Backpass: 2022 Player Reviews, Central Midfielders
Some say the Rapids were lacking at striker or creative midfielder, but in 2022, central midfield was a real problem area, too.
We’ve done the defensive midfielders. We’ve done the centerbacks. We’ve done the fullbacks. Now on to the midfielders in this insane labor of love that is position-by-position player reviews, which I shall note is the easiest and least armchair-general-manager way to say to folks whether I think we need a fresh start at a position.
I don’t think I mentioned this in earlier articles, but for positional definition, we’re going with how American Soccer Analysis has categorized players. They have their reasons. Those guys are really smart. And therefore, I trust that it all makes sense.
But additionally, in a cold, unfeeling, chaotic world defined by mans inhumanity to man and our slow and inevitable march towards final mortality, calling a player a ‘central midfielder’ instead of an ‘attacking midfielder’ because some guy at Opta clicked a certain checkbox on a certain day isn’t really all that important. And also, this isn’t reddit/mls or the comments section at Burgundy Wave. If you think ASA has mis-categorized a player, well, bully for you.
The Rapids had their problems in 2022. And while I think they are/were pretty solid at central midfield, both math and the league table indicate that perhaps this spot on the field let them down last year.
One last note that underscores the flux in the midfield: none of these players broke 2000 minutes in 2022, due to injury, or trade, or simply being a role player. Colorado in 2023 will simply need, above all things, a midfielder who can go 75+ minutes for 25 games or more, because none of these guys did that.
Mark-Anthony Kaye
1393 minutes, 3 goals, 1 assist
Best Match - April 30 in a 2-0 win over Portland Timbers. 1 Goal, 3 Key Passes, 0.2 Expected Assists, 2 Tackles, 1 Interception, 2 Blocks, and a FotMob season-high rating of 8.8/10. He had 3 shots - one the keeper parried away, the other at 37’ hit the underside of the crossbar and bounced away, and the third shot was a great curled finish for a goal at 90+4 that sealed the game. A very complete performance.
Worst Match - May 7 in 1-0 loss to San Jose. 23/34 passing, a season-low 1 Progressive Pass, 4 Shots, no goals for Kaye. Whoever thought a midfield three of Colen Warner, Bryan Acosta and Mark-Anthony Kaye was a good idea was hiiiiigh on something. He did have 4 Tackles though.
ASA Goals Added Stats:
Dribbing G+: -0.18 Fouling G+: +0.06 Interrupting G+: +0.30
Passing G+: +0.12 Receiving G+: -0.41 Shooting G+: +0.09
Total Goals Added: - 0.09 G+
fbref stats:
Mark-Anthony Kaye played in every match for the Rapids from the season opener until he was traded off to Toronto on July 8. At Week 13 Colorado had been in 9th place, but by the time Colorado shipped MAK to Canadia in Week 18, they had lost three of their next four matches and fallen to 12th, just three points out of the Western Conference basement. Considering the player the Rapids acquired for Kaye, Ralph Priso, only started 3 matches for the ‘Pids, this move was less ‘let’s shake things up for the stretch run!’ and more ‘we are abandoning ship on 2022.’ But we pundits and fans didn’t really know that at the time.
Partially, that’s because Mark-Anthony Kaye wasn’t a game changer for the team. When he joined the Rapids a year earlier, in mid-season 2021, Kaye paired with Jack Price and Kellyn Acosta to form a hard running, solid passing, defensively formidable midfield. But with Acosta traded away and Price injured for most of 2022, Kaye was re-cast as the veteran presence in the midfield meant to organize and stabilize. Maybe he did that, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was a good player surrounded by an underwhelming supporting cast. Maybe he was the underwhelming supporting cast.
The most important stats to look at are MAK’s Dribbling G+ and his Interrupting G+. Kaye’s +0.30 Interrupting G+ is great - it means he presses and harasses well for a midfielder. However, all ASA G+ numbers are calibrated based on how much they contribute to a goal. Offsetting his Interrupting G+ is a Dribbling G+ of -0.41, which is 44th out of 61 central midfielders in Major League Soccer in 2022.
To be fair, Kaye is pretty good at all the other things, although not elite at anything. I think paired with a healthy Jack Price and fronted by perhaps Diego Rubio as a creator, along a devastating striker, this could have been a recipe for a strong midfield in a 4-2-3-1 capable of contending in the playoffs. Instead, Colorado had no replacement for Price; they didn’t discover Rubio as a ‘10’ until the season was over (meaning: he never played in midfield with Kaye), and they didn’t get great production at striker.
Kaye’s very good at what he is - a reliable Swiss Army knife midfielder. But his team didn’t have a hatchet, a scalpel, or any of the other supporting utensils. And thus he’s now in Toronto, where owners MLSE are likely to spend this offseason and bring in talent that will make him look spectacular.
