The confetti has barely been swept up at the StubHub Center from LA Galaxy’s MLS Cup win, and Landon Donovan has only just left the building, but already teams are looking to rebuild for the 2015 season.
Monday saw the half-day trade window, allowing teams to shuffle their packs in preparation for Wednesday’s expansion draft. Orlando City in particular began the expansion process early, as they made significant moves for some familiar names. Sporting KC, who’d found themselves hard up against the salary cap at the end of the year, had to let at least one iconic player go.
That player was Aurelien Collin, and he was just one of a handful of veteran defenders on the move from their teams. Collin, the MVP for Sporting in last year’s MLS Cup and an All-Star player, went to Orlando for undisclosed allocation money and even more undisclosed “future considerations”.
Elsewhere Portland Timbers made their latest attempt to solve their ongoing centre-back problem by signing some proven quality in RSL’s Nat Borchers – Borchers and his beard should fit in well alongside Timber Joey et al. The Timbers also sent Michael Harrington to Colorado.
Collin is joined in Florida by Houston Dynamo goalkeeper Tally Hall and Philadelphia midfielder Amobi Okugo, while Orlando also traded international roster slots for allocation money from DC United, who’ve been rebuilding along homegrown lines under Ben Olsen. Indeed, DC also traded international slots to New York City FC, who otherwise had a quieter few hours than their expansion brethren – though they did bring in defender Josh Williams from Columbus Crew.
The Crew sent Bernardo Anor to Sporting KC, a team that missed some midfield quality down the stretch. After losing Collin and gaining Anor, Sporting weren’t done for the day however. Jim Currin got some of the speed up front that he’d promised to Philadelphia fans, if in slightly raw form, with the acquisition of CJ Sapong.
Houston, an organization facing a new, tougher conference in the West, and an uncertain direction on the field after the departure of long-time coach Dominic Kinnear for San Jose, did bring in a pair of players from DC United. With Hall gone, goalkeeper Joe Willis gets to step out from behind Bill Hamid and stake his claim as a starter, while defender Samuel Inkoom will join him at the BBVA Compass Stadium next year. Midfielder Andrew Driver goes the other way to complete the round of movers on the day.
Who did best out of the day?
Orlando were undoubtedly the big movers, adding to the spine of their team. Collin has been part of one of the best defenses in the league, even if injuries meant that we didn’t see him or his cohorts at their best last year. Hall too is a very solid MLS goalkeeper.
Sporting are at the start of a period of flux and undoubtedly lost more than they gained on the day, while Real Salt Lake too may finally be due the overhaul many anticipated when Jason Kreis left after last year’s MLS Cup. After a great start under Jeff Cassar, Real lost some momentum at the back end of the year, and the chastening playoff loss to LA will have prompted some deep thinking this offseason at Rio Tinto Stadium.
Portland, in taking Borchers from RSL, look to have made a solid acquisition to address the area of the field that has been their achilles heel under Caleb Porter. The veteran Borchers is a leader on the field and an imposing physical presence. Portland should be glad to have landed him, while RSL have removed another brick from the house that Kreis and GM Garth Lagerwey built.
What are all these drafts?
It’s MLS – get used to it. The forced parity that’s at the heart of the league’s single-entity structure means that there’s a continuous series of somewhat inelegant checks and balances for team managers to negotiate, and the drafts are part of that.
This Wednesday will see the expansion draft, when teams will ring fence 11 of their players from the predatory gazes of new kids New York City FC and Orlando City, while leaving the rest outside the door with a hastily handwritten “Still works” sign taped to them, and a cunning beard disguise on the one or two they’d really like to keep.
That little round of cherry-picking will also signal the start of the trade window being fully open, though MLS wouldn’t be MLS if there weren’t a whole host of other drafts, such as the waiver draft (also Wednesday) for players whose clubs have waived their options, the Re-entry Draft (in two exciting phases – this Friday, then 18 December) for veteran players to move between teams with, supposedly, a degree of protection in the process, and of course the SuperDraft on 15 January, when a bunch of college hopefuls and a bunch of acrylic scarves meet up for an excitingly awkward photo opportunity.
Of course there’s a further wrinkle in that the 2010 collective bargaining agreement expires this off-season and is due for renegotiation. The re-entry draft was a product of the last CBA negotiations as a mechanism intended to give veteran players a degree of protection for movement within the league, though it fully satisfied neither the players nor management and may be up for review. Add in likely changes to the salary cap, and all the current set of movements might seem like so much phony war activity when teams find out exactly what they’re working with.
Again, if 2010 is anything to go by, and if the league and players union engage in any degree of brinksmanship, an agreement could come very close to the start of the season. And with two new teams, conference realignments (Sporting KC and Houston Dynamo are back in the Western Conference from 2015) and the general uncertainty of it all, plus the fact that MLS rosters tend to be on something of a carousel even in nominally quieter off-seasons, your favorite team could look very different in just a few weeks’ time.
