The Daily Kickoff

Your Friday Kickoff: Wacky & wild results in the West; Orlando continue to climb

J. Sam Jones

What you need to know

Matchday tomorrow

It’s been a busy week. We’ve got another full slate tomorrow. Check out the full schedule here.

Assorted thoughts from the midweek that was

Thanks to Jonathan for filling in yesterday. I had to recover from watching Inter Miami score two goals directly from deflections in person. Fun to see the universe personally taunt me for my “Miami are the luckiest great team ever” take.

Anyway, I’m all caught up on Wednesday’s other action. I have some thoughts.

The West’s tummy hurts

On a Wednesday when a whole bunch of teams needed to either take care of business against a bad team or be at their best against a quality opponent, almost everyone stepped on a rake. On the slightly-to-actually embarrassing side: LAFC drew 1-1 with Austin, Seattle drew 2-2 with San Jose and Colorado got whomped by Sporting KC 4-1. On the kind of disappointing but not a total nightmare side: Houston and Vancouver drew 1-1 and the Galaxy laid an egg in a 4-2 loss to Portland. Portland and RSL are the only teams in the West that actually gained ground and RSL weren’t perfect in a 3-2 win against Dallas.

I don’t even know who to start with when it comes to giving an “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed…and also mad” speech. Colorado getting blasted by a team who entered the day on less than 1.00 point per game is atrocious. Seattle blowing it late at home against the future Wooden Spoon holders is a disaster and doesn’t bode well for any hope of a healthy Pedro de la Vega turning Seattle into a bonafide, top-tier team by the end of the year. And LAFC have forgotten how to win and have taken only six points from their last seven MLS games.

We know that anything can happen in midweek MLS. Those things shouldn’t have happened though. Now, the West is somehow even more cluttered. Five points separate second-place RSL and seventh-place Houston. Portland, one of the hottest teams in the league is only two points behind the Dynamo. Oh, and now the Galaxy feel catchable at the top by both RSL and LAFC…except for the part where LAFC forgot how to win.

The West threw up all over itself on Wednesday. It’s a great reminder that we might be looking at a playoff bracket drowning in parity. Eight teams in the West feel like bonafide contenders to make a run once we reach the postseason. Some are more bonafide than others of course, but the differences between tiers are miniscule right now. This is going to get weirder and stay weirder.

Oh, by the way…

Hey, remember that thing I wrote wondering whether or not LAFC would be better with Olivier Giroud or not? Early returns are…intriguing. It’s a very small data set and no one seems to be playing all that well right now, however, I just want to point out that LAFC are 0W-2D-2L in Giroud’s four starts so far. He’s scored once in 428 minutes across all competitions. This has not been an immediate and resounding success.

That could obviously change in a hurry. Again, early days. But it’s something to keep an eye on.

Portland aren’t going anywhere

We’ve spent too much talking about teams that didn’t have their life together on Wednesday. We need to focus on the one team that did.

The Timbers boat-raced the Galaxy on Wednesday. LA had their moments in attack of course, but Portland were able to out-Galaxy the Galaxy here with their big three leading the way. Jonathan Rodríguez, Evander and Felipe Mora all found the net in this one. All three added an assist. Collectively, they’re up to 42 goals—each has 14 on the season—and 31 assists. 42 goals is more than 11 MLS teams have this season. There’s not a better attacking trio in the league right now.

There aren’t many teams that are better either. Since the midway point of their season, 12 games ago, the Timbers have earned 1.92 points per game. That’s the fourth-best mark in the West in that span. Even more impressively though, they’ve created and allowed chances at a projected rate of 1.86 expected points per game according to American Soccer Analysis. Only the Crew have been better and it’s a marginal difference. Portland’s xG For in that stretch is a league-best 2.18. Their xG Against is 1.34, the seventh-best mark in the league.

Yes, they have their flaws defensively but they improved significantly over the second half of the year. It also doesn’t matter all that much when you can turn to your three stars and ask them to put over two goals per game on the board. This group is for real. Whoever faces them in Round One is in for a terrible time.

Meanwhile in the East…

I’ll be honest, the East isn’t as interesting or as good at soccer right now. I can’t believe we’re here after everything we talked about leading up to this season, but it’s undeniable at this point. The West is better pound-for-pound.

The top of the East is as good as it gets though. There’s such a clear gap between Inter Miami, FC Cincinnati, Columbus and everyone else that the rest of the year feels like a formality until we get Cincy-Columbus in the conference semifinals. They’ll be playing for a chance to take on Miami in the final. It’s that straightforward.

That being said, we have to give flowers to Orlando City for going up against their first team above eighth place in like two months and cruising to a 2-0 win. Yes, Charlotte is a nightmare right now and we really need to talk about how a team could get so demonstrably worse after adding two DPs to the mix, but we’ll save that for a later date. Today, we’ll point out that you can only beat whoever is put in front of you and Orlando have been doing that and then some as of late.

Tomorrow is the real, real test though. The (now fourth-place) Lions are heading to Columbus. I’m still not convinced they have the juice to hang with the East’s big three, but a win tomorrow would change my mind in a hurry.

The Reading Rainbow