I have a friend, let’s call him Mike (not his real name), who is a fan of the Loons. He’s not a Minnesota United dilettante; he has strong opinions about Franco Fragapane, and he’s the type that can name every backup fullback on the roster. He lives outside the metro, so he doesn’t get to come to as many games as he’d like, and he has a young family, so there are occasional bedtime-related issues to put a damper on his TV viewing.

What I’m saying is that he might not be a card-carrying MNUFC sicko, but he’s definitely in that next tier: serious fandom, someone who cares a lot about the Loons, as much as he cares about the Timberwolves and every other one of his favorite sports teams.

And he doesn’t have MLS Season Pass.

read more...

It’s the fifth year of Bob Motzko’s tenure as the head coach of the Gopher men’s hockey team, and the second consecutive in which Minnesota has won the Big Ten championship and reached the Frozen Four.

This seems pretty good, all things considered, but we need something a little more scientific to determine just where he ranks in the pantheon of Gopher coaches. Luckily, we’ve got just such a scientific system, which I just made up, but which I consider to be better than any other system ever designed to rank the first five years of every Gopher men’s hockey coach’s tenure (subject to further review of the literature). Here it is.

read more...

Three games after Karl-Anthony Towns’s return to the Timberwolves lineup, one thing is clear: it’s time for the Wolves to win something.

Note that this is a far cry from saying that this is the Wolves’ time to shine, or that the Wolves are going to win something - only that there’s an urgency for this particular team to achieve, because suddenly it seems like this might be as good as things are going to get.

read more...

It’s easy to say that Minnesota United is a different team without Emanuel Reynoso in the lineup. After four games, though, we’re seeing just how different, and how the team has changed its methods.

What we’ve discovered is that, rather successfully, Minnesota United has become Burnley FC.

read more...

It was another iconic snow opener for Minnesota United, a night that will live on in images: Kervin Arriaga making a snow angel during warmups. Michael Boxall and Kemar Lawrence refusing to wear long sleeves or gloves. The grounds crew, wearing shorts, clearing the snow with leaf blowers. It was a night to remember, a night for photos and warm clothes and another edition of soccer in the snow in St. Paul. Iconic, right?

Unless you were playing or coaching, that is. Then you were peeved.

read more...

MNUFC was stuck with one of the weirder schedules in Major League Soccer this year, in that their bye week - every team will get one this year, because there are an odd number of teams in the league - came in week two. And so the Loons won their season opener in Dallas, then immediately got two weeks off. But now, finally, it’s time for Minnesota’s home opener, so here’s a look at the three headlines that we’ll all be talking about this weekend.

Snowpener Redux

As time passes, Minnesota’s first home game in MLS will be remembered more and more for the several inches of snow that fell, and less and less for the fact that the Loons lost 6-1 to fellow expansion team Atlanta. The orange ball! The crews clearing the lines of the penalty area! Let these remove your memories of Vadim Demidov and company!

Well, it’s six years later, but it’s about to happen again. St. Paul got three inches of snow Thursday night into Friday, with four to six more predicted to fall on Saturday. The Loons posted a video of the grounds crew desperately clearing the field Thursday evening, something they’ll likely have to do multiple times before kickoff on Saturday. Assistant groundskeeper Peter Braun Jr. tweeted “[praying hands emoji] that the field heat keeps up” on Thursday morning.

While the snow on turf in 2017 was bad enough, the Loons’ 2022 home opener - from a field perspective - was almost worse. A freak thunderstorm, in 33 degree weather, dropped nearly an inch of rain on the Twin Cities. Lightning delayed the game for 75 minutes, during which time the field became a mudpit, and couldn’t recover until the summer.

Two months later, the team began adding a “hybrid” synthetic layer to the field, in hopes of stabilizing it.

The Allianz Field crew has struggled with the playing surface ever since the stadium opened. In 2019, the first year of the stadium, any sort of stress would result in huge divots coming out of the turf, and the club discovered a drainage problem towards the end of the year and had to replace the entire field.

Fixed or not, though, both last year’s home opener, and another thunderstorm that postponed a US Open Cup match against Colorado, temporarily turned the field into Lake Allianz.

Drainage problems aside, hybrid pitch or no, snow’s not going to help - and it’s not like the grounds crew can re-grow a lot of grass in March. Minnesota’s next home game is two weeks away.

As Braun said: if only the home opener was before the snow.

Annual injury crisis arrives before spring does

Per Andy Greder on Twitter, Minnesota’s annual injury crisis has arrived early this year.

Center backs Doneil Henry, Brent Kallman, and Mikael Marques are all out for Saturday’s game, as is left back Ryen Jiba. Defensive midfielder Wil Trapp is doubtful.

Assuming all miss the game, this leaves the Loons with just two healthy center backs, one left back (plus teenager Devin Padelford), two right backs, and zero defensive midfielders.

One assumes the Loons would probably play a midfield of Kervin Arriaga, Hassani Dotson, and Robin Lod, with Joseph Rosales in reserve. But Arriaga would be the backup center back, and Dotson would probably be the backup left back, so both better be prepared to play a full 90 minutes on Saturday night, regardless of the weather.

Up front, Emanuel Reynoso is still nowhere to be found, and Bongokuhle Hlongwane is questionable as well.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Tani Oluwaseyi saw his first-ever MLS action against Dallas; that might be the only way the Loons have more than three players with MLS experience on the bench in this game.

Reporting on the Red Bulls

It doesn’t seem like that long ago that New York was one of the main MLS destinations for big-name European talent. Thierry Henry! Bradley Wright-Phillips! Juan Pablo Angel!

