Backpass: 2022 Player Reviews, Attacking Mids and Strikers
The BIG questions get answered. One: can Diego Rubio repeat his blistering 2022 performance again this year? And two: Can the Rapids replace the modest goal production of Gyasi Zardes?
We press onward to our final field players. The most important stats at these positions are Goals, Assists, Expected Goals and Expected Assists. Everything else is nice, but ya gotta put the biscuit in the basket, so grades and reviews will mostly be focused on that.
If you missed our earlier positional reviews on Wingers, Central Midfielders, Defensive Midfielders, Center Backs, or Full Backs, click those links to catch up.
Diego Rubio
2670 minutes, 16 goals, 5 assists, +3.63 Total G+, 12.17 xG, 5.11 xA, +3.83 G-xG
Best Goal: July 16 vs LA Galaxy in 2-0 win. Rubio makes an off-ball run into the most dangerous spot. He uses great economy in his touches in setting up the shot, and then he finishes low, hard, and into the side netting. All of it is perfect.
Honorable mention: This sweet free kick over the wall and into the left corner against Portland on April 30.
Best Assist: March 5 vs Atlanta United in a 3-0 win. Rubio makes the interception and stays with it after a tricky bounce and deflection, then just puts it on a dime for Jonathan Lewis. There’s so so so much skill on display here.
Key Stats, Good: 3.63 Total G+, 2nd among all MLS Attacking Midfielders. 17.29 xG + xA, 11th among all MLS players, just below Chicharito and just above 2021 MVP runner-up Taty Castellanos. And his +3.83 G-xG shows that his finishing in 2022 was crazy good.
Key Stats, Bad: His 69.7 percent Passing Completion rate is pretty low - 23rd percentile according to FBref. That’s definitely affected by a low-overall Passing Attempts number for an attacking mid - the Rapids get the ball to him less often than wing players. He’s often on the ball in the final third, where there’s more opponents and making passes is harder, and he’s trying to thread that last killer pass through the eye of a needle. That said, his Long Pass Completion rate of 57.9 percent (on 81/140 passes) and his Short Pass Completion rate of 77.4 percent were both career lows.
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Diego Rubio’s first season for the Colorado Rapids was in 2019. That year, he played second fiddle to Kei Kamara in a dynamic duo that scored 25 goals together; 14 for the big man from Sierra Leone, 11 for the Chilean. Rubio greatly exceeded his Expected Goals (xG) that year of just 6.6. The team, however, could not defend to save their lives under Anthony Hudson, and finished a dismal ninth in the Western Conference.
In 2020 and 2021, Colorado was reorganizing. Rubio, along with Jack Price and Keegan Rosenberry, were the stable pieces around which the team evolved. The 2021 Rapids were a ‘striker by committee’ team, as five different players scored 5 goals or more. Rubio, at center striker, was sometimes a decoy, sometimes a holdup man, sometimes on the bench. He produced just 3 goals in 2020, and 5 goals in 2021. His Shots per 90 minutes declined significantly. He wasn’t on the ball that often, because he couldn’t find the game very often.
By the beginning of 2021, Matt Pollard and I had become resigned to the fact that Rubio was just an average man doing an average job for Rapids Head Coach Robin Fraser - a modern South American version of former Rapids striker Kevin Doyle. We had an entire podcast on Diego Rubio to start the 2021 season: Matt called him a ‘hard-working budget striker.’ The episode was titled ‘The Great Diego Rubio Debate’. The fundamental questions were ‘Is Diego Rubio any good?’ and ‘Can he carry this team?’ And ‘Can the Rapids be successful with a budget striker?’ I basically concluded the answer to all those questions was ‘no’. He was trash and we should move on.
In cases like this - in which I am a supreme pessimist, but things actually turn out great and to the Rapids benefit - I am very happy to admit that I was wrong.
Rubio has the best year of his career in 2022. He had an outrageous 16 goals, including 4 Penalty Kick goals. He had a career-high 5 assists. And even when he was shifted from Center Forward to Attacking Mid towards the middle of the season – it didn’t bother him at all. One might argue that it made him better: according to FBRef, he scored 11 goals as a midfielder and 5 as a forward. Rubio ultimately finished ninth in the Golden Boot race. He was spectacular.
That leads to a very important question that is exceedingly pressing in January before the start of the 2023 season: is Rubio’s goal output from 2022 repeatable in 2023?
