If It's CCL, It Must Be An Embarrassing Night For The Rapids

*sigh*.  I don't know why I thought it would be different, but I did.  Instead the Rapids did what they've always done in the CCL.  Crash out in the first round in a generally embarrassing fashion.  I didn't start following the team until just after the 1998 appearance, so I can't speak to that, but in 2011 it was Gary Smith not even bothering to travel to a road CCL match and the Rapids looking decidedly minor league from top to bottom when hosting Santos.  In 2018 it was Anthony Hudson openly stating before the matches that he didn't care about the result and was using the games as preseason warmups.  Last night it was a team playing up a man, at home, for 75 minutes and then not getting the result they needed before losing in penalty kicks.  Oh, and being apparently outdrawn in their home stadium, in sub-zero temps, by Guatemalan supporters.  But remember, we're taking it "seriously" this year.

Comuicaciones haws 2 shots on target in the series, both in the first match, and is moving on.  This despite having at least 6 players not even make the trip to Colorado and having another sent off in the 15th minute.  For 75 minutes the Rapids had complete control of the game, and they came up with a single goal.  Now credit to Cremas' keeper, he had a good night, but we didn't really make him work that hard given the difference in talent level (no knock on our opposition, they even admitted they were the less talented team), man power, and home field advantage.  In our last 3 games we've scored a single goal when 1 more goal in any of those games would have been enough.  We haven't win a knock-out game/series since the Open Cup in 2017.  This team is desperate for the guy who can step up and score when we need a critical goal.

Can we stop pretending that the answer to our hole at striker is Rubio or Lewis or Shinyashiki?  They had their chances this series and none of them answered the call.  It felt like Lewis lost the ball more than he kept it over the two games.  Rubio had the chance to be the hero, and couldn't manage to stay onside (that was correctly called by VAR).  Shinyashiki could barely get time in the series, and when he did he failed to do the thing he need to do, namely make his PK.

Robin Fraser put out a good lineup in both games, but this lineup has no ability to break down a bunker.  We saw it last year and we're seeing it again this season.  The lack of the necessary talent on this roster isn't on Fraser, its on Smith.  He talked a month ago about having targets identified at striker, but apparently he can't get the deal done.  Something he's consistently failed at, despite his success with the rest of the roster.  Literally every preview I've read for this season has talked about how the Rapids need a 9, and somehow we went all offseason without signing one.  I understand we're playing Moneyball because that's what our owner gives us to work with, but Moneyball ended the same way our season did last year.  Why will anything be different this season?

It was also embarrassing to see the crowd makeup in the stadium last night.  I'm going to make this perfectly clear up front, this isn't a knock against those of us who did show up, or even those fans with more brains than us and decide to watch from a warm home.  There's no way a random Guatemalan team should be outdrawing the home team in snow and single-digit temps in Denver.  It shows a failure of the Front Office, over 25+ years, to connect with this community and build a fan base.  There should be plenty of committed/insane fans who are willing to come out to this game despite the weather and overwhelm the couple of thousand Guatemalan fans.  Instead we sounded like the visiting support in our own stadium.  It doesn't help when that visiting team shows more respect and love for their supporters than the burgundy boys did.  Outside of Jack Price pretty much the whole team just turned and trudged their way to the locker room after the Shootout instead of acknowledging the fans.  Poor show guys, and thanks to Captain Jack for taking the time to show some love.

In the end this is another series where we failed to show up, on and off the field. and we got the expected result.  Now we go into the regular season where we have the talent to, over 34 games, finish in a playoff spot and have a "successful" season, but its going to end quickly in the playoffs again unless we add some real firepower.  And ever if we do we'll still have to wonder what could have been had we added it before the season.

Man of the Match: Max.  Hey, he scored on his home debut, which is all you can ask.  If only the rest of the team had lived up to that standard.  Honorable mention to Yarbrough, who started out the shootout looking like he wasn't going to save anything, but then came up big forcing the kicks to go 7 rounds.  But he had nothing else to do last night not facing a shot on target.

If It's CCL, It Must Be Single-Digits

That was my weather app at kickoff of Frozen Taps I, 4 years ago Sunday night

I don't know if we'll call this Frozen Taps II or Snow Clasico IV, but we're all set for another frigid game at the Dick tomorrow night.  At kickoff the forecast calls for 14 degrees and a 32% chance of snow.  Needless to say this will be a shock to Comunicaciones, not to mention a few of our own players (welcome to your first home game Max!).  Kickoff tomorrow is at 6:30, with the game on FS2 for those who can't make it, or don't want to deal with the cold.

The Rapids expect to have everyone (other than Galvan) available, while a number of the Cremas players will not be making the trip due to being vaccinated with the Sputnik vaccine, which isn't recognized by the WHO and thus, U.S. Customs and Immigration.  There's also a couple of players who reportedly hive visa issues, with one report that its due to them being Cuban.  Regardless of why, we can expect a weakened Comunicaciones squad in Commerce City tomorrow.

