With the departure of Petter Villegas, if I'm putting this together correctly, we have this situation: 1. Mark Lisi is drafted in the first round, third overall, ahead of Ryan Nelson and Q1. 2. Craig Zaidie is drafted in the 3rd round, 28th overall. 3 Lisi and Zaidi are traded to the Metros for Perez and Villegas. 4. Perez is traded to the Fire for what turns out to be the 4th pick in the second round. 5. Villegas goes for nothing. Ergo: we've effectively traded a third overall pick for a 14th overall pick, and a 28th overall pick for nothing. Remember when DCU personnel folks (Payne and Arena) picked up Steve Rammel from the local Washington Mustangs, traded him to Colorado for Roy Wegerle and traded Wegerle to Tampa (?) for the league's leading scorer, Rocket Roy Lassiter, and we got 18 goals a season out of him before we had to let him go for Chris Alright? I think all bad things began to happen with the arrival of Albright.
Kevin Payne both blessed and cursed this team. For all the good moves (brilliant, in fact) he made, there were an equal number of bonehead moves. But that is the nature of the beast. I think the structure of MLS breeds gambling GMs. You have so little control over the development, retention, and acquisition of players that you must take extreme risks with trades and drafting. Overall, I will say that the scouting (mostly since the Albright move) is where DC has gone wrong. I'm willing to place some of that blame on Onalfo and a lot on Rongen. If you recall, after the Lassiter acquisition Ray said, in effect, that he relied on "other" people to judge Roy and that in retrospect it was a mistake. I'm willing to bet that Onalfo was one of those "other" people. Tim
What did we give up for him? I don't remember. I know we gave up Lassiter for Albright. The word was that Chris, in his first season, plus AJ Wood would combine for Roy's 18 goals. The rest is history. In fact, didn't the desparation resulting from Albright's not working out contributed to bringing back RDA?
The other thing to look at is how much Lisi and Zaidie are contributing, and how much would they be contributing if we held on to them? Zaidie's a great guy but he's short for a defender and we're deep at that spot now. The great midfield experiment w/him never panned out either. And Lisi may be one of the biggest disappointments in the history of the league, and that's a long list for such a short history. Q2 and salary space looks better and better.
I've got to disagree very strongly with the basic premise of this thread. 1. Most youth players don't amount to much. Most youth players don't develop. That's borne out by the experience in the USA and also studies of WC youth stats and in England as well. For every Maradona (who was a youth star) you get a Nat Brusilhof or Mike Slivinski-except about 10 of them for everyone 1 who makes it as a very good investment. That wouldn't be that much of an issue except that MLS teams don't have reserve sides. So you don't invest in 10 Albrights (and maybe one pans out to make the first team), instead you invest in 1 Albright and must use him or give up on him. 2. Arena said it in year 1 with MLS--the basic talent was the same but the teams who got top performance from their stars--that was the difference. In 2001, SJ won it all. They weren't that different (in terms of personnel) from the side that was crap in 2000. But they got great performance from their star/key players and everyone else stepped up. I'm not even sure if LA would have made the playoffs if Ruiz had stayed in Guatemala (that team might have given us a run for the record of fewest goals scored this year). DC United has been a team where the past 3 years, our marquee players have not been at the top of their game. I realize it's a team game but when you've got a guy who scores 15-20 goals or a schemer who owns the midfield on attack, it makes everyone else better. 3. Let's suppose that we'd kept Lisi and Ziadie. Heck, let's suppose we hadn't chosen Lisi--that we'd gone for Vaca or that Ali Curtis (chosen #2) had dropped to our slot instead. This team wouldn't have performed that different than it did this year.
While I would agree with you to a certain degree on Curtis (although if he had been with DC United for two years things may have been a little different as he does have heart, attitude and courage). I would have to respectfully disagree with you on Vaca. Vaca's attitude and character is very different from Lise & Ziadie, and this team may have performed very differently than it did this year.
I don't disagree that evaluating talent is a difficult job -- but that's what GMs and coaches are paid to do, and IMHO it is fair to evaluate them on that basis. I'm not saying we should have kept Lisi and Ziadie -- I'm saying maybe we picked wrong in the first place in taking them. Selecting good personnel is critical for any team, and wasting limited resources on players that don't pan out is just that -- a waste. True, to a degree it is inevitable, just as missed goals and goals given up are inevitable. But we judge keepers who give up goals and forwards who can't finish on the basis of performance. We should judge those whose job it is to select talent on the basis of their performance as well. I think DC United has slipped in recent years in this department. As to San Jose, wasn't Agoos an addition in 2001? He added something there.
