Backpass: Six Questions
How much is Cole Bassett worth? What academy player is the next big thing? Was the success in 2021 a fluke? And more...
Are you bored out of your skull with the slowness of the offseason? Man, I am. It doesn’t help that I’m very nearly the only guy in my office these days - the Senior Rabbi, Executive Director, and Receptionist are out on vacation. The Rabbi’s Assistant and the Comptroller are out sick1. I’m considering doing this at my desk tomorrow:
For now I’ll take a few moments to ask the questions we all have going into 2022. If only because there is literally zero other news to talk about with the Rapids.2
At what price, Cole Bassett?
Sam Vines was sold to Royal Antwerp for $2 million, conditional on hitting certain incentive marks (likely appearances or minutes), plus a healthy sell-on percentage.
Sporting Kansas City’s Gianluca Busio was sold to Venezia for $6.5 million, plus $4 million in bonuses and a 20 percent sell-on cut.
New England Rev’s forward Tajon Buchanon went to Club Brugge for $7 million.
So if and when Cole Bassett transfers to Europe, how much will Colorado get? All four of these players are roughly the same age: 19 to 22 years old. The position they play has an effect on the final math, too - goal scorers are going to be valued higher than defenders. But the main factor in the transfer math is certainly a mix of ‘ceiling’ and ‘current production’. Bassett is a great distributer, good dribbler, and has excellent instincts at arriving late in the box to score. His defense is solid, although it’s almost impossible to figure out if his numbers (fbref says he’s in the 99th percentile among MLS midfielders in Pressures) are because he has become a natural defender or if the Rapids system really supports him.
My only worries are 1) that Bassett wasn’t an automatic starter every week for Robin Fraser, getting 23 starts in his 32 total matches, and 2) his progress has flattened out the past two years. He was a 5 goal, 5 assist guy in 2020; a 5 goal, 3 assist guy in 2021. Maybe the teams courting him the Netherlands and Portugal see him that way - an off-the-bench spark plug or late relief guy; a sort-of Dillon-Powers-Plus.
I peg his transfer value at $1.5 to 3 million. But he wants the experience, and I don’t think another year in MLS is going to increase his value significantly, so even if maybe Pádraig wants more, he’ll probably settle for that. The next European transfer window is open for all of January, 2022.
What current player is poised for a breakout year in 2022?
Sebastian Anderson had a career-high 2289 minutes in USL Championship last year, but he’s blocked from earning a starting spot with the senior team by the team’s stellar right back, Keegan Rosenberry. Abraham Rodriguez couldn’t earn a starting spot in Colorado Springs over previously-unknown Canadian keeper Sean Melvin. Braian Galván is a talented inverted wing forward3 … in an offensive system that has more often than not taken the field with two central forwards and no wing attackers. Austin Trusty will probably have a great season in 2022, but it feels like MLS pundits have already decided he’s arrived; and I tend to agree. He’s great, but he’s already done ‘breaking out’.
For me that leaves two likely candidates: left wing back Lucas Esteves and attacker Dantouma ‘Yaya’ Toure.
Esteves had half a season and looked like an excellent replacement for Sam Vines, and very like-for-like. Sam and Lucas are both ‘scary when they dribble at you’ fullbacks. The early indications are that Esteves passing wasn’t quite there, but a full season with the ball club may smooth those numbers out. I’m optimistic for the 21 year-old.
Yaya Toure had 644 minutes for the Switchbacks in 2021, at attacking midfield and forward positions, and had three goals. With the transition to a reserve league, I think he gets more minutes for Rapids 2 next year while also training with the Senior team - this new MLS Next Pro league was basically made for guys like him. Look for Yaya to get maybe 400 minutes in MLS next year, and for folks to take notice of him.
What is the deal with Victory Crossing?
Beyond the US Postal truck depot and transfer facility, out past the youth soccer fields, east of the in-the-middle-of-nowhere Commerce City Civic Center, before you get to the bison reserve, next to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, is a big patch of dirt. Technically, two of them, divided by a road up to the west gate of the stadium.
Back when DSGP was built there were plans to develop a retail, hotel, entertainment hub next to the stadium. Imagine a main street and a restaurant and Rapids-themed pub, from which Centennial 38 to begin a proper (if not very abbreviated) march to the match.
Alas, ‘imagine’ is really the key word here.
Because for whatever reason, despite the growth of housing to the east and south of the stadium that might provide patrons to a hotel/Gap Kids/bar/movie theater complex alongside the soccer stadium, Victory Crossing is still just a patch of dirt. KSE will neither sell the property off (or perhaps, can’t find any takers) nor develop the land. ABC Denver 7 did a brief piece on it back in 2020, and got this key quote from Commerce City Mayor Benjamin Huseman: “It’s a source of frustration, it’s a source of disappointment for a lot of people.”
I suspect that KSE is both more focused on larger projects, like the development of the LA Rams-adjacent Hollywood Park. When you’re building a multi-billion-dollar NFL stadium entertainment complex on 60 acres in the middle of one of the largest cities in the US, it’s hard to simultaneously prioritize a 10-acre plot in suburban Denver next to an MLS stadium for the leagues lowest-valued franchise.
Still, we can dream, can’t we?
What position are the Rapids thinnest at?
Considering the team has contract extensions through 2022 for the entire starting XI, there’s no real position the team is ‘thin’ at. But of course, Colorado is always looking to improve or upgrade, because if you aren’t getting better, you’re getting worse.
