To Build? or Rebuild? That is the question.

I think we should pick up some veteran European players.

Of course we need young talent from college or U-20 teams, but the Quakes need a senior fielder to act in a leadership role and teach the team. Basic stuff like ball possession and passing is lost here and in much of the MLS. Bringing in more than one veteran player who has spent time in a premiere league in Europe would be a huge assett to the team. It would influence the way the team plays.

Right now, we seem to have a mish-mash of individually strong technical players, speed, and size, but nothing really adds up at the end of the day because good teams are all about possession and passing, things which the Quakes have been horrible as of late. (it doesn't hurt to have a great striker who rarely misses the goal, either!)

I say enough bringing in mediocre players from Latin America or the Carribean, take a look at what other MLS teams are doing and try to land some talent from Europe. We need that element of play in our game and in the MLS to make the league better overall. The addition of Hucks was great for us, but alone he did not have much of an impact. We need more of that kind of stuff.

 

I thought I'd look at how the team has been built up over the past two years, and provide what I think FY & JD should do over the next year to continue (?) improving the team.

From year 1. Not including players that have already or will move on like Huckerby. And graded by value, a ratio of quality per salary cap $:

Great value
Jason Hernandez
Shea Salinas
Ryan Johnson

Mid value (due to high price or low utility)
Alvarez
Cannon
Corrales

Poor value (replaceable quality at equal or lower cost)
Jamil Roberts

From Year 2
Great value
McDonald
Sanchez

Mid value (due to high price or low utility)
Convey
Andre Luiz
Chris Leich
Cornell Glen


Poor value (replaceable quality at equal or lower cost)
Graczyk
Amarikwa
Pitchkolan
Burling
Elliot
Ribeiro
Weber
Wondolowski
Zaher


So, must keep players are the 'great value' ones. Either you keep them or you only trade them for very high quality in return (dregs + draft picks type trades are verboten).

Mid value players you can keep or use in trades to fill holes with other mid value players or steal high value players from other less intelligent GMs around the league.

Poor value: Since they know your system you prefer to keep them over swapping them with equivalent poor value players. But these players are otherwise generally inconsequential to the long term success of the franchise. They are role players, fillers, journeyman if you will. You can count on losing several of these via trades and cuts over time. Best case you find one of those less intelligent GMs and trade for a mid-level value player, maybe a younger player whose potential hasn't fully developed yet.

Those are my thoughts going into the off season.
Flame away!

 

I think that player you are describing is Simon Elliott, and we've seen how that has gone. The reality is that we have very few players with any sort of soccer IQ, so the play of ALM is lost on them. Guys do not make runs off of the ball because there is little or no faith that the ball will be delivered to them. Now that we have a player capable of getting it to them, they are standing around. Guys like Salinas, Johnson, Quincy and MacDonald are great because of the energy and agressiveness they bring, but they play with very little intelligence or intuition. That can come, but they need someone who can teach it to them. If we had a young attacking midfielder for ALM to mentor, I think that would be a start. The experienced, positionally aware CB people are talking about would also be a great help. Someone grabbing Alvarez by the neck and telling him not to show up to camp next spring without some semblance of a right foot would be high on my wish list as well. We have some decent pieces, we just need to get the guys to stop being satisfied with eke-ing out a living as a marginal professional soccer player.

 

We need YOUNG TALENT. Let's be this league's Arsenal. If Lew wants to be cheap this is the way to go.

 

"Value" is quality / cost. Many of these guys are making peanuts. So in order for them to be "poor value" they really have to be really poor quality players. There's more to "quality" than numbers, but guys like Wondo, Q, Weber have shown very good productivity in limited minutes, in which case I would argue that these are good value players. They are also young, which means that we can reasonably expect their value to go up in the coming years as they improve.

Q has the same number of goals and assists as Convey, and at 1/4 of the playing time and about 1/6 the cost. And you're saying that Convey is "mid" value and Q is "poor" value?

 

Tough, tough question. Once again, we are a last place team who played better in the second half of the season. Injuries were a huge problem this year.

I'm kind of stuck in the middle. I want to get rid of Convey, Corrales, Convey, and possible a few others because they will never amount to much. However, too many changes won't help the team.

If you had to pin me down at the moment, I would say Build. RJ and Glen are decent up front, but look for a quality striker. ALM and Sanchez are good, but we still need better backups in the center mid. I want an experienced centerback who is a leader.

However, I would like to go with more youth, but I'm not sure that is compatible with the build philosophy. Develop a McD at centerback. Keep Corrales at leftback and give Z another year or two to develop.

 

Sometimes I don't know if it is a chicken or egg question. We've been playing the long ball with minimum possesion and the CMs staying way back. Is it because FY wants it that way so he get all these supposed to be fast players and at the bay kind of CMs? Or, is it because we have these insufficient player so we play this way? This always puzzles me.