I need to disagree with you here Jose. I saw Vaca play a few times and he has great skill on the ball but at times was totally out of the game and contributed little. Sometimes good, sometimes not. He also benefitted from Dallas having a strong midfiled with Pereja and Martinez taking pressure off him. He is good but would have made little or no difference to us this year.
I think Joselito Vaca is a fine player with a good future. Having said that, he's basically an outside midfielder with Dallas and (to me anyway) hasn't shown enough consistency to warrant playing in the middle. So, to add him to our side means displacing either Olsen or Convey--neither of which I see him doing. Bottom line: this team had trouble this year b/c (a) we could finish; (b) at times our playing in the attacking third was inept; (c) our play in the middle of the park (attacking midfield, holding/defensive midfield) wasn't dominant and oftentimes was weak; (d) the team tended to be submissive on the road (especially the first half of the year).
I think there is just a little bit of bitter fruit when it comes to the subject of Albright. Lassiter had some great production when he was here. But as I remember, AJ Wood and Albright combined DID match Lassiter's stats for the subsequent year. It's just that Rocket Roy didn't come anywhere near close to 18 goals. Lost in all the bitterness about Albright and he's finishing futility is: (a) Roy Lassiter was a wildly streaky player (here and in TB) who generated some great results in some years but never showed the all-around game and skill to impress a lot of people. Just look at how little of a trial both Sampson and Arena gave him with the National side. (b) Roy was screaming for a salary increase (and probably would have been moved anyway at the end of that season). Imagine what would have had to happen to keep Lassiter (if we hadn't acquired Albright--if he'd gone overseas). My take is that in order to keep Lassiter, we'd have had to up his salary to near the MLS max. That would have meant dumping Agoos a year earlier than we did. Albright was a big disappointment. Tall, fast, skilled and never put it together on the field. But blaming him for stuff makes about as much sense as claiming the downfall of the franchise is due to Jason Moore.
For about a six to eight week period in the middle of the season, Vaca was Dallas' best offensive player. He trailed off at the end as the length of the season may have had an effect on his first full year as a starter (he's 19 after all). The only reason he doesn't play in the middle is because Pareja is the field general in Dallas.
Lassiter scored 18 goals for us in both the 1998 and 1999 seasons. In 2000, AJ scored 3 and Chris scored 3. Pete Marino (remember him?) outdid them both, scoring 4 in a partial season. And so did RDA in his second coming, scoring 5. Put them all together -- 15 -- they don't equal what Lassiter did in each of the two previous seasons.
Ignatz--this is a perfect example of what I mean by the earlier point about bitterness around Albright clouding a larger perspective. For most of 2000, AJ and Albright were OUTSCORING Lassiter. He finished with a flourish to end up with....8 goals. Which means that Pete Marino and RDA in combination outscored Lassiter. Lassiter had some great years. And, he nearly sat out 1999 b/c of his salary demands (Payne promised him a big salary raise for 2000). He did sit out part of 2000 b/c of money. I believe (and I think it's an incredibly realistic position) that for Lassiter to remain with United in 2000, we'd have had to up his pay significantly--to the MLS max or just below it. That would have meant jetisoning Agoos for 2000--a year earlier. Or a combination of frontline players (like Llamosa and Olsen). I also believe that just b/c Lassiter had two good seasons before that (1998 and 1999), that does not mean he'd have had the equivalent in 2000. I think we can pretty much agree that Etcheverry had a terrible season in 2000. We know at least three things from Lassiter's track record: (1) he's incredibly streaky in terms of his goal scoring--has good years and gut-wrenchingly bad years; (2) without outstanding service, he does nothing; (3) his performance has degraded each season since his inaugural year with MLS when he and El Pibe were the most feared offensive tandem in the league. Even when his goals scored went up, bottom line is the league keeps getting better (individual talent and team play) and his game doesn't get better. And we do know the kind of season Lassiter had in 2000. He held out for more money and then came back and stunk until the very end of the season. At mid-season, AJ and Albright were outscoring Lassiter (it was something like 3 goals to 2 as I recall but my memory of that terrible season has been mostly flushed from my mind so I could be wrong). So when we imply we'd have gotten 18 goals from Lassiter in 2000 (or even something close to that), I see no indication that would have been the case. A veteran team in 2000 stunk. We put too much in the way of hopes and expectations on Albright. But even if Albright hadn't come here, Lassiter was gone. Even Arena didn't think that highly of him (how many callups for the National side did he get?). And he was demanding big money. We couldn't afford to keep him.