Anyway, the newer versions of RBNY (NYRB? I’ve never been clear on this) aren’t so much like that. They’ve got really good players; people talk about attacking midfielder Lewis Morgan as a breakout star, and left back John Tolkin is just 20 years old, and headed for a move to Europe, maybe as soon as this year. But it’s much more about youth than big names these days in Harrison, New Jersey.

You’d have to be a true European soccer hipster to know much about new striker Dante Vanzeir (he fired Union St. Gilloise back to the top division in Belgium for the first time in a half-century, then propelled them to the Europa League!), but New York is excited about him, as well as super-sub striker Cory Burke, who they signed from his role as a super-sub striker with Philadelphia.

The Red Bulls are a model of consistency; they’ve made the playoffs for 13 consecutive years, the longest stretch in MLS. That said, they haven’t won a playoff game since 2018. They’re just always there, which is why the expert predictions for this season are all over the map; some have them in 10th, some have them in third. It’s hard to get a read on a team that just always wins.

The Red Bulls are going to line up and they’re going to get in battles all over the field, and they’re going to press and run and generally try to cause havoc. What I don’t know is if the snow, a great agent of chaos, will help or hurt them. They haven’t scored a goal yet this season, but they also haven’t allowed a shot on goal in two games (except for a penalty kick against Orlando, also the only goal the team has allowed).

Who knows what to expect on Saturday? Based on everything, it could be a rugby match - punt it long, and hope for a defensive player to slip and fall.

If you’re an MLS Season Pass subscriber on Apple TV (or a season ticket holder, or a T-Mobile customer), and you’ve watched the Minnesota United FC-related content that’s already part of the subscription, you’ll note a certain historical angle to the coverage - full of references that date back past the Loons’ entry to MLS in 2017, back past owner Dr. Bill McGuire purchasing the team before the 2013 season, all the way back to when the team was the Minnesota Stars.

The Stars only existed under that moniker for three seasons, in the first of which they were the NSC Minnesota Stars. That year, 2010, the National Sports Center rescued Minnesota pro soccer from the ashes of the Minnesota Thunder - and the next year, 2011, the brand-new NASL took over ownership of the team. With a skeleton staff and a less-than-high-powered squad, Minnesota eked its way into the playoffs in both 2011 and 2012, but reached the playoff final both seasons and won the 2011 Soccer Bowl.

Those years were pivotal for Minnesota soccer. They brought Minnesota its second trophy, all-time, but more importantly, those teams brought enough fans and enough excitement that they convinced McGuire to purchase the team. Everything that’s happened since - the name change to Minnesota United FC, the logo change that gave us the Loons moniker, the leap to MLS, Allianz Field - flowed out of those 2010-2012 seasons. The playing of “Wonderwall” after wins came out of those years, as did a song, to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and referencing Minnesota’s status as a NASL-owned squad:

The team that nobody wanted
The team that nobody wanted
The team that nobody wanted
IS GOING TO WIN THE CUP

Even now, as Minnesota begins its seventh MLS season, you can sense some of that same underdog mentality around the club. They’re not big spenders. They don’t have famous faces. They’re the most Midwestern team in a country that’s entirely focused on the coasts. And just from those MLS Season Pass videos, you can see that same chip on the franchise’s shoulder: still the team that nobody wanted.

Which perhaps fits well with the Loons’ 2023 outlook, because the team that nobody wanted, has now become the team that nobody wants.

None of the experts are predicting the Loons will make the playoffs, even now that nine of the 14 teams in the West will do so. The oddsmakers have the Loons at +2800 to win MLS Cup, which means if you were to bet ten bucks on the Loons to win MLS Cup, you would lose ten bucks. Most of the team’s fans are pushing the panic button, underwhelmed with the team’s lack of splashy moves in the offseason.

And the main thing that’s causing all this angst is simple: Emanuel Reynoso, who has been the face of the club virtually since the moment he arrived in 2020, is missing. He was the one Minnesota player that most people, even pretty plugged-in MLS people, could name - and frankly, the way the team played, he was about all you had to know, to understand the Loons.

It’s kind of hard to describe how central Reynoso has been to just about everything the Loons have tried to do over the past couple of years. Lose the ball? The team’s pressing strategy was designed to push Rey high, next to whoever was playing center forward, and hope the duo could win the ball. Counter-attacking? Win the ball, turn, and find Rey. Building out of the back? Make two passes, and then get the ball to Rey, hopefully drifting into some half-space, and then let him turn and try to find some incisive pass.

This is not, especially, a new thing for Minnesota. The same was mostly true of Darwin Quintero when he was leading the Loons’ attack in 2018 and 2019, but Reynoso turned the whole thing up to 11 - more touches, more carries, more possession, more everything.

The one thing we’re sure of, at the beginning of this season, is that - at least to begin the year - the Loons aren’t going to have that specific option. Reynoso’s still in Argentina, missed the team’s entire preseason, and has given no indication of when he might decide to make his way to Minnesota. He’s been suspended without pay. At the moment, he is a non-factor for Minnesota.

So the key question for the Loons in 2023 is: does that change how they play?

Early indications are that they’re going to make the slight change of at least listing themselves in a 4-3-3, instead of the preferred 4-2-3-1 alignment they usually have favored in the past. That said, whatever the nominal alignment, the roles within the team will likely be pretty similar - one target forward, two wider forwards, a defensive midfielder and a mostly-defensive midfielder, and one player in the center with fewer defensive responsibilities and a more offensive mindset.

But the key is really not in whether the lineup is listed as a 4-3-3 or not. The key is whether the offense has that same plan, with the entire offense orbiting around that central creator.

The Robin Role?

So far, indications are that Robin Lod will be that single key figure. Lod has played everywhere in the attack for Minnesota, and despite this, over the past three years he’s got more goals than anybody else. He might be the best player Minnesota has at four different positions, right now, and so it probably makes some sense to just make the “Rey role” into the “Robin role,” and go forward with a similar look.

