The Thorns FO has released an “end of season contract” post and I wanted to throw out a brief discussion about that.
The real “news” it contains is 1) the confirmation of “who is a free agent”, and 2) one player waived.
The waiver is forward Izzy D’Aquila.
That’s both fortunate and unfortunate.
Fortunate in that it makes it possible for D’Aquila to look for work elsewhere…which is kind of “good-news-bad-news” fortunate. I hope she finds somewhere to keep chasing her dreams.
Unfortunate in the way it kind of backhands the club technical staff and roster management.
D’Aquila came here in 2023 with the rep as a dangerous front-running striker, a true poacher. But the club already had a front-runner in Sophia Smith, so D’Aquila was faced with a bad bargain; accept very limited minutes behind Smith and a “0-to-60-in-3.5-seconds” long-term-substitute’s skillset, or develop a winger’s skillset, all under a series of coaches whose line of “player development” credit runs pretty thin.
That she was played largely as a winger without success is largely on the coaching staff. That her first touch and conversion rate never improved, well…that might be on her to a point.
Either way it’s a sad ending to her story here.
The yet-to-be-signed free agents are Marissa Sheva in midfield, keepers Lauren Kozal and Kat Asman, and defenders Kelli Hubly, Meghan Klingenberg, Gabby Provenzano and Becky Sauerbrunn.
Technically Sinclair is, too. Insert shrug emoji here.
I think it’s important that we remember that we’re in a new NWSL now. No more drafts, no more “forced” trades. The players listed above are true free agents, with all that implies.
Which is, most importantly, that they can, and should, get the best contract deal on offer.
Which means that if Sheva, or ‘Brunn, or Kozal jump immediately on a Portland offer they’re doing themselves a disservice.
They should be taking their time, looking around. If another club makes them a good offer, but they’d rather stay here they can bring that offer to the Thorns and see if the club will match or better it. That’s what free agents do.
In turn that puts the onus on the club. They need to make the players they want to keep good offers as well as a realistic opportunity to play to get the opportunity to win glory and even better offers down the line. This isn’t a rec league; these people aren’t playing for fun.
So we as fans need to understand that the roster may not get locked down for a while as the free agents look around for offers. And that some may take those other offers, and that’s not an indictment of our FO; it’s legitimate for a club to decide that someone else’s valuation of Lauren Kozal is too high.
We’ll have to be patient and see.
Update 12/12: The club posted “thank you” gimmicks (on it’s Facebook page) to three of the free agents; Sheva, Kozal, and Asman. One – Asman – has been picked up by Orlando. The other two…have not, at least that I can find on the internet.
FWIW, the whole “thanks and goodbye” press release thing has become an odd artifact. In the Before Times it was a straight-out “we cut this player/we made an offer and this player refused it” marker. In Free Agent world it means “we didn’t make them an offer” – at least I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. So kind of the same thing, except the whole goofy “Portland retains the “rights” to Marissa Sheva” business is gone.
We’ll see.
What we should be wanting is a new general manager and, from there, a new head coach, and the sooner (and better!) that happens, the better.
Thoughts?
Update 12/17: Becky Sauerbrunn has retired.
While not shocking – and I should add that it makes me even more suspicious that Klingenberg will also hang ’em up this winter – it makes the lack of FO ambition more culpable.
As I noted in the “Defenders” update, Sam Hiatt is a decent (B/B+) Sauerbrunn backfill. The second centerback signing (Daiane out of Brazil) looks little more than depth, and as the Defenders post noted, the backline was not good last season; the idea was to improve the unit, not swap Sauerbrunn for Hiatt or Hubly for Daiane.
With 20/20 hindsight the problems go back to 2023. LeBlanc and Norris were poor choices, panic-hires either by Peregrine or RAJ to stopgap the perceived problems in the C-suites. Since then RAJ has been slow-moving and tepid in ambition. The dilatory GM-hire means that we’re either stuck with Ken or his replacement-hiring will be rushed to get someone in place before March.
Things could still come together. But winter is coming, and the Thorns are looking increasingly threadbare.
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I’m a little less critical of KK than I have been in the past. When she took the job, she probably though she would be working behind an experienced GM (GW) showing her the ropes. With GW’s sacking and the prolonged sale, she was kind of left to flap in the wind all by her lonesome. Hard to blame her for using her Canadian contacts to staff the club. Probably had a limited budget for players and staff. That being said, me ire has shifted to ownership for dragging their feet on replacing her. Two other clubs have signed GMs already. I cant imagine why it is taking so fricking long to make this decision. They knew we needed a new GM for several months now. The free agent ticker is ticking. The incompetence of this ownership group is disheartening.
So it can be “porque no los dos?” LeBlanc isn’t very clever at her job. The owners are proving to be very slow-moving on, well, pretty much everything. I had an email from the club less than a month ago. The ticket rep (who’s a good rep, BTW) is STILL a Peregrine hire; RAJ hasn’t got their own ticket/STH reps in place after nearly a year. That’s pretty much “temp-agency hire” simple, but they haven’t done it.
I’m not on the #CanucksOut train. Rather I question the overall roster build as it included the CWNT players. Beckie and Fleming SHOULD have had a well-developed coordination from their national team experience, and one a smart gaffer could build on…or NOT; if they couldn’t develop a synergy – and they didn’t – a smart gaffer should have insisted that one or the other be passed up.
And as I said in the post; it IS a free agent world now, so time is LESS pressing, I think. I’d rather the Bhathals get the GM right rather then soon, if soon means settling for Parsons or some other NWSL retread. We need a GM with a broad knowledge of the WoSo universe AND experience in a transfer-market league, someone like Kellerman at Wolfsburg. Let’s not have more LeBlancs, Norrises, and Gales.
So I’m not thrilled but also not inclined to pull the trigger on RAJ yet. I think we need to see who they hire.
Well, per your prescient comment, “Which means that if Sheva, or ‘Brunn, or Kozal jump immediately on a Portland offer they’re doing themselves a disservice.” Off go Sheva, Kozal, and Asman. Apparently, per Instagram, they are all moving on.
So, in terms of GK, it’s Hogan, Arnold, and Bixby. That’s… not bad but not great.
Losing Sheva? As much as she is a likable person, for all of the 80 or so minutes she played, not really a loss. I genuinely hope she finds a good fit.
As I noted in the update, the “thank you” press release now means either “we waived them/didn’t make them an offer” or “we made an offer and they took another/better offer”. Presumably Asman’s case it was Door #2. Kozal and Sheva are presumably still looking.
I’m not distressed by any of these moves…yet. It’d be nice to have a smarter head in the technical box, tho, to oversee these roster moves, tho…
So far none of these moves are a surprise. D’Aquila simply never put it together here, and while some of that is the insistence of putting a square peg into a round hole, she also never consistently made plays when they were there to be made. The other players didn’t play enough to merit any concern about their departures.
The concern for me (as it is for most of us) is that we don’t have a GM who is working with the (hopefully new) HC to determine what this team needs to move forward. Are we moving to a 3-back formation, negating the need to find a defensive mid-fielder? Or are we planning on sticking with a 4-3-3/4-2-3-1, meaning we need to address the lack of defensive midfielders? The longer this takes the harder it is to sign the players we are going to need. The teams needs to get it done with the right person.
Oh boy, the retirement of Sauerbrunn is going to be hard on the team. Perhaps she wasn’t the best defender in the league, but she was our best defender. Now we are back to Obaze, Hiatt and Diaine. The team has some work really cut out for them.