Sky Blue shake up NWSL with Carli Lloyd trade

Sky Blue FC made the biggest splash at the NWSL Draft, trading for one of the most dominant players in league history, Carli Lloyd.

The trade had not been made official yet, so getting officials to give official statements required all kinds of unofficial subterfuge.

Accordingly, Sky Blue FC head coach Denise Reddy couldn’t comment about the franchise-altering decision the team made to deal for Rutgers alum and New Jersey icon Carli Lloyd. Not by name.

So I asked her: When you evaluate potential acquisitions, how important is it to have scored hat-tricks in World Cup Finals?

With a big smile on her face, Reddy replied: “It helps.”

There was a draft on Thursday, one in which Sky Blue FC picked four of the first 13 players, a crop to reinforce the young team as they begin the process of playing in the style Reddy prefers. But the definition of what Sky Blue will look like, on the field and in the promotional world, was set into motion by trade, not selection.

The NWSL chose to make all deals public without naming players, trying to keep the focus on the special moments for 40 women who hear their names called and lifelong dreams realized. It’s understandable.

So the pair of trades that effectively reshaped the stars atop the league didn’t become official Thursday. We know from multiple published reports, which FanSided has confirmed with multiple sources, that Sky Blue lifeforce and 2016 NWSL MVP Sam Kerr is on her way to Chicago. Christen Press, U.S. national team scorer extraordinaire, is Houston-bound.

And Carli Lloyd is coming home to the Garden State.

According to Philly.com’s Jonathan Tannenwald, Janine Beckie and Jen Hoy are also Sky Blue-bound, while Nikki Stanton is heading to Chicago.

Still, the team had been built around Kerr. Now it will and really must be built around Lloyd.

There are really two components to this deal. There’s what Lloyd means for the team on the field, and what she means off it.

On the field, it will be difficult for Lloyd to match what Kerr just provided Sky Blue. Not only is Kerr just 24 years old, more than a decade younger than Lloyd, she just dominated the best league in the world, earning MVP honors and providing a steady stream of highlights all season long.

But while this is far from a consensus opinion in the NWSL world, allow me to argue the following: Carli Lloyd’s moments of brilliance are worth the patience needed to weather the periods between them, when much of the rest of a team’s offensive flow is subservient to what the great Lloyd will do next.

This is not a bug. This is a feature. This is, please remember, Carli Lloyd. No one sat around as Michaelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and muttered, “But why can’t the buildup be more interesting? Where’s the artistry in the way he sets up his paint and ladders?” It’s Michaelangelo! You wait. And you’re lucky to witness it at all.

Okay, so maybe that’s not the greatest tagline for Sky Blue’s marketing folks, but you can be sure they’ll maximize Lloyd on every single email, mailer and paid media ad they have. Few knew the way Sky Blue would play under Reddy. Now we know: they’ll be playing Carli Ball. You know, the kind of soccer that, the last time there was a World Cup, won the United States the World Cup. That kind of soccer is coming to New Jersey.

That will tell us a lot about what Sky Blue’s ceiling really is for attendance. Last year, NWSL games averaged 5,083 fans per game. But that really doesn’t tell the whole story. Portland’s attendance was north of 17k. Orlando, Houston and Seattle all topped 4,000 per game. The only three below 3,000 were Kansas City, who sold and moved to Utah, Boston, who face an unstable ownership situation that has the team’s front office wondering aloud about the team’s future, and Sky Blue FC.

Well here’s the deal: there’s no greater figure in New Jersey soccer, in women’s soccer writ large, than Carli Lloyd. Sky Blue are about to go all-in selling themselves as Lloyd’s team, and it’s encouraging that Lloyd thinks enough of Sky Blue’s prospects she bought into a move there, and we’ll soon find out just how insurmountable all the things that stack against the team drawing well in their current location (public transportation, a college campus that empties in the summer months, just far enough away from New York and Philly to typically limit media coverage from both cities) will be.

Through no fault of her own, Sam Kerr didn’t draw the way Sky Blue need to as NWSL continues to grow. Lloyd might not, either, but if she can’t do it, no one can.

And if you want to doubt Carli Lloyd, I’d suggest instead you spend a little more time watching this.

As Reddy put it: “It helps.”