Jokes aside, there are some things I agree with JC about. I don’t think Onstad has proved much yet. He spent millions to only improve with 6 points. I think HH thus far has been a bust so far. We are both under no illusion of how terrible the Dynamo have been. The issue is on how much someone thinks the Dynamo are trying. I think they’re not going to be good next year but they are trying. As flawed as those charts are it shows that the Dynamo this year are turning over their roster well above league average this offseason. The idea that the team isn’t trying is based more in emotion rather than fact. The good thing this year is we’re going to see what kind of team they put together real quick. I don’t think this is a playoff team yet.
i mean i came on here to post because i tripped over a club america tweet how our game went. and then every one of you shows up. hmmm.
I wrote the guy that made them on Twitter to get clarification, we'll see if he responds. I predicted last year they would be terrible before the season started. I wrote again after they got HH the team was still really bad. I wrote two years ago we didn't have a scouting or analytics department and we needed to revamp that, because no coach or GM was going to fix this organization. I do think Pat is trying, but i won't say he hasn't done anything. He just dumped 14,000 minutes played from last year and upgraded a couple of positions this year. He also added two guys that are going to look for Sebas instead of their own shot, as opposed to.....well everyone that played with Sebas last year. They'll be better, just don't know how much better. I wrote before we fired Tab this was probably a 5 year fix, and I still believe that. We might make the playoffs before then, but we're 5 years away from really contending for anything important.
Q: my deal is the kinnear era dynamo would not be fielding a team year 2 that looked anything like a scrubby year 1 debacle. my deal is the only recent playoff team was the 17 turnover team. my deal is it's not just signing interesting players in the abstract. it's them being better than who they replace. if you can DQ you have big shoes to fill, not just an abstract hole. if DQ wasn't playoffs you have to be better than DQ. my deal is it's comparative signing. if the payrolls in general go up, you need to go up +some if you start out behind. if you start off with trash you need to look at what some 4-7th place type team did and do one better. signing some people to sell tickets is insufficient.
Ok, I'll confess, Jessica O' Neill and Pat Onstad told me to get on to BigSoccer and start defending the team. I feel guilty that I took expired Orange Rewards points and a promise to be the first name listed on the new STH plaque in exchange for defending them on social media and message boards.
btw you're trying real real hard to focus on the graph label issue which is just gravy atop the basic minutes criticisms eg HH barely playing but not costing many minutes in the analysis, unreplaced swiss cheese holes. that's true whether dude comes back and says it's a typo. you badly want it to be nothing but a typo. you then neglect maybe a team this bad should be clear cutting the forest.
Uh, they just let go 17 players that were on the roster at some point last year, 177 starts, and over 14,000 minutes played. 2 of our top three goal scorers, 4 of our top 8 in assists, all gone. Basically every meaningful bench player from last year is gone, we got a new backup keeper, and we kept 1 FB from last year. We've basically turned this entire roster over the last two years.
Doubtful. Not with Franco at striker anyway. He's not a striker. Don't really have the depth on the roster either. Plus, you didn't just sign 4 wingers over the last two windows to play in a 4-4-2 diamond.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but if they line up in a 4-3-3 to start the season the flashbacks and PTSD are going to kick in. I was just trying to have some fun. Bassi has played more minutes at CAM than anywhere else, and Ivan Franco has played some second striker before. He's actually listed as a CF on Fifa lol. I don't think it'll be a 4-2-3-1, but we'll see.
I think you can also look at Onstad comments about these players to predict more or less how they are going to play. He's said Franco is a winger, Bassi can play winger or midfield. I don't put any stock in Fifa. I do put stock in Football Manager, which interestingly has Bassi as having two potential roles: center midfield and CAM.
