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I hope someone picks Tornaghi so we can promote one of our youth keepers and get them cup minutes, he's too good to be stuck on the bench behind Ousted at this point is his career. I ALSO hope someone picks Barnes but that will never happen because Houston gave him an awful loving contract that we are now stuck with unless those rumours of Owen Coyle and his bizarre man-crush buying him from us for Blackburn in January bear fruit (they won't). I'd be sorry to see Techera go but he'd be a good pickup for Minnesota if he can find his 2015 form again, and frankly we have Too Many Attacking Midfielders so something has to give. I am utterly perplexed that we both re-signed and then PROTECTED Erik Hurtado but oh well, he's decent depth and, maybe THIS offseason we'll sign a striker or two that are actually consistent and mean he'll never see the field.
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Dec 13, 2016 18:37
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whypick1 posted:Are we talking about the same dude? All I've seen of Tornaghi was "Rais M'Bolhi in Philly" levels of terrible. Eh. He's looked serviceable but maybe I'm biased because I've only seen him play against Canadian/CONCACAF minnows. I'd say he's no worse than, say, Brad Knighton, who landed pretty firmly in NE before Shuttleworth displaced him.
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Dec 13, 2016 19:02
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B.B. Rodriguez posted:First the Rams and now the Chargers. We only wanted the Raiders. Who are more likely to end up in Vegas sharing a stadium with David Beckham's team when he finally gives up on Miami. Life is full of ironies!
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Dec 13, 2016 20:07
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tk posted:This is loving nonsense. The more this happens, the sooner we can dispense with having an expansion draft at all and just tossing new teams some extra Garberbucks or something so they can build rosters their way. edit: the rumour is that Mark Bloom is going back the other way, but maybe that's just Twitter speculating because he's a Georgia native. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Dec 13, 2016 |
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Dec 13, 2016 21:36
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JayMax posted:I'm sad. Toia is good & cheap, congrats Atlanta. Actually, congrats Orlando: https://twitter.com/samstejskal/status/808785339561218048 Also, the Whitecaps got themselves an actual right back. I'd ask our Houston contingent if Sheanon Williams is any good, but considering who they had playing in that position last year literally anyone would likely be an improvement.
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Dec 14, 2016 00:20
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Crazy Ted posted:Expansion: fine Yeah, this. The expansion draft is no longer necessary here (for the same reason that the Superdraft is basically American Soccer's Appendix), but if they insist on doing them then I will continue to enjoy the hilarious shenanigans that result.
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Dec 14, 2016 00:53
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Crazy Ted posted:Look at how long of a career Dominic Oduro has fashioned out of being a really fast guy with no technique. You'd think Montreal would realise Oduro was getting old and keep his obvious successor, but I guess they wanted Chris Duvall more.
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Dec 14, 2016 03:57
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^^The waiver draft is specifically for people who get waived by a team but don't meet the criteria for the re-entry draft - people who fall through it are pretty much free agents. But the part about having to meet their current contract is accurate, which is probably the main reason nobody was taken.Simone Poodoin posted:So what happens to those players now? Do they become free agents? Basically yes, or in other words: Crazy Ted posted:They move on to the Island of Misfit MLS Rejects Maybe some of them will be signed by somebody at less than they were earning, but I guess most will end up leaving the league. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 22:03
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Gigi Galli posted:Doesn't Toronto always get hosed like this though? It has to be with the weather. The past few years it's been construction (and they've been on the road until like May.) No construction this year and I could believe it was weather except... Azerban posted:..this league still has minnesota and montreal in it, right? Montreal plays indoors in March though. I dunno what they're thinking with Minnesota opening in an outdoor stadium on March 12 - good loving luck with that. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Dec 21, 2016 |
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Dec 21, 2016 20:44
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Montreal trades Harry Shipp to Seattle for Garberbucks: he never really fit in MTL's system but he may have trouble getting sufficient minutes as understudy to Lodeiro of all people, so I guess we'll see.
