Just a quick note, but after taking a month off (by accident), The Sportive did three podcasts last week. I was on all three, joined in turn by each of the three Sportive guys, talking Wild and Twins and Wolves. I won’t link to them individually but here’s the link to the podcast overall; all I’m asking is that, if you removed us from your podcast subscriptions because you thought we were dead (or if you never subscribed in the first place), please add us back, because we are alive!

When Minnesota United goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair was going good - and he was never going better than mid-season last year when he made the MLS All-Star Team - his scouting report was pretty clear.

He’s not a great distributor. He doesn’t really command the penalty area, preferring to stay on his line. He’s not much of a sweeper-keeper, nor is he especially good with the ball at his feet… but man, he sure can stop some shots.

Halfway through last year, that shot-stopping ability was carrying him to one of the best goalkeeper seasons in MLS history. The numbers put him in the upper echelon of MLS keepers, up there with Djordje Petrovic and Andre Blake and other, better-known goalkeeper names. He slid a bit in the second half, but by almost any measure, he was still a top-10 keeper for the season.

Now, the 2023 season is one-third over, and we can no longer lean on “well, it’s a small sample size” as an excuse, and so we’re forced to reckon with what the numbers are telling us for 2023, and we need to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question.

Is Dayne St. Clair currently the worst goalkeeper in MLS?

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I joined the Star Tribune’s Michael Rand, on his daily podcast, to talk about all things Minnesota United FC. Among the topics discussed: why the Loons can’t score, why their defense is better, and what’s the deal with soccer analytics these days.

Major League Baseball’s unmitigated success with its new pitch clock is sweeping the nation. Americans have clock fever! The pitch clock, were it a single person, would be the most popular figure in the history of baseball!

This is hyperbole, but not ridiculous hyperbole. Baseball has managed to cut a half-hour or so out of its usual running time, without changing anything major about the game itself, and all simply by putting an actual clock in view, to help umpires enforce the rules about pace of play that were already on the books.

With this in mind, I think it’s time for the next step: there should be a pitch clock in soccer.

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Through 55 minutes, Minnesota United’s 2-1 loss against Orlando City looked like it would be another in a series of tight, cagey defensive performances by the Loons.

Orlando had yet to create anything that looked like a scoring chance. The Loons weren’t much more dangerous.

Ten minutes into the second half, though, Minnesota made a change that, finally, unlocked their own offense - but in the process, gave the Lions the space that they needed to steal three points.

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In 1995, John Feinstein published “A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour,” an insider’s account of the 1994 PGA Tour season. The central cast of the book includes Zimbabwe’s Nick Price, the world’s top-ranked golfer at the time, and the man who led the money list on the 1994 tour.

The book adopts a head-shaking, almost tongue-clucking tone at the sum that Price earned that season, an otherworldly $1,499,927. It’s cast as almost too much money for a single golfer to make, a sum that would potentially deflate Price’s desire to not only compete, but to ever play golf again. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a little less than $3 million in 2022.

On the 2022 PGA Tour, 26 golfers earned more than $3 million for the season.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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