Nick Cushing Named Interim HC (Jul '22) / HC (Nov '22) / Fired (Nov ‘24)
- Thread starter Kjbert
- Start date
We spent $20 million last winter on additions and improvements to the roster. That's very ambitious.
However, we are spending on the wrong players. I believe the scouts and CFG people thought these three players would be good enough to help immediately. Ultimately, I think MLS is improving and changing faster than CFG realizes, causing them to make mistakes in scouting.
Again, fair enough. But of course, our gaffer just got fired. It could well be due to the F/O believing the roster was constructed to compete today, and we failed to do it. We just don't know if they're right because the guys we signed just didn't play enough.
And there, as Billy Shakes would say, lies the rub.
It's also worth considering how the picture might have been different had we ended up, say, fourth in the East and in the conference final after beating Red Bull to get there. Maybe the writing was already on the wall for the way Nick had handled the squad all season, but the margins may have been just that close.
One of my favorite bits of psychological research (partly because wifey took a class with Dunning), quoting Wikipedia:
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities."
It is rare in my experience that a lack of firm understanding stops owners from playing an active role in their businesses.
Spending $20 million on young players that fit the MLS budget rules and our choice of U22s.
Lee has been with the team since 2014. Sporting director since 2019. Whatever credit you want to give to Reyna, Lee was heavily involved since team inception through the 2021 Cup win.
Cushing joined in 2020 as an assistant and took over as caretaker in 2022.
Lee may still depart, especially if this batch of signings fails entirely, but he contributed more to team success and was the one to keep between the two.
Giving him a chance with a new manager and time for these signings is worth the chance. If they fail, though, no issues moving on.
Right -- that's my point. They're picking the wrong players. They're making mistakes in recruiting, which seems to be an issue of CFG misunderstanding the strength of MLS and the speed MLS is improving.
Fair enough I can see wanting to let him play it out with this wave of signings but to me, this is his second wave of failed roster moves. The first wave was Magno, Thiago, Pellegrini, Ledezma, Cufre, Segal, Malte, and Gabby. All post-Reyna signings all except Gabby are gone due to underperformance. Cufre was a $800K loan that lost his spot to O'Toole. Combine that lackluster list with Lee wasting a DP spot on a CB and taking 2 years to sign a Taty replacement and I think it's time for him to go.
Don't believe anyone has floated this yet, but ...
Gio Savarese is available. Likes a possession-based, high-press system. Seems to fit the CFG model.
Who says no?
Gio Savarese is available. Likes a possession-based, high-press system. Seems to fit the CFG model.
Who says no?
I don’t understand the Cushing out and Lee out folks. We have been an above average team with an extremely young roster in the post Taty era. We made the playoffs twice under Lee/Cushing with an ECF and missed once. We did all that with unproven South Americans as the fulcrum of our success. We won a championship without Key players (Parks and Tinnerholm) and we failed to advance with healthier squads who failed to score when it was most needed.
Now you can blame Lee for bad signings or you can blame Cushing for failing with those signings. IMHO there is evidence for both. Jovan is a poor signing; Ojeda, Fernández MacFarlane and even Perea saw fewer minutes than we can judge them on. It appears to me that the club decided that Nick mismanaged his assets. I tend to agree, though I don’t think he was an abject failure like Frank Klopas at Chicago or Phil Neville at Portland or a Caleb Porter at NE or frankly Herdman at TFC. I wouldn’t take any of those guys and I hope we don’t take Curtin either. I suspect we won’t.
We will see who was right. The club chose Lee and my gut is that it was the right choice. Maybe a new manager coaxes quality out of Fernandez and Ojeda. Maybe Talles returns triumphant. Maybe the proper guidance raises Santi to the next level. And maybe CFG lets Lee pony up for a next level 10 or sniper ahead of the stadium.
We are an upper mid table squad. We’ll see whether we under- or over- achieved soon enough.
Bottom line, it’s more efficient to turn a manager than a roster, so that has to be option 1 unless your players just suck. I don’t think ours do. You just have to look across the river to see what maxing your potential looks like.
Sure RBNJ beat us, but aside from Forsberg, player for player would anyone here trade our roster for theirs?
Now you can blame Lee for bad signings or you can blame Cushing for failing with those signings. IMHO there is evidence for both. Jovan is a poor signing; Ojeda, Fernández MacFarlane and even Perea saw fewer minutes than we can judge them on. It appears to me that the club decided that Nick mismanaged his assets. I tend to agree, though I don’t think he was an abject failure like Frank Klopas at Chicago or Phil Neville at Portland or a Caleb Porter at NE or frankly Herdman at TFC. I wouldn’t take any of those guys and I hope we don’t take Curtin either. I suspect we won’t.
We will see who was right. The club chose Lee and my gut is that it was the right choice. Maybe a new manager coaxes quality out of Fernandez and Ojeda. Maybe Talles returns triumphant. Maybe the proper guidance raises Santi to the next level. And maybe CFG lets Lee pony up for a next level 10 or sniper ahead of the stadium.
We are an upper mid table squad. We’ll see whether we under- or over- achieved soon enough.
Bottom line, it’s more efficient to turn a manager than a roster, so that has to be option 1 unless your players just suck. I don’t think ours do. You just have to look across the river to see what maxing your potential looks like.
Sure RBNJ beat us, but aside from Forsberg, player for player would anyone here trade our roster for theirs?
Sign Maxi as a player/head coach. He can sub himself in when he thinks the teams needs a spark.
This may be the answer. It's not so much a case of Nick not developing individual players as not developing a team. We never really got to the point where we were truly cohesive, where everyone knew where to go and what to do and where the other guys would be and what they were going to do.
Except against Tigres. We'll always have Tigres.
Which, ironically, may have sealed Nick's fate. It showed how good we could truly be. We weren't that good often enough. Personally, I put it down to the typical issues of a young squad being inconsistent, but maybe there was something deeper going on. Maybe we just weren't a happy ship. And that's always on the captain, not the admiral.
I think the players were happy, I think they loved playing for Nick. Even last year you saw a team that fought every step of the way.
My annoyance with Nick was the lack of improvement among the young players and tactics that, especially for road games, weren't ambitious enough.
maybe that was the issue. players loved playing for nick but when push came to shove, did nick get the best out of them? this was the common criticism for berhalter with the USMNT. the players all liked him and liked playing for him, but he was never able to get the full potential out of them.
The team definitely fought. There was no lack of effort. But the dynamic I'm talking about goes beyond effort, or respecting and liking (or even loving) the coach, or players buying into a system, or any of the things we naturally look at when assessing a team and its leadership. It's kind of this spooky mind meld.
There's no rational description of it, let alone an explanation for it. You just know it when you see it. Thinking through today's event, I had to say to myself, "We never really got there."
Since last year I've thought Nick hasn't been getting the best out of the team. Ultimately I believe that's why he was fired. He especially failed with our high-priced young players. I'm surprised it didn't happen last year, but hopefully this is the right time to extract something more out of this group.
maybe they'll pull a USMNT and bring him back after 'searching" for a new coach. haha