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Dec 22, 2016 22:24
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A DP defender? Is that legal? (kidding, kidding, looks like a solid pickup and having Ghana's centreback pair at your team will probably give American strikers PTSD flashbacks for years to come if they keep being your bogey team at the WC.)
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Jan 3, 2017 18:43
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Your Boy Fancy posted:Why didn't they just call Minnesota the loving Loons. Eh, they will. In shorthand/informally. But what works there might still look silly on a league table (though Aussie Rules' Sydney Swans may beg to differ there.) Besides, Minnesota's fans wanted to keep United when they switched leagues and I suppose that just this once the league saw no need to eat a PR poo poo sandwich for forcing the issue. I'm kind of sympathetic about the broader issue of Team Naming because either way you go it is so easy to get it wrong with SOMEBODY. You can make a generic name work if people like the rest of the branding and if it isn't appropriating something that makes less than no sense (see: TFC or MNU as opposed to...oh, we all know who I was going to mention here), whereas whether a US-style nickname goes down well feels kind of unpredictable (and depends on who it needs to go down well WITH, existing local fans vs. potential local fans vs. existing national MLS fans vs. potential national MLS fans, each of which groups and subgroups may want different things). Arguably, all of the original 10's names were terrible in the finest 90s tradition except possibly DC (depending on whether you think DC should be blamed for starting the trend of North American soccer teams trying to copy Euro naming conventions with flimsy justifications - but the lower leagues and amateur circuits are littered with that poo poo anyway). But we mostly don't mock the ones that survived (or won a lot, loving Galaxy). If the NASL had never existed, would the San Jose Earthquakes or Portland Timbers be dumb names or inspired ones? Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 16:16
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wicka posted:All sports team nicknames are inherently bad and just get accepted over time, assuming they aren't really bad.  wicka posted:MLS has big problems with appearances and not being taken seriously, and bad team names are part of that, but by no means are they the biggest problem. The fan who might think a team name is bad but is able to look past it still sees a league with 13 drafts. I, for one, think the biggest problem with MLS' appearance and being taken seriously is that most of the players are bad. (But since they actually want to develop and use North American players rather than become another Premier League, this is for now kind of unavoidable but will improve over time.) Like a nickname, if a league lasts long enough, that portion of its wacky convoluted bullshit that survives will be accepted over time and become authentic. People go into frankly awe-inspiring detail understanding the NFL and NHL's salary cap contortions and running mock drafts/waiver wires/trade scenarios, after all (this is just what I'm familiar with, maybe the NBA or baseball are marvels of simplicity by comparison).
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Jan 4, 2017 16:58
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Ciprian Maricon posted:American players would be far better served by being exposed to and forced to compete with excellent talent rather than being protected and coddled. Protectionist policies are a central tenant of the FMF and one of the largest contributors to why Mexican players have gotten worse and worse every year while the rest of CONCACAF continues to improve. It's not about the current American players, most of them are a lost cause. It's about the generations rising and to come that need someplace where they can play professionally and competitively, with and against comparatively excellent talent, but where they can also actually get playing time to improve without being shoved to the bench in favour of a Euro/South American player who is already better for a team that needs to win. Canada is finally looking to start its own national domestic league (as opposed to a regional match-fixing front) in the near future and this is explicitly the rationale, and I don't blame the USSF for thinking similarly. (also I suspect that, ironically, MLS being a place like this, where the salaries are also actually pretty big and arrive on time compared to most other leagues in CONCACAF, is a big reason that the rest of CONCACAF continues to improve. Look at the articles in the Costa Rican press about MLS pillaging Saprissa this winter, I'm sure they're even more hilarious if you can read them in the original Spanish instead of relying on Google Translate.) quote:MLS would be far better served if its wage structures were such that a team could afford to buy a handful of strong players composing the core of a team rather than always splashing out on one or two big names some idiot in a marketing office thought would fill up seats. The main reason that the league is piling on so many different colours of