That said, as good of a player as Lod may be, he does not have the same strengths as Reynoso. Reynoso is constantly trying to beat defenders one-on-one - he attempted this 236 times last season, 81 more than anybody else in the entire league - and Lod is not. Dribbling past players is not a huge part of the Finn’s game, and so there’s not a lot of wisdom in a simple “get the ball to Robin” strategy. Get the ball to Rey, and he’ll try to beat one defender, and then the race for the goal is on. Get the ball to Robin, and he’ll hold off a defender, and probably make a fairly safe pass to a teammate.

The rest of the attack

All of this means that the spotlight will be on the other attacking players in the squad, especially since manager Adrian Heath has made no bones about his desire to bring in additional offensive pieces.

This may be a make-or-break season for striker Luis Amarilla, the man who’s still 13 goals short of the 25 (per year) he promised when he originally signed with Minnesota back in 2020. Amarilla had nine goals in 27 starts last season. Among guys who played at least 1,000 minutes, he was 57th in goals scored per 90 minutes. This is not a good enough return for a Designated Player in the number 9 role, and it puts him as the latest in a long line of misfiring Minnesota center forwards.

As the wide forwards - I hesitate to call them “wings” because neither one plays out near the touchline or provides width - Minnesota has Franco Fragapane and Bongokuhle Hlongwane. On the left, Fragapane has managed 12 goals and 11 assists over 50 starts, a decent return for a player who doesn’t play centrally. That said, he’s been quite streaky - he had no goals and one assist in his first 15 games last year, and then seven goals in his last 15 games - and, even as a 29-year-old, even when the Loons were scrambling to find healthy attacking players, he was rarely trusted to complete an entire 90 minutes.

On the right is Hlongwane, who brought joy and speed to the right wing last season as a 21-year-old. Unfortunately, he didn’t bring a whole lot else, with just two goals and four assists in more than 1500 minutes. Of the 400 MLS players who played 1,000 minutes or more last season, Hlongwane had the 23rd-worst rate of losing the ball when taking on defenders off the dribble. That said, his underlying numbers were much better than his actual goalscoring numbers, and Minnesota is hoping that another year of maturity - and another year of being used to being so far from his South African home - will lead to better things for Bongi.

Four attacking youngsters to watch

Backing up the front three are a quartet of young attackers: Ménder García, Cameron Dunbar, Tani Oluwaseyi, and Patrick Weah. The team sees García, now 24, as a potential center forward, but last season he played mostly out wide after joining the team midseason. We’ll find out if he can break into the lineup this year, but if not, he’ll go down as another disappointing forward acquisition for the team.

Dunbar is an intriguing pickup, with nearly 400 MLS minutes and nearly 4,000 USL Championship minutes in the LA Galaxy system under his belt. He’s played all over the attack, and is still just 20 years old; he’s an outsiders’ pick to be a key offensive contributor.

Oluwaseyi was last season’s first-round draft pick, but lost much of the year to injuries; he might need to prove himself with MNUFC2.

Weah, a 19-year-old Homegrown player, missed all of last season with a knee injury, and will need to show that he’s back and ready to go.

New names, new depth in defense

By the end of last season, the Loons’ defensive depth had been stretched to the breaking point. They lost both starting fullbacks early in the year, they lost emergency backup fullback Hassani Dotson as well, and they had to scramble all season to fill in. By the time that stalwart center back Bakaye Dibassy ruptured his quadriceps tendon - a freak injury, to say the least - they were down to, basically, four healthy defenders, for the final two months of the year.

This is why almost all of Minnesota’s offseason acquisitions have been defenders. The biggest name is Miguel Tapias, a 26-year-old who’s made 44 starts for Pachuca in Liga MX over the last five seasons. Tapias will immediately slot in as the starting left center back, next to Michael Boxall, who should this year become the first Loon to reach 150 appearances for the team (he’s currently at 148).

Kemar Lawrence returns as the starting left back. The Jamaican made 26 starts last season after Toronto let him go for basically nothing. At right back, the Loons return DJ Taylor, who started last year as MNUFC2’s right back, and ended it with a spot on the team’s protected list for the expansion draft, such was his development.

Brent Kallman, the longest-serving Loon, returns as a backup center back. The Loons additionally brought in MLS veterans Zarek Valentin, a right back, and Doneil Henry, a center back, as potential cover.

They also drafted left back Ryen Jiba in the MLS SuperDraft, after Jiba impressed with third-division Union Omaha last season, and signed 22-year-old Mikael Marques from the Swedish second division as a further center back prospect. And the Loons also still have midseason arrival Alan Benítez available as a right back, although Benítez looked to be more of a right wingback or even a right-sided midfielder than a defender.

Homegrown teenager Devin Padelford not only has a full MNUFC2 season under his belt at left back (and some center back), but got a fair number of preseason minutes this year.

So there you go: the Loons have five center backs, six when Dibassy returns later this year, three left backs, and three right backs. Nothing could go wrong, right?

As of last week, Taylor, Henry, Jiba, Kallman, Marques, and Benitez were all dealing with injury or illness problems. I don’t know what has cursed the Loons’ defense to be perennially injured, but it’s happening again this season.

Midfield continuity and potential

Dotson was last season’s candidate to be a breakout player in the midfield. After several years of being a utility player, demonstrating that he could play in midfield or at fullback (if perhaps not that well as a winger), Dotson was set to get an extended run in central midfield for the Loons.

Instead, he tore up his knee, after starting the first seven games of the season.

