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| The 2008 Western Conference bracket, a visual |
We have now, without question, moved past the point where Major League Soccer’s gawky growing pains gave way to a league that wraps up one season and moves to the next where the names are the only thing that changes. I mean, sure, new teams join the league annually, sometimes two at a time, but isn’t that just more teams and people doing the same thing? It’s great when it comes to your hometown, obviously…wait for it…
That said, the 2008 MLS season saw: the San Jose Earthquakes return to the league and balance restored between the Eastern and Western Conferences (seven teams per); Real Salt Lake opened Rio Tinto Stadium and that felt like a louder signal to new owners that a soccer-specific stadium amounted to an ante for getting into the game (then New York City FC showed up and added a sub-clause); uh, a couple more sponsors joined (and did Amway come in this wave?), and that’s about it, though MLS fans will always have this to savor:
“Bruce Arena replaced Ruud Gullit, who resigned from his role as head coach, and Alexi Lalas, who was fired from his role as president, as both head coach and general manager of the Los Angeles Galaxy.”
That’s 2008 confirming that Alexi Lalas doesn’t know what he’s talking about, not really.
The season itself was pretty damn compelling – not least for ending with hints at what MLS’s future would look like. On a “just the facts, ma’am” level, the Columbus Crew beat a, frankly, fortunate New York Red Bulls team in MLS Cup that season; they won the Supporters’ Shield too, and they did it in style (DC United won the U.S. Open Cup…eh, so what?). For those wondering at home, yes, that was an all-Eastern Conference final. MLS organized the playoffs by having the top 3 teams from each conference qualify directly, while the final two spots went to the two teams with the most points, regardless of conference. The Red Bulls, who squeaked past the Colorado Rapids in a way the top-line numbers simply can’t explain, wound up in the Western Conference bracket. They drew the 2007 MLS Cup holders, the Houston Dynamo, in the first round and looked paper-doomed going in. With most of its championship team intact, the Dynamo continued to roll, losing just five out of 30 games all season – just one of them in the second half of the season…and, no, I can’t explain why Houston and DC United have a 31st game in the 2008 Form Guide. (The fuck…?)
That said, the 2008 MLS season saw: the San Jose Earthquakes return to the league and balance restored between the Eastern and Western Conferences (seven teams per); Real Salt Lake opened Rio Tinto Stadium and that felt like a louder signal to new owners that a soccer-specific stadium amounted to an ante for getting into the game (then New York City FC showed up and added a sub-clause); uh, a couple more sponsors joined (and did Amway come in this wave?), and that’s about it, though MLS fans will always have this to savor:
“Bruce Arena replaced Ruud Gullit, who resigned from his role as head coach, and Alexi Lalas, who was fired from his role as president, as both head coach and general manager of the Los Angeles Galaxy.”
That’s 2008 confirming that Alexi Lalas doesn’t know what he’s talking about, not really.
The season itself was pretty damn compelling – not least for ending with hints at what MLS’s future would look like. On a “just the facts, ma’am” level, the Columbus Crew beat a, frankly, fortunate New York Red Bulls team in MLS Cup that season; they won the Supporters’ Shield too, and they did it in style (DC United won the U.S. Open Cup…eh, so what?). For those wondering at home, yes, that was an all-Eastern Conference final. MLS organized the playoffs by having the top 3 teams from each conference qualify directly, while the final two spots went to the two teams with the most points, regardless of conference. The Red Bulls, who squeaked past the Colorado Rapids in a way the top-line numbers simply can’t explain, wound up in the Western Conference bracket. They drew the 2007 MLS Cup holders, the Houston Dynamo, in the first round and looked paper-doomed going in. With most of its championship team intact, the Dynamo continued to roll, losing just five out of 30 games all season – just one of them in the second half of the season…and, no, I can’t explain why Houston and DC United have a 31st game in the 2008 Form Guide. (The fuck…?)
When Houston drew Game 1 in New York (MLS went with a home/home total goals, no away goals set-up), the path looked somewhere between dicey and impassable and, damn, when did that hill get so steep (I don’t know what Vegas offered for odds, but doubt it was gentle)? Odds be damned, New York knocked Houston’s teeth clean out of their collective heads and walked out of Houston 3-0 winners. To take a stab at how, New York’s Dane Richards gave Houston’s defense (and was that Wade Barrett?) fits throughout the first half and damn near beat them on his own (see the highlights). So, maybe a tricky match-up explains it, maybe the Dynamo choked on their own anxiety because they had plenty of chances to write a happier ending...
