Level Set 2026, the Portland Timbers: Where Things Stand as We Wait for the Whistle to Blow

Hello, 2012.

[Ed. - Factually, yes, I did post a “farewell post” for this blog late last year – and it wasn’t the first time. I very much meant it at the time, but please see the bottom of this post where I mumble some excuses for what will change going forward and why the farewell holds up, if in the most sorta kinda way possible.]

What follows is a brief history of the Portland Timbers, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed in between those two sections and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., less than one week before First Kick 2026. I saw an Adam Sussman skeet telling me that Merritt Paulson told him to expect a couple more signings before then, so it's likely that not everything below is final…and yet, I’m not going to hold my breath for greatness or anything.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

…for obvious reasons, this one’s going to go on a bit longer than the others in the series…

Thumbnail History
In my head, I knew the Portland Timbers had some lean seasons before they won MLS Cup 2015. That datapoint receded to where it felt like some other team’s history until I picked through Wikipedia posts about those early seasons, as if thumbing through a yearbook. I also remember the 2015 season through a very specific lens, but I’ll get to that. Starting at the beginning…

Level Set 18, Columbus Crew: The Hottest Ticket in Flyover Country

It is hard to explain what this meant at the time. Seriously.

What follows is a brief history of the Columbus Crew, plus more brief notes on whatever long-term tendencies they have. Their 2025 season gets weighed on both sides of that and the whole thing ends with where I see things with them in this very specific moment in time - i.e., before First Kick 2026. You should count on things happening between here and there.

The post ends with a scale I came up with to measure the long-term success of every team in Major League Soccer. It does some things well (e.g., count trophies/achievements), other things less well (capture recent trends). It's called the Joint Points Scale and you can find a link that explains what it does. I was really stoned when I came up with the scale and wrote the post. Caveat lector. With that...

Thumbnail History
Don’t let the(/the greatest) flyover state thing fool you: the Columbus Crew (which I type as “Columbus Screw” 75% of the time), have long had a knack for signing exotic players. They’ve signed their share of guys who fit the working-class image of their original crest (faceless, but the crossed arms suggest the cat-calls) – e.g., Brian McBride stands out there, but they also got great mileage out of Josh Williams, Chad Marshall, Jonathan Mensah and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Artur and, briefly, Aidan Morris – but they put their stamp on league history through guys like Guillermo Barros-Schelotto, Lucas Zelarayan and, most recently, Cucho Hernandez. Toiling under the shadow of the early greats, DC United, the Los Angeles Galaxy and, to a lesser extent, the Chicago Fire and Sporting Kansas City, the Crew spent most of their first decade bumping against other teams’ achievements. They yanked a Supporters’ Shield out of their asses in 2004, but they also missed the playoffs five times between 2000 and 2007 and felt the sting of the Wooden Spoon in 2006. A mere two seasons later, though, Columbus became the smoothest, smartest team in MLS. Coached by Sigi Schmid, guided by Schelotto and back-stopped by a (hey!) working-class defense and midfield built around Marshall, Brian Carroll, and Brad Evans – incidentally, all players who would go on to anchor the all-time great expansion team (Seattle; it’s Seattle) – the Crew picked up the double in 2008, plus another Supporters’ Shield in 2009. They’d cracked a unique approach to the designated player code: finding great talents that few people States-side had heard of. And it paid off smartly until it abruptly did not – or at least until they re-learned the old trick. Between 2012 and 2022, Columbus missed the playoffs as many times as they made them and, despite being the home to the first (and, fair point, super-basic) soccer-specific stadium in MLS history, Columbus barely survived a bid to relocate the team after the 2018 season. The fans pulled together to fight that off in a way that still inspires and, a couple seasons later, Columbus reclaimed their crown as the best team between the coasts in Major League Soccer. They won two more MLS Cups – one in 2020 (aka, The Weird Season; look at the freakin' attendance) and again in 2023, both games at a saucy stroll – and they might have had one more trophy had they not screwed themselves over in MLS Cup 2015 (see: Clark, Steve and Valeri, Diego). For all their failures, and they’ve had a few, Columbus does have a bless’d eye for spotting talent. Checking their all-time roster and scrolling down is a genuinely worthwhile exercise, if just to see all the names that (arguably, in some cases) became more famous on other teams around the league. Per the Joy Points Scale*, Columbus remains one of the most successful teams in MLS history and all of the various powers-that-be that have guided them through damn near three decades’ worth of history deserve credit for accomplishing everything that they did in a…let’s go with unexpected market.

FC Cincinnati 2-4 Columbus Crew: Sizing Pat Noonan for a Hairshirt

Wait'll I get this off, you little shit...

After the Columbus Crew scored their fourth goal, the camera panned to a young woman in the stands who alternated between glaring at the field in disbelief and shooting “what the fuck just happened” glances toward her father. Cincinnati’s staff should have escorted that young woman into the locker room (after all the players were dressed and decent, of course) to have her level that same withering glare at every player who suited up for FC Cincinnati on Saturday. Or maybe send in a six-year-old boy still in tears from watching his idols lose. Time for the autopsy…

FC Cincinnati 2-4 Columbus Crew
About the Game
Before getting my hands into the viscera (don’t worry; I don’t do snuff images), I want to preface the general comments with one quick note: the highlights looked worse and more hopeless than the full 90. The final stats weren't so bad, and Columbus held a slim 3-2 lead from the 60th minute and into second half stoppage and Cincy got…kinda sorta back into it with two…vaguely promising stretches of play in the late 70s and the late 80s. It wouldn’t have erased the 60 lost minutes that saw FC Cincinnati’s original two-goal lead evaporate, but a face-saving draw would have been nice, or at least nicer…