The simple answer is: probably not.
Diego Rubio had a career year in 2022. In 2023, he will will still be good, but he likely will regress some. I expect 9 goals, 3 assists. I’ll explain, using lots of words, and numbers, below.
Simply put, MLS players do not typically lay low until their age 28 year and then break out. And if they do, they don’t duplicate their goal scoring feats, much less or improve upon their big season. Chris Wondolowski is a slight exception to this rule - he had his big breakout in his age 27 year. But his breakout was due to hardly getting minutes from 2005-2009. When San Jose finally gave him more than 2000 minutes, he went bananas. He then scored double-digit goals every season for the next decade.
Diego Rubio has been a productive but unspectacular player since 2017. He’s had up years and down years - 6 goals in 2017, 11 goals in 2019, 3 goals in 2020. He had never produced an xG above 6.60 until this year - and boy did he produce, tallying a bonkers 12.17 xG. This level of breakout is not without precedent, but it is pretty rare. In terms of similar players to compare him to, the best examples I could find - interior attacking players, in MLS, with later-career breakout seasons, are Maxi Urruti , Mike Magee, and Brian Ching.1
Urruti had 12 goals, 11 assists in 2017 for FC Dallas at the age of 25. Surrounding that season he had 4 goals and 9 goals in the two seasons before, and 8 goals and 4 goals in two the seasons after. He had another big spike of goals this past year, banging in 9 goals with a new team, Austin FC, and he scored those 9 goals on just 6.3 xG, which means he over-performed expectation.
Mike Magee was Mr. ‘5 goals, 3 assists’ throughout his 14 year MLS career. He scored 5, 6, or 7 goals seven times in a season - a totally respectable, workmanlike tally. But in 2013 with La Galaxy, at the age of 28, he had a breakout season, blistering the net for 15 goals. Then he was traded to Chicago Fire, scored 6 more goals that year for a total of 21, and won the MVP award. In 2014, he turned back into Clark Kent and put up a fairly average 7 goals and 4 assists. In short: 13 solid, above average seasons. One exceptional one.
Ching had three double-digit goals seasons: at age 25, 27, and 29. He almost always produced between 0.40 and 0.56 goals per 90, and was just a little more prolific in some years, tallying 7 or 8 goals in the years in-between his double digit seasons. There were no stats on Expected Goals back in 2001-2013. Ching was always bouncing between seasons that could be described as ‘good’ and ‘very good’.
Brian Ching isn’t as great a one-to-one comparison to Rubio as Urruti or Magee are. Ching was a 6 foot 1 big body target striker. Urruti, Magee, and Rubio are smaller, dribble-drive shooters with poaching abilities
The point is: it is exceedingly rare for a striker to have a long, steady career in MLS of modest production followed by a sudden and consistent uptick. Usually, the great leap forward year is followed by a less spectacular year. Ching, Magee, and Urruti all followed a double digit breakout season by coming back down to earth the year after.
If we want advanced stats instead of anecdotal tales, we have that too. The most telling numbers for me are Rubio’s 3.83 +G-xG number in 2022, indicated his finishing was at an above-average rate. It’s not unprecedented for him; he had a +4.47 and a +4.40 G-xG in 2018 and 2019. He’s generally a very good finisher. But Urruti and Ching and Magee (and Buddle, in the footnote) never followed a double-digit goal scoring season with another double-digit goal scoring season after their age 25 year. It’s hard to produce at that level, at that age, and have that kind of luck with service and finishing for two years straight. If Rubio does it next year it would seemingly defy historical record.2 Even 12 goals - matching his xG from 2022, would be great, but would still be a decline over last years production.
All this may be getting away from the most important point: Rubio was fantastic in 2022. No other player was nearly as prolific or effective. The defense, had they been even moderately better (Colorado conceded 57 goals, 13th out of 14 teams in the Western Conference), would have taken advantage of Rubio’s impressive production and sent the team on to the playoffs. We are grateful. He was awesome.
There are other questions for Rubio besides, ‘ can he do it again?’ The other big question is ‘where does Robin Fraser plan to use him in 2023?’ Rubio looked stylish and skillful as an attacking midfielder, although he was really only in that position because there was nobody else capable of playing that spot. Maybe the Rapids move Rubio back to striker now that Cole Bassett is back and continue playing a 4-3-3. Or maybe Colorado goes with two fleet-footed strikers, Kevin Cabral and Jonathan Lewis, and push Rubio back as a CAM again, with something like a 5-3-2. Or maybe they keep mixing it up week to week as the opposition dictates.
