The Timbers Advance: An Open Cup Victory Sprinkled with Sweet, Sweet Humiliation!

Wait! Right, left, down, A...STOP IT! What's the move?!

First of all, wow, is this going to throw a handful of ground chiles all over the next Cascadia match. The Seattle Sounders turned in a meltdown worthy of toddlers, I tell you. Clint, you've added to your legend, buddy. Congrats! Back to the regularly scheduled post...

If you've ever played Mortal Kombat, and if you're as terrible at it as I am, you know what it's like to master one even mildly effective attack. Say, it's a jab, something you can work against an opponent due to a fluke of timing, so you use it to shave off a narrow band of health at a time. This only gives you the illusion of winning. If the guy you're playing has mastered his avatar’s "killer move," you can land all the jabs you like, but your opponent has still lost only two thirds of her bar, and she'll lay your ass OUT after just two attacks. And if you're not on the floor with your entrails sprawled to the sky after that, your sad little spandexed man is swooning on his feet to set up the same humiliation.

That's the rough experience of playing against this edition of the Seattle Sounders: no matter how badly they've played all 90 long, the Sounders have the talent to score at absolutely any moment and steal the game. Turns out the tale unfolds a little differently when you push Seattle to the 120th, when, again, they melt down, get three players sent off, and just generally act entitled. And so your club wins, 3-1. Can't we game-plan this for next time?

Anyway, great, deeply satisfying win for the Portland Timbers – and I absolutely look forward to the hair-rending amongst Sounders fans (even if I'm not likely to see it), because, yes, two of those cards were harsh. One wasn't (e.g. the two yellows to Brad Evans), not that they'll either care or remember, and Sigi Schmid's game management followed roughly the same script that Caleb Porter might have followed if he was a complete idiot and left Diego Valeri in to the end of the game. But he wasn't, so Portland didn't...and now Portland is in, Seattle's is out, etc.

Then again, wins in a Cup tournament come in isolation by their very nature: they’re not part of the season overall, naturally, which means patterns from that regular season matter a lot tonight, while, at the same time, they don't matter at all. I'll attempt to draw a line between league play and Cup play below, but it won't last long. And there will be bleeding.

The Elusive 15+ Goal Season: Why the Portland Timbers Are All Right

It'll totally make sense by the end...but only then.

If you asked me cold the number of goals a Major League Soccer forward needs to score in order to rate as "quality," I'd say 15 in a season. I've even thought of 20 goals as a reasonable haul for a real quality forward. True story...

Who knew I was the angry, disappointed father type (that I always feared I would be), because that figure doesn't hold up. First of all, a goal every other game is a great strike-rate in any league in the world; that's 17 goals a season in MLS. It's even further off in the context of MLS as a league. 15+ goal seasons are rare in America's top flight. How rare? Since 2010 (according to a...loosely statistical analysis (inviting peer review, people), an MLS forward has scored 15 or more goals in a single season just 21 times. And two players – the Los Angeles Galaxy's Robbie Keane and, of course, the San Jose Earthquake's Chris Wondolowski – account for a combined total of six of those twenty-one 15+ goal seasons. As for those 15 other occasions, call them wonderful exceptions to a rather stingy rule.

How many 20+ goal seasons have there been since 2010? Just five. And those are as follows (alphabetically by team, accidentally, because that’s how the data lays out):

Marco Di Vaio, Montreal Impact, 2013 (20 goals)
Bradley Wright-Phillips, New York Red Bulls, 2014 (27 goals)
Chris Wondolowski, San Jose Earthquakes, 2012 (27 goals)
Dom Dwyer, Sporting Kansas City, 2014 (22 goals)
Camilo Sanvezzo, Vancouver Whitecaps, 2013 (22 goals)

For the curious, I listed all the 15+ goal seasons below, by player, and after everything else. But, for the general purposes of this post, I counted a total of 72 times when an MLS forward(-ish*) scored more than 10 goals in a single season. According to my stroll through the stats page every friggin' club in MLS (DC United's excepted, because it's a frickin' mess; and here's a sample of where I'm looking), since 2010, the raw percentage that any forward will score 10 goals or more in a season boils down to about 30% (29.6% by a precise count; 72 out of 243 "statistical events").

And, by implication, those same 21 15+ goal players came out of that same pool, which translates a whopping 8.6%. More qualifiers: I say *forward-ish because the word "forward" doesn't always cleanly define. For instance, I included players like Landon Donovan and Chris Pontius in the head-count; neither player is a forward, strictly speaking, but both are "forward enough." This will bite me on the ass as soon as the next paragraph...

A History of Portland Timbers' Forwards, MLS Era

Open minded. Just want goals....