Now, he’s back - perhaps not for opening day, but for the Loons’ home opener on March 11 - and he’s earned the “like a new signing” designation from the coaching staff. The question is whether he can pick up where he left off, still with the potential of becoming an automatic first choice - because now he’s got competition.

Chiefly, that comes in the form of Kervin Arriaga, who made 22 starts last season for the Loons. The 25-year-old Honduran was, by American Soccer Analysis’s Goals Added metric, the third-best player in the Minnesota squad last season. Only Reynoso made more progressive passes than Arriaga last season, as the youngster became an under-the-radar solid number 8. Arriaga dealt with some injuries in the second half of last season, but if he’s healthy now, it may be hard for Dotson to displace him in the starting eleven.

Team captain Wil Trapp is back as well, to slot back into his role in defensive midfield. Trapp’s main concern last season was a strange run of games in which he would get a needless early yellow card, then run into a situation where he couldn’t risk a foul (because he couldn’t risk a second yellow), would have to back off from a challenge, and the ball would end up in the back of Minnesota’s net. He seemed to correct this - he earned only one yellow in eight starts following a midseason injury that kept him out for a month - and, as the only recognized d-mid the Loons have, they’ll need him to be at his best in his age-30 season.

Joseph Rosales, once a loanee, is still just 22, and will have plenty of chances as a late-game sub or injury replacement, perhaps at all three midfield spots.

At keeper, Dayne’s now the man

This is Dayne St. Clair’s fourth season in MLS, but it’s his first as a no-doubt #1 keeper.

It’s been a weird career so far for St. Clair. As a rookie in 2020, he was thrown into the lineup when Miller was injured midway through the season, and was one of the key factors in driving the Loons all the way to the Western Conference final. Newly anointed as the keeper of the future, he started the first four games in 2021; Minnesota lost them all, Miller took over in net, and didn’t give up the starting role the rest of the season (except for the playoffs, when Miller was ill and St. Clair started - and gave up three goals).

Miller began 2022 as the starter, but got sick again for the fourth game of the season - and St. Clair turned in one of the season’s best performances, shutting out New York despite the Red Bulls piling up eight shots and nearly 4 expected goals. It was impossible for the coaching staff to take him out the next week, and St. Clair obliged with a red-hot first half of the season that ended with him named to the MLS All-Star team.

That said, in the second half, St. Clair was ordinary again, and so his goal in 2023 has to be consistency above all.

As a backup, the Loons brought in veteran Clint Irwin, who’s made 133 MLS starts across 11 seasons for Colorado and Toronto. Eric Dick returns as the third keeper to bring the vibes and probably handle U.S. Open Cup duties, and Homegrown Fred Emmings - now done with high school - will likely get more seasoning with MNUFC2.

Depth chart

GK: St. Clair, Irwin, Dick, Emmings
LB: Lawrence, Jiba, Padelford
LCB: Tapias, Kallman
RCB: Boxall, Henry, Marques
RB: Taylor, Valentin, Benitez
DM: Trapp
CM: Arriaga, Dotson
CM: Lod, Rosales
LW: Fragapane, Dunbar
RW: Hlongwane
ST: Amarilla, Garcia, Oluwaseyi, Weah

IR: Dibassy
Suspended: Reynoso

(Note: all players listed only once, though many can play multiple roles)

Verdict

We’re about to find out just how necessary the team’s Rey-centricity has been over the past few seasons.

There’s no doubt that Reynoso has been an amazing player for Minnesota; he’s certainly been the best player on their squad. But at times, Minnesota has done nothing but just rely on Reynoso to try to make everything happen, and they’ve looked the other way to ignore his flaws: Walking around the field rather than pressing. Getting into weird running feuds with referees (he’s the only player in MLS history to put up ten goals, ten assists, and ten yellow cards in a season).

It’s tipped the Loons away from being a team, and turned them into being Team Reynoso.

Perhaps he’ll return soon, and get fit, and by April 1 Minnesota will be back into that same comfortable system that they’ve used for the past two and a half years. But right now, it seems equally possible that we won’t see him at all this season.

And so we’ll find out: without Reynoso, is the team’s depth and quality enough to return to the playoffs for a fifth straight year? Or, all along, was this really a case of Reynoso dragging Minnesota to relevance?

Once again, this is a team that nobody wants. But as Minnesota learned, a decade ago, the team that nobody wants can sometimes become the team that everybody loves.

Longtime listeners of The Sportive will know how fond I am of bringing up the case of former Timberwolf Josh Okogie. The now-24-year-old might be the single most exciting defensive player I’ve ever seen in the NBA. He is capable of things on defense that don’t seem possible, like he’s warping space-time. I am thinking of plays like this, where Okogie falls behind Justin Holiday as Holiday drives the lane, and as Holiday leaps to shoot, Okogie somehow A) catches up to him from behind and B) leaps up to block the shot, all during the split-second that Holiday is in the air. Holiday didn’t slow down! Okogie just sped up, somehow!

He is still doing insane defensive things - here is him simply, and rudely, snatching a step-back three-point attempt out of the air - but now he is doing them for the Phoenix Suns, with whom he signed a one-year contract in the offseason, worth $2 million, one of the smallest contracts it would be possible for him to sign.

In today’s NBA, there is an almost endless amount of room for players just like Okogie, who are defensive wizards without much in the way of offensive talent as a complement. “Not wanting to score many points” can almost be a skill, when it’s paired in a lineup with other players who score many points but aren’t great at defense. But there’s one catch: in order to be a defense-first guy, you also have to be able to do one offensive thing, which is making a three-pointer.

It’s a pretty well-defined role at this point, the “3-and-D guy.” What it requires is amazing defense, and the ability to spend entire offensive possessions standing almost completely still in the corner of the floor, serving entirely as an outlet for passes from ballhandlers and post players who have been double-teamed. The corner three is the easiest to shoot, given that it’s 21 inches closer than the other areas of the three-point line. Whole careers are built on defense, and shooting threes from the corner when your assigned defender has ditched his responsibility to help elsewhere.

