Christmas News Recap

Sorry for the silence over the last two weeks, I was visiting my father-in-law in Florida for the holidays.  A recap of what happened in Rapids-land while I was gone, roughly in chronological order.

* Rapids pick Mike Grella in Re-Entry Draft, immediately trade him to Columbus for a 2019 2nd round draft pick

• As the Rapids Media Director later confirmed on Twitter this was a quick way to get a free draft pick.  The Rapids had no intention of taking anyone but the Crew approached them about making this move  (they couldn't trade the pick due to the blackout period pre-draft) so Colorado got a draft pick for nothing.  Why not?

* Steve Cooke takes over the USL's Oklahoma City Energy

• Not a real surprise except maybe the timing.  Cooke has put in his time and showed a bit of what he could do as the head coach when taking over Pablo's spot this past season.  The Rapids made keeping him a condition of any new coaching hire so I thought he'd be around at least until the midseason coaching moves in the lower leagues happened but either way he was going to get a chance sooner or later.  Good luck to him!  I don't think this is a huge loss for Colorado.  While I'm sure Hudson would have been happy to work with Cooke giving him more freedom to set up his own staff is probably a good thing.

* Rapids will open with the Fire at home on March 3rd at 7pm then head to New England for their home opener on March 10th at 11:30am (MT).

• Good to open at home though a night game in early March might be chilly.  And we always seem to get a road game in New England early in the season.

* Colorado draws Toronto in the CONCACAF Champions League.  Home game Feb. 20th at 8pm, road leg Feb. 27th at 6pm (MT).  Season ticket holders will get a ticket to the home match as part of their ticket package.

• All good news except that date/kickoff time.  Can you say brrr?  Its likely going to be quite cold by the final whistle at 10pm.  I'm much happier drawing a equally-in-preseason Toronto than a in-midseasonn-form Mexican side in the first round.  Our odds are better against TFC, even if they are the GOAT MLS team.  I mean, they hosted us last season when we were awful and they couldn't beat us.

* Colorado trades $100K of TAM to Vancouver for New Zealand outside back Deklan Wynne.

• No surprise that Hudson is grabbing up his former New Zealand players that are in MLS.  Much like McBean, Wynne has spent most his career on Vancouver's USL side, and I would expect that he continues to see time in Charlotte.  $100K in TAM sounds like a lot but with the amount of TAM more than doubling this season that's only worth about half as much as it used to be.

That's it for the news over the last couple of weeks.  To do a quick review of our offseason so far we've acquired one likely starter (Blomberg) and 3 young players unlikely to contribute in a meaningful way to a successful 2018 season (Colvey, McBean, Wynne).  There's nothing bad about any of those moves they're just fairly meaningless, outside of Blomberg.  We have a little over 3 weeks before camp opens, I expect the Rapids to be very busy stocking up the actual first team roster in that time if we hope to be successful in the CCL and league this season.

Pablo Removed

Interim head coach Steve Cooke

Well I can't say I saw this coming.  About 7 hours ago the Rapids announced Pablo Mastroeni has been removed as head coach.  Assistant coach Steve Cooke will be the interim head coach with Chris Sharpe and Conor Casey staying in their current assistant coach roles.

This move has been a long time coming.  Only his status as the greatest player to wear the badge and his unwavering loyalty to this club kept him in the role after the 2014 and 2015 seasons, and it seemed his wonderful season last year had bought him at least 2017 and probably into 2018.  Everyone was wrong on that assumption.  With a career average of 1.2 pts/game, barely better than Fernando Clavijo, this couldn't last.  Despite that he was just 4 games from Mooch's all-time team record for games managed.

After all that, I still feel bad for how this happened.  Pablo is and will always be a club legend and he was tossed into teh deep end of a sink or swim operation.  We can talk about what support he did or did not get but this isn't how you want to see the Rapids GOAT leave the club for (likely) the final time.  He didn't deserve to remain coach, but he didn't deserve to get into the situation he was in.

The timing of this move is quite odd.  Right after the transfer window closed and without a major incident precipitating it.  There have been a number of theories floated already and I think they all have a piece of the truth.  The first one is that the season ticket opt-out window is closing and they're seeing a higher than expected number of opt outs, so they felt they had to do something.  While this is probably true, I'm not sure this move changes anything since it comes so late in the opt-out window.  Second (and my contribution), is the changes in the front office over the last 6 weeks.  Hinchey left, the window opened, Smith became interim GM, the window closed last week, and Smith has now been able to turn his attention from deal-making int he window to other parts of the GM job, such as Pablo's tenure.  The third is that they have more moves coming and they waited until those were in place.  We'll see what happens in the next couple of weeks but there's some rumors something might happen.

Looking forward from here, Steve Cooke takes over for some amount  if interim time.  Reports are that Cooke has been the one putting in the work for years, running practices, etc. so it sounds like he's certainly earned this opportunity.  I know nothing about his style or what to expect so its going to be interesting to see what changes are made..  Sometime between now and next March the team will sign a new head coach.  The question is, will they have a real budget and do a real coaching search for the first time in KSE history or will we continue getting the MLS retreads and rookie coaches that the last 4 hires under KSE have been?  If its the latter, I suggest Robin Fraser.

As part of this news the Rapids have also announced that there will be a town hall on YouTube after practice on Thursday at 12:30.  More details to come but I've heard that this will be a true open forum and questions will not be pre-screened or otherwise eliminated.  I will have a recap of the forum Thursday night.

For more discussion on today's news check out the Voice of C38 podcast when it gets posted tomorrow.  The reason this blog entry is so late is that I was already scheduled as a guest on the podcast and had a good time recording it with the Voice gang.