As anyone who turned off the world and turned on this game knows, FC Cincy took a two-goal lead before the Columbus Crew got their pants on (Pavel Bucha's opener; Cincy's second fit better down below). Sadly, once they got them on (about 15 minutes in) they commenced to thrashing the home team with their belts. All without their pants falling down…

Mistakes by Cincy’s defense added the final bricks to Columbus’ comeback – first, the deflection off Tah Anunga’s arm (right?), then the own goal/general clustercuss set off by Miles Robinson’s late defensive lunge – but Columbus laid the foundation with two things: by blowing through Cincy’s midfield going forward and smothering Cincy's outlets/transition. This hardly accounts for everything that happened coming at and going out Cincy’s defensive third, but I spotted two things that details that accounted for some of it:

Columbus Crew SC 3-0 FC Cincinnati: A Light State of Disbelief

“It seems like once they give up a goal…”

I didn’t catch the name of Columbus Crew SC’s color commentator, but 1) she’s pretty good at her job, and 2) she summed up the state of play for FC Cincinnati’s 2020 in those few words. A season defined in less than a sentence.

Cincy is a limited team, without question. The only real question is whether they can be better with the current roster. I’d like to think so, but that’s without having any stirring ideas for rearranging the players in a way that makes them a more dangerous team and in a way that doesn’t leave the back-line for dead. With all that noted, I don’t like how Jaap Stam lined them up against Columbus yesterday - which, despite how MLS’s site mapped that for the prior game against Columbus, looked like the same thing to me. It looks…cluttered, I guess, in terms of going forward. I’ll elaborate on that in a bit. First, some notes on the game/0-3 loss for FC Cincy.

Did Cincinnati ever really look like scoring to you? Was there a moment you thought, “they’re getting closer,” or did the whole thing look like an exercise in holding on for dear life from the starting whistle till the final one? I mean, set aside the fact they didn’t put even one shot on goal (also, really?), obviously.

The way I saw it, it was possible to see the outlines of a goal-less draw, maybe even dream about a 1-0 Cincinnati win until somewhere around the 30th minute. From that point forward, and as happens when a better team plays a weaker on, Columbus started finding seams to spaces ever closer to Cincinnati’s goal. Having Darlington Nagbe around, doing his free-radical thing of unbalancing the defensive and collecting one foul after another in Zone 14, probably did as much as anything to force the slow unraveling, but Pedro Santos, Youness Mokhtar and, later, Luis Diaz joined in the “fun” of tormenting Cincy’s defense. The wheels came all the way off when Gyasi Zardes came on in the 62nd minute and couldn’t stop beating Cincinnati defenders to the ball. Had aliens watched that game, they would have applauded the amount and variety of probing.

FC Cincinnati 0-4 Columbus Crew SC: The Art of Massage

Sometimes you use it to break your opponent...

I can tell you the exact moment my spirit broke – and it came well after Columbus Crew SC’s two goals in stupid-quick succession in the first half. That…long, long moment came immediately before Columbus scored its third goal on the night in the form of a three-to-four-minute span of baby-seal-in-a-pod-of-orcas collective helplessness from FC Cincinnati as they strained…horrifically to pass the ball out of their defensive third without giving in to despair and/or the hapless long ball. This game ended the second Columbus understood they could give Cincinnati the collective vapors with a little aggressive man-marking in Cincy’s defensive third. It also ended 4-0 in Columbus’ favor.

In the bigger picture, with literally everything in the starting line-ups breathily hinting toward a Columbus win, what reason did anyone have beyond COVID-layoff-and-a-prayer to think that Cincinnati would win this game? Columbus hardly shined in 2019 (no playoffs, 10th in the East), but they had a better foundation on which to build and they added better-pedigreed pieces – e.g., Lucas Zelarayan, who, incidentally, came more than a little good last night. More than anything else, Columbus added pieces between 2019 and 20 to make a midfield that looks coherent. Artur with Darlington Nagbe behind Youness Mohktar, Zelarayan and Luis Diaz made sense on paper – and even more sense when you saw it work in practice, e.g., a 5-7 minute of terror by Diaz in Cincy’s left channel. The point is, Columbus has a well-constructed midfield scheme, a system where every player makes some sense where you see them, even if only conceptually.

Going the other way, every theory I saw on the midfield that FC Cincinnati threw (up) onto the field tonight just did not make sense. The 4-1-4-1 line-up MLS’s site shows for the line-up wasn’t miles off, but the scheme that worked…at least for as long as it did – and that’s 15 minutes, maybe 20 – looked more like a 4-3-3, and I say that admitting I had a hell of a time finding Haris Medunjanin out there. That said, even if you allow for a line-up that had Frankie Amaya, Siem de Jong and Medunjanin playing behind Yuya Kubo, Kekuta Manneh, and Adrien Regattin, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. Call me crazy, but it’s like Cincinnati built a bad roster at some point and still haven’t recovered from that original sin…

To touch on Columbus one more time, while there’s some dispute as to whether it took 10 or 20 minutes, most observers seems to agree that both teams spent some time feeling the other out. After Zelarayan broke the spell by curling a free kick into Przemyslaw Tyton’s net, the story of this game was Columbus finding Cincy’s like a psychic masseuse and exploiting every breakdown. They pinned Cincinnati from that point forward, whether by holding possession and passing around and (way too often) through them, or through a man-marking high-press that visibly panicked a Cincy team that’s learning a new system, a new coach, and navigating a pandemic. Nagbe and Artur look like a league-elite deep midfield and, with Zelarayan, Diaz and Mohktar showing flashes of what they can do and players like Pedro Santos and Fanendo Adi waiting in the wings, Columbus’ ceiling keeps pushing up. That said, Vito Wormgoor, new addition for 2020 and heavy-metal icon (obviously), limped off in the first half and he seemed important to Columbus’ plans for 2020. Cincinnati couldn’t test that (can we rewrite the rules to that a team can get points for reaching the midfield stripe?), but who’s to say that Atlanta United FC and the New York Red Bulls won’t, because my guess is they will...