For now, the main aspect of the Great Diego Rubio debate has been settled. He did it. He could do it. Now that I’ve weighed in on Rubio’s odds for matching his 2022 performance, the only question is 'can he prove me wrong again?'3 I hope he does.
Grade: A+
Gyasi Zardes
2260 minutes, 9 goals, 1 assists, -0.17 Total G+, 11.21 xG, 2.44 xA, -2.21 G-xG (For COL)
Best Goal: August 6 vs Minnesota United. Zardes scored a hat trick in this match - two spilled Dane St. Clair balls that Gyasi pounded back, bookending this sweet goal gif’ed below. It’s not razzle-dazzle spectacular, but the degree of difficulty in receiving an awkward ball on your trailing foot and sweeping it into goal with power cannot be overstated. Rapids would go on to win this one 4-3.
Key Stats, Good: 12.47 xG overall (11.21 for Colorado), 10th best among MLS strikers.
Key Stat, Bad: -0.54 Dribbling G+, 110th out of 130 strikers in MLS, although in good company with Raul Ruidiaz (111th), Julian Carranza (120th), and Jeremy Ebobisse (127th, -1.21 Dribbling G+). Not a big deal: Gyasi is target forward and front-of-goal poacher, and these numbers reflect that.
He also had a -2.21 G-xG; second-worst rate of his career; Gyasi had a -3.33 G-xG rate in his rookie season in 2013.
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Look, I make a lot of predictions. That’s part of the role of a soccer pundit - throw out takes, hot or otherwise, for folks to bandy about, and then wait a few months to see how they pan out. In general, I try to be honest when I get it wrong or I get it right. So I’m just going to spend a paragraph or two patting myself on the back about how I got it right regarding Gyasi Zardes.
When Colorado acquired Zardes on April 22 for what would eventually be approximately $1.1 million in GAM (due to Zardes reaching certain performance metrics), I was very pleased. Zardes’ track record of finishing in front of goal was undeniable - in his prior nine years in MLS, he had 88 goals. So back in April, I crunched all my numbers and predicted that Gyasi Zardes would score 12 goals. I predicted he’d produce an xG of 10.08, and that based on his history, he’d over-perform that number by roughly 2 goals.
Including his 1 goal with Columbus, Gyasi Zardes had 10 goals in 2022. He had an overall xG of 12.47, but underperformed it by 2.47 goals. In other words, I was pretty damn close to spot on.
Matt predicted that Zardes and Rubio would combine for 20 or more goals, and in the end, he was right - they combined for 25 goals. I more modestly predicted 16 goals, so I missed on that - but that’s because I underestimated Rubio.
All this means - I was pleased with Zardes’ contribution. He was a proven goalscorer, and he scored goals. Sure, he underperformed what math suggested he was capable of, but only slightly, and within expected parameters. Two or three more goals from Zardes probably wouldn’t have made the difference to get Colorado into the playoffs, and as I mentioned regarding Rubio, those goals were more than offset by the defense conceding at a rate that put them in the bottom 20 percent of MLS teams for Goals Allowed.
Since the calendar has turned, and since Zardes has moved on to Austin, we have to ask how Colorado plans to replace Zardes’ goals in 2023. It could be that Rubio moving up top, Cabral going out wide, and Cole Bassett playing as the number ten all add up to a suitable replacement of scoring. I could see Bassett getting five and Cabral getting five, but as I mentioned, that still requires Rubio to get 15 to keep pace with last years offense, and I think that’s unlikely. As it stands, it looks as if Cabral and Bassett are where the goals are supposed to come from. Could happen. Might not.
Regardless of whether this team can replace the goals Zardes produced with another player or pair of players, moving on from Zardes was the right offseason move. He turns 32 this season, and Austin FC signed him to a 3-year deal through 2025. He earned $1.5 million in 2022 for Colorado, and Austin did not mention anything about Gyasi being a DP in their press release last month regarding his acquisition. So it is safe to assume he’s earning a TAM-level contract; I’m guessing between $700K and 900K.4 That’s fine for 2023, but it’s a lot for a player in his age 34 season who may not be all that productive. The guys still banging it in at that rate are few and far between.
