Write On Sports LLC - "Kansas City Wizards 2006: Going All-In with a High Card" by Jeff Bull

Kansas City Wizards 2006: Going All-In with a High Card

2006-12-14 19:57:46 | By: Jeff Bull

After sitting out the 2005 post-season, the Kansas City Wizards built their club’s recovery on a premise of quality over quantity. The Wizards have a long reputation for sturdy defending; this was the team, after all, that introduced the 1-0 victory to MLS Cup by making Miklos Molnar’s early goal stand up in 2000. With defense seemingly in place the Wizards went after a Big Fish for their offence and, just before the 2006 season, they landed him. Unfortunately, the Big Fish flopped. But that’s only the first answer to the question of what went wrong with the Wizards’ 2006.

New Men

Judging by the few personnel changes they made, one could assume the Wizards viewed the 2005 season as a fluke. That they traded two key players - midfield anchor Diego Gutierrez and Chris Klein, one of the top right-sided players in the country - for little in the way of immediate return further supports that assumption. They gained only a player allocation (a large chunk of money set aside for hiring high-caliber players and that was for Klein) and a young, attacking player named Will John in exchange for those two losses in the short-term. It wasn’t till June when the Wizards signed Dave Van den Bergh from the Dutch club FC Utrecht that they reached even ballpark range of full value.

But the big acquisition - and the big gamble - for the Wizards heading into the 2006 season was forward Eddie Johnson, the aforementioned Big Fish. Johnson’s reputation grows more from expectations than his resume: he produced one league-leading season with FC Dallas in 2004, but a season troubled by injury and friction with Dallas’ coach followed. Still, he remains one of, if not the, great, raw talents in American soccer and he is paid accordingly: Johnson comes third in all of Major League Soccer (MLS) for base salary. Knowing all this, even expecting that Johnson would be absent during the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the Wizards signed Johnson in February at the cost of two allocations.

The Bad

As implied in the intro, the gamble the Wizards took on Johnson didn’t remotely pay off. Johnson, along with the Wizards as a team, started 2006 strong; by the beginning of May, they had yet to lose and topped the Eastern Conference. Early match reports stayed on a pre-season bandwagon that assumed a break-out year for Johnson; when he scored his second goal of the season, one report noted he was “first on the team” to do so. Sadly, those two goals were the only ones Johnson scored all year. For a player making nearly 10 times the league average, that’s almost embarrassing return on the dollar.

But Johnson wasn’t the only one to leave Kansas City for World Cup duty: forward Josh Wolff and defender Jimmy Conrad departed as well and only Conrad came back to the club healthy. Head coach Bob Gansler expressed amply confidence in their replacements, but Kansas City stumbled badly when their World Cup trio left. When Wolff and Johnson returned, little by little and not always in the same game, the expectation was the Wizard’s fortunes would come back with them; instead, things got worse. Six games into what would be a devastating seven-game losing streak, Gansler, just the second coach in the Wizards 11-year history, resigned.

With or without their star players - who, overall, produced less for the season than their colleagues - the club settled into a troublesome pattern, which a July 2 report on MLSnet.com described this way: when the Wizards defense played well, they couldn’t score; when their offense scored, they’d blow the lead, often within minutes. No matter which players the club fielded, they only rarely played a complete game from back to front. Though they were rarely blown out, Kansas City’s penchant for allowing wins to slip to ties and ties to bumble into losses ultimately kept them out of their second consecutive post-season.

The Good

If one asked Wizards players for a silver lining for 2006, it’s likely they’d struggle to find one. There were highlights to be sure: the strong start to the season; a 3-2 comeback win over the Chicago Fire in mid-June that suggested they would return to their winning ways; the 4-1 home win over the Colorado Rapids on the day the Wizards players and staff learned the club had been sold to new buyers and that they would stay in Kansas City for the foreseeable future. Mirroring the season as a whole, though, subsequent events dumped all over each highlight: the Wizards picked up only one point in the entire month of May; they failed so completely to return to winning ways after beating Chicago that the coach would resign before they did; after the Colorado win, political realities have the club still searching out a site for the stadium that will guarantee the Wizards’ future. And so on.