As for FC Cincinnati…Jesus Christ…

An MLS History Project, 2013: The First MLS 2.0 Final?

Pictured thinking of phrasing for me...

Due to the way my brain does and doesn’t retain things, I have two broad memories about the 2013 Portland Timbers team. The first is unconscious: I believe this team planted the deep memory in my mind that Portland has never had a bad season. 2013 was, in fact, a very good regular season for the Timbers. Even if you remember they battled for the Supporters’ Shield to the death, you may not remember how close they came: the New York Red Bulls went 6-0-2 in their last 8 games, while Portland went 5-0-3; the Timbers fell two points short. Pretty damn close.

Second, Diego Valeri, Diego Chara aside – OK, yes, and Rodney Wallace (7 goals, 6 assists) and Will Johnson (what? 9 goals, 5 assists?!) – this team relied on players who scan as mediocre in my memory. That’s particularly true in defense, where I saw Pa Modou Kah as clumsy (mostly in disposition) and Mamadou “Futty” Danso, who I’ve always read as playing over his talent – to his credit - but who I can’t bring myself to buy as an MLS defender. (That’s why it came as less of a surprise when FC Cincinnati’s Forrest Lasso didn’t cut it; I’d seen the movie; also, the word “top-flight defender” doesn’t feel right in my mouth, so I went with “MLS defender.” Back to it…)

Whatever I thought of them, Danso and Kah anchored MLS’s second best defensive team in 2013: they allowed just 33 goals in a season with a league-wide, goals for/against average of 46.7; only Sporting Kansas City allowed fewer (30), and they won MLS Cup that season. SKC also finished fairly high – and I’ll get to that – but, to finish off Portland, the other “scan(s) as mediocre” player was Ryan Johnson. I’ve seen wistful backward glances at Ryan Johnson recently as a year ago, and he did have a pretty broad tool kit as a forward, but I’ve never heard anyone say, “that’s the guy to win Portland trophies.” A complementary piece, a second banana, Johnson fits all of that, but he did have a solid season, chipping in 9 goals and 4 assists. Those aren’t great numbers in the grandest of schemes, but they weren't far off the norm for 2013, so, in context, not so bad. Honestly, it was a tough room…

…then again, Camilo Sanvezza posted 22 goals and three assists for Vancouver that season, and Marco di Viao was the Montreal Impact’s first league-wide fascination the same season (20 goals, two assists; classy, lethal player, the guy was a total gas; a worthy predecessor to Ignacio Piatti). Johnson suffers in comparison here and there – e.g., Mike Magee hitting 15 goals and 4 assists with his hometown Chicago Fire - but he was at the low end of average at worst. And that’s really how MLS’s 2013 season worked: a tight-fisted season, which ended with a tight-fisted, balls-shriveling MLS Cup (cold AF) hosted by Sporting Kansas City, and won by Sporting Kansas City, after a fascinatingly interminable penalty-kick shoot-out, because Nick Rimando and Jimmy Nielsen, and a fiver (I’ll venmo) if you can tell me his nickname (no googling!).

MLS Off-Season Weekly: Looming, Gaping Holes, A Smart Move (with Caveats), and, Crap, The CBA!

"What do we want? More charter flights! When do we want them? More often!"

If you thought a holiday weekend would slow down the news in the Extended Major League Soccer Universe, you have no goddamn idea how media works. The news is thick and dank, so let’s dig in – starting with one of the two teams I follow (followed by the other one, then a bunch of league-wide news/perspective/angry-uncle ramblings):

Portland Timbers: Stumbling Toward the Next Plan A
Absent any updates on the Valeri Situation, my attention wandered to other parts of the Timbers’ roster – and it turns out I wasn’t alone in that:

“The truth is Chara's probably not high-scoring enough to suit Portland's needs, but it's hard to figure what their budget will be after what happened with Brian Fernandez. There are also rumors that they're leaning in the direction of getting another center forward anyway, and pushing Jeremy Ebobisse out to the wing once again.”

Personally, I’ve had Chara on my mind lately, but in a wholly different way – i.e., less about his alleged limitations (which Timbers fans have internalized by now) than his clear and absolute gifts, and what that means both in terms of managing his minutes over the next season or two and to the impending post-Chara future. So, no, he doesn’t score often (when he does, he times it for maximal effect - like his tackles), but I’ve never seen a player with his capacity for covering ground and knack for ferreting the ball off players’ feet; I’m not sure he can be replaced like-for-like (the same goes for Valeri, with some twists, as I’ll get into below). And that’s why I brought up managing minutes in 2020 and, like, one year beyond, just as much as I pointed toward the post-Chara future. Assuming he comes back, Cristhian Paredes doesn’t play the same game as Chara, or at least not to the same effect, and neither does anyone who has partnered with him so far (and if Paredes doesn’t come back, the same will apply to whomever replaces him). As such, when Chara’s not out there – whether resting for a game or two, or in the Chara-less future - the players around the area Chara vacates will need to adjust in terms of positioning, and adjust expectations as to how and how much of the ground behind or in front of them (as applicable) gets covered. That doesn’t have to be bad, but it will be, without question, different. Next question – and I ask out non-rhetorically (because I don’t know the answer) - how much does it throw players to make those kinds of shifts from one game to the next. Moreover, is what I’m describing even a meaningful issue? I think it is, obviously, but what do I know? Anyway, just fretting about the inevitable…

Portland Timbers 0-1 Seattle Sounders: It's Time to Talk About Larry

Third image under "idiot son."