Real Salt Lake made the Red Bulls work harder in the conference finals, but the roster that would put RSL in the history books had just been put together and needed more time (a season, in fact) to come together. When New York pipped that game 1-0 on another Dave van der Bergh goal, the weakest playoff team in the entire mix basically ran the table against the West. The question is how it worked. With all the time between there and here, I can’t answer that definitively, but here’s one answer: building right and buying well. First things first, nothing about this roster says “second-best in MLS”; the fact the Red Bulls went 3-5-2 over their last 10 regular season games pushes back against the famous “peaking at the right time” argument. The “running of the Red Bulls” through the West borders on a minor miracle - I’d bet against them repeating it in a dozen attempts – but a combination of “special enough” players (e.g., Richards and van den Bergh), and steady, unspectacular regulars like Seth Stammler and Jeff Parke (it was a lot of plug-‘n’-play around that foundation) made New York’s big bet – e.g., Colombia forward/team designated player (DP), Juan Pablo Angel – come good. So long as they could hold it together and Angel could hit league-elite numbers (he did; 16g, 5a), the Red Bulls went into most games with a shot. Add a freak accident like John Wolyniec hitting a hot-streak during the playoffs and your local team just might find itself competing in MLS Cup.
Trouble was, Columbus had the better foundation – and they had an even better DP. Guillermo Barros Schelotto had arrived the year before, but he added an MVP to his DP credentials on the back of a dominant (7g, 19a) 2008 regular season. He won MLS Cup MVP by assisting on all three goals – and, if you watch the highlights of the Crew's 3-1 win, pay more attention to the Crew’s first and even more attention to their third, because it says a lot about how Columbus’ attack operated. Alejandro Moreno (who came up from Houston’s 2006 championship team) excelled at the dirty work – i.e., battling for every ball and, later, drawing fouls – while Eddie Gaven gave them a secondary passing, facilitating, scoring hub; and, when the question became, “what’s next?” finding Schelotto was a great answer. Back to that third goal: maybe a third of the players in MLS in 2008 would have spotted Frankie Hejduk’s run, but I’d put the number who could loop-de-loop a pass into the beating heart of the No Man’s Land in front of Red Bull’s ‘keeper (wait…who?) Danny Cepero at 10 players league-wide. More players have the talent, but next-level sang froid didn’t grow on trees back when.
I skipped over Columbus’ second goal, because that introduces the foundation of the 2008 Columbus Crew. Chad Marshall scored that one – a set-piece header, natch, but also the game-winner – just like he nodded home the equalizer in the Eastern Conference final against the Chicago Fire, and just like he’d do over and over again for the Seattle Sounders when Columbus’ then-head coach, Sigi Schmid relocated to Seattle Sounders and called him over. Marshall ranks among the most dominant defenders of his time – and very few players period matched him in the air. Two more names on that roster stand out: one, Brian Carroll, had anchored the midfield for DC’s best teams of the mid-2000s, and he’d do the same for Columbus (then later for the Philadelphia Union, though that was a bigger ask); the other, Brad Evans, channeled that same spirit, only he carried his torch from Columbus to Seattle. Marshall and, to an even greater extent, Evans always struck me as “Sigi’s guys,” players who understood his system and how to translate it in-game. Marshall was a bit of a freak, but knowing your role and performing it well goes a long way – and I’d bet a coach values it almost as much as his best DPs talent. In fewer words, Columbus had a strong team without Schelotto, so, of course they swept (the real) league honors with him.