I coveteth a forward from another Major League Soccer club: Sporting Kansas City's Krisztian Nemeth. It started innocently enough, back in the pre-season, when he lit up a club or two in one of the ever-proliferating preseason tournaments. (sorry, no links; KC runs one of MLS’s limited website templates.) Coveting ripened to lust (bosom now heaving) when he put his foot up Chris Hedges' ass in KC's recent rout over FC Dallas (just, FYI, I'm down with master/slave stuff) and so his reputation grew, at least in my eyes. I dream of him winning the Golden Boot, MLS MVP, and possibly MLS Defender of the Year the way a pre-teen girl imagines Zayn Malik strolling into her bedroom. I mean, look at that sick little spin against Hedges (start watching at about 1:30 here). Totes dreamy!

Let's pause there, because I looked up Nemeth's numbers yesterday. They're solid, certainly, and they don’t capture the full scope of Nemeth’s contribution (he passes well, combines a little better, and, to borrow an Armchair Analyst favorite, he's developing reasonable gravity). That said, his level, at least in terms of raw numbers, should translate pretty readily for Portland Timbers fans: Nemeth is exactly one assist better than the oft-slagged Fanendo Adi. Both players have 6 goals; Nemeth just has two assists to Adi's one.

I lead this post on the Portland Timbers'....troubled? Allegedly troubled? Imperfect? A couple steps on the wrong side of paradise? At any rate, I entered into this exploration of the Timbers' history of signing forwards on the premise that none of them really panned out for Portland. But I lead with that note on Nemeth to acknowledge that perception, greed (for goals), and envy play some role in all this. (Also, just real quick: I had hoped to include some data from the USL/A-League days, but those are buried deeper in the internet than I'm willing to dig, at least while I’m on a self-imposed deadline. The only forward from those days who I remember by name is Fadi Afash. He was impressive, too, scoring 27 goals in 53 games for the USL Timbers...he, uh, also embezzled $138,000 from an elderly couple, which puts him squarely in the Timbers All-Time XI for non-violent criminals; um, back to regularly scheduled programming).

MLS Week 14 Rankings: Creating v. Getting, MLS's Mason-Dixon Line

At one point, there was definitely a right side of this one.

(Man, I really have to work on titling my posts sometime before the last minute.)

Going with very little preamble this week, and rankings. Just...rankings. And some comments before and within. I'll post other content elsewhere. Soon. At any rate, here are the games I watched in full during Week 14:

Portland Timbers v. New England Revolution
DC United v. Toronto FC
Sporting Kansas City v. Seattle Sounders

I was in Seattle for Week 13, where I endured Seattle's win over the New York Red Bulls. All I'll say about that is, thank god for good company.

Before assigning a number to each MLS club, a couple things occurred to me over the past couple weeks. First, good teams create chances while mediocre and/or bad times get chances. Yeah, that's a pretty banal observation, but it strikes me more and more as this season progresses. It's the difference between this this (good) and this (lucky, even when a team makes some of the luck) – especially in open play. A great cliché of the game is that all goals count. Like most cliches, that's true and trivial all at once. Chance creation speaks to replicability – i.e., the capacity to do it consciously and with some form of intent, instead of relying on lucky bounces and a defender falling on his ass.

Second, and more significantly, I had hoped to wax excited about some long-awaited separation opening up between the top clubs and the bottom clubs, but Weeks 13/14 put the kibosh on all that. Sadly, only a select few MLS couple clubs appear primed for excellence. With too many of the rest, it's once-good teams slipping (e.g. FC Dallas, Columbus Crew, New York Red Bulls), as a selection of the previously dire outfits rise (e.g. Montreal Impact, Toronto FC...paging Ottawa; sensing a pattern here). The really crazy thing: that the New York Red Bulls can lose three straight and stay on the right side of the Velvet Rope (stupid playoff format). More to the point, how the hell do just 12 points separate acknowledged no-hopers like the Colorado Rapids from league darlings like the Seattle Sounders?

OK, onto the rankings! Again, the first number in parentheses is the number of times I've watched a full game for each MLS club, while the second numbers show the previous week's ranking for that club – or, in this case, where I ranked that club for Week 12. This week’s sub-text: Right, on with it:

Timbers Top New England: The Wonderful Efficiency of the Counter-Revolution

Yes, that is absolutely as fun as it looks.

A couple things escaped my attention while watching the Portland Timbers' late (late) 2-0 win over the New England Revolution. Holy yellow cards, for one. That ref really seemed to get a kick of pulling stuff out of his pocket.