I’ll keep this short. (Now, how many of you guessed that I’ve started scores of posts with that exact same phrase, only to delete it when the proof slipped straight out of the pudding? And...failed again.)

To start with the short version, the Seattle Sounders (specifically, centerback Kim Kee-hee) pegged an own-goal off the heel (probably) of the presently-struggling Julio Cascante. They’ve built their late streak on fluky/lucky goals, Seattle has, and that one goal allowed them to smuggle all three points out of Providence Park  last night. The ending 0-1 score-line in no way represented the action on the field - see the box score and the evidence of the eyes of all witnesses to this, just, gross injustice - and, so, to wrap up the short version, those motherfuckers…

The Portland Timbers (I haven’t even named them yet? seriously?) played the better game out there tonight and were, without question, the better team. I heard talk that the Timbers withdrew into the safety of the “Christmas Tree” formation for tonight and the contours of the match bore that out: the wretched cluster-fuckedness and missed marks of the last three games gave way to a solid shape and, by the numbers alone, an improved attack. I also saw Zarek Valentin and Alvas Powell push high enough (if somewhat ineffectually) to give said Christmas tree one fat fucking middle section, so I’ll just say that the Timbers played in some way that let Sebastian Blanco and Diego Valeri get on the ball a lot, but all while keeping fairly reliable shape. And that worked well, Timbers players looked like they had a good sense of where to go, and what to do, and that’s good.

It wasn’t enough, of course, and that’s now four straight losses (can I get a “huzzah”?) Moreover, it became even less immediately after Seattle scored their shitty, slop goal. I had to check the highlights to recall the Timbers’ best chance on goal - for me, that’s Samuel Armenteros’ lightly over-heated header across the grain off a (motherfucking) moment by Zarek Valnentin.

About those highlights, they open with this absolute gift of phrasing:

“89th all-time meeting between professional soccer teams calling themselves Portland Timbers and Seattle Sounders.”

I can do nothing but applaud that man’s adherence to the strictest of accuracy.

Back to the gristly meat of the matter, there is not a lot of Portland shining in those highlights. Yeah, there’s the one shitty goal for Seattle fans to cling to (lo, it is their guns and religion), but this game otherwise played out as a futility collage, and with Portland trying more and suffering more disappointment for it. Worse, the Portland Timbers plus a slip into the permanent (frankly shameful) midnight of life outside the playoffs, and with the Sounders stepping on their shoulders to get into the light.

MLS Week 10: A League of Dilemmas & Ten Things

Neutral fans for Chicago v. Atlanta

“And there is that long ball to start things off for the Rapids.”

- Confirmation of general reality from the broadcast booth, #SKCvCOL

I don’t just love the unsubtle dig in at the Rapids’ in that line, it also sums up in a small number of words why I didn’t tune into Sporting KC v. Colorado. The same goes for SKC: I don’t watch them much because I feel like I know where they are. The same goes for Columbus Crew SC gutting out a goal-less road draw at the Seattle Sounders after going down a player (Pedro Santos…who really needs to check his shit) at the 15th minute: neither team is doing much right now and aren’t of much interest as a result.

So goes the process of elimination when I decide which games to watch every weekend on either side of whatever the Portland Timbers get up to. Because it’s half-driven by catching a spoiler - and only half; I still watched New York Red Bulls v. New York City FC, because that’s just good data (not to mention very impressive) - it’s a fairly imperfect method. For instance, I doubt anyone but fans of both teams and betting members of the sadomasochism community picked the Chicago Fire versus Atlanta United FC as a top bout for the weekend. Two other spoiled games lead me to that one, but I’m at least a little glad I tuned in because Chicago managed better than I expected, even playing at home; they also have a point of semi-major concern I’ll look at in one of the 10 Things below.

At this point in the season, though, I’m not sure Major League Soccer’s teams are so much rounding into either good or bad teams, as teams are sorting to, for lack of a better word, types. For instance, the Montreal Impact has to be the biggest “trap” team in MLS, terrible one weekend, lethal as poison the next, just ask the New England Revolution (but…more on that below). In Toronto FC and the New York Red Bulls, you’ve got the two teams likeliest to land 20 blows before you even hit the ground; New York City FC, on the other hand, has stumbled hard enough over the last month to fall from a permanent state of grace. The win against FC Dallas (again, more later) between two…just bad losses (NYCFC got shut-out in both and lost by a combined total of 7 goals) keeps the dreaded “glass jaw” label at bay until a bigger sample says otherwise, but, seeing a team who had rolled as fast as NYCFC take those hits…damn. (During the broadcast, Adrian Heath called the Red Bulls loss, “a shattering reality check,” or something like that.)

If you see omissions in the short (implied) list of top teams above, the team you have in mind might show up below. Might not, too. I’m confined to what I catch and I missed all the talkies and write-ups on this stuff this past weekend. Also, if you’re wondering where the Timbers fit into the puzzle above, I’ll wrap up with that after the 11th Thing down below.

Houston Dynamo 2-2 Portland Timbers: An Unwelcome Comparison

Also, these get fucked up real fast.

