A 2024 Portland Timbers Post-Mortem: Entertaining the Possibility It Really Was That Bad

Let the image go blurry...you'll see Raffi, I promise.

As I sit down to write this, I’m not even sure that I can see around the crushing 0-5 “home” loss to the visiting Vancouver Whitecaps in the play-in to the 2024 playoffs. (Play-in to the playoffs; that had to be deliberate, right?) One could even make a case that looking past that result amounts to a demand to misread the 2024 season, to treat it as something other than a failure or, even yet another “transition season.” That last rock gets kicked around a little more below, not least because I'm no longer sure that still applies, but when your team only “makes the playoffs” through a bloated invitation list, then passes out and collectively shits themselves an hour into it…don’t worry, I’m not even going to try to find that image…

Something else that’s in my head as I type this: because 2024 was my first full season on the Timbers subreddit, I have a lot more voices rattling around up there. That’s not all bad, of course – a broader perspective is good! – but digging through any accumulation of detail(/clutter) inevitably pushes you toward the trees side of the forest/trees equation and this just feels like a moment to focus on the forest, maybe figure out why all those fucking trees caught on fire all season long?

That absorption on detail expressed itself in a singular way this season, if just for me (and, obviously, nobody pushed me into all those subreddit rabbit-holes) – i.e., a loose perception that every player on the team was, in so many words, more or less fine. To be clear, yes, people on the Timbers sub-reddit (hereafter, “Over There”) did eventually start naming names – e.g., Zac McGraw ain’t doing so good, even if Kamal Miller’s making that a contest, and some dude Over There mounted what started as a lonely campaign calling for James Pantemis to start over Maxime Crepeau and, for all doubt, even ridicule that guy endured…Pantemis did, in fact, take over the starting job – but just about every player had their champion, and several of them more often than not. When faced with a team that finished 9th in the West, aka, hanging on by a rotted toe, that idea just doesn’t hold up. Call it a paradox, call an argument for firing the coach, or just some specific coaches, or for firing the general manager, but just the loose sentiment says more about how fandom works than anything about the Timbers’ 2024 season.