Player Evaluation, Speculation, and Prognostication

fantastic news if we can resign beita. its gonna be a process though, business is business and its gonna be painful negotiation im sure. will be paid more handily than Morrow we can assume that much.

 

Shocking, yes. It's like they are reading BigSoccer to come up with their ideas . I don't think the comment about "fast foward" means Fucito is gone necessarily. In fact, maybe it means he has a better chance of staying, since "fast forward" is something they are explicitly valuing, and presumably they'd need some depth at that capability.

 

thats exactly how I read it. Maybe its more forboding of Lenny and Gordo

or........we just keep all of Wondo, Lenny, Gordo, and Fucito and add one more developmental forward. thats probably the smart thing to do.

 

Did they mention getting rid of Baca?

After pretty much being released, does DeRo have options?

 

He did last year and really well (he was our best outside mid defender)

 

I'm sure early season injuries to Lenny & Gordon and relying on Adam Jahn didn't help the goal scoring production early on. Jahn scored 4 goals but he disappeared after that and I don't think he was really ready for the pro game despite the early scoring streak. I also think a bit of complacency had something to do with it and other teams buckling down and knowing how they played with their lobbing into the box in the dying seconds of matches.

 

Hard work starts in the offseason.

If Quakes management (and I'm not talking about John Doyle) thinks -- as they did last off-season -- that they can simply "stand pat" and trot out basically the same group of guys, but this time with a proverbial pep talk ("work harder, dammit"), I predict they will miss the playoffs -- just as I correctly predicted last off-season.

Imagine, for example, if last offseason the Quakes had, instead of Portland, acquired DP Diego Valeri, the 2013 assist leader, and exactly the sort of piece-of-the-puzzle most of us agree is needed for the Quakes, who with him would be top of the conference instead of the Timbers. But it takes hard work (and ample staff) to scout blue chip players and more hard work (and money, which management won't provide) to induce them to sign.

"Hard work" from the existing lunch bucket brigade is no substitute for more scouts and a bigger DP budget. And we shouldn't have to wait until the new stadium opens to get them.

 

This I agree with. Every team in every league in the world changes and scouts players. I don't think I've ever seen the same group of guys two years in a row in many teams around the world. You have to replenish and out with the old and in with the new. Maybe you might miss on some players and maybe some might not pan out but you can't remain complacent with the same bunch. Never!

 

Well, next year is an even year, and in Quakesland those are the good years where they remember to not stand quite so pat (after the obligatory bad odd year). So I'm optimistic about 2014.

 

Bud, I am recommending that we trade Hernandez and keep the rest of our defenders. I'm suggesting that we carry nine (9) defenders next year.

I agree that it depends on who is healthy, who can recover, and who can't.

Muller - I expect that he will recover. He's young, and I'm not sure that his injury is really serious.
Nana - It's possible that Nana is already recovered. He played 65 minutes in a reserve match.
Harden - I've no idea if he will recover or not.

None of our other defenders are on the injury report.

I was impressed with Harden and Gargen's play early in the season. They've had a year with us now, so they know our system, our players, and they aren't expensive. I want to keep those guys. This assumes that Harden recovers fully.

I even said to keep Bernardez, who I'd be willing to trade or cut if I knew for certain that the rest of our guys were healthy. Vic is coming to the end of his career, and he's a bit of a hot head. We could move on. However, I am not certain of our other players, so let's keep him.

GO QUAKES!!

- Mark

 

The roster we had shouldnt have had the start we had, for any reason. I dont blame you for wanting to go bigger and better, but lets not pretend while building our own stadium privately financed we are going to have the biggest budget in MLS.

And Doyle I think is fundamentally right. We got off to a slow start, and its because guys thought it should come easy. Remember how we were losing games early in the year? Remember dropping points to Vancouver because two of our players decided to switch shoes at the same time? Remember Chavez, Lenny, and Gordon all losing their minds early in the season and picking up multi game suspension? The team got frustrated to easily, and rather then working it out lashed out.

We got sloppy and complacent and gave up goals and points we never should have given up. I also think our preseason training was pathetic. It started late, we had I our starting 11 for the year play in only I think 3 games left.

We started slow, but the attention to detail from the players and the coaching staff was a disaster at the start of the year. We tried to coast when we needed to be on our game the most with all the injuries we were coping with. To me a culture of hard work is about making sure you cover all your bets, and not leaving anything easy for your opponents. Work hard, and make your opponents work hard to beat you.

I dont accept "I dont have the players" as an excuse from the coach unless everything else is on point, and the bottom line is for the first half of last year it simply wasn't. I am a big believer Yallop was a huge part of the problem with our team under-performing every other fricking year, and believe a big part of the reason that Watson was successful is that instead of complaining about the players he didnt have he made sure the ones he did have did their damn jobs.

