Without cheating, try and guess who is top of the castrol index for the Crew. Bonus question, are they in the castrol index top ten?
I love the fact that 2 forwards we jettisoned are in the top 10, and above our highest ranking player. Hell, Kei is THIRD. And Lenhart is 8th.
By the metric of points-to-minutes, keep an eye on Josh Williams. And Vukovic too. They have a fairly decent points-to-minutes ratio.
That's beside the point. At that time, Kei wasn't what that team needed, BC was. And it worked. What the idiots have done since is irrelevant. Besides, Kamara is on his third team since that trade.
Understandable. It helped us at that time, but now, we sure could use Kei up top. Heck, I'm pining for the days of Jason Garey
The index does seem to weigh forwards highly, at least in the top ten 8 are forwards, and only 2 defenders.
ok, I will give it to you. Yes Vargas is #9 overall, and #1 in our hearts in the Crew. That Ole Man Vargas.
Brian Carroll will forever be the Shootout Shanker to me. The Columbus Crew Castrol Index starting XI (6 - 3 - 1) Gruenebaum Miranda - Marshall - Williams - Gehrig - Francis - Vukovic O'Rourke - Mirosevic - Urso OnlyMan Vargas
Brian Carroll will forever be one the most important players of the best MLS Cup team of all time to me.
In the BC case, he wasn't willing to play the Brian Ching card and threaten to retire. They thought he was untouchable due to his salary in the expansion draft. Turns out he wasn't, so they decided to get *something* for him rather than nothing. The whole thing was complicated by Lenhart wanting a trade after the expansion draft. The main culprit here is the expansion draft, where the Crew have gotten s*rewed on a regular basis. Houston should have been fined for the game they played with the Ching case.
Part of the problem is too many decisions made with heart and not head. He shanked a PK. SO EFFING WHAT. You don't get rid of, or not protect, your best Dmid for not hitting a PK in the playoffs. Donovan shanked one in MLS Cup and didn't go un-protected. It's just another example of the stupid freaking decisions that get made with heart and not head around here.
I really doubt they got rid of him just because of one play. I think the move was made partially because Carroll was (and is) getting older, and the assumption was that he would be losing a step and wouldn't be as effective. Remember the 2010 playoffs when that notorious speedster Pablo Mastroeni ran right by him on a Colorado goal? Carroll was a good player and an important part of our best team ever. He isn't the same player he used to be, though, and he wasn't last season either. At this point, I think it's a toss up between him and Balchan (even though being gone for a while has apparently turned Balchan into another one of the whipping boys around here. We have short memories.) The only difference is that Carroll is healthy and Balchan isn't. We traded Lenhart at his request. We got Meram and cash in return. Not a bad deal. When we traded him, the general BS mood was that we weren't sorry to see him gone (even though he led the team in goals across all competitions the previous year).
If BC wasn't the "same player he used to be", then why did we and the league sign him for 4 more years in the middle of that season? The guy is only 30 years old right now, hardly old enough to be declining in skill set... and he would have been 28 or 29 at that time.