MLS Week 23 Snapshot: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Where They Largely Don't Matter + Up From the Depths!

Best sidekick eva! Woo-woo!

Just like that, I’m on a roll. League-wide posts two weeks in a row. Woo-woo!

The preamble for this series/concept went up in last week’s post, so I’m going to just refer anyone who wants to know the “why” of this post back to that one. To give the short version, these aren’t detailed posts for two related reasons:

1) the details generally don’t matter; unless…

2) they either rhyme with or emphasize trends that have been going on for a while.

That doesn’t mean I’ll never flag details – i.e., three of the talking points below are only in here because I spent more time on a result that tickled my fancy – but these posts will mostly traffic in trends. Fans of deep cuts can always mosey over to Matt Doyle’s weekly columns (which I only skimmed this week; on a schedule), or lose as many hours as they’re willing to burn in the distinctly non-local MLS Season Pass archives, but it should take more than some random dude scoring a banger (e.g., Cristian Dajome, for a still-woeful DC United team) to make this short-list…which, for the record, is still longer than the specs said it would be. Dammit.

With that in mind, let’s dig into the notes for MLS Week 23 (again, yes, this is Week 23, look at the current standings (effective for reference only through Wednesday morning, July 17, which a bunch of games get played). Here are 10 Things That Happened on or Before MLS Week 23:

1) Nothing Happened to the Supporters’ Shield Race, Ignore MLS Content
I don’t have a sense of the overlap between the people who find this tiny corner of the internet and who subscribe to the MLS Kickoff newsletter, but Monday’s edition dug into race to the Supporters’ Shield – specifically, all the league-topping teams that lost games last weekend. The list includes, FC Cincinnati (waylaid by Charlotte FC! (see below)), Real Salt Lake (drummed out of Providence Park (see below)), the Los Angeles Galaxy (who couldn’t get going at FC Dallas (see below)), and, in the one game that actually felt like it mattered, Los Angeles FC, who got all but drawn-and-quartered against Columbus Crew SC in LA. Here’s the thing: that didn’t change anything about the relative position of any of those teams. Not one of them. Did a couple distant rivals gain ground on all of those teams? Sure, but only one team looks like it has a real shot at catching up with the pack…hold on...

Note the lack of spectators...

2) Why All the B.S. at the Bottom Doesn’t Matter
For the first time this season, I decided to pay attention to what changed in both the conference standings and the overall standings between last MLS Week and the MLS Week that came before. The answer: it’s mostly musical chairs among teams below the playoff line – i.e., bad teams taking points off of one another in a contest where no one really wins. To list the teams that either improved or harmed their momentary station: in the East, Atlanta United FC, DC, Club du Foot Montreal, New England, Nashville, Orlando, Philly, and TFC; in the West, Dallas, Minnesota, Portland (in a good way!), SKC, and St. Louis CITY FC. All the teams that actually mattered neither gained nor lost ground. Meanwhile, back in the land where things matter…

3) Yes, Columbus Fucking Destroyed LAFC
[NOTE: I watched about 40 minutes of this one, some of which should have been favorable to LAFC. And yet.]
They didn’t run away with it until the second half – and the bonus two goals’ worth of distance didn’t come until the end – but Columbus got their foot on this game early and generally trod on LAFC from there. Doyle’s piece has a long, smart section on exactly how Columbus pulled them apart on the first goal, but LAFC’s complete incapacity to get anything going stood out more than anything else. LAFC plays against the ball all the time, probably even more often than not, and Columbus going straight at them with and without the ball can quickly unravel into over-committing doom for plenty of teams. That didn’t happen, at least not last Saturday. Columbus executed a pretty nifty game-plan and LAFC in one fell swoop and thus continues their five-game winning streak. And, to be clear, they are taking fucking heads as they go, i.e., see the goals for and against – i.e., 20 for, two against(!!).

4) Charlotte Has Never Been Bad
[NOTE: I caught a solid 40 minutes of this one – with enough time for Cincy to “wow” me, too. They did not...]
I suspect Cincy’s loss got attention for two reasons: it was at home and against Charlotte FC. On the one hand, sure, things happened – e.g., how often does Luciano Acosta miss a PK (not a rhetorical question; I don’t actually know)? – but that detail misses two demonstrably true things: 1) Charlotte’s is goddamn close to just 1.0 goals allowed/game (24 allowed over 23 games), and 2) they went up 2-0 early and Maurice Edu told me they deserved it. Based on what I saw, Cincinnati burned a lot of time on hero-ball bullshit (aka, The Assertion of Superior Talent!) and Charlotte was equal to most of it. I flagged this game for one specific reason: Charlotte has never been a bad team – i.e., they finished ninth in 2022 and 2023, which meant they surpassed five and six teams over their fist two seasons in MLS, respectively, and made the playoffs in the latter when MLS’s planners expanded the playoff pool. They’re running hotter this season (good for them! wait…does anyone hate this team?) under newish head coach Dean Smith and the whole thing feels pretty earned by now. Still, their win over Cincy offers a very specific moral: don’t get two goals behind Charlotte.

Crawled through some wild shit.

