Portland Timbers 2-1 Los Angeles FC & MLS Week 7: re Asking the Right Questions

MLS Week 7 felt like a good week for defenses to let a player run from the midfield stripe to goal. And that’s watching just one game over half of them.

As hinted at on Bluesky (not sure how many people who find this site are on there, but it feels like most), I’ve tweaked the formula for these posts…yet again, so we’ll see where this goes. Per the Next Five-Year Plan, there will be:

1) a post about the Portland Timbers game, plus the round-up of MLS action for the relevant week, six games will be covered, if more contextually than specifically; and

2) a preview post for the Timbers opponent for the MLS Match Day to come.

Social obligations have put this post a couple hours further behind deadline, so I’m cutting off the preamble there, whatever doesn’t make sense shall become apparent, the first shall be last, the meek will get the best seats at the opera and dolphins shall walk the Earth, moving on to this week’s main event, which had a sweet, sweet chaser…

Portland Timbers 2-1 Los Angeles FC
What Passes for a Match Report
Regular readers of my preview posts know that the real payoff is all the shit I get wrong. After making a firm, reasonably empirical case that LAFC wouldn’t rotate their roster much, they rolled in with most of their regular starters except Denis Bouanga and Nkoski Tafari resting on the bench, it looks like Son Heung-min didn’t even travel, and so on. That set this up as Portland versus LAFC’s Youth Academy, bench players and the two aforementioned starters, which kicked the game off with an opportunity for the fully-loaded Timbers and plausible deniability for LAFC.

Portland Timbers 1-1 Los Angeles Galaxy: Something I'm Choosing to See the (or Some) Good in + a MLS Week 5 Recap

Me, before they even leave The Shire.

Welcome to another week of me triangulating toward what’s possible between time and other ambitions. Dreams of putting in long shifts on several games have shrunk to watching the Portland Timbers game, scouting the team they play next for 60-plus minutes, spending about the same amount of time on, literally, just one other game, plus going through as many highlights as I can get to. The plan is to tighten things up on the content side, but I've been dreaming that same dream since the late 2000s and yet what did I do but top the Director's Cut of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with commentary and all the songs from The Hobbit (plus commentary on the songs). My therapist told me that not working on my problems is the worst thing I can do, so here we are. Something else I learned about myself this past weekend: I will not sit through ten minutes of a game when neither team scored and I know the result. With that in mind, I need to revamp one of the regular sections a little:

Results That Surprised Me (This section will be removed going forward)
Charlotte FC 6-1 Red Bull New York (wait for it...)
Sporting Kansas City 1-4 Colorado Rapids (didn't think SKC was this bad; don't trust a word I type)
Vancouver Whitecaps 0-1 San Jose Earthquakes (though maybe it shouldn’t have; more later)
San Diego FC 2-2 Real Salt Lake (maybe less “surprised” than notice taken?)

Results I Ignored (no surprises here; but also links provided!)
Atlanta United FC 0-0 DC United (but Atlanta should feel very disappointed)
St. Louis CITY FC 3-1 New England Revolution (expected it enough, and good for St. Louis)
Austin FC 0-0 LAFC (don’t think this was good for anyone, but see below)
FC Cincinnati 4-3 Club du Foot Montreal (Cincy dodged a bullet that shouldn’t be sighting them)
New York City FC 2-3 Inter Miami CF (they’re both good teams; didn’t feel educational)
Minnesota United FC 0-0 Seattle Sounders (see note on Austin v LAFC and below)

I’m tracking results/opposition for all teams, for what it’s worth – and fuck The Mothership for letting the Form Guide cut off at Week 23 and not including anything to scroll over (they don't add one later; I check) – and that gives me big-picture perspective on some of the results I’m ignoring. For instance, LAFC’s goal-less draw at Austin looks different than, say, Minnesota's goal-less home draw versus Seattle: the context for LAFC's result includes a road game, sitting atop MLS’s Western Conference and not a goal allowed all season; the context for Minnesota’s is them scoring less than one goal per game (0.8/game, fwiw) and allowing 11 (2.2/game, fwiw, though most of that happened at Vancouver) and just generally presenting as a team running through mud. With those games dismissed (I'll do this better/deeper in the copy next week, promise), let's turn to The Main Event:

The Unmentionable Thing Vancouver Did the Portland & an MLS Week 3 Wrap Up

You're not sinking, you're thriving. MENTALITY!

Major League Soccer Week 3 went into the books a few days ago, fucking up a narrative or two as it passed through. I’ll get to that, but let’s start with the usual editorial notes.

Responsibilities around home improvement forced some adjustments to The Plan. That was noted in last week’s post, but in light of the abandonment of The Plan, I shall not reference it further. The only plan is that The Plan will evolve with one exception: I will watch a minimum of 60 minutes of the game played by the Timbers’ next opponent every week they have one. That went out the window this what with the New England Revolution getting a reprie…er, having their game against Houston Dynamo FC cancelled for reasons I couldn’t easily find and don’t care to find out.