I actually think we'll see a 4-3-3 (really a 4-1-4-1) with a 6 and two 8's. Bassi, Baird, and probably Quinones will cycle through on the right until we find the best 11. I still have questions over that position, but that's about the only one I have a question on right now other than who plays LB until Smith is ready to go.
as i explained, i think the statistic misleads. what part of we may start 7 or 8 old players are you confused about? "oh, but it's only 59% of the minutes. yes, because HH and some others didn't soak up many minutes while running the team into the ground in the fall. and then a LB they had planned into this season who hd 2nd most minutes demanded a trade to our playoff competitor up the road. and we haven't replaced him or even filled his position with anyone who can play. as we have not with some other swiss cheese areas i detailed. ie we dumped the minutes, "then what." fwiw brian's post is cutely worded "17 people who were on the roster at some point last year" including several players who were either traded last spring (eg jones), waived (pasher), loaned to USL (eg hoffmann), loaned to south america (eg bajamich), loaned to sweden (eg corona). thing being while he pads his count thusly he ignores the all but pasher were bench riders. ditto many of the options declined folks. the core problem here remains that we are very good at running off bench and reserves but glacial at altering the core. as such, i repeat, we may start most of last year's spine and as many as 7 or 8 holdover players. to then use either "minutes" or a mix of players who were gone in 2022 and the few dumped for 2023, to suggest some wholesale change, is just bullsh*t. sorry dudes but it's like you badly want black to be white. last winter with the 2 DPs, the buy out of a player, the U22s, that was when the real change could have happened. they responded by signing sebas without support, HH, extending steres, brought back DQ then canned him, etc. they don't have the nuts to do what it takes. it's really funny to try and spin it like they do because the back end of the roster shifts and they sign a couple attackers. the first 11 are the ones who play the games. try working on that. btw jones had 10 starts for charlotte last season coming mostly at the end of the season.
I would just like to say posting exact numbers aren't "Padding his count". That's just called "numbers". We'll see at a minimum new starters at LB, RB, DM, LW, and probably RW. We'll see at a minimum 3 new faces off the bench every game, especially in the midfield. I know that you would rather just throw the entire team in the garbage can, but I think there are only five guys here from the Matt Jordan Era. Hadebe, Baird, Dorsey, Bartlow and Nelson. Two of those guys are really cheap and young, one is your third keeper, the other is your best CB. That's a lot of turnover in basically one calendar year.
first off, the big sign you all are full of it is you attack me when i say decline more options. we can't cut that many JC. you now pretend we have cut a bunch of people by counting names who were traded, loaned away, etc. as early as spring 22 as supposed 23 cuts. spare me. second, in reality, by my count, we retained 17 players from last year plus promoted emergency loan player micael who also saw game time here. so that's 18 familiar faces when you're implying we have 20 changes. your math isn't adding up. the pretense we cut 20 people this winter is false and laughable. i wish. i argue for it every year. you folks say it's a bad idea. then you play word games to claim it's true when you want this to seem like a new team so you have an excuse to act like it deserves a break from accountability. or maybe the argument is new team all promise. i can't tell sometimes whether you are promising the world or just laying the groundwork for pat excuses. third, i might give them an accountability break if this sort of new GM takes over and runs it in the ground pattern wasn't already repeated before. i thought last year was the reset. so now pat says he was busy so this is the reset. or maybe the reset was 20. or 19. or 18. or 16. or 15. or 14. surely you see where at a point there maybe i should be free to think they just either lack resources or can't do the job right, or both. i don't think making the playoffs is this hard.