Monopoly money instead of just raising the goddamn cap is that, in a world where two thirds of an MLS roster has to be domestic, raising the cap and adding free agency would just mean overpaying the Conor Caseys of the world (see for example the "English tax" in the PL, where mediocre players who meet the homegrown quota draw hilarious wages and transfer fees), whereas when you combine all the different salary cap exemptions (DPs, TAM, homegrowns/Generation Adidas) you can actually put together a solid core group if you scout well. It's not ideal, but within the context of American soccer it's working towards the situation you describe. wicka posted:Yes, but they have no other choice. There is one football league. There is one hockey league. For soccer, there is a global market. I can watch more of the Premier League on television than I can MLS, and the rules are a hell of a lot easier to understand, and the level of play is a lot higher. It will take a lot of time and money for MLS to develop the talent needed to compete globally, and that's probably what it's going to take to get better TV exposure. But as far as the rules go, they can just change it. They could do it right loving now. Most of this is true (the KHL may someday be competition for the NHL if Russia can avoid starting World War 3 in the next decade or so but that's another thread), but I think our fundamental disagreement is that I simply don't think the structure is what matters for potential fans compared to the other two advantages that the PL, for example, has. Most people care about the games, the metagames just set the stage. And yes, the rules are within MLS' control and could be changed, but there are reasons they exist besides Don Garber's personal grudge against you. Maybe some of those reasons are not as valid as they were, maybe some of those rules now hurt more than they help, maybe the whole thing is a dumb imperfect messy compromise (it's this one). But the context of why they exist needs to be reckoned with, and this winter needs to loving end already so I can post textwalls about the game instead of the metagame please and thank you. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 17:32
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camoseven posted:and Luke Boden is... actually I don't know where Boden went but he's not on their roster anymore! They declined his option this year so I guess he's off to the Island of Misfit Toys.
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Jan 4, 2017 17:52
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wicka posted:How is that his point? No one is tuning in because they are interested in these Byzantine rules, but people are sure as poo poo turned off by it. My point is, and has always been, that the second part of that sentence is not relevant (at least for people who are not obsessives like us) compared to the fact that the PL is easier to find on TV and the players are better. Americans watch sports with Byzantine player movement rules, and learn said Byzantine rules to the best of their ability or follow people that do for their dumb hot takes, all the fuckin' time, and I don't buy "they have no choice but to do that" - other sports exist! Other entertainment methods exist! Limiting your conception of "competition for the NFL" to "only other American Football leagues" is great for your argument but bears no relation to reality. NFL ratings dropped like 20% the first half of this season - what did they go watch? College football? The Arena league? The Donald Trump Traveling Roadshow? (not the USFL, the other one) quote:You say they turn in to watch players bought by allocation money - but only because it exists. Just get rid of it and increase the cap slightly to compensate. IMO, abandon all these idiotic rules and set the cap closer to what clubs' real wages are. As I have tried to explain in tedious detail but will now instead try and summarise, allocation money in its various flavours, and all the other complications to the roster construction rules, exist because MLS has various priorities that act at cross-purposes with each other, and is working with owners that aren't broadly willing to lose seven or eight figures a year indefinitely to bootstrap a soccer league and appreciate being protected from themselves, skeptical broadcasters, a viewing public that largely has other better options, and last-but-definitely-not-least, a veteran player pool (and, crucially for this, a large voting bloc in the players' union) that, if MLS didn't exist, would mostly now be small-town dentists or car salesmen like 90% of college athletic standouts, not making bank in the global market. These things probably constrain Don Garber's set of choices even if you managed to body-snatch him and steal his job. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 20:17