Further minor adjustments shall also go unmentioned as I think even careful readers won’t miss them. With that, let’s get to the good stuff, starting with…

Results That Surprised Me (both expanded on below)
Colorado Rapids 4-1 Los Angeles Galaxy
Red Bull New York 0-3 Club du Foot Montreal (also, congrats Montreal! Thought y’all were cooked)

Mild shocks aside – e.g., the final score on Nashville’s win over Minnesota and the weight of the hurt New York City FC dropped on Orlando (both also noted below) - every other result tracked well enough for me. Moving on, now, to this week’s main event…and I see you, Orlando fans.

Portland Timbers 3-2 Columbus Crew, Plus MLS Week 1 Notes/Theories/Bullshit

No, seriously. Buffets are almost always bad.

I’d call that a decent opening weekend. This post looks to recap portions of that, but it also doubles as a first step in to a different, still unsettled approach to digesting a reasonable amount of the never-ending buffet that the average Major League Soccer matchday has become in the 30-team era.

Still working on the model for that, but to get the main programming note out of the way, I noticed that the recaps offered through Apple TV all appear to have come in at around 10 minutes so far. Assuming that holds, MLS Wrap Up is dead to me. Some non-trivial number of fans seemed turned off by MLS’s in-house talent – aka, Sacha Kljestan, Dax McCarty, Bradley Wright-Phillips, Kaylyn Kyle and (for me, the insufferable) Kevin Egan – which, here, means they actively hated them, so it looks like they’ve turned that into a loose narrative told over a bundle of short highlight clips. Sure, the in-house talent said some stupid shit, and I may be alone in missing the banter, but all those people still said something amidst the blah-blah-blah and you simply lose all of that in a two-minute clip of disconnected highlights.

Ten minutes, on the other hand, gives a fella something to work with. For as long as (the notoriously cheap and unreliable) Apple TV keeps that up, the plan going forward will be to: 1) watch and report on my Portland Timbers every week and whomever they played; 2) watch 45 minutes of three other games, one more involving a Western Conference team and two involving at least one Eastern Conference team, plus 3) tentatively going with five 10-minute recaps for the other games that interest me…

…while it would be a little harsh to say the rest of the games can gently fuck off, I’m also not not saying that. With that, lets get to this week’s results starting with a section I intend to use as framing:

Notes on the MLS Stretch-Run, with the Portland Timbers, FC Cincinnati & Spinal Tap

I've always wanted a girl who believes in Chicago.

We’ve reached that special time in the Major League Soccer calendar when pundits start stitching together posts that look like proofs – i.e., the ones that breakdown all the permutations that will see your local team either eliminated (aka, ded) or alive to fight for one more…let’s face it, almost certainly pointless weekend. A few teams have already been eliminated, of course – goodbye, DC, adieu, Montreal – but that still leaves plenty of teams counting long-dead chickens and hoping they can pawn them off on somebody.

With that in mind, you can add the following to the games I’ll be ignoring for this look ahead at this MLS Week, I dunno, 29? (Nope! It’s Week 33.)

Club du Foot Montreal v St. Louis CITY FC
New England Revolution v Toronto FC
Real Salt Lake v Sporting Kansas City

That doesn’t mean I’ll cover every other game at length, especially when the stakes fall short of existential – i.e., I don’t have much to say about Atlanta United FC v Columbus Crew beyond noting that Columbus needs to win this one and it’ll say something if they don’t, because it’s been a minute since that team saw a W (I count four games). One could argue the same applies to FC Dallas v Austin FC, but that one hits too close to home for me to ignore it.

At any rate, I pulled this together with an eye to get myself back in a sexy regular season mood after the international break. More whip-around than analysis – this will be the biggest possible picture, don’t expect anything on absences (unless I remember them; rare) and keep dreaming on a tactical breakdown - the facts and theories will come fast, but hopefully enough with enough meat on them to make it worth the time. Think the protein blast of riding down the highway on a motorcycle with your mouth open.

Right…starting with games of the most local interest (born in Cincinnati, live in Portland, OR):

San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers: A Little Satisfaction, a Little Future Trepidation & a Wrap Up of the West

With, like, a lot of shit left out.

This post also counts as my first/second stab at a new format/concept. On the most basic level, it involves: 1) kicking around (or just kicking) the Portland Timbers’ most recent result; 2) a quick tour around the relevant parts of the Western Conference for perspective on the grand scheme; and 3) a quick check-in with the team Portland plays next (the Dread Pirate Minnesota). I’m going to hit this at the highest stream-of-consciousness speed I can manage – about all I can do four days late, but I pledged to drag myself through this, gritted teeth, bad taste and all.

Close readers may have noticed I identified this as a first for a new format and, paraphrasing one of the worst we'll-do-it-in-post moments in the Star Wars universe, that’s true from a certain point of view – specifically, I switched the order after the sections on last Saturday’s game, so that the Scouting Memo (I tightened it up), aka, the only forward-looking portion of the post, comes at the end, which is the opposite of what I did for the FC Cincinnati post. (No need to read that; already forgotten.)