To finally get to the point (holy shit, these preambles), I see 2008 as the first year where buying a title became a workable concept in MLS. The way you do it evolved, of course – ask Toronto FC – but, even with TAM and GAM in play, the essential process/theory remains the same: build the foundation, buy the difference-maker; it’s the same game with bigger budgets and dumber mechanics. My post on the 2007 season opens with a quote that called that season the beginning of MLS’s modern era. I get the assertion and, factually, both Schelotto and Angel arrived in 2007, but it took 2008 to deliver proof of concept. I did my best to describe what parity looked like in MLS’s teenage years (see the 2004 season post), and that’s crucial context for what the DP rule – and all the tweaks that followed it – knocked loose. Some of those seasons were absolute muddles, the top of the table not even 20 points above the bottom, and that had a lot less to do with great competition than it did with most of the teams battling tooth, nail and battle axes at the margins; in far too many ways, it was seven or eight different versions of the same team. MLS teams could and did sign impact players, even from Argentina – see, Christian Gomez, DC United – but leveling up relied more on winning a lottery or two (e.g., landing Taylor Twellman via allocation or drafting Shalrie Joseph or Clint Dempsey). Once the “marquee player” generation dried up (e.g., Carlos Valderrama, March Etcheverry, and Jaime Moreno), teams had to rely on American attacking talent and…that went the way it did. By changing the question to “how much are you willing to spend?”, the DP rule opened up a much larger market for talent - which meant you could pass on a player (or just miss) safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t take so long to find the next one. And, if you fucked up and splurged on Denilson, that’s on you. (Denilson or Angel…)
The DP rule was not, however, a one-stop cure for a team’s woes – as, David Beckham, the player who inspired it found out over two awful seasons with the Galaxy. Those Lalas-built, Guulit-guided LA teams showed what happened when a team skipped “building right” portion of the DP formula. Featuring a 2nd-worst-in-MLS defense and an attack built around the rest of the team climbing on Landon Donovan's back, the 2007 season was not kind to LA, but the way the blew 2008 underscores the value of a foundation. Between a career season for Donovan (20g, 9a), a personal best for Edson Buddle (15g, 3a), and Beckham’s best season to date (5g, 10a), LA lead most of the league in scoring by a long shot (10+, or thereabouts); they even topped Columbus by 5 goals scored: their defense undid all of that by bleeding goals to the tune of 11 more than the next worse team (DC United, as it happened, and they allowed just shy of 20 goals over the league average of 42.2 goals scored/allowed). As LA would rediscover during the Zlatan years, even a world class player can’t drag a mediocre team to glory. They went back to the drawing board, obviously…
All right, that’s my big narrative recap of the 2008 season. Let’s close out by wrapping up the state of play across MLS for the season. In the order in which they finished, and with their stats for the season embedded in each team’s name:
Columbus Crew (17-7-6, 57 pts.; 50gf, 36 ga (+14); 1st in East; Supporters’ Shield)
Covered amply above.
Houston Dynamo (13-5-12, 51 pts.; 45gf, 32 ga (+13); 1st in West)
Nothing to add beyond emphasizing that Houston remained a very, very good team. When you lose Ryan Cochrane and replace him with Bobby Boswell, things tend to hold up.
Chicago Fire (13-10-7, 46 pts.; 44gf, 33ga (+11), 2nd in East, playoffs)
They had a strong defense (2nd best in MLS; and Wilman Conde was a class act), a nicely varied attack (led again, by Chris Rolfe (9g, 8a), Cuauhtemoc Blanco (7g, 11a) and Justin Mapp (2g, 8a), and John Thorrington had a banner season in midfield, but they also sputtered down the stretch. And yet, in a season without THAT Columbus team, who knows?
Chivas USA (12-11-7, 43 pts.; 40 gf, 41 ga (-1); 2nd in West, playoffs)
A late hot streak rescued their season, but the story here was the attack drying up. Maykel Galindo tanked and age caught up with Ante Razov, and that forced Sacha Kljestan to lead a rag-tag bunch o’ randos in the attack.
New England Revs (12-11-7, 43 pts.; 40gf, 43ga (-3); 3rd in East, playoffs)
A very similar story to Chivas’, actually: they shipped Dempsey ahead of 2008 and lost Twellman for most of the season – which forced Steve Ralston (8g, 7a) to lead a rag-tag bunch o’ randos, etc. Also, they died down the stretch, so small wonder Chicago knocked ‘em off easy.
Kansas City Wizards (11-10-9, 42 pts.; 37 gf, 39 ga (-2); 3rd in East, playoffs/legit)
Not awful by any means, just limited to keeping games tight because they were a little thin in the attack (e.g., Davy Arnaud led with 7g, 3a, followed by Claudio Lopez with 6g, 7a, but nice season, Jimmy Conrad!). Meeting Columbus in the first round couldn’t have helped…
Real Salt Lake (10-10-10, 40 pts.; 40gf, 39 ga (+1); 3rd in West, playoffs)
The main thing here is that you see all the pieces in place – especially up the spine with Kyle Beckerman, Nat Borchers (both borrowed from Colorado, for the record), and Jamison Olave – and that let them turn L’s into D’s down the stretch. Javier Morales looked a hell of a lot like Schelotto (6g, 15a), but they didn’t have the forwards to carry them.