What has always fascinated me about Okogie is that he’s an utterly amazing athlete, seemingly capable of anything – except for this one thing. In four years with the Timberwolves, he never managed to make even 30% of his three-pointers, when 40% is the accepted goal. With Phoenix, he’s made slightly more threes, 33% so far this season, but still not enough to make him more than a role player with the Suns.

There’s one thing, just one thing, he needs in order to have an extraordinarily lucrative 15-year career in the NBA, and so far, he can’t do it!

What got me thinking about this again was this excellent Defector blog by Albert Burneko, about Ben Simmons in Brooklyn, and his coach Jacque Vaughn’s deeply truthful answers that boil down to “we cannot figure out how to use a guy who will not shoot the basketball.” Simmons is an otherworldly talent that seems to have lost any rational understanding of how basketball works.

Simmons, and Okogie, are hardly the first players in NBA history who have been limited in this way. Just from a Wolves perspective, Ricky Rubio had almost everything in his game that anybody could want from a ball-handling guard, but injuries and an inability to make jump shots kept him from reaching the level of the NBA’s elite. Currently, they have Rudy Gobert, a three-time Defensive Player of the Year who scores 15 points per game, who nevertheless looks like aliens have hijacked his nervous system if he ever handles the ball more than five feet from the hoop.

Which brings me to the Timberwolves’ current issues, and especially their dilemmas about how to get things working with Karl-Anthony Towns.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a player quite like Towns, in all of NBA history. He’s listed at 7’0”, 248 pounds, though he plays even more physical than that - yet for his career, he’s a 40% three-point shooter. He’s capable of scoring in the post, he can put the ball on the floor and score off the dribble, and he can shoot over any player in the league from deep. He’s a matchup nightmare. There really is no good way to guard a seven-foot-tall guy who can rain down three-pointers, and this is why he’s been All-NBA twice.

But at the same time, he’s been unable to become a standout on the other end of the floor. His limitations as a defender, especially in a scheme that requires him to be the last line of defense at the hoop, have caused a succession of coaches to throw up their hands, and his inability to become a top-echelon rebounder has made it much easier for good teams to get two and three offensive chances per possession, especially in the fourth quarter of close games.

In the same way as Okogie, I find this fascinating, specifically because brand-new GM Tim Connelly immediately tried to address it in the simplest possible way: if Towns can’t protect the rim and rebound, then he’ll just trade the team’s entire future for Gobert, the best rim protector and rebounder in the game.

This might have worked perfectly, if only NBA teams were allowed to execute hockey-style line changes; the Wolves could have Towns play offense and Gobert play defense, and put together, the two would become the best player in NBA history. They’re perfect complements; each is all-world at the things that the other is bad at.

In reality, though, it’s awkward to have both in the lineup. Gobert can run the pick-and-roll on offense, but if Towns has the ball, he’s mostly taking up valuable space underneath the hoop. Put him anywhere else on the floor, and he’s a liability; if he’s ever in a situation where he has to dribble the ball, a sense of panic seems to envelop him, like a man trying to understand important directions in a language he’s never heard before.

Towns, for his part, fully leaned into the deferential, eager-to-please part of his personality, and did his best to bend his game to Gobert’s on offense, mostly by throwing him unguardable tower-to-tower lob passes - which is fun, as an academic exercise, but also takes Towns away from the All-NBA part of his game.

On defense, though, the pair’s limitations were apparent. Sure, other teams could barely approach the rim, but with two lumbering defenders on the floor, they mostly didn’t have to. Gobert’s defensive skills, fairly famously, can be neutralized simply by playing a lineup without a big man; he’s not quick enough to guard smaller players out by the three-point line. Towns is both quicker and more enthusiastic as a perimeter defender, but has less severe versions of the same deficiencies, and so most teams could give themselves a matchup advantage simply by playing a normal lineup, one without two big guys in it.

The problems have been paused, for now, by Towns’s severe calf injury, but in his absence, the Wolves have changed again - and not to support KAT. Trading D’Angelo Russell for Mike Conley gave them more financial flexibility, but it also represented the team doubling down on Gobert, by bringing in a point guard that’s had plenty of success working with Gobert in the past.

It’s a chain reaction that has led to the Wolves determining that Anthony Edwards, not Towns, is truly the future of the team, and to developing a rotation that has a pretty good starting five and a pretty good set of substitutes, even without KAT.

So if you’re keeping track, Towns’s few flaws - ones that were not enough to keep him from earning the extremely high honor of All-NBA and All-Star selections - have led, through a series of bold but understandable and defensible personnel moves, to him being replaced as the franchise cornerstone, and to a rotation that somehow seems to have no place for him on either the first or second unit.

I’m rooting hard for Towns, I really am; his flaws, though frustrating, also make him more endearing. I want the Wolves’ coaching staff to find a way to integrate him into the team and to make things work, because a decent team - which the Wolves are, without Towns - could become a really good one, with the addition of an All-NBA-level player.

But even more than the case of Okogie, or Simmons, or any of the other amazing-but-partially-flawed players that have come through the NBA, Towns is simply a fascinating case. He’s an amazing player, one almost without precedent in league history, whose front office is addressing the few things he struggles with in a way that may end up requiring him to be removed from the team entirely.

Minnesota United held a press conference with manager Adrian Heath on Tuesday, so we got a few details about what’s going on with the club, eleven days before the Loons kick off their season in Dallas.

