Backpass: We Want <insert team here>!
The playoffs beckon. Who will we face? Who would we want to face?

Good afternoon, Backpass-a-reenos!
Last week I took off both because work beat me down hard and also because the creative juices, they were not a-flowin’. I often find this stretch of the season, games 28 to 34, really challenging. Which, in the past when the Rapids were well out of the playoffs by this time of year, made sense. But now, with Colorado cruising to their second-straight playoff appearance in as many years, I say that with a tinge of guilt. Of all the entitled, whiny things to say, ‘ucch this part of the season is so tedious, can’t we get to the playoffs already’ is the most entitled and whiny of all. Somewhere an FC Cincinnati fan is feeling deeply empty in their soul right now and doesn’t know why.
But it’s hard on creativity to come up with something unique to say about these Rapids after 11 months of Backpass. On Thursday, the MLS Players Association released their September salary data, and I thought ‘ooh! that’s a Backpass’. And then I looked and saw that the only new piece of information on Colorado was that our new Brazilian left back Lucas Esteves will earn $412,467 this season1. Which is a little high, but fair. Dominique Badji was a new player to the Rapids, but since he was traded, there’s nothing new about his $306,250 contract, except for the fact that we’ve never mentioned it.
As Matt Pollard and I were talking last night, though, it dawned on me that a thing worth thinking about, now that thinking about it can’t jinx it, is our first round playoff opponent. Who would we want to face? Who wouldn’t we? The possible candidates are: Portland Timbers, LA Galaxy, Minnesota United, Vancouver Whitecaps, Real Salt Lake, and LAFC.
A reminder that this year’s MLS playoffs will have 14 teams - 7 from each conference. The top team on either side of the bracket (probably Seattle in the West, definitely New England in the East) get a first round bye, and the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place teams in each conference will host the 7th, 6th, and 5th place teams, respectively. The Rapids are currently 3rd; tied on points with Sporting Kansas City and behind 1st place Seattle, who are on 58 points.
Candidate: Portland Timbers
Current 2021 Record: 14-4-13 (WTL), 46 points, 4th place in the Western Conference
Rapids Results Against in 2021: 2-2 away draw on Sept 15, 2-0 home win on Oct 23
Odds of meeting the Rapids 1st round: Unlikely
Portland have been damn decent this year with a lineup of aging stars, and that’s a credit to Giovanni Savarese. But the two best players in this team’s history, Diego Chara and Diego Valeri, were the key pieces for this teams *2015* MLS Cup win, which in soccer and MLS years is like ancient history, and they’re still key pieces in 2021. The team this year has a negative team G+ of -8.07, meaning math thinks they’ve over-performed expectation by quite a bit. Their striker replacement for Jeremy Ebobisse, Felipe Mora, has been fine - 11 goals, 3 assists. But two of their four starting defenders - Dario Zuparic and José Van Rankin, have negative Overall G+ numbers. And both Valeri (age 35) and Sebastian Blanco (age 33) aren’t capable of playing 90 minutes much anymore, forcing Portland to turn to young and unproven guys.
With Colorado likely to stay in 3rd in the West, they’re most likely to meet the 6th-place team in the Western Conference in the first round. Portland is currently sitting 4th and has a pretty easy final schedule of San Jose, RSL, and Austin. They’d have to stumble pretty hard to drop to 6th. But it could happen. And I wouldn’t mind that at all. An older team at the end of a long season with some underlying indications that they’ve been over-performing and that hasn’t beaten the Rapids since September 8, 2018? I’ll absolutely take it.
Candidate: LA Galaxy
Current 2021 Record: 13-7-11, 46 points, 5th place
Rapids Results Against in 2021: 2-1 away win on Aug 17, 1-1 home draw on Sept 11
Odds of meeting the Rapids 1st round: Moderately Likely
LA Galaxy, since the retirement of Landon Donovan, have been ‘Star power / gate draw / we have no plan’. It was Giovanni Dos Santos. Then it was Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Cristian Pavón. And now it is Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernandez. All that talent and it has amounted to 5th, 3rd, 11th, 7th, 5th, 10th in the Western Conference, and never higher than 6th in the Supporters Shield standings.
