Backpass: Standing Pat for 2021
The Rapids re-signed darn near everybody. Also, why did MLS fans really boo Don Garber? And was it justified?
Not since the 2016-to-2017 offseason have the Rapids brought back so many players as they did yesterday, when they announced a veritable plethora of player re-signings.
Of the 26 players on the active roster for 2020, as of now, 24 of them will be returning next season. The only active player to have their contract option declined was Deklan Wynne - William Yarbrough, on loan from Club Leon, might also come back in the new year, if the Rapids can make a deal with the Liga MX club on a transfer fee. Two other players, Abdul Rwatubyaye and Niki Jackson, had been out on loan last year and were not on the active roster and were also non-tendered.
That’s pretty stunning.
Just two weeks ago, when I took my first stab at what the roster changes might be, I suggested the Rapids ax six guys - Collen Warner**, Drew Moor, Deklan Wynne, Danny Wilson, Niki Jackson, and Steven Beitashour. But the Commerce City FO decided to keep four of those guys.
Three of those guys I will predict will have little to no impact on the team next year. It seems very likely to me that Warner, Moor, and Beitashour together will play fewer than 1600 minutes (collectively) in 2021. They have that ‘salty veteran locker room presence’ way about them. Moor is still a very capable center back - tidy with the ball, a good passer, and a fantastic backline organizer. But I wouldn’t want him to be the only thing between Josef Martinez and the goal in a 50-yard open field sprint. Warner was in the bottom third of MLS midfielders in Goals Added, or ‘g+’, with a - 0.31 overall g+ and a - 0.12 passing g+ in just 297 minutes of play. Goals Added measures a player’s total on-ball contribution in attack and defense. It does this by calculating how much each touch changes their team’s chances of scoring and conceding across two possessions.*** He also turns 33 next season. Beitashour didn’t play a single minute for Robin Fraser, although he didn’t join the team until September.
The more perplexing re-signing, and the one that really has Rapids fans befuddled is the re-signing of center back Danny Wilson.
OK, so let me play a little devil’s advocate.
Danny Wilson had some really bad moments for the Rapids in 2018 and 2019. I mean, I was expressing doubts back in March 2018, when Wilson was in his very first few games in burgundy, as to whether this guy would be better on the field than just dragging a green plastic trash can into the 18-yard box to slalom past. But strangely, Robin Fraser coaxed an improved performance out of Wilson last year. Wilson was 17th amongst all MLS center backs in Goals Added, with a + 0.71 g+, mostly on the back of exceptionally good interrupting and passing numbers.
That matches with the eye test. Wilson was generally good in games defensively, and he adroitly stepped into the role of ‘distributing CB’ that was formerly occupied by Tommy Smith quite well. He was equally comfortable at advancing the ball on the ground into a safe space for the fullback or defensive midfielder as he was launching a 40-yard forward or diagonal pass that bypassed the midfield. Those are critical things along the backline, and those skills aren’t the strong suit of his central defending partner, Lalas Abubakar - while he is excellent at clearing balls or stopping attacks, he’s more shy with his long passing.
So perhaps Pádraig Smith and Robin Fraser believe in Danny Wilson. Maybe they think that whatever problems he used to have were due to a slow adjustment period, or to having the wrong coaches, or the wrong players alongside him.
Another reason for the retention of Wilson could be simply math - the Rapids looked at the ever-escalating prices for experienced, reliable, first-division center backs, and reasoned that whatever they could get in Wilson’s place would either be not worth what you’d pay or would be prohibitively expensive. Colorado isn’t exactly in Jerome Boateng / Sergio Ramos territory in terms of their spending.
The last reason I would give for this decision is that even if you don’t get what you were hoping for from Wilson, the Rapids have a healthy list of backup choices. A Wilson regression could be offset with 800 minutes from Drew Moor along with a 2000-minute season from Auston Trusty, who just needs the opportunity to step forward and do the thing. Wilson’s two-year contract extension probably cost the team in the range of what he was making beforehand - $540,000 a year. For the Rapids to let him go and then find a bargain-basement backup for Trusty at $200K, or to instead invest in a DP centerback for north of a million, might not have been worth it to the Rapids considering the uncertainty that comes with either option. There isn’t a lot of room for improvement above “17th among MLS center backs in g+”, and there’s a whole lot of players worse than that (92, to be exact.)
However. Do I love this move of re-signing Danny Wilson? No.
I would prefer the Rapids go out and spend $1 million for a transfer fee and $1 million annually in salary on a well-respected, experienced, in-his-prime center back from a well-respected league like French Ligue 1, Liga MX, the Eredivisie, or the English Championship. If there were only three spots on this team to improve, Danny Wilson’s spot at center back would be one of them.****
The central philosophy behind the Rapids offseason moves is clearly ‘we like what we’ve got, and with a little tinkering we can go far.’ I do think they will add one or two more players via transfer, another two from the draft, and perhaps another two Homegrown call-ups. Maybe there’ll be a trade or two - Pádraig loves a trade. Maybe just a mystical and perplexing ‘GAM for TAM’ deal, or maybe for real live soccer players.
