Diack Out, Navarro In?

Tommy Scoops, aka The Athletic's Tom Bogert, had two pieces of Rapids news today.

Let's start with the more concrete one.  The Rspids will not be buying Lamine Diack.  This is no surprise considering how little time he's gotten, just 16 minutes across 4 games.  Later today Padraig Smith was on the DNVR Rapids podcast and talked about how Connor Ronan's injury really hurt Diack's chances, as that led to the successful double-pivot with Larraz and Bassett, which made it hard for him to get time.

I think that clearly explains why he never got a chance to start.  It doesn't fully explain why he hasn't made the gameday squad in the last 6 games, despite them happening in 2 sets of 3-games-in-a-week runs where squad rotation has been necessary.  Clearly regardless of the success of Larraz and Löffelsend dealing with injuries there was something that kept Armas from picking Diack.  Maybe its as simple as them figuring out by early May that they weren't going to pick up the option and prioritizing players under contract.

Diack got a guaranteed compensation of $864,150.  That number will likely be prorated for his time here though.  So since we're at the halfway point of the season we paid him $432,075 for 16 minutes of work.  That's $27K per minute of play.  Needless to say this move was a complete bust.  We spent $75K (prorated) of TAM plus his loan fee, used up an international slot, and didn't solve one of the biggest holes we had going into the las offseason, defensive midfield.  We landed on Diack as one of 4 players we were reportedly targeting in the offseason.  As I pointed out in January going with Diack over the other options was a very 'classic Rapids' move where we take a flyer on a young player on a loan with the hope it pays off instead of filling a need with a known quantity.  The only good news here is that we realized he didn't work before pulling the trigger and being stuck with him (see Ilic, Marko).

On to better news.  Tom is also reporting that the negotiations over Navarro are going well.  There's work still to be done but everyone is on-board with getting it over the line.  Unfortunately his improved play has sparked interest from other teams driving up the price, which means the hope of structuring the deal in a way that would allow him to be a max-TAM players instead of a DP is not going to work out.

Going into and through the first month of the season it didn't look like Navarro was going to be worth retaining.  He's really settled in ow and is looking like potentially the best striker we've had since the Conor Casey days.  Right now he's at 9 goals and 3 assists at the midway point.  Doubling that would be 18 and 6, which would be a new team record for goals and goals+assists in a season.  I think 18 goals might be a stretch given that he's had his last two PK's saved and he can't expect to get 4 more PK goals in the second half, but tying Casey and Rubio's team record at 16 seems possible.

I don't think he's worth the originally negotiated price of $4.5 million.  He probably needed to make those 2 saved PKs and have another couple of goals from the run of play to consider that.  But if we could get him for under $2.5M?   That would still be solid work.