A couple, three weeks back, I posted a poll on twitter that gave a quartet of projected overall records (e.g., 6-5-3, 4-7-3, 8-2-4, etc.) with which the Portland Timbers would see out the 2017 season. I don’t remember the exact numbers (and that tweet lies buried beneath an avalanche of anti-Trumpublican venting), but I landed on each of those projections by going through the rest of Portland’s schedule and divining results based on the opposition, the venue for each game, and some vague potential plotlines for each opposing team going forward. I felt like science, people (if only social science).

How’d I do so far? I had the home game against Real Salt Lake carved in stone as an easy Portland win (violently nope!), and yesterday’s draw against the Houston Dynamo as a certain loss – both of those across all scenarios. As for the road win against the Vancouver Whitecaps, I put that down as either a loss or a draw, so…yeah, fucking psychic over here. If anyone out there wants help picking the ponies, I offer reasonable hourly rates. (A friend helpfully pointed out that I got the total number of points over the past three games right at least – four points out of nine.)

If I sound less confident than I used to over the past couple seasons about what’s happening with the Timbers, I guess my rebuttal is, can you blame me? If this team played soccer like it thwarts expectations, they’d win the triple every year.

As for yesterday, the best excuse I can offer for a bogus (and silent) “Lock of the Week” prediction was that the Dynamo team I expected didn’t show up. Part of that had to do with the twin Honduran terrors – Alberth Elis and Romell Quioto – starting the game on the bench. Portland countered with a line-up close enough to its starting eleven – and that’s even with Lawrence Olum starting in central defense (more later), and Darlington Nagbe and Sebastian Blanco starting on, at least what I assumed were the opposite of their usual assignments in the 4-2-3-1.

The Timbers opened the game strong (literally; just re-watched the condensed game and the team held possession through Nagbe’s opening shot inside the first minute), and they continued to find one another in space all the way to Diego Valeri’s opening goal. Some bad defending provided either the secondary or primary assist (Zarek Valentin fed Valeri, but, holy shit, did Leonardo make at least one terrible decision in playing that pass), but the Timbers earned that one. The team looked comfortable most of the evening, especially on the ball; the passing was respectably crisp and all concerned looked lively in spite of Houston’s sticky East Texas heat.

Scouting San Jose, With Excessive Scenery

It's in there somewhere...

About a week ago, I glimpsed an Armchair Analyst tweet that said something about the San Jose Earthquakes attack coming online. On reading the section of the article, I immediately decided I would no longer cover all of Major League Soccer. All those 20-minute condensed games were burying the goddamn lead, just as I had feared…

…nah, I decided to stop because I couldn’t cover everything without going over seven pages – e.g., that point where I’m basically writing out of spite. When I stuck to 10 or 20 talking points, I fretted about the value of everything that hit the cutting room floor. My notes never did make any goddamn sense either; shit looked like ancient Greek written through doses of shock therapy. So, yeah, fuck it. I took my weekends back.

The plan is to watch/preview only the teams the Portland Timbers will play in their next game. With that, Conifers & Citrus will be devoted only to what the Timbers did in their last game, and thoughts on who they will play in their next, notes on the meaning of the game, if any, etc.Yeah, right...

So, does tonight's game against the ‘Quakes at Providence Park mean anything special? Well, last night I put some thought into what number of losses constitutes a death sentence to any given MLS team’s playoff hopes. Didn’t look it up or anything (haven’t figured out how to phrase the search, and the actual research sounds…unpalatable), but the drop-dead tally feels like something over 10 games, certainly. 12 or 13, maybe? Portland has five losses already, so it’s just this thought.

At any rate, that note on Hyka got me wondering (there’s video, too), not least because I had a couple vague recollections of collapses by the Timbers defense knocking around my memory. I also recalled some game when all of San Jose’s new guys played to expectations; they really took that team apart, I remember. Something told me I’d seen Danny Hoesen, of all people, look like maybe he could liven up the ‘Quakes attack. Man. Who was that?

On the Portland Timbers' Revealing(?) Draw Against Atlanta and (Barely Touching) MLS Week "11"

Goddammit, the 80s....

Yeah, yeah. I’m way behind on this stuff, but, look, someone died, I had to help plan my first funeral, and that shit’s time consuming. As such, the only MLS game I could watch this weekend was Portland Timbers v. Atlanta United FC. So, this week, it’s all and only about what happened when Atlanta came to Portland, Oregon. I’ll comment very, very generally on the week’s results, because I feel like I’ve got something there too. At any rate…hold on, wait.

Also, I’m doing this from memory; I don’t have time for even the condensed game at this point. I had this really compelling conversation about the service industry going on during the second half, and the damn game was how many days ago? Feels like a fucking lifetime…by which I mean, more than a little vagueness ahead. But that game did stir some thoughts…

Think I’ll start with this: the first few games of the year pumped my expectations for Portland’s season pretty high (the LA win, though, first road win since Rome fell? C'mon, you loved it). Stupid high? Maybe. (And are we there yet?) Felt good, the idea that Portland made just the right moves, solved the key problem(s) (honestly, I thought they’d solved only one problem, but, also, all of that problem with David Guzman), but some part of me thinks the Timbers have settled into what this season will actually look like. Think the Facts of Life theme song. And if you don’t know what that is, skip looking it up, that’s just your garden variety sit-com; not that’s there’s anything wrong with loving it, just have some goddamn perspective on what you love. And google the damn theme song.

Hold on. Just did it. Here you go. Back to the game…

Portland Timbers 2-1 Vancouver Whitecaps: A Quick Rummage Through Our Back Pocket

Because not all back pockets are created equal...