I can’t really tell you what’s not working for LA in specific. Sebastian Lletget and Jona Dos Santos aren’t having great years according to G+, and both play defensive midfield, meaning what they add in advancing the ball offensively isn’t being offset by what they give up in terms of defending through the middle. Lletget in particular is a defensive liability - 11th percentile in Pressures, 9th percentile in Tackles, 11th percentile in Interceptions.2 That’s atrocious. He has additionally gone out on international duty in a World Cup qualifying year, which is tiring. So he’s overused, and he then doesn’t play as well, and he gets used some more. You see where this is going.
Chicharito has been good - with the team’s highest Overall G+ of +1.51. But he’s also been hurt a bunch, and Googly-eyed Space Alien FC’s3 replacement for the 1000 minutes Chicharito has been out has been Ethan Zubak - who has 1 goal, 1 assist, and 1.3 Expected Goals. That’s in the 1st percentile in terms of non-penalty expected goals for a striker. That means 99% of MLS strikers are better at getting into a place to score than Zubak, so that’s awful.4
I don’t really want to face Head Coach Greg Vanney, who is a clever tactician and Robin Fraser’s former boss in Toronto, in a knockout playoff match. But there are a lot of things that are shaky about LA. So I feel pretty confident that a Colorado-LA Galaxy matchup at 5280 feet of altitude would be very favorable for our burgundy boys.
Candidate: Minnesota United
Current 2021 Record: 12-9-10, 45 points, 6th place
Rapids Results Against in 2021: 3-2 home win on May 8, 2-0 home win on July 7, 3-1 away win on October 10
Odds of meeting the Rapids 1st round: 50-50
If the playoffs started tomorrow, Colorado would face Minnesota United. And I don’t like it.
“But Rabbi”, you say, “Colorado is 3 and 0 against the Loons this year. We have their number.” Yeah, but that’s not the number I’m thinking about.
Minnesota has a +9.78 Team G+ differential, 4th best in the league; meaning they have vastly underperformed expectation. Why? Mostly it’s underperforming their xG. Their Team Expected Goals is 45.0, but their actual Goals For is just 36. That failure falls pretty squarely on the shoulders of their attackers and forwards: Robin Lod (8 goals in 1554 minutes), Adrien Hunoa (6 goals, 1492 minutes) and Emanuel Reynoso (4 goals 2,113 minutes). Hassani Dotson and Ethan Finlay have also had a fair number of reps at forward, and both have underperformed a bit.
So, you can look at that all and say ‘Minnesota have a definite weakness in their finishing. Get your lead, mark them well in the final third, and watch them fold like a Spirit Halloween store on November 3rd.’ Well, maybe. But Lod is really electric when he’s on his game, and Ozzie Alonso and Wil Trapp have been around long enough in MLS to know how the playoffs work better than most players. And Argentine newcomer Franco Frangapane has 4 goals, 9 assists in just 1,221 minutes.
I’ll also add that the Rapids got knocked out in the 2020 MLS playoffs by Minnesota; 3-0; in a game where Colorado looked totally outclassed from whistle to whistle. My high school cross country coach used to give us a speech when we would face a team we had lost to earlier in the year; ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’ he’d say. And then usually Alemany or Chaminade or Notre Dame would whup us again.
I think this team is better than the Rapids have seen them be, and I don’t really want to find out if we can beat them four times in the same year.
Candidate: Vancouver Whitecaps
Current 2021 Record: 11-11-9, 44 points, 7th place
Rapids Results Against in 2021: 1-0 away win on May 2, 1-1 home draw on Sept 19
Odds of meeting the Rapids 1st round: Unlikely
Ah Vancouver, the vanilla yogurt of the Western Conference. Some years there’s some sprinkles in that yogurt, or prunes, but in general, with the exception of the years they had Antonio Davies in his breakout era, this team is various kinds of bland with a few special additives that ultimately add up to them finishing somewhere between 7th and 12th.5
I won’t belabor this because I don’t think we’re likely to play them. Vancouver are clinging to 7th right now by 2 points, and their final three games are against Minnesota, who need a win to hang onto to a playoff spot, LAFC, who need a win to get into the playoffs, and Seattle, who might rest players their last week of the season but are still better than everybody. I can see Vancouver picking up 0, 1, or 3 points in their final three matches and getting bounced from the postseason. Alternatively, they might cling to that 7th and final playoff spot. But they’d still miss playing the Rapids.