Grade: B
Jack Price
1211 min, 0 goals 1 assists
Best Match: April 16 vs Minnesota United. Jack had 8 Shot Creating Actions, 88.9 percent passing (72 for 81), and a bonkerballs 12 (!) Progressive Passes, which is the highest I’ve seen for a Rapids player this year. Fotmob rated this match a 7.7 for Jack.
Worst Match: Uh, the one where he cracked a rib and punctured a lung. That’s a ‘worst day’ for anyone.1
ASA Goals Added Stats:
Dribbing G+: -0.07 Fouling G+: -0.05 Interrupting G+: -0.35
Passing G+: +0.45 Receiving G+: -0.24 Shooting G+: -0.32
Total Goals Added: -0.59
fbref stats:
Price started the season as he usually does - hitting deep diagonals and set pieces into dangerous spots and chasing down attackers like an angry pitbull. He missed a pair of games late April/early May for a hamstring pull, returned, and was on the field as they scuffled for points throughout midseason, sitting in 10th in the Western Conference as of June 18.
Then he sustained a calf injury on June 20 that put him out 7 games. Jack returned in September, played three games, then suffered a cracked rib and punctured lung that would spell the end for his season. So the team captain, who had put up more than 2000 minutes in three of his four seasons in Colorado2 turned in just 1211 minutes in 2022.
It was his second-worst season in MLS, according to the advanced stats.
Jack’s passing was exceptional as ever, but his Interrupting G+ indicates he wasn’t tackling and intercepting to the degree that he was in prior seasons. I think one could conclude that he played hurt a bit, and it affected his ability to bomb around the pitch causing typical Jack Price-levels of mayhem. The coaching staff probably did the right thing in deciding ‘80 percent Jack Price is better than 100 percent Collen Warner’, but G+ don’t lie.
The other brutally unfair aspect of soccer is that Jack’s passing numbers were great, but the luck just wasn’t there.
In 2021, Price’s Passing G+ was +1.94 in 2762 minutes, produced an Expected Assists (xA) of 5.8, and resulted in 12 assists, second in all of MLS.
In 2022, Price’s Passing G+ was +0.45 in 1211 minutes, produced an an Expected Assists (xA) of 2.3, and resulted in just 1 assist. That’s unlucky.
In summation, a healthy Jack Price is a huge boost to the Rapids, and Colorado seemingly only had healthy Jack Price for maybe 10 or 12 games. He turns 30 years old on Christmas Day (Happy Birthday Captain!), and so we can expect minutes to decline and injuries to become more frequent in the future. The Colorado Rapids can still win a trophy with Jack Price on the field. But the window for that to take place is definitely shrinking.
Grade: NG (injury)
Max Alves
1038 min, 0 goals in MLS; 1 goal in CCL, 1 assist (MLS)
Best Match: Max scored a goal in first start for the Rapids. His 28th minute swish-and-flick3 tied the series against Comunicaciones in the second leg of the Concacaf Champions League on a freezing cold night in February.
Worst Match: Max played 81 minutes against RSL on July 9, but had just 34 touches. He was a pretty bad 15 for 23 on passing. And he had a shot from three feet out which Zac MacMath parried away. That shot had an outrageously high xG of 0.5. Yuck.
ASA Goals Added Stats:
Dribbing G+: -0.06 Fouling G+: -0.09 Interrupting G+: +0.32
Passing G+: +0.07 Receiving G+: -0.23 Shooting G+: +0.01
Total Goals Added: +0.02
fbref stats:
According to fbref, Max Alves played eight different positions in 2022: Left Wing, Right Wing, Left mid, Right mid, Central Midfielder, Defensive Midfielder, Attacking Midfielder, and Forward. He played 1 minute here, 9 minutes there, 52 minutes here, 90 minutes there. He was a forward harasser; a midfield connector; a dribbly box-attacker; a midfield line-cutter. The trained eye says he’s an attacking mid that likes to dribble at defenders and shot his shot. Fbrefs stats are filled with green bars indicating he’s a good passer and great at Clearances. ASA’s numbers say he’s a turnover machine that’s pretty average at everything except defending.
Honestly, what the hell does all of this mean? I have no idea.
Max was bought in January, 2022, from Flamengo in Brazilian Série A for a reported $750,000 plus $250,000 in incentives. Fans immediately assumed he was the game-changing number ten that they had been praying for since forever. In his second match ever, he scored. In his third match, against LAFC, he did absolutely nothing and was taken off after 53 minutes. Robin Fraser set him on the pine for a month, gave him a game, sat him down, gave him some minutes, sat him down, etcetera, etcetera. He just never impressed the coach enough to lock in a spot - even when Price got hurt. Even when Mark-Anthony Kaye was sold.
