Backpass: Midseason grades are in. They aren't good.

The Colorado Rapids, in the lead to win the Wooden Spoon for 2023, have been pretty poor. Is there any way to fix this team in time for a comeback?

Moise Bombito in attack. Image C/O John Babiak, @photog_johnb.

There isn’t much to write at this point about the Colorado Rapids that would be compelling or relevant for you, dear reader. (Much as the Rapids themselves right now are neither compelling nor relevant.) What can you say about the worst team in the league? What possibly might I be able to offer about a squad that is winless in MLS play since May 6, a now-10-game slide? What possible hope, my friends, could I offer you, other than to encourage you to become a supporting member of Holding the High Line, so that at least I could offer you some cool glassware?

We’re probably safe from having the worst season in MLS history: that goes to Tampa Bay Mutiny in 2001 and DC United in 2013, with just 16 points. Colorado is already on 14 points, so just a tie here or there and maybe another win or two and we’re into ‘not the worst ever’ territory, hopefully. However, with the Rapids at just 2 wins for the entire year¹ the team is in a small amount of danger of finishing with just 3, 4, or 5 wins for the year. Only DC United has had just 3 wins in a year; only Tampa Bay, Chivas USA, FC Cincinnati (twice), and San Jose has finished the season with 4 wins. The Five Win Club is populated by RSL, Toronto FC, and NYRB. The Rapids really don’t want to join this ‘barely won a game’ club.

The season is probably over. It feels like an improbability that Colorado make the playoffs. At this point, we’re playing for ‘it was a bad year’ vs. ‘it was an historically bad year.’

It’s an epically bad year. I have run out of creative ways to turn the prism and see what new or different light can emerge. There’s not enough talent on this team. The tactics are completely stale, or if they are adequate in theory on the training pitch, it doesn’t translate in execution. So we’ll do player grades. At least it’ll allow us to contemplate some bright spots in this season that is so much ever-loving shit.

Player Grades

First off, these will be brief.² I tend to get long winded when I break things down player by player. This team doesn’t really deserve that level of detail. When it’s poop, you’d prefer to avert your eyes rather than analyze the specific consistency and contours of the turds floating in the bowl.

Second, the highest achievable player grade is a ‘B’. Because when you’ve been this bad, nobody earns an ‘A’, no matter what.

Third, I will be using the F word many times in the paragraphs below, something I generally do not do. It is warranted. And at the very least, it differentiates my brand from what you’d read at the Denver Post, because I can afford to be profane and unprofessional. Many of my friends expect that of me, to be honest.

Defense

Keegan Rosenberry; 1557 minutes, +0.74 G+³. Grade: B

He’s probably the hardest defender to get past. His durability - he has five seasons with more than 2500 minutes played, and will likely have a sixth this year - is exceptional. He’s quite hard to dispossess. He leads the team in Goals Added (G+) with 0.74.

Whatever’s wrong with this team, it isn’t Keegan.

Danny Wilson; 1693 minutes, +0.11 G+. Grade: B-

Danny’s been pretty regular-ol’ Danny this year, with little age-related regression, so that’s good. His defensive positioning makes up for his lack of mobility, and his passing, rated a +0.27, is the highest on the team. He can still pick out that two-line over-the-top dinger to Jonathan Lewis or Sam Nicholson better than anyone. We’d be screwed even worse without that.

Lalas Abubakar; 1516 minutes, -0.94 G+. Grade: D

He’s been exposed in single-marking more this year than in the past. He’s still fouling too much instead of defending. And on a team that’s struggling with a three-CB system, he’s been poor enough that I think it’s probably time we switched to two centerbacks. That all said, I think the main problems with Lalas are related to game states: the team can’t score; they play from behind all the time, and thus they take risks with the midfield that force the defense to become exposed time and time again. He ain’t making the all-star team, but I think Lalas is paying dearly for the sins of other players. That G+ is rully, rully bad though.

Steven Beitashour; 520 minutes, -0.17 G+. Grade: D

When the LB with the most minutes is 36 years old and was let go from LAFC *four years ago*, bro, you got problems. Beitashour defends adequately, but he’s not really going to add to buildup or the attack in any way. He wouldn’t be *on the roster* for probably 25 of the other 28 teams in MLS, but for the Rapids, he’s been our most frequent starting LB. Yuck.