Good luck in Texas, Gyasi. Please don't score a hat trick against us.
Grade: B
Darren Yapi
223 minutes, 0 goals, 0 assists, +0.17 G+, 0.71 xG
Key Stat, Good: Yapi’s 0.33 Receiving G+ in just 223 minutes is a good indicator that he settles the ball very well in dangerous spots. His 0.71 xG demonstrates he created danger for the opposition in his limited pitch opportunities.
Most important key stat, though: Yapi just turned 18 years old, is a Rapids Homegrown, and is signed to a five-year contract through 2025, plus a club option for 2026. KSE loves a low risk, high-reward bargain player.
Key Stat, Bad: Yapi was 27 for 45 in passing, for 60.0 percent. That’s pretty bad.
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There’s very little to say about Yapi so far. He had 6 goals in 15 starts for Rapids 2, and got his first MLS start in the Rapids final match of the season against Austin FC. He was 6 foot 1, 175 pounds when Colorado signed him, and was placed on an academy team waaaaay back at the U12 level. The Rapids know what they have: a big, fast kid with instincts for goal. He could someday turn into Edson Buddle (101 MLS goals) or Steven Lenhart (36 goals). Or he could turn into Niki Jackson (3 MLS goals), or Ignacio Maganto (1 MLS goal), who is now playing in the Spanish fourth tier.5
All we can hope for with Yapi is that his development continues unobstructed. That means that he stays healthy, gets minutes in MLS Next Pro, gets good coaching, and perhaps double or triples his minutes with the Rapids Senior team in 2023.
Grade: NG
Nicolás Mezquida
159 minutes, 0 Goals in MLS, 1 Goal in US Open Cup, -0.14 G+, 0.04 xG
Fond Memory: Mezquida scored the Rapids only goal in the 2022 US Open Cup before they went out, 2-1, against Minnesota United.
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Nico Mezquida had a solid career as a utility man for Colorado, and for Vancouver before that. He could play attacking mid or wing, and was always, always described when he entered the match as ‘a spark off the bench.’ His passing was generally tidy and his possession was reliable. He wasn’t much of a factor other than ‘long end of the bench relief’ after 2019, his first season with the team, but he was one of those high-caliber training opponents the first team had to face - a doppelgänger for Sebastian Giovinco or Miguel Almiron, if a decidedly lesser version of those guys. His lack of usage probably led to his desire to be moved, and he transferred to Greek Super League side Volos NFC, an Aegean Sea port city that I imagine has ample sun, delicious souvlaki, and a real need for an experienced ball distributor like Nico. As of this writing, Volos sit 5th in the Greek League, just out of the Europa League spots.
I interviewed Nico back in September 2021, and found him to be a lovely fellow. He told me about how he was one of the ‘fun locker room guys.’
Mezquida told me, “My role was the same like in Vancouver. The way how I am. I’m a guy, I make jokes. I’m a guy who is always smiling around the training room. When I come onto the field, I try to push the team forward, and this is the same in the locker room. I’m funny, but on game day, I’m serious.”
And I wrote:
“Due to the accent, and also the overall sense of the man, I couldn’t help but think that Nico is this team’s Danny Rojas - a player that believes in ‘mucho mucho joy.’”
Grade: Mucho Mucho Joy
There’s another striker to compare here, and that’s Edson Buddle, who had a couple double-digit goals scoring years at age 26 and 28. Age 27 he was hurt, and age 29 and 30 he was playing in the 2.Bundesliga, so it’s hard to use him as an example for anything. However, he might indicate that yes, Diego Rubio could put together another big season.
It is entirely possible there is an MLS striker who scored double-digit goals in back to back seasons after the age of 27 having never done it before. I went through recent history, though, and couldn’t find one.
I think he gets 9 goals in 2023, roughly 0.40 Goals per 90.
It is totally possible that Austin have him on a TAM deal at more than $1 million a year. That’d be stupid, but they could be doing it.
Lenhart was never fast, and Maganto is not big. But the point is: you just don’t know if a kid is going to be the next big thing, or a future rec league star that makes his actual living selling insurance. Which is great. People need someone to explain the exclusions on Home Insurance rider regarding their personal valuable property. Or whatever.