Red Bulls New York (10-11-9, 39 pts.; 42 gf, 48 ga (-6); 5th in the East, best in West)
Covered amply above.
Colorado Rapids (11-14-5, 38 pts.; 44 gf, 45 ga (-1), 4th in West, no playoffs)
Finally got some scoring – e.g., Conor Casey (11g, 2a), Omar Cummings (6g, 4a), plus a rebirth for Terry Cooke (1g, 12a) – but they gave up too much ground on defense.
DC United (11-15-4, 37 pts., 43 gf, 51 ga (-8); 6th in East, no playoffs)
To get a little over deterministic, I’m guessing they never recovered from losing Gomez, Carroll, and Boswell – and their defensive numbers say which were the bigger losses. Luciano Emilio and (incredibly, still) Jaime Moreno posted solid numbers, and Santino Quaranta came along, but they still died on both ends of the season and Marcelo Gallardo wasn’t enough.
FC Dallas (8-10-12, 36 pts.; 45 gf, 41 ga (+4); 5th in West, no playoffs)
This is such a Dallas team: middling and good all over, with a damned good year for Kenny Cooper (18g, 3a) and a decent one for Dominic Oduro to boot, and just one of five teams with a positive goal differential at the end of the regular season, and yet doomed to go nowhere.
Toronto FC (9-13-8, 35 pts.; 34 gf, 43 ga (-11); 7th in East, no playoffs)
Swung for the fences by prying Amada Guevara from New York, but he fell short (4g, 4a) and the straws they grasped at didn’t come good. Having an eternally injured Maurice Edu probably hurt them more.
LA Galaxy (8-13-9, 33 pts.; 55 gf, 62 ga (-7); 6th in West, no playoffs)
Already ridiculed above. Again, it’s easy to forget how bad LA was for much of the 2000s.
San Jose Earthquakes (8-13-9, 33 pts.; 32 gf, 38 ga (-6); 7th in West, last in league)
Built out of second-banana players from around MLS – e.g., Ronnie O’Brien (from Dallas), Scott Sealy (from KC), Darren Huckerby (from obscurity) - they played like an expansion team.
And that’s everything. See you next year/post…and we’re getting there, aren’t we?
Real Salt Lake made the Red Bulls work harder in the conference finals, but the roster that would put RSL in the history books had just been put together and needed more time (a season, in fact) to come together. When New York pipped that game 1-0 on another Dave van der Bergh goal, the weakest playoff team in the entire mix basically ran the table against the West. The question is how it worked. With all the time between there and here, I can’t answer that definitively, but here’s one answer: building right and buying well. First things first, nothing about this roster says “second-best in MLS”; the fact the Red Bulls went 3-5-2 over their last 10 regular season games pushes back against the famous “peaking at the right time” argument. The “running of the Red Bulls” through the West borders on a minor miracle - I’d bet against them repeating it in a dozen attempts – but a combination of “special enough” players (e.g., Richards and van den Bergh), and steady, unspectacular regulars like Seth Stammler and Jeff Parke (it was a lot of plug-‘n’-play around that foundation) made New York’s big bet – e.g., Colombia forward/team designated player (DP), Juan Pablo Angel – come good. So long as they could hold it together and Angel could hit league-elite numbers (he did; 16g, 5a), the Red Bulls went into most games with a shot. Add a freak accident like John Wolyniec hitting a hot-streak during the playoffs and your local team just might find itself competing in MLS Cup.
Trouble was, Columbus had the better foundation – and they had an even better DP. Guillermo Barros Schelotto had arrived the year before, but he added an MVP to his DP credentials on the back of a dominant (7g, 19a) 2008 regular season. He won MLS Cup MVP by assisting on all three goals – and, if you watch the highlights of the Crew's 3-1 win, pay more attention to the Crew’s first and even more attention to their third, because it says a lot about how Columbus’ attack operated. Alejandro Moreno (who came up from Houston’s 2006 championship team) excelled at the dirty work – i.e., battling for every ball and, later, drawing fouls – while Eddie Gaven gave them a secondary passing, facilitating, scoring hub; and, when the question became, “what’s next?” finding Schelotto was a great answer. Back to that third goal: maybe a third of the players in MLS in 2008 would have spotted Frankie Hejduk’s run, but I’d put the number who could loop-de-loop a pass into the beating heart of the No Man’s Land in front of Red Bull’s ‘keeper (wait…who?) Danny Cepero at 10 players league-wide. More players have the talent, but next-level sang froid didn’t grow on trees back when.