Andreas Maxsø; 1735 minutes, -0.88 G+. Grade: D

Again, probably another case like Abubakar’s of ‘with no midfield support, the defense suffers.’ Still, I was quite surprised to open up the file with American Soccer Analysis’ G+ numbers and find that Maxsø is among the worst on the Rapids, and the 14th-worst among MLS CBs. He passes and possesses well, but he’s not winning the tackles, 50-50s, and aerials like he should; his Interrupting G+ is a putrid -0.72. Maxsø doesn’t tend to foul and he’s often in position between his man and the goal, which looks good. Problem is, he’s not making stops and winning balls, so he’s not having the desired effect on the opponent he needs to in order for this team to, you know, not suck.

Moïse Bombito; 238 minutes, +0.57 G+. Grade: B

Just when you want to curse Pádraig Smith for fucking over this team with a terrible offseason that was November 2022 to February 20223, you are reminded that Moïse Bombito exists. The third pick in the 2023 MLS Superdraft, Moïse has exceeding expectations. Generally top five picks take a season or two to get on the field, but Moïse has put himself in the conversation to become the starting LB as an MLS rookie who previously played for University of New Hampshire - a school with zero soccer reputation. It is all the more impressive that he’s excelling at Left Back considering he played Center Back up till now. One silver lining in this accursed season, I guess.

Anthony Markanich; 402 minutes, +0.60 G+. Grade: B-

I think the kid’s been great. He does a little of everything, and he seems to me a perfectly good long term option as a backup d-mid or left back. The Rapids are pretty good at MLS draft.⁴ We just suck at literally everything else.

Alex Gersbach; 276 minutes, -0.06 G+. Grade: F

Gersbach got into two early games where he looked mediocre in one game and bad in the other. Then he started a May game against Atlanta where the team hung in there for 80 minutes and then completely disintegrated in the final 10, losing 4-0. Gersbach didn’t get back for goal 2; and goal 3 rattled off his chest and in because he misplayed it. We still haven’t seen a whole lot, so it’s possible he’s been unlucky. Evidence suggests, though, that the 26-year-old Australian isn’t very good. Pretty awful to be the fourth string Left Back on the depth chart when A) the team started the year with only 3 LBs and B) you started the season as the opening day starter.

DATA INCOMPLETE: Sebastian Anderson (6 min), Remy Cabral (13 minutes)

Midfielders

Connor Ronan; 1759 min, -0.81 G+. Grade: C+

Goals Added doesn’t really like Ronan, and I get why. His passing is a +0.26, which tracks, since he’s often asked to receive the ball deep, turn it around and make a line-breaking forward pass. And those numbers are very good: he leads the team in Key Passes (31), Passes into the Final Third (132) and Passes into the Penalty Area (19), and on all three numbers, no other teammate is even close.⁵

But the rest of his numbers are crap. He’s a hustler, too, but not a murderous rampaging destroyer like vintage Jermaine Jones or Sam Cronin. When in defense, he’s there, but he’s not an impenetrable wall. He’s not a big scoring threat. He’s not a tenacious dribbler. Like a lot of our 2023 players, he’s a got a thing he’s good at, and like five things he’s average-or-below at. I think he can add to those aspects of his game, or that those aspects will emerge when he’s surrounded by better teammates.⁶ Right now, he’s our best midfielder, and he’s only maybe average for MLS, which is again why we suck.

Bryan Acosta; 951 minutes, +0.27 G+. Grade: C.

A good connector and an able defensemen, Acosta would’ve been ideal as a 70th-minute replacement guy. Instead, we’re counting on him nearly every game to be our field leader.

Cole Bassett; 804 minutes, +0.08. Grade C.

Poor Cole Bassett. Discarded in Europe after an abortive loan deal with Feyenoord, he returned to Colorado to a total shitshow. He’s also been struggling with hamstring issues. Bassett’s still only 21 years old, and thus still has some of that potential to be, while not a star in MLS, certainly a very good player. Right now he’s settled in to the Dillon Powers role of ‘solid but unspectacular’. A Johnny Lunchpail Ben Zemanski type guy, instead of what we had hoped for, which was a local boy version of Wil Trapp or Jackson Yueill.

Max; 725 minutes, +0.05 G+. Grade: F

Fuck this guy with a rusty broken goalpost tube. The absolute unmitigated gaul to come to a team in America from Brazil and then *allegedly*⁷ engage in match-fixing for some Brazilian mobsters who only paid you $10,000 to potentially ruin your whole career and make teams avoid you like unshielded enriched plutonium. What was Max even thinking? When he was on the pitch, he was decent; dribbly in a fun way, but not a great passer or finisher. He’s never playing for Colorado again though, and he’s also still taking up a roster slot for the foreseeable future – innocent till proven guilty and all that. No word on if he’s being paid while charges are still pending, but my guess is he is. So again, fuck this guy.

