2019 Most Valuable Player

Normally when I choose my MVP I go back through my game reviews and count up the number of Man of the Match awards I gave out to get some kind of indicator of who should be in the running.  This year though I didn't need to do that, and I'm willing to bet that this player wouldn't have shown up with that many MOTM awards.

The 2019 MVP is Jack Price

This was really obvious to me as the season drew to a close.  Price set a MLS record for assists in a season from free kicks with 10, beating out the likes of former free kick specialists like Claudio Lopez and David Beckham.  Now to be fair, some of those guys not only totaled a number of assists but they also scored from dead ball situations, which Price didn't do, but as far as putting a set piece into a dangerous area nobody has ever been as dangerous in MLS as Price was this season.

I was planning to write this column today anyway, but some stats tweeted out by OptaPro reinforces my decision that Price was our most valuable player this year:

That's Jack Price there in the middle just below 30% of team's chances created, better than players like Vela, Barco, and Rooney.  And then this reiterates the value of his free kicks:

That's the Rapids in the upper right, way ahead of the rest of the league.

In a year where we set post-Shootout team records for goals scored a significant part of those records were due to Price.  He did the small things, the quiet things, but the important things.  He was rarely flashy, which is why he didn't win many MOTM awards, but he was consistently the second best Rapid in most games which means over the season he was the best Rapid out there.

Also in unrelated news defender today Sebastian Anderson was named to the squad for the U-17 World Cup in Brazil next month!