no, be honest and start listing names then. we will then see your count is "padded" by including players like corona, jones, etc. who weren't dynamo in 22 game 1 much less 23. no, you used a clever bit of wording where anyone on the roster nominally 1/1/22 counts even if they were gone 1/2/22 and never played a senior minute. otherwise, as i just explained, it's 17 of the 30 who ended last season here. and to emphasize something there, the false pretense being suggested is that we have been steadily working on the team and progressing while churning the roster. the reality is about every player we brought in beginning roughly zeca turned out to be junk -- HH, quinones, thiago, avila, etc. the reality is the team was far worse second half of the season last year, until the coach was fired in garbage time. i say this because i think you're arguing the same falsehood they are. we are going to put HH back in the lineup and take off. reality last year was it got worse when he came in and better when he was mothballed. i say that because your 1/1/22 analysis assumes we sailed off into the sky last season and i am being a jerk for insisting on season end roster change. because in reality anyone who watched the team and was fair minded would be like, woah, can we cut some of the people we signed last summer. that was not progress. that was regress. the whole story of last season was we patched something together after naga abandoned bunkering, but not good enough for playoffs, and when pat tried to rev the engine in the repair garage, he set it on fire and the season was over. what you're missing is we need fresh bodies from the point of october 10 -- when the season was over -- including a reversal of some 22 mistakes, not fake analysis that gives pat false credit for his blown 22 efforts. like it's almost double bookkeeping to count, say, both zeca and escobar. "that's 2 swaps, JC." kind of like thiago and quinones and co. how many times does he get credit for f*cking up the same hole? last point, a pattern of the last couple seasons has been to end up trading, cutting, or loaning players whose options were exercised the previous fall, a sign to me of our inability to properly evaluate, keep players happy, and set a consistent course. those people might show up in your analysis as "cuts" and you take credit but the funny thing is when the previous offseason ended they were "keepers" and yet 3 months later you end up having to reboot RB or LB or wing forward unplanned in the spring, the options are dramatically different. in reality, pat didn't fix any of it.
I have no problems posting guys like Jones, Corona, or your golden boy and savior at LB Ian Hoffman. Why? Because they were on the roster at the beginning of last year, and are now no longer on the roster. Also, you are amazing at putting words in other people's mouths to argue your point. That's a genuine compliment.
Just for everyone's benefit of what these forums look like if you have Juve on block, each page of a thread is like 4-5 posts long. I can't see your reply, Juve, and this will fall on deaf ears as it has been brought up to you a thousand times before by almost everyone on this board: but perhaps you could try and be more succinct like the rest of us. The fact that you post so many times that it means 4-5 posts per page in a thread if you're blocked is bordering (no, really it's way past) absurd.
there are 2 fundamental questions. what formation. and do we have a 10 within that formation. pat's words have been coco HH artur MF. that's 3 MF. that makes some variation on 433 4321 4312 451 likely. coco HH artur is two 8s and a 6. there is no room for a 10 unless we play like 6 mids or 1 forward then. this concerns me as i think that means the MF absolutely sucks, is meant to defend but can't, and that bassi isn't a 10, at least to start games. last year kind of screamed we needed some sort of 10 or trequartista or we were uncompetitive trash, a defensive team in a 433 who can't pitch a shutout. good luck. if that's the Ms, then you can have bassi and franco wide, but i think only one of them (franco) is an ok wing. bassi didn't look like a wing to me. he looked like a DQ replacement. and we need sebas to get service to maybe have DP value. the alternatives are do a trequartista thing or play with a single forward and a couple players beneath. the question then is does sebas need "wing help" ie specific type of service or would he work with closer help. question before that would be how to get the ball upfield if we lack a wide presence and have a fairly mediocre MF. and even that assumes 3 dedicated attackers are enough. i thought last season said otherwise. this is not italy. i think half our offensive problem since 20 has been the deterioration of attacking productivity, and since 17/18 the issue has been the lack of a 10. bassi as F doesn't help that. i think some of you are so eager for your toys -- setting aside the debate on their actual quality -- that you're not thinking like a soccer coach, in terms of how are they going to get the ball. one of the reasons i was really grouchy with HH and coco MF was i thought