If you watch Max, you know that he’s best at dribbling at defenders. But his ASA Dribbling G+ is an unimpressive -0.06, and his Receiving G+ is a pretty bad -0.23.4 I’m savvy enough at melding the watching of soccer and the advanced stats on soccer to understand this and to let you in on a little secret: ASA metrics hate dribbly-little box-crashers like Max. They've done great players like Lucas Zelerayan and Alejandro Posuelo dirty, specifically because they punish players like that for losing the ball without sufficiently rewarding them for drawing defenders. Listen, G+ treats Lionel Messi pretty well even though he fits this description, but that's likely because Messi dishes that rock and scores insane goals while also dribbling at guys and causing mayhem. The mayhem causing? It doesn't get you the love.
That all said, Max needs to do more than dribble at guys and turn it over. His challenge is: with all that possession and dribbling, he should be producing a lot of xG and xA, and subsequently, a lot of goals and assists. He had a respectable 2.3 xG, but a fairly poor 1.1 xA in 2022. But to be honest, when I say ‘with all that possession and dribbling’, I’m not being totally forthright. He was lacking touches in a lot of games, struggling to find spots to receive. And once he received it, he wasn’t all that reliable in dishing it. His passing percentages were a little low 79.2 percent on the year.
And probably Max’s most damning problem? He didn’t score. After his CCL banger, Max had 23 shots for the Rapids - and he put just 6 on target. That’s 26.1 percent. Which is slightly better than Michael Barrios’ 23.9 percent, but also below Gyasi Zardes’ 30.4 percent and Diego Rubio’s 39.3 percent. And ‘on target’ is always misleading, because of course it treats a dribbler right into the maw of the keeper the same as a blistering shot into the upper 90. What we care about is goals. And Barrios, Zardes, and Rubio produced goals from their shots (2 goals, 9 goals, and 16 goals, respectively).
It was Max’s first year. He has time to grow and develop. He’s only 21. We have him for four years. It was probably foolish to expect he’d light the world on fire in year one. Maybe all that shuffling around - in the lineup, out of the lineup; left-right-middle; forward/central - hurt his ability to settle in. And if you look at his final four games of the season, he got 230 minutes, he had more touches, and he passed quite well - 40 for 43 and 31 for 34 against FC Dallas and Austin, with a total of 10 Progressive Passes. So he finished strong. All signs point to a better 2023?
Grade: C
Ralph Priso-Mbongue
For Colorado: 219 min, 0 goals, 0 assists
Overall in 2022: 468 min, 1 goal, 0 assists
Best Match: According to Fotmob and FBref, Priso had a pretty good game in the Rapids 6-0 destruction at the hands of Philadelphia on August 26, earning a 7.1/10 rating due to 5 interceptions, a season-high 42 touches, and having generated 0.5 Expected Assists (xA).
Worst Match: On July 16 Priso started and played 45 minutes against LA Galaxy, but had just 18 touches and 10 for 12 passing. He wasn’t bad - he just wasn’t that involved either.
ASA Goals Added Stats:
Dribbing G+: 0.01 Fouling G+: -0.02 Interrupting G+: -0.14
Passing G+: 0.03 Receiving G+: -0.09 Shooting G+: -0.06 Total Goals Added: -0.26
fbref stats:
Twenty-year-old Ralph Priso came over on on July 8 along with GAM and an international slot for Mark-Anthony Kaye, a veteran two-way midfielder who, at age 28, is likely to be in the beginning of the decline-phase of his career. Priso, I would assume, is a move to get a young guy on the come up. He didn’t appear much in 2022 for the Rapids, and what he had to offer was indeterminate. His passing, defending, and receiving according to both the raw numbers and G+ data indicates he wasn’t great, although the sample size is small enough that all of those statements could be chalked up as ‘still too early to tell.’ What isn’t too early to tell is that on a bad team that couldn’t make the playoffs and was clearly unimpressive in midfield, he couldn’t earn a starting spot down the stretch.
The Rapids have a lot of options for a starting three in midfield in 2023 - Jack Price, Cole Bassett, Max Alves, Priso, Bryan Acosta, Yaya Toure, Oliver Larraz, and likely one or two players that are acquired in the next six weeks. It’s a crowded field to try and stand out in. It is very unclear whether Priso is really in the mix for a starting job, or will essentially be remembered in Rapids history as ‘some guy.’5
Grade: NG
Colorado’s communications called this an ‘upper body injury’ for about a month, refusing to disclose details. Matt Pollard asked Jack right after he came back from injury and Jack disclosed it immediately. We’d reached the point where this level of opaque obfuscation by an MLS front office is ridiculous. MLS needs to require its teams to give more precise details about injuries to reporters, and in a timely manner.
Except the Covid-shortened 2020 year, when Jack played in 1300 of 1620 total minutes.
“Wingardium Leviosah!”
These numbers are not actually bad at first glance. But they are pretty terrible once you remember that these numbers are NOT normalized for 90 minutes, and therefore they’re based on just 1038 minutes. Now they look kinda terrible.
See ‘Nathan Sturgis’ or ‘Ross LaBeuex’