Based on GD, you would figure they would have a good record. It's pretty shocking how big the difference is.
It was a combination of one Fire mistake and the rinky-dink pub-league-sized rosters that magnified a horrendously unlucky injury situation. The Fire can be blamed for signing a near-useless Hristo to a guaranteed contract that completely limited our options once the number of missed game-minutes started going from the insane to the surreal. Beyond that, all you can do when Armas, Nowak, Whitfield and Wolff all get hurt and even your bench players can't play (how do you anticipate Jason Moore missing games for ---- wait for it----- appendicitis?) is throw up your hands and say "Next year." The team is built around Armas and Nowak. We can miss one of them and still be competitive but missing BOTH for most of the season just killed us in a season filed with gameday lineup chaos. If any other team in MLS had lost the same number and quality of game minutes lost to injury and call-ups as the Fire, they'd have been knocked out of play-off contention by late July.
Agreed. That said, the 11 we put on the field are/were still responsible for producing. Beginning in early to mid August our forwards couldn't find the net and our defenders/goalie couldn't hold late game leads to save their lives. Many of our woes are due to an unbelievable number of injuries. Some of it though is due to mediocre players who never had the chemistry/time to gel. I think we'll see a big (for the Fire) housecleaning this offseason.
I think the roster chaos caused by the call-ups and injuries has caused any "underperformance" by whatever 11 we've cobbled together for any particular game. Even if you have very talented individuals, soccer is even more of a team game than many sports. So when you can't put together a stable lineup from week to week, you're going to be at a disadvantage to even a theoretically slightly less talented team who has been able to play all their games together with minimal disruptions to their lineup. Also, let's face it, Nowak, Armas and Wolff (and even Whitfield not to mention Hristo) are the core of an MLS Cup contender unless they're surropunded by some real losers. To have ALL these guys ripped out of your lineup is a body blow few MLS teams could even hope to deal with. Let's see how well the Galaxy would do if Ruiz, Lalas and Jones all sat out most of the season and Victorine, Cienfuegos and Glinton all spent significant time either with the US Nats or on the IR list.
What I'm getting at is this. If you told me that an MLS team would score 41 and allow only 37 I would bet anything that they'd make the playoffs And yet, here they are, in 9th place. It might not look so good, 41-37, but it really is a good GD. You could possibly make the playoffs in MLB with that kind of spread. If you're a baseball nut, that works out to a pythagorean winning % of .551 (or an 89 win season). Soccer is a bit more complicated, of course, but to the idea that Chicago is 9 out of 10 with that kind of performance is extremely surprising. Chicago has won only 3 one goal games while losing 8. Ouch! Games decided by 2 or more goals: .583 Games decided by one goal: .273
I wouldn't feel so bad about his considering that when he has played, until this year, he's been the best MLS player. It's staggering how well he's played: 2000-2001: 1,903 15 12 1.28 This year he has been mediocre and missed a ton of minutes, but compare that with Etch, who has been mediocre for three years now, especially the last two, taking up a ton of salary.
The trouble is he has barely played this season or last. I don't care if a player is the second coming of Maradonna, if he only plays two games a season for you he can rack up the highest "goals per minute" average in soccer history for those two games and it won't mean dick to your season standings. Hristo was spectacular in his first year with us but he's been pretty much dead weight since then. The Hristo apologists will point out the development work he's done with DMB (we won't go into how much he has or has not helped Dema) but if 90% of his worth to the Fire is from his coaching, fine, make him a coach so we can get the salary cap room back to get players who will, y'know, like actually PLAY! Of course, if we hadn't had everyone except Sparky the Firedog out injured, Hristo's disapparing act while costing us the league max wouldn't be so big an issue. But when you can't get decent replacement players because you have this big white elephant sitting on your bench, suddenly you're having to call up A-Leaguers just to avoid forfeiting games.
keep in mind that there are other international players who are also pulling in max salaries too...I'm not a Hristo fan by any stretch, but at the same time, I do realize that as far as the salary cap goes, Peter's contract (and the 2 months he misses every year) go a long way towards putting the clamps down on the Fire's player salary space.
2001 Nowak: 1560 minutes played Hristo: 916 minutes played 2002 Nowak: 1288 minutes played Hristo: 660 minutes played
who would you rather have, Hristo or Waldo and Diego. We killed ourselves with this deal. This hurt our depth. Then we get Moore, Vaud, and Orlando Perez to fill in? Hard to say underachievers when most guys don't even play (Wolff, Armas, ect...) and with the Bulgarian Albatross.
Funny, I still enjoy watching Hristo play. As for the G/D, it was absurd right before our 4 game losing streak. We are still a top tier team in this league, injuries and all. If we started the season with the team we have now and (magically) suffered no injuries, we'd do very well. We'll 'gel' by Sunday and play hard throughout the playoffs. Both rounds.
Putting this year aside, I see a guy that basically gave you the best year in MLS history, but spread it over two years. That's a damned good deal. He was not deadweight last year. He played 916 minutes and with 6 G and 5 A. You would prefer he played 2000 minutes like many others and accomplish no more?? You guys are lucky as hell to have got the guy.
2001 (27 game reg. season) and 2002 reg season (to date): Total Minutes played for the team: 2430 1288/2430 = 53%. 1560/2430 = 64% Sure, they're better numbers than Hristo's but they're not exactly the greatest themselves.