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Ciprian Maricon posted:I know this, and again, its a dumb idea and it doesn't work. The FMF has done tons of dumb poo poo in the interest of giving Mexican players a place to grow and develop and all it has done is stagnated and regressed the quality of players produced in Mexico. Meanwhile the existence of MLS has meant that loads of other CONCACAF teams have had their players exposed to greater competition than their domestic leagues offered and low and behold, the likes of Costa Rica, Honduras, ETC. have improved drastically over the years. The thing is that it all needs to fit together. MLS wouldn't have Costa Ricans to poach (well, aside from the ones that immigrate to the US) if Costa Rica didn't have a league where they could play and be seen. Unlike most of CONCACAF (and probably unlike Canada when it starts), MLS and Liga MX could afford to poach entire rosters from out-of-country if they weren't restricted from doing so, and US/Canadian soccer execs are probably looking at the PL and its apparent effect on the English national team as their cautionary tale here, rather than Liga MX (espescially since "soccer" and "England" are basically synonymous among a certain vintage and shade of soccer fan in those countries). I agree that covering the country in academies is probably going to do more in the long run, but even then, why would you play an academy product over an import if you weren't required to and weren't explicitly choosing to? Especially in a North American academy since they mostly, right now, produce really rough talents that need a lot of technical refinement and seasoning? US businesses hate having to train their employees everywhere else, I don't expect soccer to be any different left to its own devices, though maybe you could get away with it in MLS since it doesn't punish losing as harshly as other leagues (for reasons which we all know but I hope we do not need to get into). Competition for places is important, absolutely, but the US is big enough and MLS is small enough that there's no way that competition for places will ever not be a thing. Especially note that, unlike Liga MX's rule, MLS' rule doesn't care if the domestic players actually make the starting 11, so you've still got to compete for that starting spot with Juan/Jean Random, the quota just gets your foot in the door. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 21:43
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wicka posted:Then they should produce better academies? Plenty of leagues worldwide manage this just fine Well, that depends on your standard of "fine", doesn't it? Most of them don't really have a choice, because there are practical or regulatory reasons they have to produce their own players (various limits on foreign/non-EU players are popular, or not having the money to pay well enough to outbid the non-impoverished soccer-mad countries they're close to, as opposed to the impoverished ones we're close to). Some have a choice and do it well on the level we're talking about, but they have advantages MLS doesn't currently have (mainly being the primary traditional sport in large and/or rich nations), for which the path to getting them is not as easy as waving a magic wand, as the Chinese (who are trying to do the same thing the old fashioned way with the help of billions of dollars of state subsidies) may soon find out when they try to transition their league from "post-Beckham MLS but with all the dollar figures multiplied by 100" to an actual long term concern. quote:I'm confused as to why you raise it as an issue. Mostly because I reflexively contextualize everything, it's a sickness. Obviously we need to improve our academies. But the US is the largest economy in the world. If we had a soccer league to match that and no league restraints on foreign players, we'd have the money to buy teenagers from Brazil long before we could sufficiently train our own teenagers to compete with them, and that league was big enough to need relegation then the incentive would be to pick whoever is currently best, nationalism be damned. quote:It feels like most of your posts are rooted in wanting MLS to already be on the right track, rather than genuinely thinking they are. Conveniently, it feels like most of your posts are rooted in blithely handwaving away the practical reasons why the progress along that track is slower than you want it to be, and assuming that if we just did it like everyone else and ignored the things that are actually different about the American environment today as compared to the rest of the world now, or in the 19th and mid-20th centuries when they got their starts at this, things would work out fine. I do want MLS to succeed (really, I want soccer in North America to succeed and I'm not convinced that if you burned down this system a better one would rise from the ashes in my lifetime, which is my default assumption for all the flawed systems I live with). I do think it's on the right track, or at least one that offers less chance of yet another catastrophic failure than any realistic alternative. I engage in these discussions because 
Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 22:27