There will actually be a third iteration this weekend, when I post notes on the game and then the other bits later. At any rate…

I just sat through the highlights to reconnect with this game. The first that struck me was the full minute of the 7:30 burned on the VAR review for the Andres Dreyer “goal” called back for offside around the 30th minute. I had a joke in the hopper about that being the only actual event of the game, but the rest of the highlights and the final stats painted a better memory for this game than the World of Imagination in my mind. It was still pretty damn dull, but, hey, little Ws have big hearts.

San Diego FC 0-0 Portland Timbers
About the Game, Briefly and Broadly
Is it possible that Corey Baird, formerly of FC Cincinnati (formerly of Houston Dynamo FC, formerly of LAFC, formerly of Real Salt Lake), coming off was the single most significant event of the game? It’s possible, sure: he played two drop-flicks that sent Dreyer free-‘n’-easy behind Portland’s back line, including the one that teed off Dreyer’s offside shot. The drought only looked more apparent thanks to San Diego’s failure to post even one shot on goal over the second half. They had a couple, just not many. Even so, I wouldn’t have believed MLS’s newest kids put just one shot on goal all game if the stats didn’t swear to it…and, yep, even that one shot on goal followed from the earlier Baird/Dreyer connection. The sum of that feels a tenuous combination of promising (for Portland) and significant (for San Diego), with the emphasis on tenuous.

The Portland Timbers, the Playoff Race & Some Soft Motherfucking Schedules

A thing to be avoided. Focus.

A post about FC Cincinnati’s end-run went up yesterday and, while this post will follow the same basic format (see below), the Portland Timbers are playing for different stakes. That doesn’t make the stakes lower, mind you, and goddammit, because the failing to win the Supporters' Shield isn’t so existentially different from, say, getting the results that punch a team’s to hosting playoff games instead of the sporting equivalent of crashing on some other team’s couch. It's just yes/no to a different question.

I’ll get to the question of the Timbers’ chances of hosting down below, but, to flesh out the notes on the format: while I provide a lot of details on each team – e.g., their record over the past 10 games and their remaining schedule, mainly – I’m neither equipped to nor interested in strapping in for much analysis; related, while I acknowledge trades that have happened since the beginning of August, only a handful of the names rang a bell, so I don’t have much to offer beyond their name and (loose) position on the field. The notes I have will focus on past results, players that seem worth noting, and some informed speculation on the games they have left – and they won’t be lengthy or linky (i.e., don’t expect a lot of links).

And, after that historically short preamble (who knew it just took getting older), let’s kick off this post with the sixth-in-the-West…

6th) Portland Timbers
10-9-7, 26 games played; 37 pts., 35 gf, 37 ga (-2); home 6-3-5, away 4-6-2
Last 10 Results: WDLWLLDWLL (3-5-2)
Strength/Location of Schedule
v STL (2-1 W); v SJ (1-1 D); @ TFC (0-3 L); v NE (2-1 W); @ STL (1-2 L); v RSL (0-1 L); v MIN (1-1 D); @ LAFC (1-0 W); @ FCD (0-2 L); v CIN (2-3 L)
Remaining Schedule: @ SD; @ MIN; v RBNY; @ HOU; @ VAN; v FCD; @ SEA; v SD
Additions: Kristoffer Velde (F); Felipe Carballo (M); Matias Rojas (M)
Losses: Santiago Moreno (M)

To wrap up the new players quickly as you like, I’m excited about Velde (please resolve all of our attacking incoherence, thank you), but withholding judgment on Carballo and Rojas. As noted in the post on Cincy’s slim win over the Timbers, my primary hope is that the new guys settle in quickly and that Portland’s style of play follows suit.

MLS Western Conference Check-In, More Words at the One-Third Mark

I'm coming for yer place, Soccer Don.

Careful readers who visited last night’s Eastern Conference check-in may notice I cribbed that preamble for this one. Fuck it. Who reinvents the wheel when he doesn’t have to? Ahem.

Welcome to this broad and necessarily shallow check-in on where things stand in Major League Soccer’s Western Conference about one-third of the way through the 2025 season. To set expectations a little:

I watch just one Western Conference team religiously – my Portland Timbers – and most of the additional (somewhat) in-depth watching I’ve done involved teams that they played the upcoming weekend. So, again, I’m not coming at any of this from some all-knowing, all-absorbing perch.

Against that, I sincerely believe that a lot of the week-to-week global coverage I see from this league (almost all of it from Official Organs) suffers from a pernicious tendency to read too much into the last game played – i.e., Content, particularly the stuff around failure and progress in players, formation shifts, etc., over-values the latest details, often at the expense of considering broader details like, say, did your team look like some hot-rod shit last weekend because they ran over the Los Angeles Galaxy (ha!) at home? All of the everything below looks at the same things, just over a longer arc. That follows for necessity, for sure, but it’s also about patterns, particularly when it comes to results, where they happened and against which teams and in what form.