So yeah, I want to see more from the FO, but we were absolutely criminal in some of the ways we threw points away early in the season.

 

The "guys," who from this greying perspective are barely more than kids, thought it would come easy because management imbued them with that mindset during the offseason. And management's self-satisfied mindset extended to the new stadium schedule, as well. Complacency started at the top. Missing the playoffs was predictable (I predicted it in February) long before guys were simultaneously leaving the pitch to tie their shoes, which was not predictable.

Frank Yallop may bear part (but hardly all) of the blame for the complacency, but he at least wanted to re-sign Simon Dawkins. And let's not pretend he had the same players that Mark Watson did, or that Watson was better able to restrain his players.

Clarence Goodson and Jordan Stewart were huge additions that Yallop lacked. (Yallop gets credit for Goodson since he originally drafted him the expansion draft in '08. And Stewart was a lucky find, thanks to a tip from Darren Huckerby, which says something about the randomness of the Quakes' "scouting" program).

And, as for doing their "damn jobs" under Watson, Lenny was red-carded at Chivas at the end of September for breaking a guy's nose, which put the Quakes down a man needing a goal to save their season (thanks to Wondo, they miraculously got it). There was Muma getting sent off in late June at the Stanford game, which cost his services in Chicago a few days later; without Muma's defense, or Shea Salinas' service (DisCo suspended him for elbowing Keane at the Stanford game), the Fire scored three goals and the Quakes missed a critical point in the standings by a single goal. Plus there were cards in Dallas in August to Muma and Baca that prevented them from playing in the first L.A. away game, which resulted in Wondo being our center attacking mid and a predictable 3-0 defeat. A draw there (like a draw in Chicago), which was do-able with a full line-up as the Quakes proved on their return visit to L.A. a few weeks later, would have resulted in a playoff berth. There may be other instances I'm overlooking, but there's no doubt that the Quakes were undisciplined all season long and it almost certainly cost them points and ultimately a playoff berth.

 

Is Darren Huckerby emplyed by the Quakes to be their scout in Europe and if not, wouldn't it be a good idea if he were?

 

I'm tired of this straw-man excuse. I privately finance my season tickets with my own money (which includes a phantom playoff game which still has not been refunded). I expect value for my money, which means at a minimum a bona fide good faith commitment to making the playoffs each and every season. No excuses, especially when you sell me a worthless playoff ticket a year in advance.

The Quakes are going on year seven in their temporary venue. The delays in building the stadium are entirely the fault of Quakes' ownership and a lack of urgency in getting the new stadium built. It does not relieve them of the obligation to try to field a contender every year, a duty they are shirking. On average more than half the teams in MLS make the playoffs. So, if the Quakes were merely "average," not the league's biggest spenders, you would have expected them to have made the playoffs at least three times in six seasons. But they've only made it twice -- which means, based purely on results which matter, the Quakes are below average, which is to be expected based on ownership's below average commitment to providing resources.

 

I agree and you are right and not trying to deflect anything but when I see TFC who started one year before the Quakes did, with their fans , stadium, , coaching changes and the players they've signed, I think the Quakes by comparison are are slightly better off. Not by much though.....

 

On the whole "complacency" thing, I wanted to make a couple of points:

1) It is very common, if not the norm, for a championship team (and I consider the 2012 Quakes to be a championship team) to have a down year the following year, even with largely the same roster. Why is that? I think a combination of things: a) a sort of loss of "hunger", a bit of complacency / basking the sun - there's a psychology to it that is very difficult to combat, b) an expectation that you can walk out on the field and get the same results as you did last year, and when you don't, you panic a bit, and c) other teams may be gunning for you in a sort of quest to topple the champion.

2) You can go back and check the preseason "standing pat" thread. There were very few who predicted nothing but continued great success for the team this year. I argued till blue in the face that by "standing pat" they would fall behind, but got shouted down repeatedly by the wayward masses :--). It wasn't just the FO that was complacent, it was everyone, including most of the fans, who insisted that the Quakes had a great off-season by re-signing most of the team and adding depth.

3) While complacency may have been an issue all the way up and down the org, again, this is very difficult to combat. Not many can overcome it even when recognizing the trap and making some kind of noble effort to do so. But maybe even more importantly, when trying to explain away the early to early-mid season woes, I think it's unfair not to also consider the number of injuries that the Quakes were dealing with early in the season. I remember Yallop saying explicitly that he was worried about it.

 

I'm not consoled.

 

Stewart's old millwall teammate Liam Trotter would make a perfect #8-type attacking central midfielder for us.

http://www.transfermarkt.com/en/liam-trotter/leistungsdaten/spieler_39694.html

 

First, are you paying 3 million dollars a year for those tickets? No? I understand the frustration, but paying for the stadium construction is a multi-million dollar drain on the organization. We also have less revenue potential because of our temporary stadium. We arent going to be able to compete financially with other teams until the stadium is built unless we have a sugar daddy owner, and I for one would rather have a club that tries to be financially responsible then one that is a loss of interest or a divorce away from being financially insolvent and moved.

