 |
| It's nine ten somewhere, mother...shit. Never mind. |
MLS’s highest franchise, the Colorado Rapids, have just two trophies (that aren’t the Rocky Mountain Cup) in their trophy case after 29 seasons in the leg. So, one may ask, what the flaming hell are they doing as the seventh team in this series? To explain the title, Colorado is like a team that gives the right time twice a day, and just twice. Consider the following: they won MLS Cup once (2010) and have felt the shameful sting of the Wooden Spoon exactly one time, way back the league’s first season (1996); the only other MLS Cup they competed in arguably doesn’t count, coming as it did in the second season (1997), even if they won their one and only U.S. Open Cup that same season. What sets them apart, even if by a thin margin, comes with the fact that they have this thing where they come out of backside of absolutely nowhere and do something wild and weird like reach the semifinals in the playoffs (2016 and 2021), or maybe they jump out of the bushes and swipe the Western Conference title (okay…yes, that’s 2021 again). To be clear, yes, I understand that fans of this team sees opportunities to brag less often than Americans elect their next president (hold that thought; might not hold for long), but every one of those rare, great seasons gives the Rapids a certain kind of superpower: they scramble expectations for all the teams around them, if mostly during the regular season, and mainly in the Western Conference. Part of that follows from the challenges of drawing top talent to a (no offense) backwater market and with an historically tight-fisted front office writing the invites - e.g., paying $3 million for Djordje Mihailovic going into 2023 was their record signing until they bumped it to (maybe) $3.5 million for Rafael Navarro in the middle of 2024 (great deal so far). Their most famous players used to be goalkeepers – e.g., Tim Howard, Zac Steffen(?) - defenders – e.g., Marcelo Balboa, Drew Moor, Jeff Larentowicz(?) – or defensive midfielders – e.g., Pablo Mastroeni. A couple dozen players could squeeze onto the very short list above if one wanted to go deeper (see Colorado’s (gently-outdated) all-time roster and build your own!), but the Rapids have often been a spine of a team waiting for attacking legs and arms to make them complete and dangerous enough to make one of those semifinals runs. As implied above, they do pull it off now and then, with the most famous example being the attacking line of Omar Cummings and Conor Casey, who led them to MLS Cup 2010. The relative absence of famous names on the Rapids’ other two, post-2010 “glory teams” – i.e., the one that mounted the 2016 semifinal run (Shkelzen Gashi? Dillon Powers? Axel Sjoberg?) or 2021’s Western Conference-winning roster (Jack Price? Danny Wilson? The season that sold everyone on Lalas Abubakar before…yeah) – goes back to the point I’m making about the Rapids franchise overall: there is no way to see their next good season coming, but that season will abruptly become one more obstacle standing between your local team and a shot at glory.
And if that doesn’t completely explain why I placed them seventh in their series, here’s the rest: they have consistently been the same team throughout their history in MLS and, unlike the rest of the originals coming up, they have enjoyed some form of success over the past 10 seasons.