I skipped over Columbus’ second goal, because that introduces the foundation of the 2008 Columbus Crew. Chad Marshall scored that one – a set-piece header, natch, but also the game-winner – just like he nodded home the equalizer in the Eastern Conference final against the Chicago Fire, and just like he’d do over and over again for the Seattle Sounders when Columbus’ then-head coach, Sigi Schmid relocated to Seattle Sounders and called him over. Marshall ranks among the most dominant defenders of his time – and very few players period matched him in the air. Two more names on that roster stand out: one, Brian Carroll, had anchored the midfield for DC’s best teams of the mid-2000s, and he’d do the same for Columbus (then later for the Philadelphia Union, though that was a bigger ask); the other, Brad Evans, channeled that same spirit, only he carried his torch from Columbus to Seattle. Marshall and, to an even greater extent, Evans always struck me as “Sigi’s guys,” players who understood his system and how to translate it in-game. Marshall was a bit of a freak, but knowing your role and performing it well goes a long way – and I’d bet a coach values it almost as much as his best DPs talent. In fewer words, Columbus had a strong team without Schelotto, so, of course they swept (the real) league honors with him.
To finally get to the point (holy shit, these preambles), I see 2008 as the first year where buying a title became a workable concept in MLS. The way you do it evolved, of course – ask Toronto FC – but, even with TAM and GAM in play, the essential process/theory remains the same: build the foundation, buy the difference-maker; it’s the same game with bigger budgets and dumber mechanics. My post on the 2007 season opens with a quote that called that season the beginning of MLS’s modern era. I get the assertion and, factually, both Schelotto and Angel arrived in 2007, but it took 2008 to deliver proof of concept. I did my best to describe what parity looked like in MLS’s teenage years (see the 2004 season post), and that’s crucial context for what the DP rule – and all the tweaks that followed it – knocked loose. Some of those seasons were absolute muddles, the top of the table not even 20 points above the bottom, and that had a lot less to do with great competition than it did with most of the teams battling tooth, nail and battle axes at the margins; in far too many ways, it was seven or eight different versions of the same team. MLS teams could and did sign impact players, even from Argentina – see, Christian Gomez, DC United – but leveling up relied more on winning a lottery or two (e.g., landing Taylor Twellman via allocation or drafting Shalrie Joseph or Clint Dempsey). Once the “marquee player” generation dried up (e.g., Carlos Valderrama, March Etcheverry, and Jaime Moreno), teams had to rely on American attacking talent and…that went the way it did. By changing the question to “how much are you willing to spend?”, the DP rule opened up a much larger market for talent - which meant you could pass on a player (or just miss) safe in the knowledge that it wouldn’t take so long to find the next one. And, if you fucked up and splurged on Denilson, that’s on you. (Denilson or Angel…)
The DP rule was not, however, a one-stop cure for a team’s woes – as, David Beckham, the player who inspired it found out over two awful seasons with the Galaxy. Those Lalas-built, Guulit-guided LA teams showed what happened when a team skipped “building right” portion of the DP formula. Featuring a 2nd-worst-in-MLS defense and an attack built around the rest of the team climbing on Landon Donovan's back, the 2007 season was not kind to LA, but the way the blew 2008 underscores the value of a foundation. Between a career season for Donovan (20g, 9a), a personal best for Edson Buddle (15g, 3a), and Beckham’s best season to date (5g, 10a), LA lead most of the league in scoring by a long shot (10+, or thereabouts); they even topped Columbus by 5 goals scored: their defense undid all of that by bleeding goals to the tune of 11 more than the next worse team (DC United, as it happened, and they allowed just shy of 20 goals over the league average of 42.2 goals scored/allowed). As LA would rediscover during the Zlatan years, even a world class player can’t drag a mediocre team to glory. They went back to the drawing board, obviously…
All right, that’s my big narrative recap of the 2008 season. Let’s close out by wrapping up the state of play across MLS for the season. In the order in which they finished, and with their stats for the season embedded in each team’s name:
Columbus Crew (17-7-6, 57 pts.; 50gf, 36 ga (+14); 1st in East; Supporters’ Shield)
Covered amply above.
Houston Dynamo (13-5-12, 51 pts.; 45gf, 32 ga (+13); 1st in West)
Nothing to add beyond emphasizing that Houston remained a very, very good team. When you lose Ryan Cochrane and replace him with Bobby Boswell, things tend to hold up.
