MLS week 32 review: The penultimate week’s biggest takeaways

MLS stuffed all their games into a rapid-fire four hour span on Sunday, the penultimate week of the regular season. We’re here to review it all. 

‘Till I Collapse

To start our big recap of everything that went down on Sunday night, we’re looking at the three biggest takeaways from the weekend. No, this does not mean “Team A made the playoffs and Team B didn’t;” it means looking beyond those scores (Are you watching the games or are you just looking at the stats?) and deducting what those takeaways mean for next week and the postseason landscape. We’ll start with Sporting KC and Houston, before we move on to Chicago and Nemanja Nikolic and another bad FC Dallas result.

The Way I Am

You probably won’t find a more CONCACAF-y MLS game than the wacky affair that was Houston Dynamo vs. Sporting KC at Children’s Mercy Park. Thanks to remarkable shooting inefficiency from each team and a ridiculous performance from Dynamo goalkeeper Tyler Deric, the final score was 0-0, qualifying both for the postseason and allowing both the chance to advance further forward than fourth and fifth in the conference.

The tactical synopsis of this game centers around SKC constantly getting forward and either ripping unwise shots into the stands or watching Deric leap and dive all over the goalmouth, and Houston content to sit back and counter while relying on Alberth Elis to take on Sporting’s squadron of athletic defenders completely by himself. As a result, we often spent more time watching Roger Espinoza get into squabbles and trainers handing out red Advocare water bottles than we did actual soccer.

It felt like a 0-0 game all the way through, partly because it closely resembled a Panama vs. Honduras World Cup qualifier. Sporting won’t go far in the postseason by employing the “shoot from the blue line, something good has to happen eventually!” tactic:

To be fair, Houston won’t go far either if they think Deric can turn into US Open Cup Mitch Hildebrandt for 90 minutes against, say, Seattle in a week and a half.

Not Afraid

Chicago, though, could nab a postseason win or two by simply letting Nemanja Nikolic take advantage of opposition mistakes for 90 minutes. The Fire stormed back from an early 2-1 deficit to squash visiting Philadelphia 3-2 on the back of a Nikolic hat-trick. However pretty the build-up is from Chicago, the Hungarian-international never fails to put up goals like this:

He has 24 goals and looks likely to take the Golden Boot, so clearly he has the ability to keep scoring these on a regular basis. The Fire have the best full-back combination in the league and are getting good production from the central midfield (including 18-year-old Homegrown Djordje Mihailovic), but they are far too weak at center-back and goalkeeper. If I were a Fire fan, I’d be dreading the moment when Bradley Wright-Phillips finds the back-shoulder of Johan Kappelhof in the 80th minute of a knockout game.

Survival

In the second Fox Sports 1 game of the evening, the Seattle Sounders eviscerated FC Dallas at Century Link by a score of 4-0, led by two Will Bruin goals. This gives Seattle a legit opportunity to take first-place in the west next week, and it makes things a whole lot more complicated for FCD next week, especially after San Jose stole a point from Vancouver.

Despite the inflated scoreline, the problems for Dallas originated in a stale and passive attack, which eventually allowed the Rave Green to turn a 1-0 64th-minute advantage into utter domination. Mauro Diaz, the No. 10 and string-puller for the Hoops, looked sharp and incisive when on the ball, but he rarely was able to actually get on the ball.

Javier Morales the deep playmaker was a successful experiment, but that still hasn’t solved Dallas’s inability to actively seek out attacking opportunities. Throughout their steep fall off a cliff, they have been content to wait for chances to fall into their laps rather than implementing any sort of organized press (which you don’t have to be Pep Guardiola to do) or figuring out exactly how they’re going to get the ball on their best players’ feet in the attacking half.

Awards

The best team in the league: Toronto FC celebrated their Supporters’ Shield before and after their 1-0 home win over Montreal, which had no tangible significance other than TFC’s record-breaking pursuits and Jozy Altidore’s confidence-boosting (Altidore scored the goal).

Sebastian Giovinco took a penalty off the post in this game. Then he retook it because Maxime Crepeau was inching off his line. And he hit the post again. So finally something didn’t go TFC’s way this season.

The worst team in the league: The Colorado Rapids got to play a very satisfying role of spoiler in a 1-0 home win over Real Salt Lake, who now look unlikely to qualify for the postseason. It was Josh Gatt who picked up the goal, an early one set up by some Alan Gordon hold-up play. Replace Gatt with Clint Dempsey and you’ve got a USMNT goal in Trinidad and Tobago.

Random result of the week: It has to be Colorado’s win over RSL, because that best fits the description of this MLS-unique award. For the first time in a long time, the Rapids successfully uglied up a game at home while also scoring a goal in the same 90 minutes, a pretty nice accomplishment for this squad. I know, high bar.

RSL are in eighth in the conference, a point behind FCD and the Earthquakes for the sixth and last available spot. They hold the primary tiebreaker (total wins) over Dallas, but are tied with the Quakes on 12 wins. The Claret and Cobalt host Sporting KC on Decision Day, a tough matchup that they need to win and have other results go their way. A point from Colorado was very necessary.

Predictable result of the week: Portland ripped D.C. United 4-0 at Providence Park, led by Sebastian Blanco and Diego Valeri. It was pretty straightforward, if it did feature some very curious game management from the always-controversial referee Mark Geiger.

Attacker of the week: That would be Nikolic, obviously, but shout out to Blanco, Diego Fagundez, Bruin and Romain Alessandrini for their various contributions to their teams’ winning efforts.

Biggest result of the week: A lot of games are obviously in contention for this award, but we’ll go with San Jose’s 1-1 draw with Vancouver. Vako Qazaishvili’s late equalizer for the Quakes moved the visitors from an unlikely playoff contending spot from behind FCD to a very good place alongside them. Despite their -22 goal differential (the second-worst in the league), the Quakes are in good position to qualify for the postseason.

Goalkeeper howler of the week: Matt Lampson of the Fire makes his first entry into this space for his rough handling of a ball into the box against the Union:

Jesse Gonzalez gave up a bad rebound to Bruin in Seattle, so he gets a shout here as well.