that MF was sloppy as heck. i don't understand their value. they don't defend well. they aren't setup men. we lose the MF battle routinely, teams transition right through us like butter, and i think they are overrated in their capacity to get the ball forward into dangerous spots to the right people. i think fairly mediocre mids can receive and play the ball to the flag. i was taught however that doing that over and over reflected some mix of lacking quality or lacking ideas. how about straight to goal? the USMNT reminded me of this the other day. i am not a sonora fan but he led vazquez with a pass in front of the CBs. it was almost startling because they so routinely just play it wide and cross. we too lack that direct element. if bassi is a F and not a M i think we still do, and i think the GF will stay down as long as this is a crossing team with mediocre wings crossing it. low percentage sh*t. though DQ was too old and not productive enough, it at least started to get interesting last season when we started going direct to goal. we have not had good 10 play since alex. we haven't had interior direct to goal since like dero or davis. does anyone need reminding those were the productive periods? if you liked the goals on tape where bassi weaves and fakes through the middle then shoots it in a corner, duh, it's a different angle to goal from out wide. i didn't see much of a burst. wide players need a way to separate. the routine problem wide last year was players who either couldn't separate (thiago, avila) or could but were sloppy on the ball (quinones). last point, key concern i have with pat & ben here is if you veer back in the game 1/2 2022 defensive direction it needs to hold up. i was skeptical before yesterday because we kept too many CBs. i think yesterday speaks for itself. per usual the excuse makers will say "but i can't tell who we played." i see hadebe and some other starters out there. if you want to play defense i kind of thing that chord is struck now, and we gave up 6 goals preseason. surely i don't have to explain from the ramos years or the periods when DQ was out last season, what it means if we have no 10, on the premise of team defense, and the team defense doesn't work. and you can say, ben will work on it, but in my experience good defenses are purpose built. like you sign the parts and then ben activates the tactical portion. if you activate the tactical portion without the parts you just have a team that wants to defend but can't. which, to me, the purpose of tactics is to play to strengths and not kid oneself. we keep hiring coaches for purposes then not staffing up the team to execute them. i. think this is what happens when one hires green GMs who just sign names. i wouldn't even mind if we made this into some super defensive counter team but you then need to do some hard personnel work to make this airtight. and we lazy.
last thing i give a f*ck about is how the board looks like if i am blocked by the user, thanks. i doubt you would give a sh*t shoe on other foot what your carbon footprint was. fake news. i think the point being missed is with limited exceptions i feel like i am carrying my viewpoint alone. there are not 10 like me essentially interchangeable with 3% different thoughts, which there are in support of the team despite being 13th place in 14 team conference. no one else is going to step in and offer a similar answer or help me out. and a lot of the discussion lately seems to be the pro team faction trying to shout down my reasoned criticism. of which i am the only expression. so i perhaps take on all comers since who else will bother. westie has been brain snatched. most of the other critics have probably either already given up or are on hiatus from caring about a bad team. otherwise i feel like some folks are pretty heavy on pro organizational propaganda and cherry pick stats for a team with our history and my estimate of how good this offseason really has been. i think you're eager to run me off. i think you don't care if meanwhile the games go 6-1 L. it's personal rather than soccer. as such, until i make a decision, i feel like i am defending one side of this by myself, against a badly deluded bunch of wishers, and i'll post as much as i think it needs. and i won't be pushed around until i make any decision i make. you don't get to be a good defender backing down from bullies. if you want fewer JC posts maybe either (a) be honest what you think instead of trolling me or (b) try to get the other critics to come back. i feel like my alternative is let people post "59% changed" or "20 players swapped" propaganda when i thought this team needed like 95% or 27 players gone. i exaggerate a tiny bit but not too much. i don't think some of you get how many little breakdowns and failures position by position someone like me sees. and then when i think we did more like a 33% churn from the end of october i have to listen to mr. cherry picked numbers pretend like the team is fundamentally different. then start most of the same people. not letting that go. the old guard deserves this. the old team does. i'll defend it if no one else will.