The big topic was the continued absence of Emanuel Reynoso, who was officially suspended by the team and the league last Friday. It represented a new chapter in the team’s relationship with its perennial MVP - a sign that, while the Loons are still hoping for Rey’s return, for the moment they are moving on without him.

“Obviously it’s a distraction that we could have done without,” said Heath. “I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t concern me and I’m not disappointed, but it is what it is.”

Heath also noted that, even if and when Rey does return, the team may still be without his services for a significant amount of time. “I’m not quite sure what type of condition he’s going to be in,” said Heath. “Is he working out down there? These are all open-ended questions.”

Minnesota’s Head of Sport Science, Sean Buckley, appeared on the team’s Sound of the Loons podcast a few weeks ago, and noted that the team has offseason plans for every player, and can see whether those players are logging in and checking off their exercises during the offseason - so it can be safely assumed that Reynoso has not been taking care of that plan, at least.

All of that said, Heath was clearly planning ahead for what the team might do in Reynoso’s absence. “Players are pretty resilient people, they understand that this is an opportunity for someone else in the team,” he said. “This is an opportunity for us to look at one or two different formations. This is an opportunity for us to see if we can tweak the system a little bit for the players we’ve got.”

Minnesota played a 4-3-3 in their friendly last Saturday against New York, with Wil Trapp as a defensive midfielder, Kervin Arriaga and Robin Lod as attacking midfielders, and a front three of Franco Fragapane, Luis Amarilla, and Bongokuhle Hlongwane. Heath also noted the possibility of the team playing with two forwards, whether that be Lod and Amarilla, or a combination involving Ménder García.

While Garcia’s six starts were split last year between striker, left wing, and right wing, Heath said that he sees the 24-year-old as a center forward. “I think he can play in the wide areas, but he’s going to develop into a number nine, playing on the back shoulder, playing on the last man,” he said.

The manager was also adamant that he’s still looking for attacking reinforcements, as well - from outside MLS. “There are players that we are actively talking to,” he said. “I’ll be really disappointed if we don’t add to the group by the time comes for the transfer deadline.”

For the moment, though, Heath is trying to look at February 25th. “As I said to the group, as much as Rey’s an integral part of everything that we’ve done over the last few years, the bottom line is that we have a game in a couple of weeks’ time” he said. “We have to make sure that we’re mentally and physically prepared for that game. At this moment in time, he’s not here, so let’s concentrate on the players that are here.”

Other notes:

Honduran midfielders Kervin Arriaga and Joseph Rosales were both back in Honduras on Tuesday, attempting to get their green cards as permanent United States residents. This would allow Minnesota to count them as domestic players, instead of them taking up the team’s limited international spots. While I couldn’t confirm that the club still has their initial allotment of eight international places, it’s worthy of note that the team’s online roster currently has ten international players listed, not including center back Miguel Tapias, who would also count for a spot - so it’s likely that Minnesota needs to get green cards for anyone they can. Heath also mentioned that Luis Amarilla was attempting to get his permanent residency, as well - and at least hinted that the team might need to open international spots in order to make new attacking signings.

Tapias does not yet have his U.S. work visa, but the club was hoping that the paperwork would come through Tuesday or Wednesday - and that if it did, he would play in the team’s friendly, his first official appearance in a MNUFC jersey.

Heath planned to play a split squad in Wednesday’s friendly against San Jose, with most of the team’s young players getting a chance for some minutes, and then aim for a first-team lineup on Saturday. “I would like to get as close as possible to the Dallas lineup in the Vancouver game,” he said. “Certainly we will be picking the team for the Vancouver game with the following week in mind.”

DJ Taylor is dealing with a lingering injury and may not be ready for Opening Day. Taylor, who made 23 starts at right back last season, was set for “a few minutes” in Wednesday’s friendly against San Jose. Veteran Zarek Valentin started at right back against New York in last Saturday’s friendly, and may yet be the starter in week one.

Left back Kemar Lawrence sustained his own injury against New York, but Heath said that it appeared that he would come through with no ill effects.

Left back Ryen Jiba and center back Doneil Henry have minor injuries, and did not travel with the team.

You’ll note that if every defender on the team is going to get hurt at once, it’s going to leave the team’s depth looking a little thin. Right now, the only defenders that are definitely not injured and definitely have their work visas are Devin Padelford, Michael Boxall, Brent Kallman, Zarek Valentin, and Alan Benítez.

Sports fans in North America have more major leagues, like truly big-deal major leagues, than anywhere else on the planet. The NFL is obviously the dominant one, and most countries have a similar dominant league - the Premier League in England, Serie A in Italy, the IPL in India, and so on. But beyond the dominant one, North America’s got just a fascinating collection of other leagues.

The second-biggest league might be an amateur, collegiate version of the dominant league - a “league” that has far more history and far deeper local roots than the NFL, to the point that you could make a fairly coherent argument that the true dominant league in the country is actually college football and not professional football, even given pro football’s preeminence in both the sports consciousness and the TV ratings.

The NFLs popularity is such that it’s part of the sports consciousness in the two smaller countries in North America, Canada and Mexico, even though zero of its teams play in either country. And yet, each of those countries has its own dominant league - the NHL in Canada, Liga MX in Mexico - that has a significant presence in the United States; 25 of the 32 NHL teams are in the USA, and one recent study estimated that about half of Liga MX’s fans are in the United States, even though none of the teams are.

The second-most-popular pro league, the NBA, is also the one that’s may be the most popular outside of North America.

Fifty years ago, the third-most-popular pro league, Major League Baseball, was more popular than every other league and sport combined, giving it a historical and traditional hold on the sports consciousness that continues to this day. And despite obvious declines in national popularity, the local popularity of its teams are durable enough that in many cities, the baseball team is the second-most-popular team in town, behind the NFL team.