I wouldn’t might playing them at all. I think they’re pretty mediocre. But I don’t think we’ll get that lucky.
Candidate: Real Salt Lake
Current 2021 Record: 12-6-12, 42 points, 8th place
Rapids Results Against in 2021: Ugh I don’t want to talk about it
Odds of meeting the Rapids 1st round: Please God No
There’s a big reason to hope we play RSL in the first round:
And a big reason to hope we don’t:
If you didn’t catch who’s who in this gif, we’re Brian and RSL is Stewie.
That’s because, after this season’s defeat, RSL holds a 12 to 5 series lead in the Rocky Mountain Cup. We are 18-11-25 against the boys from Utah. Also: fun fact! Pablo Mastroeni, our team talisman and the guy that basically epitomizes what the Colorado Rapids ethos has been since our team’s inception in 1996, is their coach. He was ours once, you remember. And we fired him. So there’s a handy revenge-narrative for RSL in this one, too.
Matt and I have spoken at length about how Damir Kreilach is a good player who somehow becomes super human when he plays the Rapids. It drives me nuts.
So on the one hand, I want sweet sweet revenge for what they did to us two weeks ago: beating us 3-1 and taking home the Rocky Mountain Cup once again. And on the other hand, I absolutely want no part of having to get by RSL in the first round. We historically suck against them. We are cursed when we play them. And no xG / tactical babble /triumph of the human spirit bullshit will overcome a curse.
Candidate: Los Angeles Football Club
Current 2021 Record: 11-8-12, 41 points, 9th place
Rapids Results Against in 2021: 2-1 away loss on May 22, TBD on Nov 7
Odds of meeting the Rapids 1st round: Extremely unlikely
When I spoke to Total Soccer Show’s Joe Lowery a few weeks back about how the Western Conference has shaped up - what’s been surprising and what’s been expected, he said this: “Teams that we thought would be good and are not good: LAFC. I thought they had the tools to be a title contenders for sure, supporters shield contenders, no doubt. And it has not gone that way at all.”
There’s lots of reasons.
LAFC sent their best striker, Diego Rossi, to Fenerbahce on loan, and assumed Brian Rodriguez would pick up the slack, and he didn’t. Carlos Vela, league MVP in 2019, has only 1,175 minutes played in 2021 due to a never-quite-healed hamstring injury that’s sapped his strength. At the start of September, Bob Bradley abandoned the 4-3-3 that LAFC has been in since their inception in favor of the leagues most popular formation, the 5-3-2. And that’s been better, but not ‘we dominate the league a la 2018 and 2019’ better. And since parting ways with Tyler Miller in 2019, LAFC just haven’t found even a league-average goalkeeper that can keep them in games. This year they’ve used three GKs: Tomas Romero, Pablo Sisniega, and Jamal Blackmon, and all three have been below-average in ‘Post-Shot Expected Goals minus Goals Allowed’ a metric FB Reference uses to track advanced GK performance. Team wide, LAFC are 25th in the league with a -6.7 PSxG-GA, with only DC United and FC Cincinnati below them.
That said, the midfield of Eduardo Atuesta, Latif Blessing, and Jose Cifuentes are really good at moving the ball and also defending the middle, and midsummer arrival Cristian Arango has 12 goals in 14 games in MLS since joining the team from Millonarios in Bogota, Colombia.
And then, there’s Vela. He’s set to return this week against Seattle, and considering LAFC is sitting 3 points below the playoff line, they really need him back. If Vela can come back and even be at 80% of his regular self, I would prefer not to face him.
That’s ‘annualized’, meaning had he been a Rapid from January 1, he would have made $412K. In reality, Colorado’s on the hook only for the pro-rated amount for the salary he’s earned since he arrive in August.
C/o fbref; https://fbref.com/en/players/73019c31/Sebastian-Lletget
Zubak does, to his credit, have some really nice forward pressing and defending numbers for a striker. But if the best you can say about a striker is ‘he defends well’, that’s not ideal.
They finished: 8th in 2016; 3rd in 2017; 8th in 2018; 12th in 2019; 9th in 2020.