We haven’t had much success without Jack….ever: Courtesy of stats genius @_EmilioGonzalez. The #Rapids96 points-per-game totals with/without Jack Price since he arrived in 2018:Regular SeasonPPG w/Jack Price making an appearance: 1.49PPG w/o Price: 0.91All comps (USOC, CCL + Playoffs)PPG w/ Jack: 1.42PPG w/o Jack: 0.86— Brendan Ploen (@BrendanPloen) March 20, 2023
You know...if losing 1 guy basically KO's your season 4 games in, I'm pretty sure that means someone fv<ked up when building the roster. Sure, losing an important player will impact a team, but it shouldn't as catastrophic as this seems to be. At this point you have to hope the healthy guys step up, cuz lord knows we can't count on transfers to fix it.
Agreed. I’ll just say that losing Capt Jack is more than his on-field production, it’s his leadership and what he means to many of these younger players. It’s especially devastating when you have a roster devoid of any real leaders. Maxso could be it but he’s new and it takes a while to gain the trust of everyone.
I think this hole, at least from a leadership and motivation stand point, could be filled by Cole Bassett. Local kid comes back to the Rapids and puts the team on his back? Yeah, I could see that. The question is, can Cole?
Building off of these numbers, I figured it would be worthwhile to look at the numbers under Fraser alone (throwing out Hudson and Casey games). In games which Jack logged at least 1 minute - it's pretty enlightening to say the least. 2019 - with Jack we saw 2.5ppg, and without we saw 0ppg (Jack missed 1 out of the 7 games under Fraser to close out 2019) 2020 - with Jack we saw 1.635ppg, without Jack we saw 1.0ppg (2 games missed) 2021 - with Jack was 1.87ppg, and without was 1.25ppg (4 games missed) 2022 - with Jack was 1.47ppg, and without was 1.06ppg (17 games missed) 2023 - we're at 0.0ppg with, and 0.5ppg without Overall under Fraser? We're at 1.72ppg with Jack Price playing. Without Jack on the field, we're at 1.04ppg. That's an insane difference. So, uh, I guess its also fair to address the elephant in the room as well.... Rapids under Casey / Hudson without Jack - 0.92ppg Rapids under Fraser without Jack - 1.04ppg So - building off of this thought, as well as looking at these numbers over the last few seasons - Price certainly seems to make or break this team. The question then becomes....Is Fraser really that great of a coach, and Padraig really that incompetent at bringing Fraser talent? Or is Padraig bringing in talent, and Fraser just can't utilize it. Or is it a combination of both? Looking at the Rapids ppg under Casey / Hudson compared to Fraser when Price doesn't play, does NOT bring me confidence that Fraser has raised the bar for the team without our 'Talisman' any. I'm honestly shocked to see that it's that close from purely a ppg perspective.
My son tore his Achilles playing adult rec soccer, also untouched. Awful injury. Brutal rehab. Not sure someone Price’s age can pull it off, or will even want to. Heartbreaking for the guy and team. Let’s face it, we’re playing this year for next year. Try to get the Yappi’s and Markanich’s experience for next year. Might as well play the new keeper too.
What happens if you compare Hudson (without Casey) to Fraser. How much is Casey's good run in 2019 propping up Hudson here? Personally I think these numbers don't reveal as much as some think. We know Hudson was trash. We know that Casey had a good run, but was unable to carry that into another job in Charleston. Fraser was able to keep this team humming for 2+ years and really only started to struggle when a combination of injuries and wasted transfer windows (Smith) hit the team. The league has taken huge steps forward in quality since the pandemic started, but the Rapids have not. The Rapids not being able to compete week in and week out against that greater quality isn't on Fraser.
So the numbers on a ppg basis if you separate Casey from Hudson: Hudson 2018 w/ Price - 0.87ppg; w/o Price - 1ppg (Price missed 3 games) Hudson 2019 w/ Price - 0.25ppg - then fired Casey 2019 w/ Price - 1.69ppg; w/o Price - 0.75ppg (price missed 4 games) So regardless of who's coaching, Price brings up the PPG pretty dramatically. Yes, Fraser without Price is still better than either Casey or Hudson (and with a larger sample size), but still no where near competitive. We're basically settling for less stinky poo instead of really stinky poo when Price isn't out there. I'm not saying Fraser isn't a good coach. I just find it terribly inconvenient that no one has been able to bring the Rapids to a competitive level when ONE player goes missing, and then when that one player is healthy, we are improved dramatically. Which brings us to.... Sounds an awful lot like a certain someone saying “fighting at the bottom with a bottom group of players” Hudson must be a prophet or something! LOL
Yeah, but Hudson was before the pandemic quality shift, as Casey and Fraser proved. Seriously though, I brought up this point last week. What was the last addition to the Rapids that's on the current roster and has been more than just an average MLS player for a significant period of time in Colorado? Barrios in '21? Yarbrough in '20? That's a long time for a team to go without bringing in a quality player.
I said this on Jan 13 during an optimistic vein on the off-season thread. “ I do worry that Price is getting old.” As I’m clearly brilliant I say in Fraiser I mostly trust in part cause we will never get somebody better.
When The Athletic put out its article crunching the anonymous survey data of all GMs and Head Coaches, Padraig Smith got a few votes as "most underrated GM in the league." I confess that for a couple years I also believed that we had a real "diamond in the rough" of a GM. But I'm getting totally pulled into @Quinn 33 's camp on this question. The success St. Louis is having with a brand new team and a modest budget stands in very stark contrast to what Padraig has accomplished.