Just to note it, I constructed the information boxes that top each section for each team from the (current) Conference Standings, the much-reduc’d Form Guide (still mourning the loss, contemplating egging MLS HQ…so long as that’s not a felony, because I can’t have another), and applying a filter one team at a time to the Official stats page. Just to note it, MLS has gutted its non-app content. Jesus fucking Christ, the home pages for must teams are like the shells of abandoned houses with all the copper piping and really good built-ins stripped out.

Los Angeles Galaxy Scouting Report: When Harry Met Anxiety

Mood.

I’d give my left…can’t actually think anything on the left side of my body that I’d willingly part with on this, but I really would like to feel better about this. Starting with the basics…

Los Angeles Galaxy
0-3-0, 0 pts., 1 gf, 7 ga (-6); home 0-2-0, away 0-1-0
Last Results: LLL
Strength/Location of Schedule
v SD (0-2 L); @ VAN (1-2 L); v STL (0-3)

The Portland Timbers host the Galaxy this weekend and I know how LA started this season and remember that they’ve lost at least five players that started MLS Cup 2024 (I say five because Puig counts in spirit). I also know the Timbers are one, narrow home win better than LA.

Disclosure: Prep for this scouting report included about 40 interspersed minutes of the Galaxy’s 0-3 loss versus St. Louis CITY FC last Sunday and, for something that (barely) tracked better, their 1-2 loss at the Vancouver Whitecaps FC the week before. To anyone who wants to go through it: the first half of the loss versus St. Louis felt like the closest analog to what I expect this Sunday. Even if they played a sorta janky XI in that one…then again, Greg Vanney has scrambled the formation every week so far.

The Big Picture
Between the big names lounging on the trainer’s table – e.g., Riqui Puig and Joseph Paintsil are the standouts – and a couple key starters dealt over the offseason – take your pick between Dejan Joveljic (poor fucker’s in KC) and Mark “Not Marky” Delgado – LA, again, aren’t the team that won the Cup last season. Still, Vanney relies on a core of players that includes: Maya Yoshida (surprisingly old), Carlos Garces (fast AF), and right fullback John Nelson (he’s fine) in defense; in midfield, there’s Edwin Cerrillo, with Diego Fagundez stepping in for cover (and playing time?) and he still has Gabriel Pec in or just behind the front line. The only consistent piece is the four-man back-line, with Nelson and the opposite fullback bombing forward. After that, it’s a lot of mix-‘n’-match. New free agent signing (right?) Christian Ramirez looks like the preferred starter and Marco Reus the early choice for creator. Ramirez looks like he’s finding his feet and, as for Reus, his brain’s still there (he made a run so clever against St. Louis it rose to eloquence), his body, whether by age or injury, can only do so much. Fagundez chips in – and I still rate him, crossing and firing from range – but a lot still falls on Pec, a genuine talent, but a young one.

Portland Timbers 1-4 Vancouver Whitecaps: The Brutal Laws of the Game & a Game to Aggressively Memory-Hole

So long as it feels better later, I'm good.

The rules of the game, when read and applied in black and white, make some calls unavoidable, even inevitable. I don’t know what Kamal Miller could have done differently in real time – i.e., Brian White’s first touch took the ball into the space into which Miller was running to catch up, he couldn’t do much to avoid some contact, so the real question was always going to turn on the kind of contact that occurred (you can toggle to the video here, but the link doesn't appear to change to the specific highlight) – but, no matter how many details you drop into the basic scenario, there is simply no getting around the fact that Miller was the last defender covering White, an attacking player running into a one-v-one against the ‘keeper, Maxime Crepeau.

I’m confident some Portland Timbers fan will undertake a frame-by-frame deconstruction to argue that White went down too easily and that another other fan will explore the practical physics of how much weight Miller’s hand would have needed to exert upon White’s shoulder in order to cause him to actually fall: by my reading, calling White for a dive presents the only alternative to the red card and I don’t see enough in what happened to sustain a flop.

Miller’s red card wasn’t the only mistake the Timbers made today; it was merely the first. It took several more to get to today’s lopsided 1-4 loss to the Vancouver Whitecaps in Portland. Again. The smoldering question turns on how many of those mistakes followed from Miller’s red card against the balance of them that happened all on their own.

Before getting to that, or to anything else really, I want any Timbers fan who finds this post to keep one thought firmly in mind: as much as this result stings, maybe even embarrasses, it does not matter. It doesn’t matter even a little. Portland still has 33 games left to play and they remain very much alive on the bare terms of competing for an indulgently generous allotment of playoff slots. As MLS fans learn every season, and appear to unlearn after each regular season starts, a team can eat absolute clown-shit for three, even four months and still redeem the season with a good run in the playoffs – see, United FC, Atlanta, just one season ago (even if their own fans don’t entirely feel it). So, throw in the fact that the Timbers couldn’t field its best-possible team, take a deep breath, take the L (/spectator-sports equivalent of an enema), get out those binoculars so that you can take the longest possible view of the overall situation…

…which isn’t the same thing as thinking the Timbers are destined to have a good season, never mind a great one.

