Question on Perkins

What hindsight are you claiming?

A good deal of people said at the time of the trade that it was waaaayyy too much to get him back.

How is this hindsight when the objections were made from the start?

 

Even knowing what we know now, I don't think there's a lot of fault on the FO for bringing back Perkins.

He's a former MLS Goalkeeper of the Year and won hardware here. He went to Norway and won a cup there and played well enough that at times he was as high as third on the US national team's GK depth chart and as recently as the winter he had a good shot to make it as No. 3 (till Hahnemann locked down the starting gig at Wolves).

So getting a player like that in his prime isn't a bad move, especially when your other GK options are a crazy dude with injury and drug issues and an untested kid.

You can quibble about what United paid to get him. A No. 1 pick on top of Fred was probably too high but they didn't have picks in the second and third rounds and Philly was gonna want more than a 4th. Blame the FO for trading away the other picks, but the No. 1 pick was they key piece to get him to begin with.

I have no issues with trading away Fred. He wasn't coming back anyway. Using him to get a player was a smart move.

You can quibble about Perkins' salary, but given his resume, it wasn't unreasonable at the time.

Finally, regarding Hamid, as others have stated no one had any clue he'd be this good, especially this soon. This certainly wasn't known in January.

You can fault United for being in a position where they were left with no choice but to give up a first rounder to have a veteran GK in his prime. And you can fault them for not having enough besides a No. 1 pick to use to sweeten a deal for Perkins.

But the rest really isn't the FO's fault. Perkins poor start is the fault of Perkins while Hamid playing well is actually a rare positive for which the club deserves credit.

There are so many legit things to blame the FO for that blaming them for the Perkins deal just feels like piling on.

 

Because the opening post was asking why we needed to bring Perkins back at all. There was no mention of the price we paid for him.

And the answer is quite simple - you cannot go into a season with an 18 year old rookie as your #1 keeper.

The "hindsight" is in response to the question asking why we would acquire Perkins at all if he's just going to ride the bench - and the answer is that you simply can't take that risk.

Yes, we paid too much. And yes, that was obvious from the start. But that's not really the question here.

 

I like him, too. I'm bummed for him and the team about his play this season. He has certainly had a few howlers of his own this year, but even if we were confident he is the better keeper at this moment (which I'm not), the season is over. Hamid has great potential and a lower salary. I'd play him the rest of the way and get him as much experience as possible.

It does suck for Troy, but he did it to himself.

 

You don't know that. Based upon this season, he'd have found some other creative way to ******** up.

Nobody says an 18-yo keeper is perfect. He'll make tons of mistakes. That's all part of learning.

I'm willing to go on record and say that for his salary,age and upside Hamid is a FAR superior GK to Perkins.

 

Because the objections that were made from the start were silly. They turned out to be right in their conclusion -- that the Troy move wasn't a good one overall -- but the bases used for their objections back then were bogus. Put another way, right now, it's possible to look back at how he's done this year and say "that was a bad move." But back then, you may have said "this is going to be a bad move"; but your justification for that claim at the time was lousy, so you don't get to take credit for it.

These are the facts:

1. Troy was a good keeper while he was here. There are a few people here who will disagree with that statement; these people are wrong. Or at least, the set of coaches who coached in MLS in 2007 certainly believed these people were wrong, and I'm going to claim that that set of coaches as a whole knows more about the sport and the evaluation of performance than any of us do.

2. Despite being a good keeper while he was here, Troy had definite deficits to his play then.

3. He went to a league generally considered better than MLS and, by all reports, not only did quite well there but improved. In particular, his identified deficits (and among those, in particular, his distribution) were reported to have become much better.

4. So to summarize, we're talking about a keeper considered excellent by the coaches in the League while playing here who went to a tougher league and reportedly improved while there. Sounds like someone good to have, to me.

