2017 Roster Discussion
- Thread starter NYCFCfan
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Frank = June 20, 1978
Me = June 22, 1978
I just made it!!! YTF mother Fers!!!!!! I feel so young!
Is it true that you two had a joint Bar Mitzvah in '91?Frank = June 20, 1978
Me = June 22, 1978
I just made it!!! YTF mother Fers!!!!!! I feel so young!
If history is anything to go by.
Round one: guy might make the 23, probably won't because we ended the season on a high note and have a really bad draft number. Whoever he is is probably going to be USL quality.
Round two: will never play MLS quality soccer, might hack it in USL might not.
Round three: basically non existent chance of playing soccer in a professional capacity.
The basic problem with the draft is that the really good players, the guys who can cut it in MLS, have probably already been snapped up by an academy somewhere. There are always a few exceptions to that general rule on a yearly basis, but the MLS draft is basically the USL draft.
That is true. But that lazy bastard took the haftorah and left me with the rest! (Now that's a SUPER jewy joke)
Yes we did. Or we were supposed to. After telling everyone we were doing it together, he decided to wait till '92 so he could spend some more time with his real friends in the UK. (Less Jewy joke, more Forum centric)
we still have brandt and rawls from that year ....we had a fourth rounder but he was cut and i didnt even recognize the name.....2016 was only harrison
i gotta see how many go to USL from this draft
There's not a ton of guys who make it via the Draft anyway. OF all the leagues, MLS does the best job getting the good guys off the board early. You don't see late round fliers hit in this league like you do in the NFL or MLB. Even the NBA gets guys who hit in the second round.
Geoff Cameron. Third round. Wondolowski.same. Tim Parker was 13. Roldan?
Do I only hang around to fact check? What the hell guys?!?? Post some shit about what kind of spikes some guy wears and it would get corrected in 2 seconds. Post practically anything about actual on field things or player quality and people just accept it.
I think there's a lot of mis-interpreting small sample size here. Fewer draft picks means less chances at winning the lottery. That's all. But if you choose wisely, there are gems that can do a job.
Two guys in 20 drafts. I said nothing about mid round first rounders except that the clubs do a good job of getting the talent off the board early.
I'm sure it's more than 2. That's just what I knew off the top of my head. Pretty sure there are some other later round guys who have been decent defenders, I just don't care to do a complete analysis.
As to picking the best guys early, I'd say that's not especially true to any more of an extent than it is in any other draft. My bet is MLS is probably signicantly worse than NFL or NBA, actually. How do starter level players not come off the board in the top 5 every time? They aren't looking at that many players relative to every other sport. So to the extent you are correct in your early pick hypothesis, it's probably a function of a small pool and even smaller pool of potentially top players that they can't help but pick most of the best players early.
Maybe evaluation in soccer is much more like baseball in that it's really hard to project how well a player will translate. I could buy that. That would help explain why there are so many busts in both.
Where MLS fails regularly from my understanding is that they typically seem to over-rely on their combine results rather than a full body of work. They also, until recently, had little to no means of polishing a player who may have had the physical tools. I say all this just to stress that I find it highly unlikely that an institution such as "American soccer" that is so widely criticized for its development programs would also somehow be more adept at scouting and drafting than leagues with far more experience and dollars invested in same.
So to me, the only likely explanation, if you are correct, is that there are so few players worth a shit, teams can't help but fall bass-ackwards into drafting them "early" (whatever that means to you). And even then, as I said, how is it a good job if I can look back only two drafts and there are so many wasted picks before two players ready to contribute practically immediately come off the board.
In summary, you may be right. But the point I am trying to make is if you are, it would be counter to logic in that it contradicts several long-standing, generally accepted premises about American soccer. Could they all be wrong? Of course. But I think the burden of empirical proof falls to the theorist whose assertion runs counter.
I think you need to look at the culture in different countries, and what happens to players who "don't make it".
In the US, there's not the same culture for football as there is in the rest of the world, and players who drop out the system - as I understand it - either switch to other sports if dropped while quite young or go into business thanks to their university studies which players in the rest of the world don't undertake.
For this reason there's a massive emphasis on retaining anyone with a modicum of talent at the early stages, but once that support network disappears if they miss their chance to make it big from the combine, they're at real risk of disappearing out of football. Admittedly my sample size was small but I looked at 3rd round picks from the 2011 SuperDraft as an example and half of them no longer actually play the game anymore. Obviously anyone who gives up on their career after 2-3 years stands no chance of later earning their stripes and hitting the big time as a late bloomer. That's just the reality of a country with fewer teams, less money and more sporting competition from other codes. This creates a systematic bias towards 1st round picks seeming to always be the better players.