last point, if you wanted me quieter maybe nod your head with me once in a while like honest people. i think one guy did that this week. for comparison, brian will make some postseason post like this needs the same churning i say it does, but he won't follow through to the individual personnel decisions, and he'll even pull this "59%" or "20 player" stuff to try and make white into black. if the change had already happened that you claim in the numbers then we wouldn't need more work. the pretzeled nature of it makes me take it personally. i think you really believe closer to what i do but have decided to go after me playing number games even if you're contradicting your own previous arguments or their spirit. you have done similar things with xG or the like before. let's pretend the offense is secretly great. to me what this team needs, if the coach/GM are not hair trigger and clear eyed, is honest fan feedback, not trolling and personal attacks when someone really believes the exact opposite. you wouldn't be posting "59%" or "20" if you also post how much change we need. not in the same blog post at least. you're just spinning in the moment to go after me. stick to dealing with reality.
get down to it, my issue is this. the one year in roughly a decade when they put together a playoff team, you could tell around xmas. the other years, it's not like with us a point above the line or below some key guy goes down clutching a knee and that's bad luck. or the ball bounces wrong or a ref misses a call on decision day. like we repeatedly just aren't good enough. it's over months before decision day. over and over. as such i think it's bullsh*t or blowing smoke to be backpatting them about 41% change or 20 players churned when reality is they finished 13th and need a ton more. when reality is you agree with me this isn't good enough and needs more. we haven't even put together teams where luck or injury is a factor, just not even competitive. i don't think bs'ing about it for the purpose of attacking the messenger you don't like, helps that or us. to me our personnel effort seems to be annualized and insufficient. as such if they are going to do most of what little work they do, now, then now is when to be yelling it's not good enough. them/you figuring it out in august, it's already over. i don't think i'd be this loud right now if i felt like there was more continuous effort, academy/HGP/HD2 coming up, strong summers, constant building. if all the effort comes now and we routinely underresource or underestimate then this is the only time to hope they hear and fix the mess. i have taken some crap in recent years for focusing more on personnel and stats but my deal is i think the teams are usually fundamentally rotten in some way, ceiling is either at the red line or below if coached by alex ferguson much less who we actually hire. i watch the games and occasionally bother to break down what i see but when you make the same mistake 10 times a season, game film isn't the answer, it's someone's little flex to post xs and os when what they need is heads rolling, and it's really a personnel matter or HC/GM decision. it should be discussed as such and only protects the HC/GM to treat as individual mistakes and break down game film. you have to be competitive for game film to matter. i find the culture discussion amusing because based on what i have seen we try hard but just suck. you can't hit that with a cattle prod and motivate it more. they try hard enough. you just need different players. and the incrementalists constantly fight it. it's funny to see the incrementalists quoting cherry picked churn numbers. the real problem is HH f*cks up 22 and is back 23 for $4-5m more like nothing happened. deluded it's better year 2.
last last point, i see a key issue here as we do not admit enough mistakes or undo them when we notice. and the fanboys mirror this back by acting like they don't do that much wrong, or are on the right track just pedaling slowly. we haven't used our buyout as far as i can tell, an ironic decision considering some fans' emphasis on expiration dates. that's the easy way to resolve that concern. why? a buyout costs. for all the talk about resources, we don't seem willing to pay a little more, off cap and just as a team expense, to simply make mistakes leave. we won't eat the acquisition costs of coco, we seem ironically bound to expensive veteran misfires, and we'd rather trade parker and owe 1/2 salary for 2 years instead of just void his deal, and go have lunch. why? because many of those scenarios involve paying money. i don't think we want to pay any more than we have to. thus we carry a variety of bad deals years longer than makes sense, or if we used various tools, would even show up on the cap. we will also often keep GMs or coaches a second or third year when one year should have said enough. same story, you'd owe 2 GMs money the next year. they'd rather owe 1 even at competitive expense. anyhow, i don't think the incrementalists have put 2+2 together on why it happens so slow. that's what happens when you carry more deals to term or to an option. and while perhaps justified by some on here as expense-averse "business" it's indefensible as "soccer." the product has spoken for itself on the soccer impact of the cost averse approach. people will now point to payrolls or something and ignore that austin or FCD not only spend more payroll but also on "off cap" expenses that won't show up in roster payrolls -- as they are being offloaded -- they will spend what it takes to get rid of people too. it's 2 differences not just the payroll disparity.