An MLS History Project, 2012: A Real Change Up of a Season

Just saying, "peaking at the right time" is rare...

Major League Soccer served up a fairly compelling 2012 regular season. For one, it saw some of the older powers reclaim the stage after a couple years of chaos (as described in my post on the 2010 season), but the several teams involved wandered separate paths from the start of the season to its end. At one end of the season, five teams, a mix of old/former powers and rising new ones announced their intentions by starting strong – over the first 12 games (~1/3 of the season), the Seattle Sounders and Real Salt Lake went 7-3-2, while eventual Supporters’ Shield winners, the San Jose Earthquakes, edged both at 7-2-3; Sporting Kansas City won their first seven games, then lost three, then evened out for a 8-3-1 start, and, finally…occasional, sorta (also, future) power the New York Red Bulls matched SKC (if this project has reminded me of anything, it’s that New York has produced some fun teams).

All five would fall by the wayside, and all of them in the playoffs, when a pair of real playoff powerhouses nudged past them into MLS Cup. Both eventual finalists – the Los Angeles Galaxy and the Houston Dynamo – struggled out of the gate. The Galaxy missed Omar Gonzalez for the first half of its season and started 3-8-2 as a result; the Dynamo, meanwhile, couldn’t keep their asses from bouncing on the playoff line until they end. They finished 8th and 9th overall, respectively, and both had to pass through the play-in to make the playoffs. In doing so, they carried forward the infamous, semi-apocryphal tradition of “peaking at the right time.”

I’d counter with a theory that combines form and “good bones.” LA and Houston weren’t uniquely good teams in 2012. Observers had credible reasons to believe that the five “hot start” teams listed above had an equal or better shot than Houston or LA of winning MLS Cup – highly credible in some cases, e.g., San Jose’s (more later). Of the 10 teams who made the playoffs, only the Vancouver Whitecaps looked like make-weights; both the Chicago Fire and DC United looked less likely – offense hurt the former, defense the latter – but they still performed well enough (and DC got screwed in their series against Houston (more later)) to look like they belonged. And I’ll get to that. First, let’s take a detour…

The way I consumed MLS changed after the Portland Timbers joined the league. Expansion played a role in that it overwhelmed my capacity for keeping up with the details on every team in MLS, but I didn’t need those details to tell me why Portland missed the playoffs in 2012 – badly, too. The Timbers signed their second-ever DP that season, a Scottish striker named Kris Boyd. While the Scottish Premier League’s reputation had dimmed quite a bit over the course of MLS’s existence, Boyd came to Portland as the SPL’s all-time leading scorer (as he remains, apparently). My memories of how Boyd failed to pan out don’t match the record: in my memory, he scored a lot early, and largely with the same kind of goal (headed goal, near-post run), but the stuff I’m scratching up out of the record doesn’t support that – i.e., he didn’t score much or often (just seven goals and one assist all season; no one did, really) and his minutes dried up completely after the Timbers parted ways with the head coach who hired him, John Spencer. And, point of interest, Boyd picked up where he left off upon returning to Scotland.

The failure was probably more total than that, a matter of the already-precarious roster Portland built for its Year One getting knee-capped by a sophomore slump. Having a striker like Boyd – a target-man who required service – didn’t work because the Timbers didn’t have a player to provide service. Maybe they expected Darlington Nagbe to take on that role, but, as later years proved, that’s not his game, and Bright Dike and Jack Jewsbury can’t carry that pail of water either. It’s possible the team had a deeper problem with defense. They struggled to find a starting line-up – e.g., Eric Brunner played just 13 games, Mamadou “Footy” Danso 10, and David Horst started only 20; I can’t even remember Hayner Mosquera in a Timbers jersey but he started 25 games for Portland in 2012, more than any other defender. And the numbers show the problems on both sides: in a season where the goals scored average rose to 44.9 per team, the Timbers scored just over 10 fewer (34 goals scored; 1.0 per game on the nose!) and allowed over 11 more (56 goals allowed). To put that in context, that’s second worst for goals scored – and that against a Chivas USA team who, regardless of what this table says, probably scored the fewest goals over a regular season in MLS history (DC’s 2010 record came during a 30-game season, while 2012 was a 34-game season) – and third-worst for goals allowed. (Thanks again, Chivas USA! And Toronto!).

In fewer words, Portland threw a crappy, poorly-constructed team into a league where teams could pay to improve like never before. This continued the process that started, I’d argue, as far back as Guillermo Barros Schelotto for the Columbus Crew (recounted in my post on the 2008 season). Name recognition, as well as the long career that came ahead of it, started to matter less than finding a player to fill a need. Portland needed a striker, without question, but they needed another player to get that strike the ball - Boyd, especially. That’s also not to say that there weren’t any aging Euros knocking around MLS – the Galaxy had both David Beckham and Robbie Keane on their 2012 – but fans remember those names because they made their mark on MLS fields. The Timbers would internalize that lesson and make it count – and soon too. (Plus they’d already found one good DP in Diego Chara.)