Because I’ve basically stopped reading about soccer and can only make it through about 20 minutes of any soccer podcast, I got a little blindsided by yesterday’s starting line-up for the Portland Timbers. And I have the pre-game tweets to prove it. Just thankful I didn’t cough up something like, “Fanendo Adi’s contribution will define this game; nothing else matters” or “The Timbers need Jake Gleeson in goal or the entire goddamn house will come down.”

For fans, the cost/benefit break for these kinds of things doesn’t actually matter (con: you’re more likely to go home unhappy; pro: hey, now you have something to talk about before and after the game), because they’re gonna play the game regardless and, in that sense, the line-up is what it is. What can players and coaches do except play the hand dealt them by The Fates, The Furies, the referees – aka, the delegation from the Cosmos sent to every game.

Even with regular starters like Fanendo Adi out for suspension, and regular starters like Jake Gleeson and Sebastian Blanco missing through injury (the latter, only mostly missing), the Timbers knocked off the Vancouver Whitecaps 2-1 yesterday at Providence Park. That’s good as a stand-alone fact, obviously, and the Timbers played all right, the depth stepped up smartly enough, etc. The specifics of yesterday matter most in the sense of knowing what the team has in its back pocket (“what does it have in his pocketssss?”), at least when it comes to the subs, but, still, let’s mash all that together for a bit and see what the lump looks like when I’m done. I’ll start with Vancouver, sort of draw an outline of the shape of the challenge.

If you go back and look at those preview tweets, you’ll notice I flubbed pieces of the ‘Caps line-up as well. Their biggest changes came with sitting Alphonso Davies and pulling Christian Bolanos from the center of midfield to play at the midfield left in a 4-1-4-1 (dammit; I hate when the TV splits from the website on formation, but I think the 4-1-4-1 is more accurate). Presumably, Vancouver coach Carl Robinson did that so he could bulk up the midfield by starting Andrew Jacobson and Tony Tchani in front of Matias Laba – i.e., putting all that muscle in the middle, so that the Timbers couldn’t play through it. I won’t pretend to know whether having Davies’ moxie and talents on the field would have pulled back at least a point for Vancouver and, even as both of the breakdowns that lead to Portland goals originated from (essentially) central areas, the ‘Caps midfield gave their opposites a game. For me, the biggest open question comes with what Vancouver lost by having Jacobson play the role that Bolanos has been playing – and I’m flagging Jacobson here instead of Tchani, because when it came to late runs into the area, it was the former who most often made them. The ‘Caps did their best coming inside from the wings and they got a decent share of chances – two or three of them quite good, too. To take the next step, and not to knock the win overly, but if Jacobson knocks in Cristian Techera’s cross (he had a good afternoon) or if Fredy Montero’s chip over Liam Ridgewell finds the side netting, this post would read both differently and a little gloomy.

Portland Timbers 0-1 Sporting Kansas City: Say, That's Not Right (But It Is)

WWWWAAAHHH!!!!

First, some context: my wife and I had gone on a date prior to the game, and that put me about two sheets to the wind at kickoff. I made it through the game, and then some, but I think I wrapped myself in Sheet 4 or 5 somewhere in there and, in every sense except actually being asleep, called it a night. With that in mind, I’m going to approach this from an impressionist angle.

A feeling sums up the Portland Timbers’ 0-1 loss at home to Sporting Kansas City: a sense of vague yet persistent frustration. Every time a Portland player faced an obstacle, he did it knowing that another obstacle stood beyond that one, and so on to what felt like infinity for some damn reason (or maybe Sheet 3, but I digress). By game’s end, most Timbers players looked not so much tired, as weary*. Enervation in game form: that’s what Saturday’s loss felt like. Running, but never moving, Sisyphus putting his shoulder to the rock again, etc.

Something told me that Portland would never score. I can’t even peg the time this occurred to me – did that come to me before or after KC scored their goal? – but I think I’d experience the former as resignation and the latter as despair, and how far are those two things, really? No team in MLS has had much luck breaking down KC this season, but the Timbers seemed likelier than most teams to do it. Instead, we got a double-layered shit sandwich: a loss at home against a Western Conference rival and an indication that KC’s has both the system and the intent to put their opponents in a submission hold for the length of the 2017 season. They’ll choke off games, basically, and that’s boring, but effective. And boring.

I just sat through the condensed game to fan the fires of memory a little, and here’s where I pick up that asterisk. * Portland’s best chances came late, so my memory failed me a little on that detail (but is that timing issue relevant? you be the judge), but I still maintain there’s a reason my chief mental impression of the night featured Diego Valeri seeming to just scream at referee, Drew Fisher. From the looks of it, it just came out as “WWWAAAAAAHHHHHH!!” It’s like Valeri performance-arted The Scream live, on-field, only instead of wailing about the horror of existence, his felt more like "do you believe this fucking guy?" as a madman's bellow. At least that’s how I remembered it…

Philadelphia Union 1-3 Portland Timbers: Situation...Just Normal

We got a good thing going...

I just watched the condensed version of the Portland Timbers depressing (for some) 3-1 win over the Philadelphia Union (yeah, it’s those guys I’m talking about). I wanted to tour the details one more time, even as I don’t think anyone can bend, shape and squeeze them into any kind of revelatory permanence. By that I mean, this one’s all about the narrative, because the details don’t look to have changed all that much.

