Draft could be less than super for Caps
This year’s selections not likely to help Vancouver, who pick 35th and 83rd
In most pro drafts, the final player selected is cynically dubbed “Mr. Irrelevant,” the grown-up equivalent of being picked last for sandlot baseball.
Some of those players do indeed fade into irrelevance, relegated to mere one-line Wikipedia footnotes, while others have established themselves as bonafide pros.
Ryan Succop was drafted last in 2009 by the Kansas City Chiefs, but his NFL career is a decade long — his 160 games played is the most of any NFL Mr. Irrelevant — and he has been one of the most accurate kickers in the league.
Patric Hornqvist may have gone last to the Nashville Predators in the 2005 NHL draft — 230th overall — but he has scored 218 goals and 437 points in 683 career games, and is the only Mr. Irrelevant to have his name inscribed on the Stanley Cup.
But they are the standouts in a long, long list of forgotten names, ones too obscure to even be fair trivia questions.
The MLS SuperDraft’s first two rounds go Friday in Chicago (the third and fourth rounds will be held “via conference call at a later date”) and the way the league is trending, the entire class may just be Mr. Irrelevants.
The annual university draft was, at one time, of great import to the league, as teams could pick up domestic talent and build their rosters with them. But as Major League Soccer has evolved, becoming a higher-calibre league, it has also become more of a destination for players from outside of North America. No longer are teams stuffing their rosters with draft picks; players are either developed internally through academies or brought in from abroad.
Plus, by the time players enter the draft, their prime development years have been spent in programs that don’t always match the professional environment that United Soccerl League teams can provide.
The Philadelphia Union made their position abundantly clear Wednesday when they traded all five of their picks (Nos. 13, 29, 37, 61 and 85) in Friday’s draft to expansion side FC Cincinnati for $150,000 in 2019 General Allocation Money and $50,000 more in GAM that is conditional on the performance of the players selected.
Union sporting director Ernst Tanner was blunt about his assessment of the draft, saying he didn’t think there were any players they could select that would make their USL side, Bethlehem Steel FC, let alone the middling MLS side that finished sixth in the Eastern Conference.
“When evaluating how we want to build our roster for the 2019 season and beyond, we decided that acquiring this money is the best use of our SuperDraft resources,” Tanner said in a release. “Not only will we look to continue both signing Union Academy products for the first team and Bethlehem Steel FC, as well as attracting young talent from abroad, we believe that this sum of money will help us complete crucial signings ahead of the upcoming campaign.”
The Vancouver Whitecaps have just two picks on Friday — 35th and 83rd. They shipped their No. 11 overall spot to New England when they signed Kei Kamara in December of 2017, and their third-round pick to Orlando last month when they acquired Victor “P.C.” Giro from Orlando.
Historically, the Caps haven’t unearthed a trove of talent in the SuperDraft, apart from fullback Jake Nerwinski (No. 7 overall in 2017) and centre back Tim Parker (No. 3 overall in 2015). In 2013, they did select Kekuta Manneh and Erik Hurtado at Nos. 4 and 5, respectively, and snagged Darren Mattocks with the No. 2 pick the year previous, but no player chosen later in the draft than Nerwinski has cracked the firstteam roster.
Even a top pick doesn’t assure success: Omar Salgado was the first overall pick in 2011, and he scored just one goal in 29 appearances over four years. Making that pick look bad was the fact Darlington Nagbe went No. 2. He has developed into one of the best midfielders in MLS and one who tormented the Caps for years as a member of the Portland Timbers.
With no first-round picks this year, it’s unlikely the Caps will be adding any players of permanence. None of their picks from last year are still with the organization.
But they could look at local talents, like SFU forward Mamadi Camara, the 6-foot-2, 175-pound Montreal native who had nine goals and 13 assists with the Clan this season. They have history with SFU, taking striker Jovan Blagojevic in the third round (54th overall) of the 2015 draft.
There’s also a chance Camara may be scooped up by the draft’s biggest buyers — FC Cincinnati. The Orange and Blue not only have the No. 1 overall pick but nine others, including three of the first 16 in the draft.
And since Cincinnati’s Alan Koch coached Camara during his time with Whitecaps FC2, the MLS expansion side could be a possible destination for him.
There is, despite the draft’s waning importance, still some elite talent available for Koch and Co., including two other Canadians who could go in the top five: Victoria’s Callum Montgomery, who established himself as the draft’s best centre back with solid credentials at UNC Charlotte, and Brampton’s Tajon Buchanan, who starred at Syracuse University. Also working in Buchanan’s favour is his inclusion in the 2019 seven-player Generation Adidas class, meaning his salary wouldn’t count against the MLS salary cap.
Koch has been active in building his roster, even acquiring former Caps SuperDraftees Mattocks and goalie Spencer Richey, along with trading for Vancouver centre back Kendall Waston. Despite some of the proven names already on his team, Koch knows it will be a slow process to success, and is expecting a rocky start to MLS play with nine out of their first 10 games coming against playoff teams from last season.
“Rome was not built in a day,” Koch told the Cincinnati Enquirer this week.
“We’ve done some very good pieces of business so far to get the pieces we have in place, but we still have work to do in the remainder of this window. We’ll have work to do in the summer window, and we’ll have more work to do next year.
“We’re not going to come out of the gates blazing. It takes time. It takes time to gel a team. You can even see that from our own experiences.
“Look at last year in the USL. It wasn’t MLS, but we’re playing the same game and we were building a team in the same manner. We struggled for the first few games, and then we went undefeated all summer.”