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, as 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…enjoy an image from a more wholesome metaphor...

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 the doubt, even ridicule that guy endured…Pantemis did, in fact, take over the starting job – but just about every player had their champion, many of them for as long as the season lasted. When faced with a team that finished 9th in the West, aka, hanging on by a rotted toe, that cheering section shouldn't exist. 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.

MLS Weakly, January 28, 2023: A Thermometer Enters an Orifice

If you know, you know.

The U.S. Men’s National Team wraps January Camp 2023 with a friendly against Colombia tonight. Be there, or expand your cable package/antenna TV offerings (c’mon, antenna TV, old buddy, don’t let me down). That wee nugget is the biggest shit in domestic soccer today, but all that will change. And soon.

Since I started with the national team, I may as well finish the thought – though I have less to say than I thought I would (and I’ll have notes later tonight). A rash of consternation at the soap opera state of U.S. Soccer flared up across the twitters this week – one tweet flagged looming tournaments and other future events like a maid of honor staring at a wide-open to-do list through one eye and a calendar through the other – and...I just couldn’t give less of a shit about the comings and goings of Earnie Stewart, Brian McBride, and whatever the hell’s happening with Claudio Reyna. To offer some words of comfort to that hypothetical maid of honor, the big day will come and you’ll be ready for it or you won’t and you’ll celebrate or despair accordingly...and who knew this site would age into naked fatalism? I blame society, society is to blame...

After that, if you want to know what Walker Zimmerman and DeAndre Yedlin think about the state of the National Team, here you go. My main takeaway from that piece...gods preserve us, I forgot that the U.S. (and Mexico and Canada, right?) won’t have to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, courtesy of its (their?) hosting duties (I’m not looking it up). That makes me far more nervous than whatever’s happening in Salem (shout-out to Days of Our Lives...which I just discovered is set in the...Midwest. Did anyone else know this??). Oh, and this was a fun little nugget (from this):

“Setting aside the top five leagues in the world -- in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain -- MLS had the most rostered players (36) of anywhere else. It was represented by more countries (12) than any league outside the top five and, for the first time in league history, it had a player on the winning team: Argentina's Thiago Almada (Atlanta United).”

The U.S. had that midweek loss to Serbia, of course, and I queefed (sp?) out some thoughts, but Matt Doyle had a couple nice additions to my vague gesturing in his notes on the "shaky start" to the new cycle. Two things I didn’t talk about in my post: 1) I agree that Columbus’ Aidan Morris wasn’t great where he lined up...but did you expect him to be? and 2) how good could Brandon Vazquez be with the regular U.S. Men’s line-up behind him? And that segues nicely to...

A Statement on Merritt's Statement

Dick!

“Yates’ investigation found that Paulson knew of other alleged, non-sexual abuses as early as 2014, but did not act on the information. It also found that in a conversation with the Western New York Flash — after Riley and the Thorns parted ways — that Wilkinson blamed Shim for ‘putting Riley in a bad position’ and said that he would ‘hire (him) in a heartbeat.’ Riley was soon hired by the Flash, which later relocated and became the North Carolina Courage.”

“’In 2014, after Riley’s first season as head coach of the Thorns, the NWSL issued an anonymous player survey in which players identified Riley as “verbally abusive,” “sexis(t),” “destructive” and stated he “s--- on (the) players every day,”’ U.S. Soccer’s report reads. ‘The survey results were shared with NWSL Executive Director Cheryl Bailey, USSF President Sunil Gulati and (CEO and secretary general) (Dan) Flynn, but no one provided them to the team and no action was taken.’”

And that’s without getting into darker findings about the Portland Timbers/Thorns front office impeding the investigation, revelations that Timbers/Thorns owner Merritt Paulson and General Manager Gavin Wilkinson “not only enabled, but also vouched for [former Thorns head coach Paul] Riley,” a man who, even they now agree, used his position to manipulate and do all the abuses (sexual, emotional, professional, probably some others) during his time with the team. And, as the phrase goes, they knew.

Just over(?) 24 hours passed (does it matter?) before Paulson released a statement. He attempted contrition – he may even believe it – but the substance of the response amounted to an apology that, in context, reeks of insincerity. Moreover, taking the token step of removing himself and the other executives under suspicion (Wilkinson and Mike Golub) from all “all Thorns-related decision making” raises more questions than it answers – e.g., if they didn’t take a pay-cut and now have less day-to-day responsibility, how is that not like out-of-school suspension for a high school kid who doesn’t give a fuck?

Portland Timbers 2020 Retrospective: The Season I Let Jesus Take the Wheel...and How the Car Wound Up in the Ditch

I still feel good overall. (Nailed it!)

Fucked up year, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just thinking that reminds me of the ads at the beginning of the lockdowns when all the commercials included some perfunctory spin on the phrase, “as we go together through these [random adjective generator for new/difficult] times.”

It’s fitting there, though, because for the first time I can remember, I more or less shut down the critical capacities in my brain fairly early into the 2020 season and just decided to believe everything would work out just fine. Maybe that goes back to some lizard-brain coping mechanism of basically going limp in the face of danger (e.g., the way I quietly muttered, “oh well,” as my car slid into a ditch just before last Christmas), but I think something simpler suggested the choice.

I’ve insisted that either or both Diego Chara’s or Diego Valeri’s legs would give out “this year” for longer than I should have - and it’s always been Valeri’s that set off the most agist-predictive concern. I didn’t recall what numbers Valeri posted in 2020 till I checked (8 goals, 7 assists) and, sure, they had to manage his minutes, but the former came in higher and the latter didn’t stop him from continuing to serve as both key cog and inspiration for the Timbers - and his set-pieces (corners, in particular) have never looked better. Chara, meanwhile…maybe he can keep retirement eternally at bay by tackling that shit before it sees him coming.

It absolutely didn’t hurt that every player Portland signed ahead of 2020 worked out well or better. Felipe Mora never looked like much, but maybe that’s the same voodoo he uses to lull defenses asleep (and does he double in size when shielding the ball? And do defenders’ eyes somehow see the same thing?) I remember Jaroslaw Niezgoda looking on the verge of passing out after scoring his first goal for the Timbers (what? he came in with a heart issue), but, until his knee blew up toward the end of the season, he showed he could score all kinds of ways and his combination-play added still more fluidity to a much smarter and trickier Timbers attack. Yimmi Chara looked like a miss at the start of the season, but found both feet in time to hold Portland’s attack together as a succession of injuries took one player after another out of the team. On the other end of the field, and no disrespect to Bill Tuiloma, Dario Zuparic gave Larrys Mabiala his missing partner in central defense…also, hold that thought…