To quickly review those details, however, Darlington Nagbe scored, and that’s always nice; Fanendo Adi scored again (still nice, but less surprising), to become the Portland Timbers all-time leading scorer (just give him the damn ball, guys); after that, Diego Valeri did something lethally important, Jake Gleeson made (I think) a couple confident saves, and that’s good (even if I can only recall the one), I had a blast watching Adi battle Oguchi Onyewu, was it just me or did David Guzman finally look a little sloppy out there (and, holy shit, wouldn’t that be a big deal?), Philadelphia has some good pieces, sure, but they’re not fitting into the same puzzle yet, and, when it gets right down to it, isn’t that the difference between Portland and Philly right now? That sense of, to pick up another metaphor, of the dancers knowing their steps?

That’s where it ends: a better team beat one that’s still struggling (pulling for ya, Philly; I’m totally on part of your side), but isn’t that how it’s supposed to go? For all its silver linings, both old and new, yesterday….shit, Saturday’s (two days out, now) win doesn’t mean anything besides three arguably unexpected points for the Timbers. With the emphasis on “arguably,” because Philly has been grasping after nothing all season long. I’ll get to that in exactly two paragraphs, but, first, I’ve got to wrap up this larger thought on the Timbers.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Los Angeles Galaxy: A Parade of False Flags

Early season stupor. Also, unfamiliar.

Tonight, I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by people of good, clear insight. The Portland Timbers picked up their first road win since 2015 when they beat the Los Angeles Galaxy 1-0, and that’s a big deal. Something else slipped past me, given my anxious state, but the Timbers also kept a clean sheet today. So, thanks to @cobolsky and @brioe162, for being wiser men than me.

Still, that “anxious state” followed me home, and it revealed itself in the way some sort of invisible safety net left the game when David Guzman walked off, holding his left arm all funny. Guzman jacked his shoulder, as we all know now, even as we don’t know how badly, on what wound up being a second-yellow challenge from the Los Angeles Galaxy’s Jelle Van Damme. I watched that specific replay often as they showed it, and I’m still not 100%-clear as to whether Van Damme hit Guzman at knee level, or whether Guzman hurt himself on a leap/dive to get around Van Damme’s lunge. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme, I mean, Guzman will take the same amount of time to heal, whether fair or foul, and that’s my biggest take-away from this game.

Things went some form of haywire after Guzman stepped off. Portland’s central defensive arrangement has functioned like a triangle through preseason and Game 1 2017 – e.g. Liam Ridgewell and Lawrence Olum, and with Guzman running in front of them in defense, and dropping between them when Portland had possession. Basically, Guzman really has (near as I can tell, and I can’t promise proximity) played as pure a No. 6 role as Portland will allow, and, once he went off, Portland reverted to Olum and Roy Miller (Ridgewell’s sufficiently creditable replacement) behind Ben Zemanski and Diego Chara, who receded to the back line in order to protect the lead, and the win. The sweet, sweet road win. Smells like honeysuckle on a June night, I tell you…

That was nice, right, sweet reverlry? Now, back to the panic…

Los Angeles Galaxy 1-2 Portland Timbers: Pleasantly Dull, Yes?

Third image...incredible...and stop spying on me, Google.

I didn’t need a ton from tonight. If the Portland Timbers showed some sense of purpose and direction in 2017’s preseason finale, I’d feel OK about things, up to and including sputtering throughout March. Why not, right? It’s a tradition. Still, any sign that a couple key relevant parts of the team had improved or stabilized would have been enough.

Up to the 75th minute (maybe, or thereabouts; somewhere in the deeper parts of the second half), it was possible to believe that Portland would exorcise two demons tonight – e.g., they’d win on the road and keep a clean sheet. That was a good dream while it lasted, but it’s not bad going into the regular season with one demon slayed, if only in the most glorified of scrimmages.

Yeah, Portland coughed up a goal against the Los Angeles Galaxy – a stupid little piece of disorganization, too (both (big) marks got lost, basically) – but they won on the road, 2-1, too, but, all in all, I figure it’s a little like hitting a respectable jackpot – nothing big, about $250 – after tripping over a black cat while carrying an umbrella and walking under a ladder. There’s a clean metaphor in there, I swear, but, the point is, Portland won on the road for the first time in over a year. Is that stat 100% verified? No. It’s more an allusion, but you get my point. Unless you don’t. I mean that road wins have been rare, therefore problematic. Moving on…

Do I need bullet points? Trying without…

I think the defense looks better. Sure, there’s the unsettling absence of clean sheets, and, sure, I wondered how much Portland owed their last win to the Vancouver Whitecaps, 1) starting non-starters and, 2) being broadly shitty in the attack, even with starters. The same applies to who LA coughed up tonight: the Galaxy might have fielded starters, but none of them have come up with a clear sense of how to go forward, with or without his teammates. It wasn’t till Romain Alessandrini came on and just started running headlong toward them, that LA consistently attacked the Timbers midfield, never mind the defense, and even that didn’t last more than 15 minutes.

The Late Tackle, 02 21 2017: Kicking at a Mental Block (Nagbe) and Vancouver Rebuilds Without a Foundation(?)

It is A plan, I suppose.

“Nagbe-led Timbers clicking, but Porter wants more”

MLSSoccer.com could not have slapped a more “click-baity” tease to this article, at least not for me, due to what my counselor politely calls “heightened, specific / troublesome interest” in Darlington Nagbe (I’m working on getting that third modifier scrubbed from my file, but every day’s a new day. For the record, the actual article – one that examines the decision to stick Nagbe on the left wing, and the meaning thereof - carries a more measured headline…so I probably wouldn’t have clicked on the thing, so, to MLS’s headline hacks, you’ve earned your rent this month.