Getting Reacquainted with the Vancouver Whitecaps, Cascadia's Afterthought

"I forgot I had to bring something."

Thumbnail History
To begin, the Vancouver Whitecaps have never had a great season. That’s a big thing to hold in the back of your mind anytime you see a pundit push them toward the hype train before or during any given season. Over 14 MLS seasons, the ‘Caps have not once advanced past the quarterfinals in the playoffs. On the one hand, yes, they reached the CONCACAF Champions’ League semifinals in 2017 – which took beating peak, if off-season Red Bull New York (e.g., the Red Bulls won the Shield again in 2018) – on the other hand…c’mon, who gave ‘em a snowball’s chance of beating Tigres UANL or Pachuca CF to win the whole thing? A gentler scale than mine might have rewarded them for four wild card appearances (2012, 2014, 2021, and 2024), but I call them “Joy Points” for a reason - i.e., stalling at the quarterfinals the two times you make them spells “s-u-c-c-e” at most, as opposed to “success.” It’s been a slog for them, basically, and yet Vancouver has had their players. Alphonso Davies, who unwittingly auditioned for Bayern Munich by playing for Vancouver, tops the list, of course (and, lord, was he a blast to watch), but that list gets pretty damn short from there. Despite all of the promising candidates that have auditioned for the No. 10 jersey (or its equivalent role) - Camilo Sanvezzo comes to mind, Ryan Gauld can’t be avoided, of course (also don’t think he actually wears No. 10) and, um…Davide Chiumiento? - the ‘Caps have struggled more than most MLS teams with landing “impact players,” particularly on the attacking side of the pitch. Lest they be accused of not trying, Vancouver has also gone with signing battering ram forwards to increase goal production - think Eric Hassli and Lucas Cavallini – but Hassli neither did much nor lasted very long, and Cavallini’s chief talent was pissing off opposition CBs. At any rate, none of it came all the way off (see below) and the length of that short list only underscores the 'Caps' ongoing failure to get enough things right. I could walk through the same issue in the defense, name some names, and so on…but, well, what’s the point? Long story (very) short, the Whitecaps have never managed to squeeze enough of good players onto the same roster, or to hire a coach who could squeeze that little something extra out of the players that they did have available. The end, if until they finally get that new beginning.

Total Joy Points: 0 (lifted to zero by Canadian Championships, fwiw)

The Timbers Take a Giant Shit in Providence Park, The End.

I generally don’t do emotion as a soccer fan, it’s just not how I experience the game. And yet…

On an experiential level, tonight’s 0-5 loss at Providence Park to a lately woeful Vancouver Whitecaps side had a helpless feeling to it. Suffocation feels like the best analogy, only with full awareness of how much longer it would last.

Also, losses generally roll off my back, but this duck is fucking soaked.

I like all of these players enough that I hated to see them humiliated, but I say that knowing full well that something about this team has to change.

David Ayala showed up tonight. I think a couple of the attacking players might have, but I’m not sure how one would tell given how rarely they got on the ball. Oh, except Jonathan Rodriguez, a player seemingly obsessed with getting on the ball where he could do absolutely nothing with it.

Weird, brutal fucking game.

The Timbers missed the playoffs in 2022 and 2023, but this? It was worse on every level.

Unless I somehow get caught up in the rest of the 2024 playoffs – maybe Miami cashes out early? – and feel like I have anything to say, the next post about the Timbers will be a post-mortem.

There’s nothing left to do, but accept things went wrong and figure out the best way to douse the flames and put a bow on the corpse. Till then.

Thoughts from the Meat in a Seattle and Vancouver Sandwich, aka, a Portland Timbers Review/Preview

The state of play, in blues legend form.

I think of the Portland Timbers 1-1 road draw at the Seattle Sounders in terms of finding the proper balance between love and hate. Some markers are obvious – e.g., they gave up the inevitable soft goal (this one came with a pillow-top); against that they got a bold, dare I say spicy, goal from a source (Antony) that wasn’t the big three (Evander, Felipe Mora, and Jonathan Rodriguez).

All kinds of things fall into the space between those two poles, including the way Seattle took all the game the Timbers gave them (a lot), all the shots that resulted therefrom (could have been 1-2, even 1-4 against Portland), but for Portland’s James Pantemis rising to every occasion save the one. Moreover, the draw extended the Timbers’ lease in Seattle’s collective heads. The latter might not matter at all in the big picture, but it is really, really funny in the smaller one.

The rest of this post comes in two parts, the first looking back to the Saturday’s _______ game (still working on the adjective that fits it best), the second looking ahead to Wednesday’s big, big play-in against the Vancouver Whitecaps. Courtesy of motorsports, the lingering effects of Major League Soccer’s second-tier status in the North American landscape, the Timbers get to host that one despite the ninth-place seed. I think every Timbers fan knows that by now, but the thought still brightens my face with a mirthful smile two days later.

Sorry for the delay on this going up to anyone who noticed, but I had a family reunion this weekend and it was welcome and very nice.