Before wrapping up the regular season, I want to highlight some of the structural changes MLS made ahead of the 2012 season – including two big and, as I see it, really smart ones. To start with the little ones, they returned to entirely intra-conference qualification for the playoffs – i.e., the top five teams in each conference qualified regardless of total points earned. This screwed the Columbus Crew in 2012, who finished on the outside in the Eastern Conference 11 points higher than the Whitecaps with a winning record (15-12-7) and a break-even goal-differential. (Vancouver, though not good in 2012, gave the Galaxy a major scare in the play-in round when they scored the opening goal.) I think I already mentioned the 34-game season, so…moving on.

As for the two big changes, one corrected a long-time error while the other one incentivized smarter player acquisition. To start with the easy one, MLS ended the silly business of booking MLS Cup in a neutral venue and changed to allowing the highest-seeded team to host it. The righteous goods that follow from this are so obvious and varied that I don’t feel any need to dwell on them. The second, greater change introduced the “young DP” incentive structure. This reduced the salary cap hit teams would assume for signing younger designated players. By the numbers, players 20-years-old and younger would count for $150,000 against the cap, players 21-to-23 would count $200,000, while players 23-years-old and older would count the full $350,000. The impact of this rule didn’t come all at once – I’d argue it’s still coming together – but I think this points teams in wiser directions, even just in terms of making MLS a selling league.

In any case, starpower played an increasing role in any team’s fate at this point in MLS history. The way any given player came into the team didn’t necessarily matter – e.g., he could be signed as a DP, or come in through the draft – but having key players of some kind was, in general, a make-or-break phenomenon. The Chicago Fire (who I seem to point to as a negative example a lot) explains the phenomenon from the other side. Whether by accident or design, the Fire had produced a series of attacks that scored by committee. That doesn’t hurt you much in seasons with low goals averages, but it sorta kicks your teeth in when you’re competing against teams with highly-productive players – e.g., Chris Wondolowski, who had a monster season with San Jose (27g, 7a), with two monsters playing beside him (Alan Gordon, 13g, 7a; Steven Lenhart, 10g, 2a), or Thierry Henry (15g, 12a) and Kenny Cooper (18g, 3a) for the Red Bulls, or even Graham Zusi putting his name in lights as an assist specialist for SKC (5g, 15a). By contrast, here are Chicago’s top four in scoring: Chris Rolfe, 8g, 3a; Marco Pappa, 6g, 3a; Dominic Oduro, 6g, 3a; Patrick Nyarko, 2g, 7a. The whole “scoring by committee” thing isn’t a damning sin on its own – even with Will Bruin playing “The Season of the Dancing Bear” (12g, 4a), Houston’s attacking profile wasn’t far off Chicago’s (after Bruin, and Brian Ching playing as a super-sub (and chipping in 5g, 5a), Boniek Garcia got them 4g, 6a, while Calen Carr and Macouma Kandji both added 4g, 2a. Houston, however, had something Chicago didn’t – e.g., Brad Davis, who turned in his fourth straight big season (8g, 12a) – and that just underlines the point of how much having “a guy” (or “guys”) who do something matters.

I’ll wrap up the 2012 regular season with an assist from the 2012 Form Guide. And, to make a narrative out of it…

A couple obvious candidates expired on their way out of the gate – e.g., TFC, who started 1-10-0 and then went winless over its last 13 games – while others, like Chivas USA, died down the stretch (they got their last W in Game 20). Others fell apart so thoroughly in the middle of the season as to make recovery impossible (e.g., the Colorado Rapids, who lost 12 of 17 during the summer; Dallas who had a 13-game winless streak from spring to early summer; or the New England Revolution, who went 3-10-7 from Games 13-33). Columbus, Chicago and the newly-arrived Montreal Impact (have I not mentioned that yet?) all hit little streaks down the stretch, but all of them too late and with too many red Ls in their recent past. Some teams just sort of sucked regularly throughout – I’m looking at you, Portland – while teams like the Philadelphia Union only managed to catch little breezes here and there; ironically, notably, or whatever, that applied to Houston and Vancouver, just to a lesser extent. As always, I’ll list all the teams that competed in MLS down below, with their final records, goals scored, and some notes on their roster. This was a pretty fun season…

