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| Or something that is neither a quonset hut nor a strip mall. |
Last weekend, I put Five Questions to the Portland Timbers
as a way of putting down my marker on where they are as they head into what has
to be the fattest season in Major League Soccer history (i.e., the most milk
and honey bless’d). Today, I’m going to take my best, 2/3-sighted shot at
filling in the blanks for the rest of MLS. And I’ll get to that fraction…
Over the last couple nights (slowin’ down…gas), I picked
through The Mothership’s (aka, mlssoccer.com’s) one-stop strip mall for season
previews - a metaphor I feel is, frankly, beyond apt. Goddamn hacks barely keep
up the website anymore, never mind do full-service…
…I’m kidding: given where my head is, I'm happy to have a quicker
(cursory) tour around all…fuck, I’ll count after, every team in MLS that
touches base on how they’re all shaping up for the 2018 regular season. (Did
they…know that?) For the record, I have been picking at MLS news since the
beginning of February, and that gives me some context for what I see in the
preview “blurbs” that feature in MLS’s Tour de League season preview - or what I'm calling the MLS Strip-Mall Season Preview. Which means you should see this post as a quonset hut built on the side. That said
- now we’re getting to the 2/3 thing - while I couldn’t land on a fraction that
felt good, 1/2 felt too low, and 3/4 way too fucking high, so, I settled on
claiming that I know some amount of stuff about 2/3 of the…let’s call it “broader
situations identified” in all those previews. By which I mean, I have some
genuine sense of 2/3 of the players just by seeing their names, because I’ve
seen him enough to have an opinion; the same goes for coaches, trends, and the
basic history of most teams.
With that, all I’m going to do is use the MLS Strip-Mall Season Preview as a platform to roughly comment on where all…of MLS’s teams are
heading into 2018 (swear I’ll count it by the end). You can judge for yourself
whether my knowledge base presents as 1/2, 2/3 or 3/4 knowledgeable. I don’t do
predictions - they’re not my style (and I’m bad at them) - so this is mostly about
strengths, gaps, weaknesses, quirks, etc. All the links down below go to the “depth
charts” MLS posted for each club. Finally, I have no goddamn
idea how any team but the Timbers did in preseason. I’ve been told that doesn’t matter enough times that I've decided to internalize it.
Whoops. One more thing. On the way to finding that link
above, I visited The Mothership, only to find a pile-up of fresh acquisitions. I
can’t vouch for whether MLS interns got those into the depth charts, but still
think most of the opinions voiced below will hold up. About 2/3 of the time.
Also, this won’t take long. Probably. Just a thought or two.
Oh, and I actively encourage thoughtful comments. Just don’t
be an aggro twit about any of it.