5) Cascadia Rising…
The Portland Timbers have won five of their past six games (6-1-0, here’s to shit in yer eye, Dallas!). The same goes for the Seattle Sounders (6-0-1; eat shit, assholes!) and the Vancouver Whitecaps twisted St. Louis CITY FC’s defense into knots so tangled last weekend that a Boy Scout would curse them as the product of the Devil - and they’re on a 3-1-1 run over their own. Vancouver owes a chunk of their late resurgence to Brian White’s return to his better self, but they’ve bubbled above the top half of the table for most of 2024. Seattle and Portland, on the other hand, had to rise from the depths – the deepest depths in Portland’s case, i.e., where the fish look all fucked up and everything. And yet, here they are, the hottest teams in MLS over the past six weeks, at least in the West and barring only the Galaxy (an actual, immediate problem for Portland). Still, they way Cascadia has barged over the red velvet rope that sets playoff teams apart from the unwashed counts as one of your bigger trends going into the “Leagues Cup Break.”

6) With Portland in the Lead?
Hello (hello). Homer (homer.)

Yeah, I’m going to declare the Timbers streak the best of the bunch, i.e., I’m channeling my inner stage-mom and, yes, she will crawl out of my skin and fucking cut you for disagreeing. The evidence supporting it isn’t the sturdiest – e.g., four of Portland’s last five wins came at Providence Park and the road win came at 2024’s wildebeest, the San Jose Earthquakes – but none of the other candidates – going with the Galaxy, Colorado, Seattle and Vancouver (who all feel like present rivals) can claim wins as stirring as beating Vancouver and RSL. And, to be clear, the Timbers manhandled RSL (my notes!) like the gorilla in the (very) old Samsonite ads. Sure, the Galaxy’s win at RSL a few weeks prior looks great, Vancouver took a piece of Minnesota on the road…hold on. Say, fun fact: a lot of Cascadia’s rise came at the expense of Minnesota. Who are sputtering rather loudly…

7) Meanwhile, Over in the East
Speaking of clawing up from the depths, Orlando City SC have won four of their past five games – a streak that has seen them double their total for wins on the season (yes, things were bad before then) and lifted them into the light above the playoff line. Notably, that recent run of form tracks with Facundo Torres' recent scoring streak – e.g., he has scored five of the eight goals he’s scored all season over their past five games…but the quality of the opposition bears noting. Orlando’s four wins came (in order) v Chicago, at Toronto, v DC, at New England. In their defense, Toronto just stuffed Philly at BMO (also, see below) and, though faltering, the Revs have seen better days of late and they didn’t have Carles Gil, but, as if doing a mentor/mentee thing a la Columbus, Orlando put the hurt on all of those teams – to the (loosely) rhyming tune of 14 goals for and three goals against. Keep tabs on Orlando, basically, particularly when they play better teams in tougher venues. Along the same lines...

8) The Looming Problem of “Good Enough” Teams
I caught…probably 40 minutes of Dallas’ win over the Galaxy and the big takeaway is how hard Dallas stuffed ‘em. You could actually see the xG divide – 1.9 for Dallas for 0.4 – in real-time. Both teams have big pieces missing – e.g., Jesus Ferreira, Alan Velasco, and Paxton Pomykal for Dallas (then again, when isn’t Pomykal out?), and Dejan Joveljic and Gaston Brugman (same note re Pomykal) for LA – but only Dallas said, “no problem.” To be clear, this does not make Dallas a good team: they went 4-8-5 over the first half of 2024, but I still think they have good bones and believe their recent 3-3-0 run supports that. They still have a decent shot at slipping into the playoffs via the back door – they’re just four behind Minnesota and Austin FC, and five behind Houston Dynamo FC - but I’m more interested in what they did to LA than all that. Every season, a team puts it together too late to save themselves, but just in time to fuck up your local teams’ dreams of glory. Dallas fits that tricky bill, as does Orlando.

9) A Quiet Season, A Shit Year for Nashville?
I checked the highlights of Nashville’s loss to a truly shit DC United team (i.e., last weekend’s win was DC’s first in 12 games), but two things stood out: 1) DC’s defense is really bad (they’ve allowed 48 this season!), and 2) Nashville’s inability to make something out that. When I saw Hany “Typically Money” Mukhtar miss a header, I got to wondering how he was doing in 2024. The answer: 5 goals and 7 assists. Some of Nashville’s late woes follow from a tough schedule – e.g., v MIA, @ CLB, @ POR…@ DC – but they’re also underperforming the league average for goals-for by eight. I have to believe Mukhtar going MIA has something to do with that, if not a lot. Moving on to deeper mysteries…

10) Philadelphia’s Collapse
For those who haven’t noticed, Philly hit rock-bottom in the East this weekend – which means, name any Eastern Conference team and, congrats, you’ve named a team that’s doing better than the Union. They’re 1-8-1 over the last 10 games and they just lost to Sporting Kansas City in Chester, PA. This remains one of the biggest mysteries of 2024, but they’re almost automatic for coughing up points this season.

That’s all for this one. May the next be one-third shorter!