Outside of the US, and certainly in Europe, clubs know they can afford to be wasteful because the culture encourages it. Obviously everyone wants to discover the next Messi but not when kids drop out from major academies they don't go for other sports, they remain committed to football and they simply find a place in a smaller youth setup. Even if that means joining their local hometown team, with their 500 fans, they still do it. For those players who drop out after briefly shining at the top in their late teens/early twenties then this counts doubly so because those players have rejected an education in order to live the dream, so they don't have many other prospects, but there's equally always a team willing to take them on, at some level.
For this reason it's very common to see failed products of PL academies playing at non-league level into their 30s. The offshoot of this is that late bloomers almost always have their chance to shine. Most of them, due to the size of the footballing world outside the US, stay at a high enough level to not be considered failures but you still get your classic examples of players who make spectacular late rises.
Take Jamie Vardy for example. He dropped out of Sheffield Wednesday's academy at 15 and joined a local team. His debut cake in the 8th tier of English football. He didn't play his first professional game until 24 and at 25 he still wasn't even in the Football League,but at 29 he just won the PL and scored his 5th goal for England this week. Yannick Bolasie played in the English 11th tier. The culture exists such that this kind of story simply can happen like it can't in the US, and that makes it look like European clubs are worse at spotting talent.
Yes. There are so few players worth a shit, that in most years, the good players are gone by the middle of the first round.
Nothing to disagree with here. I don't know if it was your intent, but I can't help but read this as further evidencing my point: there's no reason to think that MLS exceeds expected norms for drafting players. eta: And in fact, they might be proven worse further were there to be more opportunity for a low pick to refine/develop/be a "late bloomer".
Okay. So then how is the league as a whole good if they pick 10 or 15 shitty players before Tim Parker or Christian Roldan? We're interpreting the same data differently. Because to me, that screams "pathetic" that half or more of the league passes on players that would have helped them.
I wouldn't argue the league is all that great. There are 20 teams. Those teams typically have 23 players on roster. The average team has 3 homegrowns. So let's assume there are 20 teams with 20 players acquired in other ways (400 Players).
From Wikipedia - there are currently 160 International Roster Spot players in MLS. That leaves you with 240 American players across 20 teams. 12 Americans per team. One good draft pick for every year, and that's not including guys picked up from USL and NASL.
There's not a ton of depth in this league domestically.
One other point to make.... there have been times when a player wants to go to a particular club, and has a handshake agreement with said club to draft them, and in the interim the player says they have zero interest in MLS and instead are going overseas. Nobody drafts the player for fear of losing a pick and he falls to his team of choice. The caveat being that he has to be credible with his dismissal of MLS and have a nobodies fallback in case he's drafted by a team he has zero interest in. Still not a losing situation with a job offer.
Not saying this will happen to NYCFC, but don't discount the draw we have for top prospects to want to come here instead of anywhere else they aren't geographically tied to.
Not saying this will happen to NYCFC, but don't discount the draw we have for top prospects to want to come here instead of anywhere else they aren't geographically tied to.
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So this talk about the superdraft got me a little bit curious as to what we could expect, so I did a little bit of googling and came across this mock draft.
Now, I know absolutely nothing about any of these prospects so I'm not sure how good it is, but I do have a couple of questions already (e.g., they have NE drafting a GK though they signed Cody Cropper last season).
This has us taking a 6'5" CB from UNC, which sounds like it could have some value were we to dump Mena and potentially Hernandez. If there is a CB good with his feet, he could good some decent, cheap depth. But, maybe we could unload Saunders and take a GK (they have the top GK going at pick 22).
Also interesting, they noted that Chicago has two homegrowns coming in this year that would be the top 2 picks in the superdraft were they in it (not sure if they are considered better than the other homegrowns though) and Chicago has picks #3 and #11. After drafting Campbell and Vincent last year, they have the potential to build a quality, young back 4 that can grow together on the field.
Now, I know absolutely nothing about any of these prospects so I'm not sure how good it is, but I do have a couple of questions already (e.g., they have NE drafting a GK though they signed Cody Cropper last season).
This has us taking a 6'5" CB from UNC, which sounds like it could have some value were we to dump Mena and potentially Hernandez. If there is a CB good with his feet, he could good some decent, cheap depth. But, maybe we could unload Saunders and take a GK (they have the top GK going at pick 22).
Also interesting, they noted that Chicago has two homegrowns coming in this year that would be the top 2 picks in the superdraft were they in it (not sure if they are considered better than the other homegrowns though) and Chicago has picks #3 and #11. After drafting Campbell and Vincent last year, they have the potential to build a quality, young back 4 that can grow together on the field.
Aurelien Collin is out of contract with RBNJ but not a free agent, not enough years with MLS. Would take him if the price was right. He was pretty impactful for them
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