Hristo's 2001 Goals: PK vs. Dallas 7/21 PK vs. L.A. 5/30 2 goals vs. K.C. in heavy mop up time chip in goal vs. Colorado 7/14- legit goal legit goal at Tampa on 7/7 So, he didn't score for us after July 21st, he had 2 PK goals, and 2 mop up goals, and 2 "legitimate" goals. Not exactly stellar.
I care about assists as much as goals, but good point about the PKs. They really F up the calculations. I should be taking them out. Most definitely. It still is a great year on a per minute basis. Add to that 2000 (yes, we'll take away his PKs, still a killer year- and the playoffs!) and he's a great deal.
No it's not when you consider we could have gotten two players who probably would have contributed more (not necessarily just goals) and helped ease the injury crisis while Hristo was picking bench splinters out of his ass. We were lucky for one year and then we should have thanked him from the great memories and let him go. Hirsto's cost/benefit ratio has helped kill us this year. Sure, he wasn't the only factor but his salary's presence and his lack of playing time made a bad situation so much worse. Like I said, you can have a sky-high goals/minute average but it means diddly-squat if the number of minutes you play is so small that you're a non-factor over the season. If Hristo could play even Nowak's minutes, he might be worth his price assuming he produced 2000-like numbers. But he plays only a bit over half the minutes Peter plays and he hasn't been able to contribute that much in the little time he HAS been on the pitch. The bottom line is that while Hristo can still occasionally pull an entertaining play out of his ass, his positive qualities are not worth the costs of keeping him on our bench for 3/4 of a season. We need guys who can contribute week in and week out over the majority of a whole season. Hristo can't do this anymore, even if nobody hacks him like they do Nowak.
Let's see the record after the 79th minute: 4/27 - FIRE give away 2 points on 83rd minute goal & crap line call in OT. One defeat. Minus two points. 6/2 - FIRE get Boca winner at 80 minutes to beat Crew 5-4. One win and one defeat. Even. 6/22 - MetroScum get 81st minute winner from Faria. One and two. Minus 1 points. 7/4 - FIRE snatch defeat from the jaws of victory from Carrieri 82nd & 88th minute strikes. One and three. Minus 4 points. 7/7 - Vaudreuil bags OT winner in Rapids rematch. Two and three. Minus 2. 7/13 - Another OT winner from Beasley against MetroScum. Three wins, three losses. Even. 8/10 - Kreis' 89th minute winner & O'Brien stoppage time insurance. Three and four. Minus 1. 8/18 - Sidebar: Razov scores in the 31st minute. It's the last goal by the FIRE's top salary making frontrunners spanning 420 minutes of play. 8/24 - The Revs begin their late season run with an 89th minute winner from Kante. Three and five. Minus 2. 8/31 - Brown's 90th minute winner for Wizards means no road points against the West in 2002. Three and six record. Minus 3. 9/7 - Ruiz brace (79 & 87 minutes) snatches defeat from the jaws of victory yet again. Three and seven record. Minus 6 points and a minus 7 GD. Call it what you want, I call it spitting the bit down the stretch. Throw in the two home draws against the worst team in the league (DC) and those lost points are the difference between coasting the last few weeks before the playoffs and fighting for our lives. Luck be damned, I say underachievers. The points were in the bag.
If we had a healthy Nowak, Armas and Wolff in our lineup all season, do you really think we'd have gotten the same results? I don't .
So I take it you think the Fire are just as good a team without Nowak, Wolff and Armas as with them. So we should just get rid of them next year to make salary cap, right, because our bench is "good enough"?
Good Lord, we are back to the same old bitch fest while ignoring all of the FACTS. Give me one good reason why you continue to separate out Stoitchkov, and then lump everyone else into the "wow, its unfortunate we got hit be all these injuries" pile. Hristo was doing just fine, thank you, until the smelly little fish hacked him down. ANY player in the same position faced a long term injury from that hack. If you have ever played the game, and I work on the assumption that most people on here have, then you know that injuries come with the territory. How many minutes has Waldo played for Charleston this year? How about Evan, Josh, Chris Armas, Daniv, Santino Quaranta, John Spencer, Tab Ramos (ok, so that one is a running joke), and on and on and on. Josh is a good comparison. He has missed a ton of games throughout is Fire career while continuing to rise up the salary charts. He has had a hernia (like Hristo), he has had long term knee injuries (like Hristo), but he is young. There is no way to tell if ANY player is going to be healthy throughout a season. Sure you can look at a players injury history when constructing your roster, however, Hristo did not have a history of injuries or missed games before last year. Josh did. There was no reason to think that Hristo was a greater injury threat than Wolff this year, and unfortunately, we will never know how he would have held up without being hacked down. I would join in with those who would say that ALL of our injuries have been unfortunate, and have led to our current plight, but I have never been able to figure out the venom certain "supporters" spew at Stoitchkov. There, I'm going over to the "I love the Fire" thread.
To answer your questions, no and no. Other than Armas (a big part, mind you) and Whitfield the defense has been relatively intact this season. Can depth make a difference late in the game? Sure, but defenders are seldom subbed out anyways. A good team closes the game out. We were pretty good at that the first four years, and suck this year. These guys are professionals and they need to play like professionals for 90 minutes.