5. Meanwhile, since his departure, DCU had undergone two years of absolute and utter goalkeeping disaster. There's no sugarcoating the DCU goalkeeping situation in 2008 and 2009 -- it was beyond the valley of the shadow of incredibly laughable.

6. A goalkeeping corps of Milos Kocic and Bill Hamid were not going to solve that problem. Somebody had to come in as keeper. And after two years of incredibly ridiculously disastrous keepers being brought in based on scouting alone, someone with a proven track record with which the team had lots of direct experience on which to base their high hopes is a no-brainer.

But what about the cost?

7. At the end of 2009, most people I talked to didn't care if we got anything for Fred at all; they just wanted him gone. Many of those same people that said they didn't care if we got nothing for him later went on to say that including him in the Perkins deal was too much! Of course, if they'd been watching his play for Philadelphia this year, or reading the assessments of his play by Union fans and the local media covering the Union, they might be reminded of how they used to feel about him: in Philly, they think he's not contributing anything like what he costs. What did we lose by putting Fred in the deal? A player we didn't want, who wasn't contributing here at the level he was being paid, and who has gone on to tie up a bunch of Philly's cap room and isn't contributing at that level there *either*.

8. We also threw in our first round draft pick. You don't have to look at United's past drafts -- just look at D's league-wide analysis of first round picks. Even first round picks are not a sure thing in this league. Just under half of first-round picks make less than 50 appearances in their entire MLS careers.


So, with those facts in mind, it comes down to this: given that you must bring a keeper in somehow, would you trade {a player you don't want, that's being paid a ton of money and isn't coming close to earning it; a small amount of allocation cash; and a mid-first-round pick who might, if we're lucky, give us a couple of years of solid play} for {a former League keeper of the year, someone very highly thought-of by the coaches in the League, with whom the team has tons of past experience, and who by all reports has improved since he left}?

I'd make that trade every day of the week and fifteen times on Sunday. I'd make that trade on pay-per-view. And the fact that Troy has subsequently had an absolutely shitty year doesn't change that one bit. You play the odds, and sometimes you lose. Sometimes, for whatever reason, even the right decision doesn't work out. But given all the information available at the time, you bet your ass I make that trade. Too expensive? For reasons above, Fred doesn't matter to assessing the cost; so after two years of goalkeeping absurdity, we traded a mid-first-round pick that if we were lucky would have given a solid contribution for a former keeper of the year who'd supposedly improved while gone. In a fscking heartbeat do I make that trade.

 

Actually, that did confuse me somewhat - did Nowak want Fred? He's a fairly expensive player and had never really produced, even in his first and, I would argue, best year his performances were spotty. It's one thing if Philly demanded a role player, McTavish or James or Christman - they all had fairly low wages and if they were a bust, no big deal. But if Nowak values Fred enough to pay his, relatively, high wages, then maybe he had a plan for Fred and maybe we undervalued him in the trade. Even though we may have been willing to let him go for nothing, once somebody actually wants him, we have to consider if we could have gotten more.

Or maybe we're all looking at this backwards; we all think the deal was that DC gave Fred and a 1st round draft pick to get Perkins back, but really DC said, "Fine, we'll give you the draft pick, but you have to take Fred and his wages too."

Of course, Fred now plays for a more successful (& expansion) team and it's not like our attack has exploded without him. Maybe I should hesitant before mocking him. Also, he seemed like a legitimately good guy.

Full disclosure, I thought the move for Perkins was expensive, but not erroneous. (I was wrong on one of those accounts)

 

the valley of the shadow of incredibly laughable?

 

Great post!

 

I actually think this is a viable theory.

 

Bootsy I agree with everything you posted but I think one thing that we all have to keep in mind is that this DC United team is so terrible talent-wise that Fred, even at his worst in a DC kit, would've been a huge upgrade over virtually ever starter except for Najar and Quaranta (recently).

That says a lot more about DC United's roster than it does Fred, but I don't think there's any doubt that the team could've used him this season.