Padraig Smith runs the Rapids on a starvation budget and has to find players that other teams don't want. It's obvious that he's not allowed to spend real money on good players. Proven goal scorers are available but they cost cost mucho money. Sometimes Padraig has gotten lucky grubbing around in the bargain basements but this is a miserable way to build a team. I respect what Smith has been able to do but I wouldn't want his job. If given a reasonable selection of players, Fraser has shown he can produce good results. Is it his fault that this team is barely above USL quality? I would challenge anybody to put a better selection of players on the pitch from this roster. The unfortunate thing is that Robin Fraser will be the guy fired if things don't improve and the problems are not his fault. That brings us to the real problem and I'm surprised that his name hasn't been mentioned more--Stan Kroenke. To me, it looks like Stan (or whatever member of his family is pretending to run things) doesn't want a soccer team and is unwilling to spend the money necessary to make it successful. The Kroenke organization gives the league 30% of attendance and runs the team on all the free players (salaries paid by the league) and the various forms of Garber cash. Throw in concessions, sponsorships, occasional player sales, etc. If it breaks even, they're happy. They don;t want it to get better. It's almost like they're giving a middle finger to the league.
As others have been saying lately, the biggest growth potential for the league is not in expanding, but in actually succeeding in some of the legacy markets: New York, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Dallas...
Nah, this lets Smith off the hook far too much. It wasn't KSE's starvation budget that caused Smith to trade both Acosta and Kaye for piles of GAM he didn't reinvest in the team successfully. It wasn't a lack of funds that led Smith to trade for a DP that hasn't succeeded in MLS and now can't even win a starting role on a bad Rapids team (and oh, by the way, also bought the Galaxy out of their fine and inability to sign a new DP due to a transfer ban). Kroenke has blame, absolutely, but Smith put this roster together poorly after raiding a roster he build well for GAM.
I don't respect him at all. He's arrogant and thinks he's the smartest person in the room, despite demonstrating pretty poor knowledge of the game. Here is the thing about the Kroenke argument; KSE has always been cheap (something he's been aware since before Paul Bravo was even fired). If you can manage to get a good team under those constraints, you should hang on to it. He had one and did the opposite of that. He thought he could just keep hitting home runs, when now it seems pretty evident him landing a good roster was mostly down to luck and benefiting from two major academy products maturing at the right time. The latter part of the 2021 season and its aftermath are really the most infuriating thing about Smith's tenure. We had a good team and he liquidated first 11 players that were instrumental to that season (Basset, Vines, Trusty, Acosta) as well as important bench guys (Kaye, Mezquida), all in a relatively short span of time. Moreover, the absence of their contributions didn't seem to be considered until after they were all gone. A smart GM would have either made sure replacements were secured before the fire sale, or they would've spaced out the departures of these guys so you had ample time to plan and integrate new players. I get letting young guys go to Europe when the opportunity arises, but the Acosta sale to LAFC was insanely terrible. On the net of that deal (since the GAM went to waste), we essentially handed a national team caliber player to another MLS club (in the same conference no less) for basically nothing. Couple that destruction of the 2021 roster to the failed acquisitions of guys that were supposed to be significant replacements and it only looks worse; Zardes, Gutiérrez, Priso, Nicholson, Vallecilla, Max, Bryan Acosta, Esteves, and Cabral. Even if the deal looked fine on paper at the time, none of these guys have passed the eye test. On top of that, Padraig literally slept on two critical transfer windows (Winter 21/22 and Summer 22) that would have gone a long way to boosting the squad. Never mind the numerous times we've heard "We were close to signing X". He's not a shrewd planner or a true moneyball guy. He's a guy that won once while gambling on the nickel slots, and keeps playing in the hopes he'll strike it rich again. tl;dr He had a good team, didn't know what to do with it, and has no idea how to find one again.
I'm just not totally convinced that Smith would sell off every salable player on the team unless he was asked to do it by someone higher up the food chain. Perhaps the Kroenke organization saw an opportunity to finally take some money back from what had been (to them) a useless property. The team took in quite a bit of money from transfers and the deals they did afterwards didn't seem to spend much of it. JasonMa, maybe you should ask Padraig why he did it at the next opportunity. I would be interested to hear what he has to say.
The money he got from trading off those assets (Kaye, Acosta, etc.) can’t be taken out of the club by KSE, and MLS pays their salaries so there’s not even a savings there. The only move that would have allowed KSE to take money out of the club was the sale of Vines and it’s been reported that the $1M a club can reinvest from a sale was used on Max. There’s no benefit to KSE with the moves that were made.
On to recovery! Surgery went fantastically well! 🙏🏼 massive thank you to Dr Metzl and @RachelFrankMD 💙 road to recovery starts now!! ⚽️💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/wOtpmwUTTa— Jack Price (@jacko_8) March 22, 2023
Strange injury. With a lot of surgeries, they have you walk on it immediately. Not Achilles. You can’t do anything.
I get that a lot..... Got into the MLS in 2009. July 18th, 2009 I went to the Rapids match in DC. Went with a friend who had free tickets and didn't really care about soccer. Went and decided to pull for the Rapids. And that's how it was born