Listen, if you have the funds to buy the team, fast track the stadium, spend money on DPs, go wild. But we have the ownership we have, and while they may be frustrating at times, the team has made progress on and off the field over that time. Slow, at times painful progress, but progress nonetheless.

Second, the team is I believe exactly .500 since its return. In the last 4 years its made the playoffs 2 out of 4 times and has a winning record over that period. And yes, we missed the playoffs this year, but it was with the second highest point total in league history for a team that missed the playoffs, and no team as far as I can tell has been as close to the supporters shield winner and not made the playoffs. We finished 8 points off the supporters shield. 8. If we were an eastern conference team we would have had the points to make the playoffs. We were 3 games over .500. This year was incredibly frustrating and disappointing, but it wasn't the unmitigated disaster like people are painting it out to be.

We will have a different coach to start the season for the first time in 6 years. Lets see how it goes at this point. Over those 6 years we have seen a roller coaster between seasons, but if instead you break it down into 2 year periods, we have seen consistent improvement in every one of those 2 year increments. There has been progress on the stadium, it is being built, its been delayed, but its still moving forward.

I am not saying that its wrong to want the club to spend more money, to feel like it could be run better, that aspects of it need improvment, to be dissatisfied with the overall results to date. But what gets me is that people treat mixed results under difficult operational circumstances like David Kaval and John Doyle personally knocked on their door and kicked them in the balls.

 

He even looks like Stewart, but much younger. Hmm...

 

Point-by-point:

[1] You effectively concede that the delays in the stadium progress are impeding the Quakes' competitive position on the pitch. If the stadium was built in time to host the 2010 all-star game (as David Alioto once told me it would be), we might have had the financial wherewithal for a couple DPs (as Dave Kaval once told me the new stadium would allow) to enable the team to qualify for the playoffs in 2013. It's not just the latest year-long stadium-construction delay, its the several years delay in even getting to the groundbreaking, which has hurt this club.

[2] Your perspective on the Quakes' 2013 season is complacency-inducing, so I hope the Quakes' brain-trust does not share it. At least three of the Quakes' 14 wins (more than 20 percent of the total) were of what I would describe as the miraculous variety. Twice the Quakes won games while down a man (at Stanford and at Chivas), and another time they defeated a team when Wondo was allowed to re-take a penalty (vs NYRB). That's seven miraculously-found points in the standings. The league will improve over the off-season -- again -- and the Quakes need to do the same just to keep pace on the periphery. And they cannot depend on miracles next season to secure their playoff position. They need reinforcements.

[3] David Kaval operates under difficult operational circumstances, to be sure, but rather than acknowledge the fact, he smugly acts as if he's in charge of Barca, for example publicizing a fictional "comprehensive international coaching search" and, last October 2012 (flush with winning the Supporters Shield) telling me that the Quakes are "a Big Club now." As a Big Club, the Quakes are not entitled to be graded on a curve due to "small club" concerns about finances or other difficult operational circumstances. I'm judging Kaval on his own articulated standard.

 

[1]Yes. This is something I think we all know to be true. The first set of delays were funding related, as the economy went into recession as all this stuff was being planned. The second set, once funding was taken care of, have been issues with the site. Now, if you want to criticize the delays in the stadium, I wont stop you or argue with you. My beef is when you don't acknowledge the operational constraints that puts on the guys who put together the team on the field.

[2] I had the exact same perspective after the 2011 season. 2011 wasn't nearly as bad as people on the board made it out to be. There are areas on the field that clearly need to be addressed, but the base of the team is in good shape. Specifically we need to add quality attacking options. As for what happened in the 2011 and 2013 season (or even the 2009 season), teams that don't make roster changes shouldn't play so much worse the next season like those teams did. I am in the camp that those are coaching and preparation errors.

[3] Really? That to me is sales speak, which goes in one ear and out the other. I don't put any weight on it at all. If you want to criticize how the team is being marketed, that's fine. But you cant hold the people making football decisions to a standard that involves amounts of financial resources they clearly dont have.

 

I no longer give credence to anything Kaval says, either. But we had a months long new coach thread on here because plenty of people on this forum naively believed that the Quakes were actually searching for one.

What you call "sales speak" is often non-actionable "puffery," but it can cross the line and be considered fraud, especially if people are buying season tickets in reliance on what Kaval says. No matter how many chia pets he pushes, Kaval is not a carnival huckster, but rather he is president of a soccer club -- a purported "Big Club" at that. He should consider his words more carefully.