But overwhelmingly the staff in Commerce City have decided to hew to the motto ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
There is another aphorism that might ultimately come to fruition, though, if things don’t work out: ‘if you aren’t getting better, you’re getting worse.’
Why they booed Don Garber
It seems so natural - so second nature to boo your sports commissioner that I think we’ve reached the point in American sports history where we don’t even stop to think why we do it anymore. At the Sporfing Championship, our Sporfs Commissioner presents the Ernest P. Shillingsdrop Trophy and everybody boos.
Don Garber handed the trophy on Saturday after a thrilling MLS Cup Final in which the Columbus Crew thoroughly dismantled a Seattle Sounders team that not only invented soccer (snark) but also played exceptionally good football all season (sincerity). And the fans started booing - and that was before he rambled on for something like three minutes unnecessarily about how great the fans the owners the sponsors the networks blaah blaah blaah… No, they booed the minute his face hit the jumbotron. So, besides droning on and delaying the trophy presentation, besides the reflexive scorn that comes with the title, are there legitimate grievances with Mr. Garber?
Of course there are.
First and most immediately relevant, Garber was handing out a trophy in Columbus, an MLS original city that only three short years ago was nearly deprived of its team altogether when owner Anthony Precourt reasoned that there was more money to be made from being the third MLS team in Texas than in being the only team in Ohio. Commissioners work for the owners - they have the unenviable task of trying to balance the interests of more than two dozen billionaires who are inherently not used to cooperating. And so I can say the two following things simultaneously - Precourt wanting to move his team was not really Don Garber’s fault, and also Garber and MLS handled it badly.
If the league truly is single entity, as it claims, then the league office should have more power to set rules and territories, not less, than your average league. A league in most sports and countries is just a group of teams loosely agreeing to the same sports rules and number of games a year. In MLS, it’s more of a franchise - you get to sell Official McDoogal’s Happy Meals because you paid the fee, and McDoogal’s sends you the official Star Twars (™) plastic sippy cups in return. Garber’s decision to reward Precourt with another franchise - Austin FC - was a weird way of rewarding a terrible owner with a valuable commodity. Precourt bought the team for $68 million, and sold just six years later for $150 million, more than doubling his profit. By comparison, my 1990 Upper Deck MLB box set which I bought for $50, including Sammy Sosa’s rookie card, is currently on sale at Amazon for $29.99.
Precourt stabbed his fans in the heart and Don Garber facilitated the getaway. A similar situation unfolded a few weeks ago when it was revealed that RSL owner Dell Loy Hansen was a racist, sexist, creep who values rare coins more than his employees.
His undoing was trivializing the reactions of his Black players after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Elijah McClain. MLS is forcing him to sell a team valued at $85 million when he bought at a time when the expansion price for an MLS team is now north of $300 million. So when fans boo Garber, they are booing a system where rich white men behave terribly and their punishment is the ability to cash out on their investment at a ludicrous profit. It seems patently unfair - pro sports is a world where racism has a reverse fine system, as long as you’re an owner.
I don’t have a solid answer for a better way for MLS to handle this situation. Perhaps owners would not buy into a league if there were legitimate consequences for bigotry and sexual harassment. I dunno.
But when owners behave like assholes, and the powers that be let it slide, it seems only fitting that they get a brief but vocal public shaming on national television.*****
*: This is from one of the better scenes from ‘Three Amigos’, a late 80s John Landis comedy that hasn’t really been retained as a comedy classic, but probably should be.
**: Warner was brought back on a two-year deal, which is kind of confusing. He’s a decent but unimpressive backup d-mid - why lock him up till 2022? My guess is the Rapids offered him a very humble deal in exchange for it being two years.
***: That description is from American Soccer Analysis’ John Muller. The longer explanation is worth a read, if you’re still new to g+. I have read it multiple times. Consider me fully and completely devoted to the cult.
****: The other spots would be spent on 1) a honest-to-goodness legit center forward striker, a thing that I’ve written for so long that it only merits to get shoehorned into the asterix footnotes at the bottom of the page rather than get a whole article of its own, and 2) a playmaking, pass-first midfielder. Younes Namli is wonderful on the ball, but he takes the final pass; he doesn’t deliver it. Namli in the middle is ok. Namli as a Right Wing combining with a Diego Valeri/Miguel Almiron-type creative mid is electric.
*****: I wouldn’t boo Don Garber if I could. I’d love to just sit down talk about the league with him, having a frank but respectful conversation. Alas, I’m still waiting on a reply to an invitation for Shabbat Dinner I made five years ago.