) Chris Rifer put out a pair of tweets that sum up the argument nicely:

“Sam [Stejskal] confirms that PTFC paid 6+ million for Yimmi. Definitely a DP for the length of his guaranteed deal. Second-highest transfer fee in club history and the greatest amount for which Chara has been sold despite being almost 29 and three transfers in the last 2.5 years.”

And:

“And with a third DP spot burning a hole in their pocket and a belief beyond reason that Ebobisse shouldn’t have a bona fide chance to be part of the core, PTFC appears poised to enter a multi-year period with aging Diegos and no DP spot readily available. [4 grimacing emojis.]”

First question: why do neither of these goddamnarticles directly state the length of Yimmi’s goddamn contract? Have they stopped teaching the inverted pyramid format entirely?

To parse Rifer’s argument, what we have here is a resource-management beef – i.e., yay, we have Yimmi! boo, does he fit into long-term planning? (Or, more bluntly, is Yimmi good enough to justify that kind of outlay?) Next, the “no DP spot readily available” probably references the rumored signing of 24-year-old Polish forward, Jaroslaw Niezgoda (anyone else noting the Polish Invasion of 2020?), who the Timbers might(?) be close to signing. The more times I read that tweet, the more it seems Rifer is more exercised over Niezgoda as a snub to Ebo than he is about Yimmi, but read it how you wanna. So, that’s the lay of the land, or at least one take on it. What’s mine?

First, I guess I don’t get the thinking behind keeping one DP spot dry. Valeri’s already down to a TAM-sized hit (right?), and Blanco will cough up his DP status before too long (probably), so that puts that “multi-year” at two years (probably)? That tracks (roughly) with what I expected, at least, so not much to see there. Second, the team needed a winger, Yimmi is a winger (see this for a crack at explaining his upside), and one with a friend of the organization (Chara) vouching for him to boot. If the Polish forward is available and he fits what the Timbers want to do on the field, why does signing him this season make more sense than signing a different player next season? Basically, every signing entails risk, so, unless I’m seeing his long history of injuries (or unresolved drug issues) for Yimmi, the Polish kid, or any other player Portland finds to sign, I’ve decided to have faith in the scouting. And I think Portland fans have decent cause to do so: while I’ve never gone a year without seeing “GW out,” the Timbers have had more good years than bad ones since 2013. Have they laid some eggs? Can I spell Lucas Melano? Has Andy Polo bugged the shit out of me for as long he’s been around? Yes, yes, and yes. Again, all signings entail risk. And it’s not like I’m involved in this, so…yeah, serve it up…

...just know that I’ll whine at you if it fails. Oh, how I'll whine.

Odds, Ends, and Playa Moves
LA Reloads
So…didn’t Sacha Kljestan sign with the Galaxy? This article says they did, and Wikipediabacks it up, but the Galaxy’s official roster does not. Maybe the contract isn’t final or something(?), but LA did officially bring in two players over the past week: Emiliano Insua from Argentina and Aleksandar Katai from Serbia by way of the Chicago Fire. I know nothing of Insua (but, LA cared enough to put in the effort, y’know?), but Katai has long threatened greatness while doubling as a man too alone in the attack with Chicago. I don’t know what to expect out of Kljestan – and I mean that all the way down to his minutes on the field – but Katai with more talent around him does feel like something to watch (and, for Portland fans, worry about*).

Miami Loads
I don’t know anything about Diego Alonso beyond the words on his resume and the fact that Mexican clubs regularly beat MLS teams. Inter Miami CF needed a coach, and they got one, so the math adds up. They also added a couple familiar names to their roster over the past week or so – central defender and friend of juicing, Roman Torres from Seattle and perennial promising forward, Juan Agudelo (I might have covered this one already, or was it just Agudelo’s first move to Toronto?). Looking at the rest of Miami’s roster, two things jump out: 1) they have a goalkeeper from a place called “Cinnaminson,” NJ; and 2) that roster isn’t ready for the regular season. Based on what I see, Torres feels like a useful man-to-team translation for the overall talent level – at least when it comes to the players I know. The other thing that jumps out: the players they have whose names I’ve seen or heard - e.g., Julian Carranza, Christian Makoun, and Matias Pellegrini – are all 19 years old. Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, but that doesn’t mean I’m not comparing all three to Portland Tomas Conechny in my head and wondering how that’ll pencil out for them…

* Other moves happened since this station went semi-silent – for instance, how will Atlanta’s defense hold up absent Leandro Gonzalez Pirez – but it’s my parochial interests that drive my interest in MLS as a whole – e.g., what does any given team’s move mean for the Timbers in the Western Conference, or for FC Cincy in the Eastern Conference? To use the two teams above as examples, I’m inclined to call the Galaxy’s moves and overall posture a clear and present danger to Portland’s success in 2020; Inter Miami, meanwhile, feels like a team Cincinnati can hit up for some points, especially in the period before they have their shit well and truly together.

I’ll be checking the permanent standing MLS off-season tracker every week from now until First Kick to keep current on everyone’s roster moves and calibrating expectations accordingly. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d argue that the following teams have improved against Cincinnati in the East: Columbus and New England. In practical terms, those teams just stepped into the same class as all the teams I’d rank over Cincinnati at this point in time – e.g., Atlanta, New York City FC, and Toronto. The margins get thinner against some others – e.g., are teams like Orlando and DC really better teams than Cincy (last season’s results say yes), and how will clearly stronger teams like Philly and the Red Bulls replace the key players they’ve lost? The real question is what Cincinnati needs to add between today and First Kick to leap-frog the marginal teams. The right players in the right places could shrink the size of that frog considerably.

The picture’s a little blurrier on the Timbers side, and for a couple reasons. The first is pretty simple: Portland’s a stronger team than Cincinnati; when the 2019 season ended, I’d call them even with or better than every team in the West besides LAFC and Seattle (yes, even with the playoff loss to Real Salt Lake in the mix). Not a lot has happened to make me think that’s changed – or, more to the point, I think adding the players the Timbers have – e.g., Dario Zuparic and Yimmi – should allow them to hold that place against all the teams in the West, except Sporting Kansas City (who’s reload strikes me as real) and, possibly, the Galaxy. Going the other way, Seattle blew up its defense and hasn’t done much to put it back together again, and that opens up the possibility that the rest of the West will continue the tradition of picking points off the Sounders for the first half of the 2020 season or so. After that…yeah.

All right, that’s enough for this week.