Danny Leyva; 469 minutes, -0.98 G+. Grade: D

Replacement-level player, on loan from Seattle. Not much else to say other than G+ hates his fouls rate (-0.36 Fouling, which is both ‘getting fouled’ and ‘committing fouls’). He has no yellow or red cards, and only 9 fouls, but I assume they’ve been committed in bad places. He did have that handball in the box against Atlanta on May 17 resulting in a PK, so that may be skewing his numbers. Nonetheless, I don’t see why this palooka deserves time over Yosuke Hanya or Ollie Larraz.

Ralph Priso; 507 minutes, -0.55 G+. Grade: C-

Priso covers ground and is an able defenseman. But his passing stats are a fraction of those of Connor Ronan, who generally covers the same swath of ground as he does. While Ronan has 31 Key Passes, Ralph has 4. Ronan has 132 Passes into the Final Third; Priso has just 22. Acosta and Bassett don’t quite have Ronan’s stellar numbers either, but those two are more of a scoring threat than Priso. Priso’s OK. He just needs to step it up a little more. The Rapids midfield is very average, or slightly worse than that, and Priso can’t crack the starting lineup, and that really tells you what you need to know.

DATA INCOMPLETE: Jack Price (42 minutes), Marlon Vargas (17 minutes)

Wingers

Michael Barrios; 716 minutes, +0.04 G+. Grade: B-

We don’t have a lot going right right now. Barrios is one of those things. He’s not capable of going 90 minutes, considering the way he plays the match: occasional blistering 40 yard runs in which he latches onto a long bomb, then shimmies past a defender or to on the way to goal. He’s good to do that maybe three times a half, and then he’s gassed. I wrote about it in May. He only has two league starts in the past two months, and has no goals or assists in the same time period. Maybe the well’s gone dry. Maybe teams know his one cool trick. Maybe the team can’t get him service. I dunno. My 2 cents: Barrios is really great at the thing he’s really great at, but you need a bunch of other guys creating threats too or he isn’t particularly effective. They aren’t.

Jonathan Lewis; 1035 minutes, - 0.70 G+. Grade: D-

Jonny Lewis, in one gif.

He chases down a long bomb, bodies his man, makes a slick Cruyff turn to himself, gets to goal … and taps a harmless shot into the waiting arms of the GK. This is peak Jonathan Lewis: spectacular, flashy, do it himself, but with nothing to show in the end. He is what he is: a fast, physical winger with no aptitude for the final product.

Braian Galván; 211 minutes, -0.18 G+. Grade: D

Galván’s season has been almost as unfortunate as his 2022 torn ACL year; bruv has two red cards in just 211 minutes, and no offensive production to speak of. In a start against Orlando, he put his boot high to challenge in the 39th minute, and didn’t notice Wilder Cartagena, who probably still has a six-cleat tattoo between his nipples. He also got a red in the end-of-game melee against Philadelphia, as he attempted to suplex Jakob Glesnes, who is like a foot taller than Galván. Other than that, he has no goals, no assists, 1 shot. This guy had so much promise when last we saw him in 2021. Maybe it’s still there, and he simply needs a full season to bounce back from his injury. But right now, he’s not very effective.

Sam Nicholson; 1292 minutes, +0.39 G+. Grade: B-

Sam has a goal and an assist, and his hustle and speed in being everywhere on the pitch on both offense and defense makes him indispensable. He’s not a killer finisher, but his work rate is bonkers, and he’s a defensive pest while often lining up as either a winger or our left wingback. He’s got a fantastic +0.57 Interrupting G+. Unfortunately, he offsets that with a pretty bad -0.40 Passing G+. If he was a better passer, we’d have something. Still, he’s a solid dude on a team full of one of those Jello molds with fruit chunks in it.

Strikers

Diego Rubio; 675 minutes, +0.57 G+. Grade C

Rubio’s been hobbled by injuries for much of the season, but even healthy, he’s only put in 1 goal, 2 assists on 2.0 Expected Goals and 1.2 Expected Assists (adds up to 3.2 xG+xA, friends). In 2022, he had 15.0 xG+xA on the season, but this season he’s on pace for maybe 9.0 xG+xA if he’s healthy, and 6.4 if he isn’t. In short, we had a bad year in 2022 with Rubio tearing it up. With Rubio having a not-all-star-level season, we’re absolutely terrible.