It’s that word, “led,” that creates the cognitive dissonance, because I see Nagbe as more of a facilitator than a leader. It’s been said (over and over and over and over) that Nagbe could be a truly great attacking player, but raw talent depends on disposition and what a player is motivated to do: that's what will define where and how Nagbe brings his best to Portland, whatever that best may be.

The article raises one specific point, I’d like to scratch at – the one that inspired the poll I posted today: will Nagbe return to his same level of “production” in 2017 that he achieved in 2013? Here’s my answer:

Personally, I don’t think Nagbe will score as many goals as he did in 2013 – and that goes back to the above point about disposition. That’s not to say I wouldn’t welcome it if he banged in a baker’s dozen (I mean, by all fucking means, kid), but I’m neither expecting that nor banking on it. What I do believe is that Porter has come up with what looks like a good system for Portland’s attack down the left. Moreover, that system will afford Nagbe with opportunities to shoot: the question will be, as ever, what he does with those. (Or will he spurn them, as he does my unflagging obsession?) (Also, I don’t like the choices he and his wife made in their kitchen*. I mean, that back-splash? Are they blind?!)

Fewer Questions: The Portland Timbers, The State of Things

Stepdad 1. World 0. (C'mon, you'd be impressed. Or sufficiently confused.)

In a post last week, I hit a piece in The Oregonian from an angle. That article-show (you see, when an article loves a slideshow very, very much) put 11 Questions to the Portland Timbers for 2017. If Portland answers them right, they win! More often than not! (In case you're wondering, yes, accurate.)

As noted then, 11 questions feel like checking every side street instead of just driving straight to the destination. To pick an example (#2), if Portland lands on an effective center back pairing, a few other items (let’s go with, #4, #7, #11, #13, and #14), get answered either loosely (e.g. the presence or absence of “an effective center back pairing” behind David Guzman will go a long way to determining how he plays); by answering itself (e.g., if, say, Rennico Clarke seizes the starting job, the young players made an impact by definition); by the same logic (e.g., the team, and the back-line, will either have good chemistry or it won’t); directly (e.g., if the Timbers have “an effective center back pairing,” they will win more games on the road); finally, and again, directly (e.g., if they win more games, steal some others, they will make the playoffs).

Look, I’m not just shitting on The Oregonian’s copy. This is more about highlighting/addressing the big issues (personnel) and then tuning the machinery to get it firing optimal. Call it Formula 2015, or come up with something better, it’s about the same thing: getting the most out of the players the team has at any given moment. And, now that I’ve completely incorporated the Supporters’ Shield into my universe of goals, what’s possible in any given moment should influence how the team approaches each game.

To frame that from the longest distance, playing for the Shield should mean putting out your best team every time you can, because maximizing points every game means operating on a very much live for today mind-set. If, however, you’re most focused on the MLS Cup – and I think this is viable, even wise, for some teams from the start of the season, but, even more, as your options run out during the season - you can, say, risk dropping points in order to rest players (especially on the road, and in tough venues), and give your back-ups more first-team experiences, because that builds repetitions, therefore on-field partnerships. This isn’t a clean contrast, either, because FC Dallas threw their youth to the lions a couple times last season (I think; eh, maybe), but still won the Shield. At the same time, how much did wear on their team, and Mauro Diaz in particular, doom their Cup hopes? Just sayin’, people make choices alla time…

On a related note, and to see if I finally can’t get it right, I’ve been trying to understand why the Timbers winning MLS Cup in 2015 never quite satisfied me. Because the Timbers did the consistently inconsistent thing for most of the year, winning the Cup felt like your divorced dad, after an entire year of blown promises and blowing you off, absolutely fucking nailed your birthday party. That probably has something to do with 2016, but let’s stick to the task at hand.

The Late Tackle 01 11 2017: A New Timber? Plus, a Tailored Combine/Superdraft Update

I can see San Jose from here...parts of Houston.

In news of the impossible, Patrice Bernier just picked up one more year with L’Impact Montreal.

Elsewhere, MLSSoccer.com’s The Kick Off topped the report of FC Dallas’ Ryan Hollingshead getting hit by a car with a playful “Ouch!”, and, surprisingly, FIFA took the “money-whore” option to expand the 2026 World Cup to include 48 teams.

Hmm…maybe MLS is changing world soccer…in bigger news…

Timbers Target A Winger

According to “sources,” the Portland Timbers have formally offered to take Sebastian Blanco off Argentinian club San Lorenzo’s hands. See usual disclosures (e.g., I don’t follow the Argentine league, therefore know nothing meaningful about this guy; I did, however, see Back Office Gavin ask another guy if he’s good for MLS, and the other guy said yes), but one phrase and some numbers in the article stand out:

“A creative midfielder capable of playing centrally or out wide, he has three goals and five assists in 11 appearances in the current Argentine Primera campaign and nine goals and eight assists in 78 appearances in all competitions in his two years with the club.”

The numbers lack a certain “pop,” so here’s to hoping that Blanco will get a little bump courtesy of the competitive quality between Argentina and MLS (does such a thing exist? Looked like it last time I watched Argentina regularly). I’m less hung up on that than caught between considering/ruing the possibilities of Blanco sharing the “3-bank” in a 4-2-3-1 with Darlington Nagbe, and Diego Valeri. The only real concern there comes with fitting all these guys’ approaches into something coherent; I mean, I see the interrupted phrase “capable of playing…out wide,” but, with Portland needing width badly as it does, that’s sort of a big deal. To reframe that, does Blanco prefer playing out wide, or is there a winger-to-be-named-later floating around out there?

Reserving judgment. For now, I’m happy to see a little (more) ambition, and will hope the whole thing ends in a "nice problem to have" scenario.

And what about new defenders, guys?