 

With the first leg at 1-0 to the bad guys, the Rapids have to score two tomorrow night to avoid PKs.  A 1-0 win means straight to Kicks From The Mark, no 30 minutes of extra time.  Any other 1 goal win (2-1, 3-2, etc.) means Comunicaciones goes through on away goals.  A two goal win means the Rapids are through regardless of the score.

This is the lineup I predicted last week before we went a bit more defensive.  This week we need goals so I expect a more aggressive lineup.  Unfortunately being down a goal means that Cremas can park the bus in the cold, and that's something a number of teams did successfully against us last year.  We're going to have to figure out how to break through that kind of block and score.

Prediction: 2-0 win, goals by Rubio and Barrios.  Yeah, this feels optimistic but the only time Comunicaciones got close to scoring last week was on free kicks.  With the home advantage, cold, and the weakened Cremas side we should pull this out, but it shouldn't have been this hard.

Let's Talk About GAM, Baby

With a nod to Salt-N-Pepa's 'Let's Talk About Sex'

Ok, as the league season gets started on Saturday the elephant in the room for the Rapids is the lack of investment in the squad.  Now the Front Office can't control what kind of budget they get from KSE for Designated Players, or how much discretionary TAM they get to work with, but they can control how they spend the General Allocation Money(GAM) they have.  While most of that information is private, we can make some educated guesses about where we're at.  Right now it seems like we have a lot of GAM we're not spending.

WARNING: Lots and lots of numbers ahead

GAM can be spent in roughly three different ways:

• An unlimited amount can be spent on transfer or loan fees
• A limited amount can be spent per player to buy down their salary hit.  As is typical with MLS the exact numbers allowed are a little murky, but any player making more than $1.6M is a DP no matter what, while some rules refer to up to 50% of the budget charge being covered by GAM.  For the Rapids it doesn't matter much as we don't have a player right now that falls into the grey area (more on that later)
• It can be traded

An important note, given people's opinion of Kroenke/KSE, there is no benefit to the owner to not spending GAM.  they can't pocket it in cash.

Teams get GAM three different ways:

• A yearly stiped from the league (this year its $1.625M for everyone), teams in the CCL get an unknown amount more
• Player sales, up to $1.05M of a transfer fee received can be converted to GAM
• Trades

So given that we can zero in a bit on what the Rapids have, and what they've spent.  The one piece we don't know is how much GAM they had at whatever point we start counting.

For this exercise I'm going to start counting with the Sam Vines sale last yea, and I'm going to assume that we had $0 at that point (worst-case scenario).  This is a clean place to start, because teams have to be roster compliant with salaries at the start of the season, so all 2021 salary requirements for GAM would have been covered by then, and none of the players who needed GAM in 2021 are on the roster now.

So lets talk about GAM the team has received since then:

• $1.625M - League stipend
• $1.05M - Sam Vines sale
• $1.05M - Auston Trusty sale*
• $550K - Kellyn Acosta trade (We get another $550K next year, plus up to $400K in performance bonuses)
• $225K - International slot trade with Atlanta
• $50K - Nicolas Benezet trade (plus up to $50K more if he met performance metrics, unlikely)
• $X - Additional league stipend for being a CCL team
• $X - Cole Bassett loan fee

* - We don't know how much we sold Trusty for, but Sam Stejskal is comfortable using Transfermarkt's $2M, so who am I to disagree?

Grand total: $4.55M + the CCL and Bassett GAM.  I think its safe to say we've received over $5M in GAM in the last 7 months.

Now lets talk about what the Rapids have spent GAM on:

• $1M - Max transfer fee (reportedly we spent the Vines GAM on getting Max)
• $300K - Aboubacar Keita trade (plus up to $150K more)
• $50K - Dominique Badji trade (it was for 2022 GAM)

That's the easy stuff.  $1.35M spent.  The third category, spending it on salaries, takes a little more analysis.  First of all every player has to have a max budget charge of $612,500 in 2022.  If their salary is less than that, fine.  If you make more than $1.6M, you're a DP and you hit the cap at $612,500.  Its that in-between area where GAM comes in.  If you don't want to use a DP slot on a player making between $600K and 1.6M you use GAM (or TAM, but that comes out of KSE's pockets) to buy down their cap hit to that $612,500 number.  Using the 2021 salary guide (because the 2022 one isn't out yet) here's who did, and who likely, needs GAM to buy down their contracts.