As for the playoffs, they dished out a couple epic series. First and foremost, the 2012 season featured one of the most hated teams in MLS history, the Bash Brothers San Jose team that lead with Wondo’s record-tying goals scored and Lenhart’s and Gordon’s elbows (related: this video is a league treasure; required viewing). I already noted that they won the Supporters’ Shield, but they also lead MLS in scoring with 72 scored over 2012 and a +(fucking)29 goal-differential. For reference, that’s 27.1 above the goals for the season. The ‘Quakes faced arch-rivals LA in the Western Conference Semifinals and they went into the second leg of the series with a 1-0 lead. LA, with Keane leading the way, dismantled that lead one goal at a time (highlights), including a second goal that Ike Opara probably still sees in his sleep and a third goal that completely broke San Jose’s left. Wondo shanked a sitter after Keane’s opener and (fittingly) both Gordon and Lenhart had a bead on the slop-fest goal that pulled San Jose back to within one for the series, but I’m pretty sure this was the last time San Jose fielded a team that did anything. I think this is a lonely position, but I would have loved to see another season for that team. They were like pro-wrestling in MLS. Too soon, man…

The real highlight came with the Houston v DC series in the Eastern Conference Finals. The red-hot controversy came during Leg 1, and I’ll give Wikipedia the honors of explaining just how fucked up this was:

“In the second half, United's Saragosa had a breakaway shot on goal, but was taken down by Houston's André Hainault. Protesting for a red card, due to a take down and denying a goal-scoring opportunity, center official Salazar did not card Hainault, nor call a foul. Subsequently, the Professional Referee's Association made a press release saying that it should have been an ejection. However, Houston eventually went on to score three unanswered goals, including one by Hainault.”

Yeah, that’s a pisser. Worse, DC opened the scoring at home, Saragosa could have put them up two goals and it was Hainault who scored Houston’s equalizer (highlights). I mean, sure, Houston won the second leg, but this sucker was tainted. But also one for the history books. Look, I love a good story and this is why I love refereeing errors and hate VAR.

The best thing I can say about MLS Cup 2012 was that Calen Carr scored the Houston’s opener (for those who don’t know, I have a massive soft-spot for all MLS randos.) The rest of the game looks like the Galaxy slowly taking over, as they did in their series over San Jose. The stats might give Houston an edge, but the highlights show a real breakdown on LA’s equalizer (e.g., Jermaine Taylor losing all of Omar Gonzalez) and a well-deserved penalty that put LA ahead (and another that didn’t matter at all). LA won the game 3-1 and its fourth MLS Cup. A good run, obviously.

And that’s the 2012 season. Sorry if it went on about and I appreciate the interest of anyone who made it this far. For the truly hale and hearty, numbers and notes on all 19 teams are below (and the numbers are embedded in each team’s name). Enjoy!

San Jose Earthquakes (19-6-9, 66 pts., 72gf, 43ga (+29), 1st in West; Supporters’ Shield)
I covered the tip of the spear above, but Marvin Chavez (3g, 13a) and Shea Salinas (1g, 7a) did good work on the assist side, with some bonus flair from Simon Dawkins. The CB pairing of Victor Bernardez and Jason Hernandez, briefly sold me on both, along with Sam Cronin.

Sporting Kansas City (18-7-9, 63 pts., 42gf, 27ga (+15); 1st in East)
I think these were the peak-pressing seasons, with Paolo Nagamura and Roger Espinoza at the heart of it. The Aurelien Collin/Matt Besler line-up got its start and Kei Kamara (11g, 8a) and C J. Sapong (9g, 2a) had solid seasons. This was a tough team. Helluva defensive record (all-time, too).

DC United (17-10-7, 58 pts., 53gf, 43ga (+10); 2nd in East)
Between a break-out season for Chris Pontius (12g, 4a) and Dwayne DeRosario still doing the business (7g, 12a), they had a decent chance. Personally, I have found memories of the Chris Korb/Robbie Russell at dueling fullbacks. A weak-ish spine probably killed them.

Real Salt Lake (17-11-6, 57 pts., 46gf, 35ga (+11); 2nd in West)
Big season for the classic line-up: Saborio (17g, 3a), Espindola (9g, 7a); Morales (3g, 9a); still anchored by the inimitable Nat Borchers with Jamison Olave pitching in over a promising Chris Schuler. With Kyle Beckerman holding down the base of the diamond and Chris Wingert and Tony Beltran overlapping, RSL delivered reliably as any team in the league.

New York Red Bulls (16-9-9, 57 pts., 57gf, 46ga (+11); 3rd in West)
I alluded to Henry and Cooper above, but this team just continued the Metro-Red Bulls tradition of annual races between goals scored and allowed. Joel Lindpere (5g, 5a) and Dax McCarty made for excellent pivots in front of a stable, if over-easy defense.

Chicago Fire (17-11-6, 57 pts., 46gf, 41ga (+5) 4th in West)
I covered the attack above, but it’s that dead-middling vibe of the team as a whole that defines them. They tried Mexico’s Pavel Pardo to anchor the attack and upgraded to Arne Friedrich in the back, but the “hapless” label has stuck to Chicago for a while.

