MLS Week 26: (Loose) Notes on the Re-Entry & Laying Down Some Markers

WHAT IS HAPPENING?!? (Japanese game show, btw)

I didn’t watch nearly as much Leagues Cup as I’d wanted to (a single tear rolls fitfully down my cheek as I type) and for reasons I can’t quite put words to. I watched a good share of highlights, did the requisite oohing and awing over the prettier goals, but the sense that what happened there doesn’t translate to Major League Soccer’s regular season in any comprehensible way crept in somewhere around the time my Portland Timbers got a St. Louis shove out of the tournament in the Round of 32.

No small part of that follows from the Leagues Cup format itself. The three-team, two-game group stages makes for a weird/unforgiving format, for one – e.g., the Colorado Rapids and the San Jose Earthquakes qualified for the Round of 32 with 0-1-1 records, while Minnesota United FC and Real Salt Lake failed to qualify on 1-1-0 records – and that the Liga MX teams haven’t really started their season and also play a total of zero games at home gives even the shakiest MLS teams a leg up in one-off games…

…not that that stopped me from poring over the results, clocking who lost to who, and when, and running that against the…possibly eccentric document I created to track results, also it’s not me, I’m not losing my goddamn mind, because the Form Guide doesn't get the damn visuals right.

At any rate, with games of MLS Week…26 now playing on the streaming service that lives in your TV, I wanted to reconnect with where the regular season left off and what, if anything, the Leagues Cup said about where it may go between today and Decision Day. The observations below lean more into trends than details (i.e., no, I didn’t know about that minor knock that may make [Team X’s] your home team’s second stream (high potential!) No. 8 play a little south of his best), and it mostly kicks around loose impressions to be confirmed by later results, aka, the immovable facts that decide the fate of all and sundry. As stated in, I’m just trying to wrap my head around some things to get back in touch with what I’m watching.

This starts with an Eastern Conference overview, but will wrap up on how I’m feeling about the Timbers’ chances after the Leagues Cup. With that, let’s roll…

An eastern promise. I guess.

Eastern Promises
I, like you, enjoyed seeing Columbus Crew SC ruin Inter Miami CF’s first grasp at a trophy for 2024 by knocking them out of the Leagues Cup; the fact it happened in the Round of 16 makes it all the sweeter. More to the point, that result tracked as significant, and for the same reason as the Philadelphia Union bumping off FC Cincinnati in their own house did: both Columbus and Philly look like teams who have finally put it together, even if from very different places in the Eastern Conference standings and maybe even different planes of quality.

Columbus almost certainly can’t catch Miami, not from 10 points down, but their ongoing bull-run through the Leagues Cup gives them the striking resemblance of a team that could knock Miami out of the MLS Cup playoffs – and keep them from touching, never mind lifting, MLS Cup in November(? probably?). By the same token, Philly is currently out of the playoff picture, but I see them stepping into frame over the next several weeks and staying in there to the end of the season. Enough of the teams above them – looking at you Red Bull New York, Charlotte FC, and even Atlanta United FC – limped into the Leagues Cup and couldn’t even manage to get their good leg into the Round of 32. They have the same problem as Columbus, in that they almost certainly have too many points to recover to catch up to, say, NYCFC in (now) 4th place, but hitting the playoff in form creates its own kind of magic.

Biggest picture, I get the sense that a number of Eastern Conference teams will post their ticket to the post-season on points they banked prior to the Leagues Cup break. At a glance, those include NYCFC, RBNY, maybe Charlotte, but – and this one’s a real surprise – FC Cincinnati. Those first three teams struggled to win (i.e., in order they posted 3-4-3, 3-1-6, and 4-3-3 records over their prior 10 gams, respectively), going into Leagues Cup and none of them knocked it out of the park once in the tourney. It’s harder to get a read on Cincy – i.e., how to weigh their three straight (and soft) losses going into Leagues Cup against them topping their group stage with two clean wins (v NYC and Mexico’s Puebla) and reaching the Round of 16? – but they also never really recovered from Miami slapping their hands to blistering that one time they reached for the Supporters’ Shield at the same time. The general dynamic reads as a contest between more points and the (home) advantages they bring versus the teams below rising, and with some momentum.

At least one person on that stage is hammered...

Western Swings
Per the rules laid down by L. Frank Baum, the West looks wilder than the East. There are definitely haves – e.g., the Los Angeles Galaxy and Los Angeles FC (aka, the Los Angeleses) – have-nots (aka, Sporting Kansas City), and the manifestly destitute (aka, San Jose Earthquake), but the difference comes with the way more of the mid-tier teams – e.g., the Colorado Rapids, the Seattle Sounders, and the Vancouver Whitecaps – have demonstrated real competence at stringing together results, whether in the MLS regular season or the Leagues Cup. That creates a situation where, the Los Angeleses aside (seriously; they’ve been crazy lately and play in the Leagues Cup final on Sunday), you expect any given team to be capable of beating any other, up to and including the Los Angeleses on the right night and under the right circumstances.

Moreover, the Top 7 Western Conference teams all has respectable road records – Real Salt Lake has the worst at 4-3-7, but that’s still punching points out of a lot of home teams – and I find it worth noting that the 8th and 9th-place teams the West (Portland and Minnesota United FC) started today with five or six points more than the 8th and 9th-place teams in the East (Toronto FC and Atlanta United FC). The West feels more competitive, basically, and with more of that coming from its mid-table teams doing positive things (e.g., winning!), as opposed to the (broadly-speaking) Eastern Conference mid-table pattern of the treading water (aka, holding one’s place in the standings by tying a lot of games).

What does that mean for the Portland Timbers?

It means keeping pace with teams like Vancouver and Seattle – because neither of them show signs of slowing down – and hoping that teams like Houston Dynamo FC, even RSL, slow down long enough for Portland to catch up to them. Both fortunately and unfortunately, the Timbers will see plenty of chances to tug at the shirts of their direct opposition. Here Portland’s last nine games of 2024:

v STL, v SEA, @ COL, v LAG, @ RSL, @ VAN, v ATX, v FCD, @ SEA

For all the opportunity I see in those games, I also see a large patch of work cut out for my Portland Timbers – i.e., it’ll take a smart combination of winning games and stealing points to rise from 8th in the Western Conference standings to a place where they’ll get an easier first rounder in the playoffs than a road game in Los Angeles.

At any rate, that’s my late marker on what’s ahead. We’ll see how it holds up…