The Rope-a-Dope That Ropes the Dope Every Time
I’ll start by reading some more old news into the record: Portland drawing Seattle – again, this is in Seattle – resulted in the Sounders dropping to fourth place (which puts them into a playoff series against Houston Dynamo FC…but is that actually better than facing Minnesota United FC?), missing an automatic berth in to the CONACAF Champions’ League, handing the Cascadia Cup to the Timbers in their own house, and losing Obed Vargas for the first game of their three-game series against Houston. Honestly, I don’t know how Timbers fans continue to breathe through all the laughter...

A Scouting Report & a Tease

Even your mom thinks I'm cool.

It’s not often that one gets to scout both teams that yer local team will play in the play-in they are doomed to play. And yet that’s exactly what happened when the Vancouver Whitecaps hosted Minnesota United FC and let them steal dinner with a 0-1 loss.

Most of the notes below point to Vancouver more than the Loons and, yes, that’s me hedging toward the ‘Caps as the Portland Timbers’ likeliest opposition for the play-in. Hot take. Yeah. At any rate, watching…about 75 minutes of this game dredged up thoughts and memories about both teams, and I’m going to lace those the post below. To be clear, I am familiar with both teams, as well as most of the players that line up for them, but I won’t pretend to I know either of them.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t done obsessive (unhinged) stuff all season to help me keep tabs on every team in Major League Soccer. No, you're the weirdo with the Word doc you created to track the progress of all 29 teams in the league because the Form Guide (hallelujah!) fell short of truly connecting you to the data. Not me, not this winner. That said, if I was that guy, I might have something like this just lying around.

Minnesota United FC
Record/Stats: 14-12-7, 49 pts., 54 gf, 48 ga (+6); home 6-6-4, away 8-6-3; 7th in West; 12th overall
Last 10 Results: LWLWWLWWTW
Venue:                HHHAAHAHAA (again, not laughing; H = home, A = away)
Decision Day Oppo: v STL

Vancouver Whitecaps
Record/Stats: 13-11-8, 47 pts., 50 gf, 45 ga (+5), home 6-6-4, away 7-5-4, 8th West, 14th overall
Last 10 Results:   WLWTWTLTLL
Venue:                  HHAHHAAHHH
Final Games: v LAFC, @ RSL

I’ll reference that below, but let’s start with:

Vancouver Whitecaps 1-1 Portland Timbers: I Accept This Result, I Love This Result

This can't be anything but disorienting.

The Portland Timbers rolled out of Vancouver with a point after last night’s 1-1 draw at BC Place. Based on a quick little spin around the Timbers subreddit, I liked this result more than others, maybe even more than I should. I’ll defend that choice between now and the end, but first…

The Very Basics
The Vancouver Whitecaps went up 1-0 with the opening whistle still echoing around the stadium (c’mon, roll with it). If the Timbers had hoped to ease their way into the game, the shock of Brian White’s ever-so-early (and unnervingly easy) goal hit them like a bucket of ice water waking them from sleep. The shock of it carried over the opening 15-20 minutes of the game: no Portland player seemed to know where he should be and where he should go from there. The “shock” metaphor seems especially apt because once the Timbers woke all the way up, they took hold of the game and, but for one “this fucking game” moment (Andres Cubas pinging Maxime Crepeau’s left post in second half stoppage), they never let go of it. Portland’s confidence grew side-by-side with the quality of their chance creation – i.e., Antony’s solo-run/desperate flail from the right to Juan David Mosquera firing from a seam up the middle to Santiago Moreno forcing Yohei Takaoka to save off a freekick - until Rodriguez crowned the recovery on his second bite of the apple with a deflected equalizer (his first bite was offside, sadly). The second half was all Timbers (the official stats can go to Hell), with Portland turning 50/50s into 70/30s all over the field and cutting off 90% of the paths out of Vancouver’s half. Had Takaoka’s left post not kept out Felipe Mora’s picture-perfect header, I’d bet my left leg (the bad one, fwiw) that the Timbers would be in 7th this morning.

What’s to Love
To anyone feeling blue about two points (arguably) slipping away, I’d respond with this: which team do you think feels better about not just last night’s result, but last night’s game? Sure, Vancouver punched their ticket to the post-season, but would you rather be the team ruing a slow start and 20 wasted minutes or the team trying to figure out 60+ minutes of getting played off your own pitch – and with three more crucial home games to go? The larger context only makes it worse for the 'Caps: the Timbers have defeated playoff-competitive teams since the Leagues Cup break, while the ‘Caps haven’t beat one since early July (Minnesota, on the road), or even June (Colorado, at home; Minnesota was flailing under the playoff line when the ‘Caps beat them in July). Even if you lean into the argument that Portland can only win at home, last night’s draw with the wild road draw at RSL behind it shows the Timbers getting results that, by the grace of penalty kicks, can become playoff wins. Finally, Portland has the comfort of knowing how they measure up against playoff-bound teams: both Portland and Vancouver have gone 4-3-3 over their past ten games, but the Timbers have played seven playoff-bound teams versus just four for Vancouver. That script will flip over the next two games for Portland and the next three for Vancouver – the Timbers play Austin then Dallas, while Vancouver hosts Seattle, Minnesota and LAFC – and that makes the two points separating them look at little smaller. And yet, neither team had all hands on deck…

MLS Round-Up: A Saucy Reset

This one’s going to be a blunt instrument a series of statements, a fair amount of it without showing most of my math. Suffice to say I had wee epiphany about why I bang on into the wee, foggy hours...