Forward is the position of most concern. The Rapids got reasonable production from their forwards, with Michael Barrios scoring 8 goals, Jonathan Lewis getting 7, Diego Rubio and Dominique Badji each producing 5, and Andre Shinyashiki netting 4.
But, said another way, amongst all MLS forwards, the Rapids best players on Expected Goals, Lewis and Barrios, produced 6.48 and 6.38 xG respectively. That was the 53rd and 54th-best rate amongst forwards. That’s not great.
Barrios will turn 31 years old this season. Badji may or may not be back. Rubio seems to have plateaued. The team needs a real goalscoring threat. Or at least another reliable option to add to their ‘striker by committee’ lineup.
Who is next academy product to make a splash at DSGP?
Other than the aforementioned Yaya Toure, Abe Rodriguez, and Sebastian Anderson, the Rapids have a few academy players signed to contract that are waiting their turn to make an impact for the senior team. Oliver Larraz had some sub minutes with the Rapids before going on loan to San Diego. Matt Hundley, Darren Yapi, and Michael Edwards were all down with Colorado Springs in 2021.
Edwards seems to have the clearest path to the first team. He’s a center back and he played 2045 minutes in 24 matches for the Switchbacks. Meanwhile the two oldest players on the roster are both defenders: Drew Moor and Steven Beitashour. It feels like that ought to offer minutes for Edwards.
If we want to look deeper into the crystal ball to see which young’uns might get an imminent call-up, that might be hard. Recent academy information on the younger guys is hard to come by. There are several reasons for that.
There was Covid, which paused the academy matches for a while. Simultaneously, there was the full-on implosion of US Soccer’s Development program, followed by the creation of MLS Next. As a result of the league-setup changes, folks no longer seem to be able to stream academy matches or look at detailed match results. I can tell you the Rapids U17s played at the MLS Next Fest Showcase on December 7 and that they went 0-2-1 (WLT), and I can tell you who’s on the roster, but that’s it.
Hopefully, when the Rapids name their Rapids 2 roster in March or April and add some of their promising U17s to the squad, we’ll get a sense of which of the lads Director of Development Brian Crookham thinks holds the most promise.
Did the Rapids overachieve in 2021?
Colorado’s Western Conference-topping performance in 2021 was the result of fantastic possession play, timely goal scoring, a team-before-player mentality, excellent coaching, and a deep squad that could make do after the departure of Sam Vines and the USMNT and Canadian MNT callups of Kellyn Acosta, Jonathan Lewis, and Mark-Anthony Kaye.
Math indicates that it was also, to some degree, a fluke.
If you based results primarily on shots taken, shots allowed, and the probability of those shots going in, you get a statistic known as Expected Points. It’s a stat highly correlated to your team’s chance creation and your team’s ability to limit an opponents chance creation. It helps weed out the impact of luck and low probability events - the odds of a ball of the post rattling *in* versus rattling *out*; the affect of a goalkeeper’s leaning juuust the right way 0.01 seconds early to make a fingertip save, etc. The xPoints stat will tell you what the season might look like if this were FIFA 22 and you could you re-simulate every match of the season, with shots in the same place, a thousand times.
As you can see above, xPoints thinks the Rapids would have finished with 49.20 points, rather than the 61 points they did finish with. If every team finished according to xPoints, the Rapids would have finished 11th overall in the league table.
Does that mean anything? Not really. The Revs and Portland also greatly overachieved their xPoints. The xPoints stat is highly manipulated by good finishing and good goalkeeping. And there’s still some other lesser known kinks to it, I think - I suspect that the Rapids success with set piece goals the past two years doesn’t show up in xPoints. It does tell us that the team is not elite when it comes to Chance Creation - they were only 17th in the league in Expected Goals For with 44.42, but actually scored 50 goals. So they were a little lucky, or a little good, in the final third. The same thing is indicated in defense - they shipped fewer goals (34) than the xG model would predict (40.27).
They may be able to repeat this trick once more in 2022. But it would be smart for them to find some ways to tighten up and get a little bit closer to their actual expected performance. Better to be good than lucky.
My wife and I were just discussing a large gathering in-person program I postponed. A staff person at my job said ‘Don’t you think this Omicron thing will just blow over?’ To which my wife responded to me ‘Umm, everyone had Covid.’ I currently know five people with Covid. That is certainly making this dull offseason a bit worse. It’s dull and also scary. Or at least the thing that has been scary for the past two years will simply not take a hint and go the eff away.
There are still smoke-no-fire rumors about Brazilian midfielder Max Alves will join the team; Colorado acquired the rights to FC Dallas d-mid Bryan Acosta in the Re-Entry draft; Dom Badji posting an instagram story (the ones that disappear after 24 hrs) of what folks surmised was an FC Cincinnati kit filtered into black and white. So the only news in the past two weeks is things that might happen but haven’t happened yet. Like me and the guys going to a bar on a Saturday night in my 20s - expectations of something happening were often premature, or just plain wrong.
Is he really ‘inverted’? That’s purely speculative on my part. Inverted just means ‘left footed, plays primarily on the right side.’ Arjen Robben is the most famous inverted wing forward around, but it’s simply that his manager plays him almost exclusively on the right side. I like Galván inverted, but evidence from his usage this year suggests he played mostly left wing back, some left wing, some right wing.