The single most popular sports event of the year is March Madness, an event in a “league” that we haven’t even mentioned yet.

Women’s sports have historically been given short shrift, especially at the pro level, and yet are popular enough that not only are the two biggest women’s leagues - the WNBA and NWSL - close to being the two most popular women’s pro sports leagues in the world, but also the United States national teams in both sports are historically dominant internationally, and their players among the most famous athletes in the country.

And also there is Major League Soccer.

---

Major League Soccer is not quite like the world’s famous soccer leagues. It’s also not quite like any of the other leagues mentioned above.

Most of the world’s soccer leagues are closer, in spirit and history and effect, to college football than any of the rest of the USA’s pro sports leagues. In both cases, an essentially local sport grew up to become nationally relevant, but still retains the local flavor. What is the best comparison for Europe’s Big Five soccer leagues, if not the Power Five football conferences in the United States? It’s not just a numerical similarity; in both cases, local supremacy remains important even if a bigger-picture competition (the Champions League in European soccer, the College Football Playoff stateside) has increasingly usurped the attention of fans, especially those that happen to follow one of the powerhouse squads in the local leagues.

And unlike pro sports in the USA, in both European soccer and college football, there are essentially no practical restraints on the player market (other than the obvious difference between professional and quasi-amateur paychecks, comparatively). If all the best football players want to play at Alabama, or at Paris Saint-Germain, there’s no way to stop them, no agreement between clubs to try to equitably distribute talent or, except in certain cases, income.

And because there’s no equitable distribution, there’s also no mechanism to stop a club’s free-fall. If Nebraska football can’t sustain its historical run of greatness, it ends up with a couple of decades of being a Big Ten also-ran. If Nottingham Forest or Leeds falls victim to similar mismanagement, it spends a few decades scuffling in England’s lower leagues.

Major League Soccer’s not like that. But it’s also not quite like the NFL or the NBA.

---

I can tell you two stories about MLS. One of them will sound insanely positive and another one will sound insanely negative, and both of them are equally true.

Major League Soccer is, by leaps and bounds, the most popular soccer league in the history of the United States and Canada. Soccer, historically an afterthought sport that was seen as the province of immigrant ethnic groups and therefore somehow unsuited for the countries at large, has exploded in popularity in the USA and Canada to the point that it can legitimately be seen as a fifth major pro sport.

It is the only league and sport to truly emerge from the ranks of niche sports in the past hundred years, in either country.

At the top of all of that interest is MLS, where billionaire owners are clamoring to purchase new teams at historically-unbelievable valuations, and the league’s footprint expands every season. Year over year, interest in the league continues to increase, both on a local and national level, making it arguably the only league in North America that is actually growing.

Or:

Major League Soccer is the second-most popular soccer league in its own country based on viewership and fan interest (behind Liga MX) and arguably third-most-popular, or worse, when it comes to cultural importance (falling also behind some amalgamated version of European soccer). By almost any measure it is a distinct fifth place among men’s pro sports leagues in its home countries of the USA and Canada, with a vast gulf still separating it from fourth place.

Well.

Neither one of those stories has to be true or false to note that the one thing MLS is, for sure, is different. Different from the other pro sports leagues. Different from other world soccer leagues. MLS is its own thing.

---

And if it’s different, then the arguments are obvious: are these differences a good thing? Is it good to be different from every other league?

There are two important points to consider. First, is that difference caused by something unique to the league and otherwise important or insoluble? Second, if it’s not, is the difference actually a bad thing?

An example: The NHL, alone among the other leagues, drafts players at the age of 18 but then allows those players to go play in junior leagues, like Canadian junior hockey or American college hockey. This is due to something unique to the league - the history of Canadian junior hockey and its importance in Canada, the place that provides the majority of the league’s fan interest.

It’s a history that exerts such a hold on the NHL that, even now, junior-aged players from the CHL aren’t even eligible to play in the NHL minor leagues; they either have to play in the NHL, or back with their junior teams. To that, you can add that the border-straddling nature of the league also has to take into account American college sports, which similarly require an either-or setup; once you go pro, there’s no coming back to the NCAA.

It’s a difference that isn’t replicated anywhere else in pro sports. Baseball drafts players at 18, but if they choose to go to college, MLB teams lose their rights. The NBA and NFL draft college players, who are then ineligible to go back to college after signing pro contracts. But since there’s a unique reason that this difference exists in hockey, it makes sense.

In contrast, take a look at baseball’s payroll structure, which ties players to six - and, in practice, seven - years of being controlled by their original team, without a long-term contract, before finally being allowed to become a free agent. There’s no legitimate reason for this structure to exist, other than that baseball teams used to control players even more completely, and so it remains a hollow echo of the past. The only argument is that most baseball players take several years of minor-league development to become proficient, and this period of control is payback for that investment, an argument that’s severely undercut by how little is invested in minor-league players and how much player development seems dependent less on investment and more on sheer statistical probability.

Is there a unique reason for this to exist? No. Is the difference actually a bad thing? Yes, for everyone who’s not a baseball owner. It’s bad for players and bad for fans.

---

You do not have go very far into the MLS rulebook to find rules that are, to fans of any other sport, truly insane. For example, take the arrival of Honduran midfielder Kervin Arriaga in Minnesota, in early 2022. In order to bring Arriaga to play for the Loons, Minnesota had to give Austin FC $50,000 of future salary cap space, even though Arriaga had never played for Austin FC, had never signed a contract with Austin FC, and in fact had no relationship with Austin FC whatsoever.

But since Austin FC had placed a (secret!) “discovery” claim on Arriaga, Minnesota had to give Austin something for those rights, in order to maintain the convenient fiction of Major League Soccer.