With the end of the season on the horizon, I wanted to post a read on the state of play since the…let’s call it gently(?) deceptive Leagues Cup wrapped up. Some of this follows from a personal failure to fully appreciate just how close we’ve come to the regular season – eight games left on the outside, and that’s only for four teams (Columbus, New England, LAFC, and Vancouver). It’s just six (nine teams, I think) to seven (16 teams?) for everyone else, which means shit got real two to three games ago depending.

Below, I lump all 29 teams into the following five categories, defined briefly below to make sure you catch my drift:

Contenders
The teams that look like they have a reasonable shot at reaching MLS Cup, whether by form (East) or conference (still East, but mostly West; more below).

Playoff Team, Dark Horses
The teams that, if they fix this issue or that one, have some hope of knocking off one of the contenders and reaching MLS Cup. That said, the relevant issue makes it pretty damn unlikely they will not. [NOTE: The relevant issue is not brought up much, or at all, below. Feel free to check out!]

Playoff Team, Plausible +1
Teams with a respectable chance, maybe even a decent one, of winning a game in the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to you by Audi (probably?), but I wouldn't expect much and/or shit from there.

Bubble Teams
Teams that, regardless of their present merit and future upsides, still has real shit to do if they want to reach the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to be Hello Fresh!

The Dead
Teams that I feel confident will fall short of the embarrassingly low bar that MLS has set for reaching the 2024 MLS Cup Playoffs, brought to you Les Schwab Tires.

Portland Timbers 1-0 Seattle Sounders: (Complicated) Glory! + League-Wide Shit!

Oh, I'm just getting warmed up....

I was out of town for the Portland Timbers checks-all-the-boxes 1-0 win over a (punch-drunk) visiting Seattle Sounders team, but tracked the game from afar on the socials (i.e., reddit and Bluesky). People bitching about the broadcast team (Taylor Twellman and Jake Zivin, I think) popped up here and there and…I just don’t get how anyone can’t screen out the chatter, never mind get caught up in the relative amount of praise they heap on one team or the other. In my experience, color commentary follows the “broken clock” rule, with some hacks hitting the mark more often the others.

Why start there? Perhaps because some thoughts and arguments floated below may fall short of expectations for proper fandom. Let that come as it does, I’m squeezed a lot into this one post. Because it has surely been kicked around both hard and long enough, I won’t burn too many words on last Saturday’s game – which, to be 100% clear, was pretty damn awesome and nifty…it just needs an asterisk, maybe two.

The (Righteous!) Big Picture
Apart from giving up what (giving the Timbers’ history) felt like two games worth of corner kicks in the first half alone, I don’t recall a time when Seattle looked to have the upper hand last Saturday. Even if Portland’s chances weren’t all gilt-edged, the thought process behind them shone through; half the time, they failed due to some combination of a runner being half a step ahead or behind or the angle on the pass 10-degrees off. With key starters like Felipe Mora and Jonathan Rodriguez absent courtesy of varying amounts of bullshit (now half-corrected!), that shouldn’t surprise anyone. With the chance creation that little bit off, the happy deflection that transfigured Juan David Mosquera’s goal into a thing of beauty felt right at home. As for the play that led to it, what was that but vintage Timbers soccer?

The brighter notes played on the defensive side of the ball, and mostly through Timbers defenders throwing themselves in front of the best chances Seattle created. Dario Zuparic stood out there, with his block on Seattle’s not-yet budding star Pedro de la Vega as a stand-out moment (if it's not in here somewhere...crime). Kamal Miller got caught behind the ball now and again, and both fullbacks got burned 1-v-1 more often than any Timbers fan wants to see (Mosquera, in particular), but all concerned recovered well enough and generally played for one another. Now, about all that…

MLS Week 23 Snapshot: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes Where They Largely Don't Matter + Up From the Depths!

Best sidekick eva! Woo-woo!

Just like that, I’m on a roll. League-wide posts two weeks in a row. Woo-woo!

The preamble for this series/concept went up in last week’s post, so I’m going to just refer anyone who wants to know the “why” of this post back to that one. To give the short version, these aren’t detailed posts for two related reasons:

1) the details generally don’t matter; unless…

2) they either rhyme with or emphasize trends that have been going on for a while.

That doesn’t mean I’ll never flag details – i.e., three of the talking points below are only in here because I spent more time on a result that tickled my fancy – but these posts will mostly traffic in trends. Fans of deep cuts can always mosey over to Matt Doyle’s weekly columns (which I only skimmed this week; on a schedule), or lose as many hours as they’re willing to burn in the distinctly non-local MLS Season Pass archives, but it should take more than some random dude scoring a banger (e.g., Cristian Dajome, for a still-woeful DC United team) to make this short-list…which, for the record, is still longer than the specs said it would be. Dammit.

