Editor's Note: The following is the fourth and final entry in a series of features looking back at the Seattle Sounders' season, broken down by position. Here's the first in the series, examining goalkeepers and the second, which takes a look at the Rave Green's defense. The third, looking at the team's ever-changing midfield, is here.
The Seattle Sounders are a many-faceted machine with a dizzying array of moving parts. Nothing in the system works without its integrated partners, and so in that way there is no one tier of Seattle’s depth chart discernibly more important than the next.
But ask any observer - coldly neutral or opinionatedly biased - about the international face of the franchise as it stands today, and you’ll almost certainly get two names before any other ones.
Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins.
The 2015 season was unpredictable everywhere for the Sounders, and that didn’t stop with the forwards, even the two men who are as visible as any two players in all of MLS. Dempsey and Martins began the season on an impossible scoring streak, and by the beginning of May they’d combined for 11 goals. That put both players on pace to break the MLS single-season scoring record in the same year.
It also put the duo on pace to combine for 57 goals in 34 regular season matches, which would’ve broken the all-time league record for goals between two players in a single season by 17.
But, needless to say, the tempestuous summer slowed both down a bit.
Once June hit, the verve of the Sounders’ attack dipped significantly. Martins was lost to an injury for two months on June 16, and Dempsey only played 90 minutes between June 13 and Sept. 5. Between mid-June and late August, Seattle managed just four goals during a particularly humdrum stretch of 11 winless games as the forwards thrashed to find form.
By season’s end, both Dempsey and Martins had rounded out respectable seasons by just about any measure MLS can conjure. Martins scored 15 goals and provided six assists, and he finished with a decent return of a goal about every 120 minutes. Dempsey, meanwhile, hit for 12 goals and 10 assists in 23 matches - including the playoffs - and did a bit of everything in the attacking third, for better or worse.
To address the team’s flagging scoring concerns up top, the Sounders’ front office found its answer primarily in Nelson Valdez. Most all of Seattle’s midseason acquisitions in 2015 dealt with the banged-up midfield and shoring up the back line. Even Valdez mostly settled on the right flank as Martins and Dempsey returned to the lineup full time over the final two months of the season.
Valdez ultimately only played 592 minutes for Seattle due to his late addition and some nagging injuries, but he did provide two goals and an assist, including a critical sliding goal on an Andreas Ivanschitz cross to help beat the LA Galaxy in the Western Conference Knockout Round of the playoffs. Valdez played about half those minutes as a striker, which only adds to his versatility in advance of his first full season in MLS in 2016.
Lamar Neagle and Chad Barrett spent much of the summer rotating through the top spot, and Neagle in particular had a decent run-out as a lone striker in a 4-2-3-1 Seattle head coach Sigi Schmid used to try to bust the slump in the summer. It didn’t have much effect, and he only played 164 minutes over the final eight weeks of the season.
Barrett, meanwhile, scored five goals largely from the bench, none bigger than banging home the tying goal against the Galaxy in stoppage time on Oct. 4 to keep the team’s unbeaten run going. Even still, Barrett also saw his playing time diminish late in the season with the return of so many players, and he only logged 119 minutes from the start of August through the end of the season.
But perhaps the biggest what-if of the season belonged to ponytailed rookie forward Andy Craven.
Craven played the first few months of the season with S2 coming out of North Carolina, and he was signed to the senior team in late June at a nadir for roster depth up top. It got so bad that Schmid subbed center back Chad Marshall on at forward late in a loss at the Philadelphia Union on June 24. Unsurprisingly, Craven was added to the first team not long thereafter.
Craven had impressed in practice, and Schmid admitted later in the season that Craven was slated to start against the Colorado Rapids on July 18 when he suffered an MCL strain in practice two days before the game. Two weeks later, he was added to the Disabled List and missed the rest of the year. He underwent surgery earlier this week.
So it went in 2015. As soon as one player came back to the lineup, it seemed like another went down.
The future of the forward position is set for the near term at the top of the depth chart. As long as Dempsey and Martins are healthy, they’ll be the first-choice strikers in Schmid’s 4-4-2. The most interesting questions are who provides the backup, and whether former academy phenom Jordan Morris leaves Stanford in the offseason. Because if he does, it’s hard to imagine he won’t be the No. 1 platoon option behind the two forward cornerstones.
The Sounders recently confirmed they’ve offered Morris the largest Homegrown deal in MLS history already this offseason. That would eclipse the reported record $140,000 contract the San Jose Earthquakes gave Tommy Thompson in January 2014, the largest initial Homegrown deal in MLS history. Whether Morris stays for his senior year or jumps at the opportunity, we’ll have to wait and see.
Elsewhere, Seattle must decide how to best deal with its lingering depth at the position. After a promising start to the year with S2, University of Washington product Darwin Jones only played 107 minutes for the first team in 2015. Promising teenager Victor Mansaray signed a Homegrown deal late in 2014 but only managed 28 minutes in three games over the course of the season, doing most of his damage on S2 as well.
There’s also the matter of Neagle and Barrett, whose playing time diminished significantly following the additions of Ivanschitz and Valdez. So fitting all these pieces into the puzzle in time for 2016 won’t be easy, but there’s good news. Perhaps no team in MLS has a talented one-two combo up as Martins and Dempsey, and both return for what promises to be a decidedly fascinating season.