Kevin Cabral; 896 minutes, -1.18 G+. Grade: F

“We got a DP player on a discount!” only makes sense if he’s producing and, unfortunately, Cabral is doing the opposite of producing. He does have 2 goals on 2.2 Expected Goals. But he’s in the bottom 10 of MLS strikers for xG per 96 if you look at players with 500 minutes or more (0.21 xGp96). Meaning: there are 70 guys in MLS at striker, and 60 of them will do more with the ball in the final third than Cabral. These include such illustrious names as Kai Kamara (0.32 xGp96), Gyasi Zardes (0.22 xGp96), and Dominique Badji (0.35 xGp96). You know, guys who used to play for the Rapids, but we decided we could do better. He’s also in the bottom-half on MLS strikers on Dribbling G+, which would be fine if he was good at scoring or passing, but he’s not. I was going to give him an F-, but relented after seeing that Alan Pulido (SKC), Ibrahim Alihu (HOU), and Josef Martinez (MIA) are all much worse on G+, and are all more expensive.⁸ Still, Kevin Cabral isn’t producing and we need him to and he’s not and we suck and he’s a big reason. Fuck Kevin Cabral, the 2023 version of Yannick Boli.

Darren Yapi; 659 minutes, -0.96 G+. Grade C-

Yapi has just 8 shots on the year, and none of them went in. His xG of 1.4 screams ‘agggh!’ and he has I think one or two big misses. But it’s still early and sample size is still small. With Rubio out early, we kind of heaped a lot of expectations on this 18 year old kid that he hasn’t made good on. Still, other young MLS forwards have been thrust into the limelight and made good: Gianluca Busio; Ricardo Pepi; Caden Clark. Yapi isn’t there yet. Maybe next year, I guess? Problem is, there’s nobody else that can score on the roster for this year.

DATA INCOMPLETE: Calvin Harris (107 minutes)

Goalkeeper

William Yarbrough; 1699 minutes, 59 Saves, +0.43 G-xG. Grade: C

Yarbs [AKA Yeah Barbara] is 23rd out of MLS GKs in his Goals Minus expected Goals rate for guys with 500+ minutes, which indicates that he’s been average or below average a tick for an MLS netminder. However, he’s 9th overall in Saves, which tells us that he’s forced into a lot of stops, and he mostly makes them. There are a couple of MLS keepers who have been exception this year, including Brad Stuver and Roman Burkï, and Yarbrough isn’t at their level. But goalkeepers don’t score goals, and our anemic offense is the main problem this year. So maybe a ‘C’ is too nice, but you and I have both seen Yarbrough have games where the only thing that stood between 0-0 and 2-0 was William; or the only thing between ‘losing’ and ‘being humiliated’ was another Yarby save of the week.

Marko Ilic; 270 minutes, +1.55 G-xG. Grade: D

Ilic has barely had enough minutes to judge him, but he didn’t look great in any of the three matches he played. And we bought a guy from abroad to replace Yarbrough, and he wasn’t good enough? Why did we bother spending the money when Abe Rodriguez or Adam Beaudry, two young and promising keepers, are in the academy system? Maybe he comes around, but right now it’s hard to understand why we brought in Ilic. Hey, at least he’s just a loan. In fact, odds are he’s already bought his plane ticket back to Belgium.

1. We beat the Galaxy, 2-1, on May 6, and Sporting KC 1-0 on April 8.

2. I am now reviewing this article for typos and noting that I was not, in fact, brief.

3. G+ scores are through June 24, and don’t include our 2-0 beat-down in St Louis.

4. Anthony was the 26th pick of the 2022 MLS draft. At this stage in MLS development, most late-first round picks wind up in USL or MLS Next Pro. This pick is a big success.

5. All advanced stats have some degree of subjectivity to them in terms of how certain passes, tackles, and so on are weighted. For instance MLS and Opta weight ‘Big Chances’ for xG differently than American Soccer Analysis. I suspect the ASA numbers somehow aren’t giving Ronan the love on his passing, and there’s another system in which Ronan gets more love. That’s one reason why I grade him better than his G+ might otherwise indicate.

6. G+ reflects this too. If you make a great pass and your teammate doesn’t receive it successfully, it may harm your G+ score because while some will go down as ‘good pass', bad reception’, others will be tabbed by Opta as ‘bad pass’. Add to that the negative impacts of struggling to possess the ball, and game-states issues from playing from behind constantly, and you can see how a bad year nerfs the numbers for every guy on a team.

7. I’m pretty sure he’s guilty but in theory when you throw ‘allegedly’ into your article it’s like magical armor against lawsuits.

8. Actually, Aliyu’s salary wasn’t part of the MLSPA salary drop on May 15. But I’m guessing the U22 Initiative player is more expensive.