With that in mind, let’s dig into the notes for MLS Week 23 (again, yes, this is Week 23, look at the current standings (effective for reference only through Wednesday morning, July 17, which a bunch of games get played). Here are 10 Things That Happened on or Before MLS Week 23:

1) Nothing Happened to the Supporters’ Shield Race, Ignore MLS Content
I don’t have a sense of the overlap between the people who find this tiny corner of the internet and who subscribe to the MLS Kickoff newsletter, but Monday’s edition dug into race to the Supporters’ Shield – specifically, all the league-topping teams that lost games last weekend. The list includes, FC Cincinnati (waylaid by Charlotte FC! (see below)), Real Salt Lake (drummed out of Providence Park (see below)), the Los Angeles Galaxy (who couldn’t get going at FC Dallas (see below)), and, in the one game that actually felt like it mattered, Los Angeles FC, who got all but drawn-and-quartered against Columbus Crew SC in LA. Here’s the thing: that didn’t change anything about the relative position of any of those teams. Not one of them. Did a couple distant rivals gain ground on all of those teams? Sure, but only one team looks like it has a real shot at catching up with the pack…hold on...

The Ten Most Interesting Things That Happened in, on, or Before MLS Week 21* (Really. I Did the Math.)

To kick this off with some programming notes:

1) Any and all preview posts I write will go up on reddit from this day forward. It’s the only way I can think to a) rein in the length, and b) keep myself from getting too far over my skis.

2) Portland Timbers match reports will continue go up in this space until a) the heat-death of the sun, b) my own death, c) I move those over to reddit with an eye to reining in their length and keeping myself from getting too far over my skis, or d) I lose interest and close this blog for the 10th(?) time.

3) I have spent literal years figuring out how to both minimize and maximize my soccer/MLS-watching time – which, unless you either get paid to do it or have absolutely nothing else you want to do, truly is an economic exercise.

Up next, a new concept and/or gimmick, depending how you look at it.

Pursuant to Article No. 3 of the preamble, any random fan with a job, a wife, two kids, a cat and a dog (fine, two cats, no dogs; also, one of my all-time favorite movies!), and another hobby can know only so much about the triumphs, sorrows and general goings-on of the 29 teams currently competing in Major League Soccer. With that in mind…and I think I’m still on the preamble…

This post officially launches the [Number] Most Interesting Things That Happened in, on, or Before MLS Week [Number]. Over the first…currently going with 10 weeks of the regular season, it will be Five Things, Week 10-30 (or 25; we'll see) will be Ten things, and Week 30-34 will go back down to Five Things – unless circumstances force me to keep that number higher, which, honestly, I don’t believe they will.

Portland Timbers 2-0 Vancouver Whitecaps: Is This Progress?

Glad to be back home.

Five wins in the last eight games, suddenly 6th in the West sure as Brooke Shields was Suddenly Susan in a sitcom I neither watched nor fully understood in terms of concept and timing. The Portland Timbers won walking away (also) 2-0 against the Vancouver Whitecaps tonight, thereby keeping their Cascadia Cup Dreams primed for the filling and suddenly looking like they’ve learned how to put one foot in front of the other (hold that thought). Better still, JPants picked up his/the Portland Timbers' 3rd clean sheet of 2024 – which makes one wonder (hold that thought, also) – and, better than all that, the entire game played out comfy as a well-worn pair of PJs.

Hold on…

Is it new format time? Yes, it’s new format time. Also, welcome back to the old gym. Hope it smells like memories! Right, back to the new format…

If I Had to Summarize This Game for Someone
Tonight’s game started as so many have: with the Timbers laboring to play the ball out of the back and ceding both possession and control. Vancouver’s Sebastian Berhalter teed up a few solid chances over the opening 20 minutes or so and that inject a little “what could have been” into this game if, say, Fafa Picault or Alessandro Schopf (probably?) could head the ball fer shit. The Timbers snatched after floor scrapings throughout that period, with the choicest pickings coming from Jonathan Rodriguez poking a couple (feeble) shots toward goal from the back-post.

Then suddenly, some light supernatural meddling met the yips for Vancouver and, three lucky bounces and one cool finish later, Portland went up on a cool-as-you-like finish by Rodriguez. And that goal changed the game, at least in my mind. Twenty-six-plus minutes would pass before Schopf got sent off for his second stupid yellow card (gotta be in here somewhere, surely), but Vancouver was, at most, marginally better before his red card than they were after it. Felipe Mora delivered an insurance goal that made me feel as good about the assist as I did about the goal (another thought to hold), but the ‘Caps had 52+ minutes to rack up some shots and they only managed seven, with just one on goal. Vancouver barely showed up tonight, carrying forward a run of form that has seen them slip down the standings like a water buffalo struggling in quicksand.