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Shrapnig posted:NCAA Soccer will kill MLS if the league continues to think that they can find talent there. They don't think they can consistently find talent there, as evidenced by the fact that outside the like five of them that end up in GA the rest of a given year's draft class is at best an outside shot and GMs, knowing this, value draft picks in trades approximately as highly as a bag of balls. Someday it will die. In the meantime you occasionally get a Cyle Larin and the league still wants to give bad teams/expansion teams a leg up for next year, so here we are. Decent academies don't yet exist all over the country and, while they don't, there's no reason to COMPLETELY ignore the NCAA. Just do it all via a conference call and stop trying to hype it, I agree with you that far. It's never going to be an event like the NFL draft but frankly I don't understand why the NFL draft is an event so, yaknow, here we are. Ciprian Maricon posted:Why? England is a tiny Island nation that produces an absurd amount of talent relative to its size and fills up some 9 levels worth of a footballing pyramid (the majority of that talent dwarfs what is available in mls), they are something to emulate not be scared of and the idea that the PL has somehow stifled the development of English players is laughable, Cahill, Sterling, Lallana, Henderson, Sturridge, competing in the Premier league against the best the world can offer has done loads to create exceptional players. The argument is that, despite all this (though I'd say that only the top 2 or 3 levels of the English pyramid would utterly dwarf MLS talent), the fact that England constantly fails internationally is down to failing at the step of turning all that talent into Actually Good Senior Players (as compared to, say, Germany or Spain who are the usual comparisons). There are probably other reasons (more good coaches, more focus on technique as opposed to merely hard work, and less tradition-bound administration), but I'm a firm believer in Playing Your Kids when possible so I guess I have my biases here. Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 00:18
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If laughter is the best medicine Caleb Porter will make me immortal.
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Jan 5, 2017 01:24
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Azerban posted:straight knockout They are apparently going to gin up a national coefficient system to determine seeding for the CCL proper, so with all the deep runs Canadian teams have been making we might just luck out. ("thanks, Montreal", he said through gritted teeth)
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Jan 24, 2017 20:31
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shirts and skins posted:Has NYCFC made *any* progress on that stadium issue? I haven't heard about it. I can't imagine Yankee Stadium is a viable home venue for too terribly long. There's been no visible progress and I imagine they'll be in YS for some time to come, because no alternative spot has emerged that is so obviously better as to counteract a) needing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (which they obviously have, but why spend it if you don't have to?) to secure the land and build the place, particularly in the five boroughs, and b) needing to navigate local politics in order to build on it. Or they are still working on b), just nowhere we can see.
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Jan 31, 2017 17:11
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Welcome to GBS posted:I don't think it's terrible, but it's absolutely a downgrade from what they did have. Yeah, we've had a bunch of really awesome thirds the past couple of years and this...isn't one of them. Even for their stated theme there are probably better ways they could have pulled it off. Oh, well, I don't buy our jerseys anyway (given my employment it may in fact be literally illegal for me to wear one) so not my problem.
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Feb 7, 2017 19:36
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whypick1 posted:Rogers or Shaw? Right idea, wrong side of the revolving door.
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Feb 7, 2017 19:44
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Toronto finally losing their offseason championship?
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Feb 17, 2017 01:35
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Real Name Grover posted:https://twitter.com/OrlandoCitySC/status/835660879345696769 Don't care, got rid of Barnes.
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Feb 26, 2017 22:08
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My understanding was that Brek was on 450k and Barnes was on 750k, but yeah I'm not expecting terribly much from Shea, I'm just pleasantly surprised that anyone wanted Barnes' contract besides Owen Coyle, who got fired before he could follow up on his bizarre man crush. Hopefully we can turn the extra cap room into a solid striker or CM.
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Feb 27, 2017 04:59
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Moktaro posted:Hmm, I'll take him at a lower wage, we're still pretty desperate for strikers. Honestly I'd be fine with Vancouver signing him at a lower salary for the same reason but I don't expect that will happen. See also Mix Diskerud, also on the Buyout Train (but I'd kinda rather we give Teibert the chance this year in that spot, barring a Surprise Summer Atiba Hutchinson signing). Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 20:33
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