Whitecaps deal Waston to Cincinnati
New team also selects a pair of players familiar to Vancouver fans in MLS expansion draft
FC Cincinnati head coach Alan Koch used to coach in Vancouver — he coached SFU for years and spent two season at the helm of WFC 2 — and he looked back home for his first two picks in the fiveround 2019 Major League Soccer expansion draft on Tuesday.
The newest Major League Soccer team also made a further Vancouver-related splash via trade, adding Kendall Waston.
“Obviously there’s the Vancouver connection,” Koch said on a post-draft conference call, "(but) we scouted the entire league.”
Cincinnati general manager Jeff Berding initially joked, “Kendall who?”
He then declined to comment on a report that they were trading for Waston, the former Whitecaps captain who declared he wanted to leave the club that brought him to MLS in 2014.
A couple of hours later, the trade was made official: Waston to Cincinnati for an international roster spot and up to $850,000 in allocation money.
When it came time to draft, Koch and Berding most notably used their second pick to nab Kei Kamara off the Caps’ unprotected list. Koch then announced the big striker had been flipped to the Colorado Rapids in exchange for an international roster spot.
As part of his response to the Waston query, Berding did point to the international spot as being a chip they were likely to use in another move; that fits reports saying the Whitecaps will receive an international roster spot and allocation money in exchange for Waston.
Waston took to twitter ini- tially to express surprise about the rumoured move, but then after the trade was made official he tweeted again: “happy happy happy happy soooooooo happyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!!! "
Kamara scored 17 goals in all competitions for the Whitecaps this past season, his only one in Vancouver. He proved to be a fan favourite, but new coach Marc Dos Santos indicated after he was hired that he would be looking to go in a new direction for his primary striker.
If Cincinnati didn’t already have ex-Portland Timbers striker Fanendo Adi in the fold, you could see them having looked to keep him. But like Kamara, Adi’s a big striker, he has great feet around the net.
Berding indicated they did consider looking to keep both big strikers — “they’d have been a handful together” — but ultimately saw broader roster-building opportunities.
Kamara opted out of free agency this season, opting instead to go through the re-entry process, for the usual quirky MLS reasons: under free agency, the largest salary he could have drawn would be $530,000, whereas he could potentially double that through the re-entry process.
The other Whitecaps draft connection was FC Cincinnati’s first pick: former Whitecaps striker Darren Mattocks.
Mattocks played the 2018 season with D.C. United, scoring 10 goals in 25 league games.
He was a first-round draft pick of the Whitecaps in 2012, playing here until 2015. He moved to the Portland Timbers in 2016, playing in 43 league games over two seasons, scoring five goals.
Koch called Mattocks an “electric type of player,” noting the big role he played for DC United before they signed Wayne Rooney. He’s hoping Mattocks will become a fan favourite in Cincinnati.
Cincinnati also picked Roland Lamah from FC Dallas, Eric Alexander from Houston Dynamo and Hassan Ndam from the New York Red Bulls.
He then also announced the team had traded for Atlanta United left back Greg Garza.