That “convenient fiction” is the legal fact that all MLS teams are technically “owned” by Major League Soccer. The teams are true franchises, the same as if McDonald’s owned and operated 29 franchises in 29 cities. This “single-entity” structure allows MLS to skirt rules about collusion and monopolies that have ensnared the owners in other sports. Legally speaking, MLS owners are shareholders in the same business, and can collude and monopolize all they want, just like the shareholders in other businesses. You can’t be guilty of collusion if the call is coming from inside the house.

This structure allowed the league to survive struggles that should have sunk the whole ship. At one point in the early days, MLS had ten teams and three owners. It wasn’t until oil scion and FC Dallas owner Clark Hunt sold the Columbus Crew, just ten years ago, that every MLS team had a different owner - excuse me, “owner-operator,” to use the league’s own parlance for its quasi-independent team owners.

But it also makes things very strange, like the discovery list, or any of a number of other terms that have no meaning outside MLS - the re-entry draft, general allocation money (or targeted allocation money!), or the now-dead allocation ranking, just to throw out a handful. The league has to allocate its players somehow, and it can’t have its teams out there in a free-for-all competing for players, or the fiction of MLS would start to look legally problematic. So it maintains these oddities, just so it can continue to plausibly claim that, actually, the teams are just franchises of one larger operation, and definitely not a whole bunch of independent organizations that are illegally colluding with one another.

These things are jokes among MLS fans, and indecipherable to anyone outside that sphere. I dare you to try to explain general allocation money to a friend who’s a casual MLS observer without him or her saying some version of “Why do they do that?” (or, more often, “Why do you know this?”)

But is there a unique reason for these things to exist? Yes. The reason is that MLS has, from the very beginning, been structured for survival, not competitiveness.

---

Any history of the MLS quickly discovers that its founding is impossible to separate from the demise of the North American Soccer League. The NASL burned brightly at times, mostly in connection with Pelé and the New York Cosmos, but memories of summer days at a packed Giants Stadium in New Jersey or Met Stadium in Minnesota are obscured, in hindsight, by the almost laughable instability of the rest of the league.

The NASL played 17 seasons from 1968-1984, and during that time, 67 teams - 67! - played at least one season. Not one of them managed to play all 17 seasons. Only a handful managed more than ten. Three different franchises moved at least three times; one - the Washington Darts / Miami Gatos / Miami Toros / Fort Lauderdale Strikers / Minnesota Strikers - managed to have five different identities.

You will not be surprised to hear that this did not lead to widespread media and fan interest across the country. Many teams are fondly remembered, like the Kicks in Minnesota, but even they lasted just six years before folding.

This may seem like ancient history, but only three and a half years separated the end of the NASL and July 1988, when FIFA awarded the 1994 Men’s World Cup to the United States, one of several factors that led to the beginning of MLS. The ongoing desire to not repeat the mistakes of the past shaded all the decisions that were to come, including the league’s founding with all of its convenient fictions and single entities in place.

Does that hurt the sport? Sure. Does it make it seem, in a way, un-serious, at least compared to what we know about all those traditional leagues, in North American sports and in soccer around the globe? Yes.

Is it worse?

Well.

---

It’s endlessly noted that American sports’ traditional measures to ensure competitive balance (drafts, salary caps, luxury taxes, etc.) are at odds with the prevailing perception of the winner-take-all, dog-eat-dog mindset that seems to prevail in so many other parts of American culture - and that conversely, in Europe, which tends more to adopt we’re-all-in-this-together types of systems, sports are cutthroat and restraint-free.

It does provide an awfully nice point of comparison. So let’s note this:

In European soccer, there is no dominant club that does not play in one of the largest metropolitan areas in its country. Madrid and Barcelona, combined, have about the same population as the next 16 biggest Spanish cities combined; Madrid and Barcelona dominate Spanish soccer. The seven biggest clubs in English soccer are based in London, Manchester, and Liverpool, three of the five biggest cities in England. Milan, Naples, Rome, and Turin are the four biggest cities in Italy, and account for every Serie A title for the last 50 years, save two.

Bayern Munich, based in the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Germany, is practically an underdog story.

On the other side of the Atlantic, which North American sport has similar issues with balance? It’s baseball - the sport that has made the smallest effort to ensure that all of its teams are in the same financial and competitive boat, the sport where it’s basically a given that the Yankees and Dodgers will be in the playoffs every season.

Meanwhile, in the other pro sports that aim for balance, being competitive is less about money and more about management. Here in Minnesota, I’m probably more sensitive to this than I would be if I was a fan of a coastal team, but you can see the differences. The Wild and Vikings, both pretty well managed, are often good or great; the Timberwolves, terribly managed for decades, are always awful. The Twins, meanwhile, are only competitive because of MLB’s divisional structure, which puts them in the regularly-awful AL Central.

MLS’s structure is ludicrous, sometimes, and hard to understand, almost always. It’s determined to give every team a chance, even if that means artificially hamstringing a few at the front.

But is it worse this way?

That might depend if you’re in a city that would host MLS’s New York Yankees, or in a city that would host MLS’s Minnesota Twins.

MLS exists the way it does for historical reasons, but also because the league wants every team - rich or poor, Midwestern or coastal, league-original or expansion - to start the season with a fighting chance. It not only is different from European soccer, it’s intentionally, explicitly different. It’s doing it for historical reasons, but also because it can’t afford to have fans completely checked out everywhere but in New York and Los Angeles. It has to survive everywhere, not just where the teams happen to be good.

That’s a good reason, or at least, good enough. It’s better for fans overall, even if it’s not better for every specific fan.

Major League Soccer is not quite like any other league, not in soccer, not in North America, not anywhere. It’s its own thing, but ultimately, being its own thing is the best thing it could be.