Seattle Sounders (15-8-11, 56 pts., 51gf, 33ga (+18) 3rd in West)
Yet another great Sounders defensive team, still held down by Jeff Parke and Jhon Kennedy Hurtado, with assists from Patrick Ianni and Zac Scott. They attacked well and on the cheap through high-end starters like Fredy Montero (13g, 8a), Eddie Johnson (14g, 3a), and Mauro Rosales (3g, 13a), plus random support. Always strong, so far.

Los Angeles Galaxy (16-12-6, 54 pts., 59gf, 47ga (+12); 4th in West)
Their top 5 goal-scorers show what “scoring by committee” can look like – e.g., Keane (16, 9a), Landon Donovan (9g, 14a), David Beckham (7g, 9a), Juninho (7g, 4a), and Mike Magee (5g, 4a). Put Marcelo Sarvas with Juninho behind that, and hold on to Omar for a season and you’ve got a championship.

Houston Dynamo (14-9-11, 53 pts., 48gf, 41 ga (+7); 5th in West)
Covered above, but the real take-away is this: I forgot how much this team over-performed. It was solid, but it really did rely on a stout defense and Brad Davis for all good things.

Vancouver Whitecaps (11-13-10, 43 pts., 35gf, 41ga (-6); 5th in West)
Darren Mattocks lead them with 7g, 1a – aka, Timbers-esque numbers – and he didn’t have much of a cavalry behind him (Camilo, 5g, 7a; Le Toux, 4g, 1a; Barry Robson, 3g, 2a; Koffie, 3g, 2a). Walked dead into the playoffs, even if they head-faked first.

PLAYOFFS ABOVE, DAMNATION BELOW

Columbus Crew (15-12-7, 52 pts.; 44gf, 44a (0); 6th in East)
It looks like Federico Higuain arrived too late to help them (but he still chipped in 5g, 7a), but they would have made the playoffs under the 2011 regime. The time without Higuain and Chad Marshall with too many dance partners did them in (very ultimately).

Montreal Impact (12-16-6, 42 pts.; 45gf, 51ga (-6); 7th in East)
Patrice Bernier lead em (9g, 8a) and, after Felipe (4g, 10a), but they had a dog-pile of contributors (8) that goes all the way down to Justin Mapp (2g, 5a). They went cheap at d-mid with Collen Warner, and they fielded a weaker defense than offense. Decent inaugural, tho.

FC Dallas (9-13-12, 39 pts.; 42gf, 47ga (-4); 6th in West)
With David Ferreira missing for half the season, they had a very Chicago-esque vibe on the attacking side – e.g.,. Blas Perez (9g, 4a; 20 GP); Fabian Castillo (6g, 3a), Jackson Goncalves (4g, 7a; 21 SP). It was a good group, George John and Matt Hedges in defense.

Colorado Rapids (11-19-4, 37 pts., 44gf, 50ga (-6); 7th in West)
Another case of a missing star (Conor Casey), and Omar Cummings falling off a bit (6g, 2a), but their bigger issue was not getting enough out of regulars like Jeff Larentowicz and Drew Moor. Brian Mullan (2g, 7a) and Martin Rivero (2g, 8a) did their job for assists.

Philadelphia Union (10-18-6, 36 pts.; 37gf, 45ga (+8); 8th in East)
Some stability in back and middle (Carlos Valdes, Sheanon Williams, Brian Carroll, Okugo?), but just about everyone stalled in 25 GP or less; they couldn’t stick together a reliable line-up; Jack McInerney leading scorer (8g, 3a), but it’s a shrinking grab-bag after.

New England Revolution (9-17-8, 35 pts., 39 gf, 44ga (-5); 9th in East)
Outline of a fun team, but still Chicago-style (Saer Sene, 11g, 3a; Lee Nguyen, 5g, 2a; Kelyn Rowe, 3g, 5a; Chris Tierney, 2g, 5a); decent year defensively, reasonably stable on A. J. Soares, Stephen McCarthy, but Benny Feilhaber didn’t fit. And how was Shalrie Joseph still around?

Portland Timbers (8-16-10, 34 pts., 34gf, 56ga (-22); 8th in West)
Covered amply and with sorrow above.

Chivas USA (7-18-9, 30 pts., 24gf, 58 ga (-34); 9th in West)
I have seen players on this roster do good things. They did not continue in 2012. This team was cursed by then and they die in the next season or two. I’m gonna start ignoring them…

Toronto FC (5-21-8, 23 pts., 36 gf, 62ga (-26); 10th in East)
It’s hard to remember that Toronto might have been the worst expansion team in league history when it came to having an actually successful season. Their fairly consistent mistake was trying to build a team with a couple “stars” (e.g., Danny Koevermans, 9g, 2a; Luis Silva (5g, 5a), Eric Hassli (3g, 2a), Torsten Frings (20 GS, 2g, 2a), rounded out by a handful or MLS B-listers.