It’s early. So let’s start there.
March form means different things to different teams. For a squad like Houston’s, this is an unusually critical month. The Dynamo, for instance, finished dead last in the Western Conference a year ago, and with so many new faces in critical positions in the mix, new coach Wilmer Cabrera desperately needed an early jolt to prove to his young squad they were on a new trajectory. Another poor start to the year and he might’ve lost the locker room before he’d had a chance to win it.
The Sounders are in a decisively different place, and they’re certainly lacking for that confidence regardless of what happens this month. Being a party to that rollercoaster 2016 will do that for you.
It’s a major reason, in fact, why they were able to dig out a 2-2 draw against the Montreal Impact on Saturday. They found a way to pull a road point out of the muck precisely because they’d been in far more pressure-packed situations before with a similar roster. And it just so happened that Will Bruin, one of the new guys, was on the business end of the goal. So it goes.
So here the Sounders are, just a few months removed from hoisting an MLS Cup and staring at a point from its first two games of the season, both of which were on the road. There were some good and a few choppy things from those two performances, and it’s hard to ignore a few dissenting voices wondering if there’s some sort of MLS Cup hangover in the offing where the Sounders are concerned.
And to that, I ask you to think back on the summer of 2016 and breathe. It’s March, and this is a championship roster.
To diagnose both the good in the bad, it’s worthwhile to dive into the numbers a bit. What exactly are and aren’t the Sounders doing now that they were doing late in the season last year? How is this team different at the current juncture? Where might they be going? Heady questions, some of which don’t yet have answers. But some do.
The most obvious difference is in the midfield. Clint Dempsey and Nicolas Lodeiro only got four games together in 2016 after the latter arrived from Boca Juniors, and the Sounders were largely forced to find their form from September on without Dempsey. But in those four games, Lodeiro and Dempsey both were resplendent. Dempsey scored five goals in those four, which accounted for half his season total in fewer than 360 minutes. Lodeiro, meanwhile, had a goal and two assists in that frame hitting the ground running in a brand new league just days after arriving in-country.
Without question, the pinnacle within the pinnacle was the swashbuckling 3-1 win over Orlando City on Aug. 7, when Dempsey scored a hat trick and Lodeiro had a pair of secondary assists. This was what Lodeiro and Dempsey’s combined pass maps looked like that day.
And this is how they looked against Montreal on Saturday.
In general terms, the deeper Dempsey is, the worse off the team’s structure will be on the whole. That’s why playing Dempsey at the No. 10 role in lieu of a wider shape from Lodeiro is such a gamble. Lodeiro is going to swing from sideline to sideline regardless of his deployment, but dropping Dempsey into the midfield is a recipe for pulling him away from goal. And that’s especially the case when he’s finding form.
The biggest difference in the two - Dempsey and Lodeiro were good against Montreal without being game-changing - is that cluster of No. 2s (Dempsey’s number) and No. 10s (Lodeiro’s number) in and around the center circle. There were a lot of completed passes from both, namely Dempsey, against Montreal, which isn’t a bad thing on its own. But many of them were relatively harmless possession prods, which ideally is why Osvaldo Alonso and Cristian Roldan are there. At this point in his career Dempsey is there to poach goals, as he did against Houston in the opener. The deeper he is, the farther away he is from making those runs into the box for caroms and second balls.
Lodeiro essentially has to shadow Dempsey, which is why he was even deeper than he normally is. Lodeiro likes to stay hooked in to his fellow creators - he’s not a long passer, by nature - so the deeper Dempsey drops, the more likely Lodeiro is to drop with him. That pulls the focus of the attack further and further away from the box. The Sounders are built to ping around short passes - they lead the league in passes per game under 25 yards through the first two games - and yanking everything back 25 yards doesn’t help chance creation.
None of this particularly matters on set pieces and on the business end of builds after long modes of possession. Dempsey’s already in the area in those instances anyway. But that requires good service and limits playing on the transition. In sum, the Sounders can and will win games when Lodeiro and Dempsey are often prowling deep like this, but you won’t be seeing much in the way of those quick-fire counters and breaks the Sounders were hitting on late last year. It requires time on possession.
The good news is that while the most critical partnership on the field for the Sounders hasn’t hit the ground running like it did in 2016, both are still rounding into form. Dempsey is still getting his groove back after a long layoff that severely limited the amount of time he could spend training. Lodeiro is still figuring out which flank works best with coach Brian Schmetzer’s current roster construction.
But the fact remains that any team in the league would kill for a pairing like this. The more the season wears on, the more comfortable it’ll get. Considering Saturday was just the sixth game with Lodeiro and Dempsey on the field together, things are progressing just fine.