One thing that couldn't be missed, however, was how well Portland pinned New England into the wrong end of a shooting gallery. I can't check the box scores yet (still games to watch; still results to parse), but I'd be shocked if Portland managed more shots on goal in any game this season as they put up against the Revs. The reputations of the club reversed a little, in fact, with the Timbers playing the short, quick, slick stuff on which New England built their little near-empire over the past couple seasons.

There's not much to say about New England, really, who got something close to over-run last night. The worst thing one could say is that they lost all of Adi on Portland's opening goal. They had a couple chances, of course, and Adam Kwarasey bobbled a couple of them (but on a night, and in the context of looking better every game), but the Timbers crashed into them one wave after the other. Something about harnessing the Power of the Pacific. Which, as everyone knows, is the superior ocean.

And there it is: Portland's first three-game winning streak in their short life in Major League Soccer. It's a bit of a shame, really, that the Timbers have next week(end) off, because thar be wind in the sails and a fair wind it is (Arrr, me mateys!) And there's a little irony in this because before this streak started, most Timbers fans would have killed for this week off with any eye to buying time to get Diego Valeri back on field. And that’s a good place to start into the talking points.

The Revolution Comes to Portland: A Preview (+ More MLS Week 14!)

Like New England, only with WAY better kits.

(Editor's NOTE: The rush of a week’s worth of new sights and sounds meant I never made time to circle back to the Portland Timbers' win over the Colorado Rapids. (Bad amateur pundit!!) As such, that will inform the preview below as...context, I guess? And only in the first paragraph.)

For those who haven't heard, this weekend's game against the New England Revolution affords the Timbers the opportunity to do something they've failed to do since ascending into the Major League Soccer orbit – i.e. win three games in a row. One would think that, surely, Portland managed this during the annus mirabilis that was 2013, but apparently not. It’s not inconceivable that trip-‘n’-sputter run goes all the way back to the Timbers USL days…not a ton of hot streaks come to mind (but, yes, in 2009; holy...they even managed a five-game streak!).

Will the visiting Revolution squad play a sufficiently pliable (Homecoming) victim? Tough to say. As I think everyone knows by now, neither Jermaine Jones nor Juan Agudelo will suit up for New England on Saturday (injury and international absence, respectively). Such details sweeten Portland's prospects a little given the Revolution's recent run of form. Let's just say that games 4-9 (5-0-1) treated New England a hell of a lot better than games 10-14 (0-1-4). Game-day opposition might have played a role - the clubs beat in their earlier, glory run (e.g. Colorado, the Philadelphia Union (at their worst), and Real Salt Lake) are on the opposite side of the standings from the clubs they faced in later, leaner games (e.g. DC United, Sporting Kansas City, and the Los Angeles Galaxy) – but there's something neither here nor there, and both here and there, about New England in 2015.

To clarify that last mess with clean numbers, the Revolution scores like Seattle, but defends like New York City FC (well...that's among others with the latter, honestly, but most clubs who come near their 18 goals-against aren't doing so hot).

Excited as I am about this one (and I get to go to (half-)watch it live!), this game, along with several others, let Week 14 shape up pretty nicely. I'll do little bullet/point-of-interest previews for those games after previewing the main event: Portland Timbers v. New England Revolution. Let's go with...five talking points this time.

In Which the Timbers and Sounders Go Head-to-Head in Game-Day Experience

It's enough that they thought this looked good EVER.

Someone actually noticed that I never posted a review of the Portland Timbers death-bed win over the Colorado Rapids (which somehow convinced me that my funeral might not be a total bust). I didn't post because I was out of town this past weekend, in Seattle, actually, for a Sports Weekend. That said, thoughts on Colorado v. Portland will sneak into something going up mid-week...not that anyone’s holding his/her breath...

To get back to Sports Weekend, the Seattle Mariners lost the weekend's first game – which I didn't like – while the Seattle Sounders won the weekend's second game – which I also didn't like. So, close the New York Red Bulls. So close...

During the Sounders game, I spent most of the time comparing/contrasting what I saw, heard, and smelled at the Sounders' CenturyLink Park with what I see, hear, and smell at multiple Timbers' games at Providence Park. Out loud, often as not, and for an audience that started wondering by, oh, the 12th comparison why the Hell I insisted on answering a question no one was asking. Turns out I speak "eye-roll" (Pro-tip: the fifth eye roll warns of impending violence.)

Since I can no longer bombard them with my opinions - they're in their respective cities, while I'm in mine - thank god I've got Conifers 'n' Citrus! Welcome, few readers, to one fan's analysis of the Cascadia battle forever percolating under the surface: Seattle Sounders' Game-Day v. The Portland Timbers' Game-Day. Below, I pit one fan-base/club/stadium against the other across five categories; may the best club win. And, of course, my thumb belongs on one side of the goddamn scale. Stop asking questions....