Bad as the big picture was, a few individual Wizards had solid seasons. Scott Sealy, who entered the season as Johnson’s clear understudy, led the team with 10 goals - not incidentally, ten times the number Johnson managed and more than Johnson and Wolff’s total combined. It was a defender who actually led the Wizards in points: Jose Burciaga Jr. ended 2006 with an impressive 8 assists and 8 goals - doesn’t hurt he’s the team’s free-kick specialist. Bo Oshoniyi had an occasionally inspired season in goal and Nick Garcia, the teams’ veteran defender, scored his first professional goal after 7 years and 181 games. And one new signing worked out: Van den Bergh showed a thing or two on the wing.

Wrap-Up

The Kansas City staff wasn’t alone in thinking they entered 2006 holding a strong hand. And they certainly weren’t the only ones to view Johnson as the ace in the hole; somewhere in a since-deleted blog, I predicted Kansas City would win the East, possibly even MLS Cup. Even when things went so badly wrong halfway through the season, no one, least of all those associated with the franchise, spoke of post-season play with anything less than certainty. With the Wizards overall offense/defense statistics resting comfortably within league tolerances, it’s clear the so-called role-players did their job; it was the stars, the players brought in specifically to put them over the top, who failed to produce. In the end, this put them on the wrong side of the exceedingly thin, even razor-thin, margin of error in MLS’s Eastern Conference. How close was it? Runaway conference leaders DC United excepted, when September started the Wizards sat in fourth place, one point ahead of fifth placed Red Bull New York, one point behind the third place New England Revolution, and just two points behind second place Chicago. The Wizards struggled to the end and seemed to have done just enough when, on the season’s final day, they faced Red Bull New York away from home needing only a tie to make the playoffs. It hardly mattered that Eddie Johnson didn’t play in that losing, ultimately deciding, effort; Sealy scored in any case.

The Future

It’s hard to know what will happen with the Wizards in 2007. Brian Bliss, who coached the Wizards on an interim basis after Gansler resigned, was replaced in turn by Curt Onalfo. Onalfo’s big move so far was waiving starting ‘keeper Bo Oshoniyi - not the most obvious of decisions given the past season. But what he does with the rest of the squad - indeed whether he needs to do anything with the rest of the squad - remains the big question. With the team fundamentally strong in nearly every position, it seems more a question of addition than subtraction. One addition that immediately occurs to me would be a traditional playmaker, someone who can deliver the passes to make the most out of the teams’ forwards. In the season wrap for MLSnet.com, however, Bliss dismissed the need for a traditional playmaker; perhaps Onalfo has other ideas.

But the main thing this team needs is a shot of confidence and help with concentration. And you can’t trade for that, or buy it on the transfer market.

Editor's Note: This is part of a series wrapping up the 2006 season for each of Major League Soccer's 12 teams. Readers can find other entries in the series by clicking on the author's byline.

Comments

G commented,
Nice article.
December 20, 2006 8:38 a.m.

Mike commented,
Nice article, but one thing I wanted to say, the Wizards players and staff found out about the sell of the team well before that game against Colorado. The Wizards were sold to OnGoal LLC in late August, the game against CO was Sept. 9th. Here's the KC Star article that talks about the sale. http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/15408603.htm
December 20, 2006 9:31 a.m.

Matt commented,
Good stuff
December 21, 2006 2:14 p.m.

Jeff Bull commented,
Dang. Didn't know about the comments. Yeah, I'm writing from the distant future, which means "Mike" will never see this, but...corrections are ALWAYS welcome. Accuracy is what matters here. Thanks for catching it.
March 27, 2007 4:15 p.m.

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