Chicago Fire (13-10-7, 46 pts.; 44gf, 33ga (+11), 2nd in East, playoffs)
They had a strong defense (2nd best in MLS; and Wilman Conde was a class act), a nicely varied attack (led again, by Chris Rolfe (9g, 8a), Cuauhtemoc Blanco (7g, 11a) and Justin Mapp (2g, 8a), and John Thorrington had a banner season in midfield, but they also sputtered down the stretch. And yet, in a season without THAT Columbus team, who knows?
Chivas USA (12-11-7, 43 pts.; 40 gf, 41 ga (-1); 2nd in West, playoffs)
A late hot streak rescued their season, but the story here was the attack drying up. Maykel Galindo tanked and age caught up with Ante Razov, and that forced Sacha Kljestan to lead a rag-tag bunch o’ randos in the attack.
New England Revs (12-11-7, 43 pts.; 40gf, 43ga (-3); 3rd in East, playoffs)
A very similar story to Chivas’, actually: they shipped Dempsey ahead of 2008 and lost Twellman for most of the season – which forced Steve Ralston (8g, 7a) to lead a rag-tag bunch o’ randos, etc. Also, they died down the stretch, so small wonder Chicago knocked ‘em off easy.
Kansas City Wizards (11-10-9, 42 pts.; 37 gf, 39 ga (-2); 3rd in East, playoffs/legit)
Not awful by any means, just limited to keeping games tight because they were a little thin in the attack (e.g., Davy Arnaud led with 7g, 3a, followed by Claudio Lopez with 6g, 7a, but nice season, Jimmy Conrad!). Meeting Columbus in the first round couldn’t have helped…
Real Salt Lake (10-10-10, 40 pts.; 40gf, 39 ga (+1); 3rd in West, playoffs)
The main thing here is that you see all the pieces in place – especially up the spine with Kyle Beckerman, Nat Borchers (both borrowed from Colorado, for the record), and Jamison Olave – and that let them turn L’s into D’s down the stretch. Javier Morales looked a hell of a lot like Schelotto (6g, 15a), but they didn’t have the forwards to carry them.
Red Bulls New York (10-11-9, 39 pts.; 42 gf, 48 ga (-6); 5th in the East, best in West)
Covered amply above.
Colorado Rapids (11-14-5, 38 pts.; 44 gf, 45 ga (-1), 4th in West, no playoffs)
Finally got some scoring – e.g., Conor Casey (11g, 2a), Omar Cummings (6g, 4a), plus a rebirth for Terry Cooke (1g, 12a) – but they gave up too much ground on defense.
DC United (11-15-4, 37 pts., 43 gf, 51 ga (-8); 6th in East, no playoffs)
To get a little over deterministic, I’m guessing they never recovered from losing Gomez, Carroll, and Boswell – and their defensive numbers say which were the bigger losses. Luciano Emilio and (incredibly, still) Jaime Moreno posted solid numbers, and Santino Quaranta came along, but they still died on both ends of the season and Marcelo Gallardo wasn’t enough.
FC Dallas (8-10-12, 36 pts.; 45 gf, 41 ga (+4); 5th in West, no playoffs)
This is such a Dallas team: middling and good all over, with a damned good year for Kenny Cooper (18g, 3a) and a decent one for Dominic Oduro to boot, and just one of five teams with a positive goal differential at the end of the regular season, and yet doomed to go nowhere.
Toronto FC (9-13-8, 35 pts.; 34 gf, 43 ga (-11); 7th in East, no playoffs)
Swung for the fences by prying Amada Guevara from New York, but he fell short (4g, 4a) and the straws they grasped at didn’t come good. Having an eternally injured Maurice Edu probably hurt them more.
LA Galaxy (8-13-9, 33 pts.; 55 gf, 62 ga (-7); 6th in West, no playoffs)
Already ridiculed above. Again, it’s easy to forget how bad LA was for much of the 2000s.
San Jose Earthquakes (8-13-9, 33 pts.; 32 gf, 38 ga (-6); 7th in West, last in league)
Built out of second-banana players from around MLS – e.g., Ronnie O’Brien (from Dallas), Scott Sealy (from KC), Darren Huckerby (from obscurity) - they played like an expansion team.
And that’s everything. See you next year/post…and we’re getting there, aren’t we?
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