"The season for us really starts now," Michael Bradley said on Saturday, and even if he was only talking about Toronto FC, his words apply across the board. The World Cup "break" is over, and the mid-summer grind has truly begun.
Let's take a look at some things from MatchDay 17:
1. How to build the league: Part 1
Will Kuhns, who has been around the league since Day 1 and worn a lot of different hats, wrote this piece last week: How To Win the World Cup. Read it now, and know that I endorse it heartily.
The point I want to focus on in particular, of the five that Will made, is No. 3: "Create a crucible that can forge world-class players."
Is this really progress? “We played like minnows”
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Of the five on his list, that is unquestionably the toughest, and one that will require both bottom-up and top-down effort from people mostly at the club level. MLS teams, in other words, will have to do an increasingly better job of identifying top talent (bottom-up), an increasingly better job of developing it (process), and an increasingly better job of integrating it into the first team (top-down). Organizations have to work in concert from U-10s all the way up to the big club in order to be the league that we all want to see, and there aren't really any shortcuts.
But... there are catalysts. And the difference between MLS in 2014 vs. MLS in 2011 or 2007 is the way the league invests in what are, in my opinion, the right catalysts.
Bradley is one of them. He's 26 years old, in the prime of his career as a central midfielder. He's a star for the USMNT, with eight World Cup games under his belt already. He turned down lucrative offers from Serie A and Bundesliga clubs to play here.
I've used this space to repeatedly stress what a great passer Bradley is, because there is a persistent (and infuriating) narrative that he is really just a plodder, all effort and no creativity. As if his assist to Julian Green last week - one of the best of the World Cup - was an exception rather than the rule.
Hell, let's watch it:
Erik Hurtado made a mess of that breakaway, but credit to him in the first place for being able to go from "I'm tracking back" to "I'm finding space" in an instant. Morales only needed a touch to put the ball on a platter for him, and create a scoring chance that any forward in the world would love to have.
This is why you pay Designated Players big money. The game, at a high level, has only the tiniest of openings, and guys like Morales are able to find small cracks that others don't see - or need more time to take advantage of - and open them up into giant chasms.
You get punished really, really fast against the Whitecaps now. That's Morales' crucible, and that's how an entire league improves.
3. How to build the league: Part 3
The third guy I'm going to focus on here is Portland's Diego Valeri, who has arguably been the best player in the league over the last two months and was magnificent once again this past weekend in a 2-2 draw at the LA Galaxy.
Valeri, who is 28 and has three caps for Argentina, has all those on- and off-the-ball skills I talked about with Bradley and Morales. He excels at understanding how to turn strings of possession into attacking opportunities, and is one of those players who can change the tempo of the game without having to control the ball.
He also executes at a higher level than almost anyone in the entire league when given the chance. This is perfect technique:
Players on Portland who want to get time in the midfield have to beat Valeri out. Players who line up against him? They have to beat him.
You have to figure out which run to track. You have to figure out which pass to play. You have to figure out which gap to close, and you have to figure out which problem to solve. You have to do it as fast as he does - and as fast as Bradley does, and as fast as Morales does, and as fast as Federico Higuain and Benny Feilhaber and Lee Nguyen and Javier Morales and Tim Cahill and Landon Donovan and Boniek Garcia and on and on and on and on.
MLS has been considered a physical league, an athlete's league, from Day 1. That's fine, since it is still both physical and athletic.
But these guys present problems you can't solve just by running fast and trying hard, and most of them are going to be here for a long, long time. Teams and players around the league - young and old - are going to have to figure out how to beat them.
That's the crucible of MLS in 2014 and beyond. That's how a league improves.
A few more things to chew on...
9. Dillon Powers owes Clint Irwin a shutout, and the rest of his team a steak dinner. He hit the worst pass of the year in Colorado's 1-1 draw vs. Columbus.
8. I focused on Bradley, Morales and Valeri above because they're all in their prime. Donovan, Vicente Sanchez and Thierry Henry all showed this week that the old guys can still do it a bit as well.
Henry had an audacious backheel cross in New York's 2-2 draw at Houston that was my runner-up for Pass of the Week. Watch it HERE. His early ball also gave Ambroise Oyongo the space to do this to poor Andrew Driver:
That led to Bradley Wright-Phillips' league-leading 14th goal of the year. New York's got some weapons.
7. All that said, they still have the same problems tracking runners through midfield. There are three Houstonians between the lines within 35 seconds of kickoff, and it immediately led to a goal:
6. The Robbie Rogers fullback experiment continues in LA. He was mostly quiet until the last 10 minutes, at which point he became very influential with the Galaxy pushing for a winner that never came.
You can see how much he likes to cut inside and go direct at goal from his touch map. It's Fabian Johnson-esque:
5. Mauro Diaz is back! And FC Dallas both managed to win a game - 2-1 over Philly - and go an entire 90 minutes without picking up a red card.
Diaz had one lovely floated ball that Je-Vaughn Watson could have done better with, but it was Blas Perez's passing touch that stole the show. His chip on Tesho Akindele's opener was straight out of Bradley's playbook.
4. Pass of the Week belongs to Seattle's Marco Pappa. When you're being closed down through the middle - which happened to the Sounders repeatedly as Matias Laba absolutely bossed Zone 14 - you need to be able to switch the field. So this, from Pappa, shows not just technique, but also understanding of the game's tactical bent:
Pappa has been much better in terms of game tempo than I'd expected. Credit to him, but also to Sigi Schmid.
3. I'm not sure that the Revs, who dropped a 2-1 decision at RSL but played as well as they have in a month, need a bunch of new signings. But this is funny, and wins Jay Heaps our Face of the Week:
2. Feilhaber's playing the best soccer of his life, even if Sporting KC still have to figure some stuff out after an ultimately disappointing 1-1 draw against Chicago on Sunday. He had several outstanding plays, but this is the one that caught my eye:
He tracks the ball, touches it away from trouble and into advantage, and then one-times a pass directly into the run of his inverted winger. That's how the 4-3-3 is supposed to look with a true No. 10 running the show.
1. What more is there left to say about Cubo Torres? After this latest game-winning golazo - the only moment of beauty in an otherwise dire 1-0 win over Montreal - he's clearly near the top of the list of midseason MVP candidates, and should be a lock to go to Portland next month for the All-Star Game.