If Schelotto or Blanco type of player is available at the right price, will Yallop pick him? I somehow think he instead will still pick someone in the mode of Corrales/Elliot/Sanchez/ALM/Lima, just may be different name or age. The CMs Yallop brought in so far are more defensive than offensive. That means at most we will get two improved and younger version of Elliot and these player will spend more time in our own half.

Then if your point of attack is not the CM, you need the wings to provide the spark. Unfortunately that is not happening with the wing players we have in Salinas, Convey and AA, at least not consistently. If the emphasis of the attack is the sides, please bring in some true wingers like Hucks, ROB or Robbie Rogers. Right now we really don't have any attacking focus. Just dump the ball upfield and hope for lucky bounce. Whether it is a new CM, RM or LM, we need to find a point of attack.

I still want a good striker who can pass the ball better, get in scoring position and has better shooting to pai up with either RJ or Glen. Same thing for the CB position. We need an organizing CB to pair with one of these current CBs.

So...I would say a rebuild even though we may be replacing 3-4 players only. What we need to overhaul is the way we play and add more intelligence to our game play.

 

Young talent is just potential without the tutelage of the journeyman vets with solid Euro or SA pedigree.

 

We have enough old guys.

 

Well they have to be good veteran players. That part is the key.

 

Regarding the guys making peanuts, I put them in the poor value category if I thought that they were relatively easily replaced by other players of equal quality for less than or equal cost. So a $40k journeyman player just does not have much value if you can get a different $38k guy just like him tomorrow from half a dozen other teams.

If the low value players are still quite young (or young in professional experience years), then they always have the potential to develop into a mid value or in rare cases (think Ching) high value players. But if they never develop, there is always another group of 20-30 players coming out of college that can replace them at very low cost.

This is were the coach and GM can make or break the team. It is imperative that they recognize which of the current young low value players both have the potential to develop and are on the road to doing so. It's critical because you can only buy so many mid to high value players. Organically moving players up the food chain from the low value category to the mid or high value category is the only real way to differentiate a team in MLS.

For example, I think Shea fits in this category and will likely develop into a Brian Mullan type player. On the opposite end, Jamil Roberts seemingly is not developing and on that basis has almost no value. FY can easily pull a Bobby Burling off another teams scrap heap and replace him.

Regarding Q, I know the stats, but the game is about more than stats. Q is a such a raw talent, with little understanding of positioning and tactics, and I am doubting that he'll ever do much more than 'add energy'. I hope I'm wrong, and I think the jury is still out, so he'd be one of the last 'low value' players I'd think about letting go.

And I am being a bit generous with assigning BC a mid value from low value. However, when played in the correct position, left mid, he is a solid MLS caliber player and can help the team. And I think his reputation is still high enough that he would command mid value in any trade dealing with most coaches in MLS. Unfortunately, due to FY's craziness, a large percentage of BC's minutes were in a position where he is ill suited.

 

It's lucky you hope you're wrong because you are. Q has more footballing sense and field awareness than RJ already and you rate him as great value.

 

Build the stadium, rebuild the team.

 

More footballing sense and field awareness than Johnson? Hey, some of the half-time players have shown that!

If Q is unable to turn into a Carlos Tevez clone I would still like to see if he could be converted into a right back. His speed and tenacity could be a lethal combination against opposing wingers. And he would probably prove much more dangerous rampaging down the flank than Leitch.

 

a la Mullan? Well might work.

 

Most of the guys at the very low end of the pay scale are not contributing significantly to their teams, i.e. not getting playing time and not contributing. Guys like Q and Wondo are contributing very much to the team even at their "peanuts" salary (I think they are both at around $34k though I could be mistaken). That makes them good value players, and the fact that they are young, with presumed upside, makes them even higher value. If you have a young player making minimal salary player who is already playing and contributing to the team, you keep him.

Well the game is about more than "positioning and tactics" also. Athletic ability, "fuerza", work rate, etc. are factors as well. That's why stats, while not "everything", can be useful. They factor out biases that we might have for certain characteristics.

Also, when considering a young player like Q, you have to be aware of the fact that "positioning and tactics" are learned over multiple years playing professionally. Athletic ability, OTOH, can't be "learned". So a young player who is a raw talent but needs to "learn the game" more, is most likely going to blossom, because he will learn the game over multiple years of playing professionally.

Regarding Salinas, one of your "great value" guys, Huckerby said that "if he can learn the game" he's got the tools to be a top rate winger. So you can argue that he's really in the same category as Q. He's got some skills and athletic ability, but needs to really learn the game. His big revelation on playing defense this year was, in his own words, to "just sprint at guys!". I'm not sure how much awareness of "positioning and tactics" that comment demonstrates. OK, I do know. Not much.

 

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to have this conversation without knowing what the new CBA will entail.

 

2 DPs and a higher salary cap. Inevitable.

 

Bingo! Don't bother us with facts.

I must have been reading these posts so long that now I'm in agreement with Mark about just about everything (with one major exception).

 

Hey, why give us rumors when we can make our own?!