MLS Round-Up: A Saucy Reset

This one’s going to be a blunt instrument a series of statements, a fair amount of it without showing most of my math. Suffice to say I had wee epiphany about why I bang on into the wee, foggy hours...

With the end of the season on the horizon, I wanted to post a read on the state of play since the…let’s call it gently(?) deceptive Leagues Cup wrapped up. Some of this follows from a personal failure to fully appreciate just how close we’ve come to the regular season – eight games left on the outside, and that’s only for four teams (Columbus, New England, LAFC, and Vancouver). It’s just six (nine teams, I think) to seven (16 teams?) for everyone else, which means shit got real two to three games ago depending.

Below, I lump all 29 teams into the following five categories, defined briefly below to make sure you catch my drift:

Contenders
The teams that look like they have a reasonable shot at reaching MLS Cup, whether by form (East) or conference (still East, but mostly West; more below).

Playoff Team, Dark Horses
The teams that, if they fix this issue or that one, have some hope of knocking off one of the contenders and reaching MLS Cup. That said, the relevant issue makes it pretty damn unlikely they will not. [NOTE: The relevant issue is not brought up much, or at all, below. Feel free to check out!]

Playoff Team, Plausible +1
Teams with a respectable chance, maybe even a decent one, of winning a game in the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to you by Audi (probably?), but I wouldn't expect much and/or shit from there.

Bubble Teams
Teams that, regardless of their present merit and future upsides, still has real shit to do if they want to reach the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to be Hello Fresh!

The Dead
Teams that I feel confident will fall short of the embarrassingly low bar that MLS has set for reaching the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to you Les Schwab Tires.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Seattle Sounders: (Complicated) Glory! + League-Wide Shit!

Oh, I'm just getting warmed up....

I was out of town for the Portland Timbers checks-all-the-boxes 1-0 win over a (punch-drunk) visiting Seattle Sounders team, but tracked the game from afar on the socials (i.e., reddit and Bluesky). People bitching about the broadcast team (Taylor Twellman and Jake Zivin, I think) popped up here and there and…I just don’t get how anyone can’t screen out the chatter, never mind get caught up in the relative amount of praise they heap on one team or the other. In my experience, color commentary follows the “broken clock” rule, with some hacks hitting the mark more often the others.

Why start there? Perhaps because some thoughts and arguments floated below may fall short of expectations for proper fandom. Let that come as it does, I’m squeezed a lot into this one post. Because it has surely been kicked around both hard and long enough, I won’t burn too many words on last Saturday’s game – which, to be 100% clear, was pretty damn awesome and nifty…it just needs an asterisk, maybe two.

The (Righteous!) Big Picture
Apart from giving up what (giving the Timbers’ history) felt like two games worth of corner kicks in the first half alone, I don’t recall a time when Seattle looked to have the upper hand last Saturday. Even if Portland’s chances weren’t all gilt-edged, the thought process behind them shone through; half the time, they failed due to some combination of a runner being half a step ahead or behind or the angle on the pass 10-degrees off. With key starters like Felipe Mora and Jonathan Rodriguez absent courtesy of varying amounts of bullshit (now half-corrected!), that shouldn’t surprise anyone. With the chance creation that little bit off, the happy deflection that transfigured Juan David Mosquera’s goal into a thing of beauty felt right at home. As for the play that led to it, what was that but vintage Timbers soccer?

The brighter notes played on the defensive side of the ball, and mostly through Timbers defenders throwing themselves in front of the best chances Seattle created. Dario Zuparic stood out there, with his block on Seattle’s not-yet budding star Pedro de la Vega as a stand-out moment (if it's not in here somewhere...crime). Kamal Miller got caught behind the ball now and again, and both fullbacks got burned 1-v-1 more often than any Timbers fan wants to see (Mosquera, in particular), but all concerned recovered well enough and generally played for one another. Now, about all that…