2021:

• Kellyn Acosta - No longer on the team
• Michael Barrios - $40K
• Younes Namli - No longer on the team
• Jack Price - $45K
• Diego Rubio - $15K

So, based on last year's salaries coming into 2022 we had $100K in GAM commitments.  Things have changed slightly so we'll go through them:

2022:

• Bryan Acosta - He was a DP for Dallas last year, but its been confirmed we won't be making him a DP.  He was on $700K last season, but we passed up picking him up on his 2022 option from his last contract and renegotiated with him.  So its safe to say he's not going to be making much more than that $700K, and quite possibly less.  So I'm going with less than $100K..
• Cole Bassett - He got a new contract as part of his loan to Feyenoord, and you have to figure he's making significantly more than his $120K last year.  But we're getting an unknown loan fee for him as part of the deal with Feyenoord.  Basic negotiation is probably good enough to get back from Feyenoord at least enough to cover any GAM we'd have to spend on him.  So I'm going to cancel out his possible GAM hit with his GAM addition and call it $0.
• Jack Price - Team captain, was already over the limit, and got a new long-term deal.  It would not shock me to see that he's getting $800-$900K or a bit more.  So lets call it $300K of GAM for now for him in 2022.
• Michael Barrios - Contracts typically have a least a bit of a raise in them, so lets be generous and say we're spending $100K on him this year.
• Diego Rubio - See Michael Barrios.  Call it $100K
• Marc-Anthony Kaye - Got a new contract but he was only on $250K last year.  Do we really think we tripled (or more) his salary?  Lets be generous and say $100K which would be almost tripling.
• Max - Was signed on the U22 Initiative which means he makes under the max salary charge and hits the cap at even lower, so no GAM needed.

Anyone else who got new contracts or on existing contracts would have to have surprisingly large escalation clauses in order to need to use GAM.

So estimate $700K in GAM needed for our salary charges combine that with the expenditures above and you're looking at around $2M in GAM we've spent/committed to spending.

So cancelling out Cole Bassett, we're still looking at close to $5M of GAM we've stockpiled in 7 months, and $2M we've spent.  That's a difference of $3M!  Even if I'm off on my assumptions we've got enough GAM to sign a top-level non-DP player!  And we probably have enough to sign two of them!

So all of those numbers boil down to a simple question.  Why aren't we spending our GAM to improve the team before the season starts?

Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some strikers, don't you think?

The wit and wisdom of Jayne Cobb, paraphrased.  Last night the Rapids looked exactly like they did at the end of last season, toothless in attack.  90 minutes, 0 shots on goal.  The rest of the team was adequate enough, only getting beat 1-0 on a late free kick that got past Yarbrough because of a deflection off Bryan Acosta's back.  There were 1-2 other good looks for Comunicaciones, but only one that was really dangerous, an early corner kick that Yarbrough made a blind save on.  Hard to complain about a loss when you don't have any sort of attack though.  The lack of a striker signing this offseason is looking like a bigger failure by the day.

This means the Rapids need to win by 2 next week, or keep it to 1-0 and go to Kicks From The Mark.  A 1 goal win where Comunicaciones scores means they'll go through on away goals.  Important note, there is no extra time next week.  If the game is 1-0 Colorado after 90 minutes we go straight to kicks, there is no extra 30 minutes played.

Random Thoughts:

• Colorado really struggled to adjust to the heavy field.  Passes were dying about 75% of their way to the target all night
• Starting Warner over Barrios left us with 7 defenders and 3 attackers, and that gulf between midfield and the attacking third was huge.  We could not cross that divide without going outside, which made defending us far too easy
• We looked like we still had a lot of rust on us.  Any chance we could arrange a scrimmage this weekend against the Switchbacks to knock some of it off before Wednesday?
• The bad part about this result (well, besides the loss itself) is that Comunicaciones can now just park the bus here in Colorado on Wednesday.  As we saw last year that's the best way to control the Rapids at home
• Jack Price struggled with his (limited) free kicks last night.  Hopefully that's just some of that rust
• The guys didn't seem to have stamina issues at least, they just couldn't generate offense
• Lewis had a rough game.  For a guy Fraser talked about last week as a good option at 9 he sure wasn't showing that in this game

Man of the Match: Max.  He only played 10 minutes but had our best chance of the night.  A flash of what we're hoping to see long-term.

Off To Guatemala!

Well technically the team flew in yesterday, but our thoughts turn south to Guatemala with the start of the CCL, and the start of the season, tomorrow.  Our first chance to see the Burgundy Boys in a meaningful match in 2022 and unlike most games the last 2+ years we will be able to see them.  Kickoff is at 5pm tomorrow and the game is on Fox Sports 2.

Comunicaciones will reportedly be without 3 of their more notable players as midfielders Rodrigo Saravia and Lynner Garcia and forward Oscar Santis have reportedly tested positive for COVID.  to the best of our knowledge everyone for the Rapids should be available for selection, other than Braian Galvan obviously.

Two rules items to keep in mind.  This is a 2-legged series and away goals are the tiebreaker.  Also VAR will be in use for these matches.

This is essentially the lineup and formation the team has been playing to start the preseason games.  The only change is Kaye for Warner.  Kaye missed most of camp with the Canadian Nats but is a clear starter.  If he's not quite ready we'll see Warner, but I'd be shocked if anyone outside those 12 players start.

Prediction: 1-1 draw, goal by Rubio.  This is a hard one to predict because I don't know that much about Comunicaciones and its our first match of the season.  I'd be shocked if either team wins in a blowout, and I'd be slightly surprised if the Rapids lose given the absences for the home team.  Worst case I think the Rapids lose by 1 but overcome it in the home leg next week, and I think they'll actually be taking home a point.