MLS Draft 2011 Recap: First Round Maneuvering Rules the Day

While they likely wanted a RB, there probably was not a right back that they had rated very high.

Fucito and Zak…

One can hope, yes?

I think the Sounders pretty much made a statement that the draft is for suckers. Like you said, second round stars in the MLS draft are not likely. It happens, but not very often. To me this was all about getting some allocation dollars and filling up the reserve league.

Tetteh seems the only one we’ll be talking about beyond mid season. Considering how much starting talent they signed as discovery and DP in the last 12 months, they’ve pretty much made it clear, we will build through international signings and we don’t much care for NCAA talent. Drafts are for making the numbers work out on the roster.

Yeah yeah long schedule… open cup etc, but these guys seem like long shots to even make the 18, let alone make the field.

The talent pool in the US is only getting stronger and deeper, and MLS is getting deeper pockets, so fewer of the top talents are escaping overseas. That means draft classes which are improving over the years. Even if the draft doesn’t improve, I feel like it is still a very important place to help build your team.

In baseball, a ton of first-round picks flame out. But at the same time, most of the All-Stars in the league were selected high in the draft. The numbers you cite here don’t particularly convince me that the draft is a bad place to find talent. It’s just that it can’t be the only place you look for talent. Just skimming over the list of Generation Adidas players here, there are a lot of guys who play regularly for their team in MLS. (And I noticed Sturgis, Ianni, and Jaqua all were GenA players.) If you did a similar analysis of the ‘06-’10 MLB draft, you’d probably see even less of an impact made in MLB by those players, yet many of those players could still play hundreds of games even if they haven’t seen a single game in the majors yet.

I think there’s merit in not getting too caught up in draft hype, but I think there’s danger in going too far in the other direction. This year, from all accounts, it seems fair to say that the Sounders were targeting a few top players, and when they couldn’t get them at #11, or couldn’t find a partner to trade with, they thought they would try their luck hoping that their needs and views would be different than other teams and that for the specific circumstance they found themselves in, they could get pretty equal value in the second round and took some allocation money to move down.

Fifty-two percent of players selected with picks 21 or higher never start an MLS game and are out of the league within 3 years.

At first glance, it appears the stats you linked to were done on a study of the 2006-2010 drafts. The players from the ‘08, ’09, and ’10 drafts haven’t even had the opportunity to fail out of the league after three seasons, since there’s only been (at most) three seasons for those players. On top of that, any data-only look at the draft is going to make it look worse than it actually is, because players going overseas on transfer will count as having dropped out of the league.

Look at the 2006 draft, for example. Jozy Altidore was 1) a Generation Adidas player, 2) picked 17th, and 3) out of the league after three years. He also has 32 caps with the US senior national team. Klejstan’s played a bunch for the USMNT and is playing overseas now. Wynne and Ballouchy both played a bunch for the MLS Cup champs last year. McCarty was the top pick in the re-entry draft and was a big part of what FC Dallas did last year. Movsisyan did well in the league and is overseas now. Garey had 86 caps for Columbus. Bornstein’s later down in the draft, has a bunch of USMNT caps, and is now playing in Mexico. Kei Kamara’s done pretty well for himself.

Wahl, Ianni, and Sturgis were all in the top 20 of the draft, and all managed to stick around on the Sounders’ roster last year in a playoff year. Even Wahl has made 16 appearances for the team over the last two years.

So I think you have to be careful. You can’t put too much stock in the draft, but I also don’t think you can look back at something like the 2006 draft and say the draft isn’t a place to find good soccer talent. Some of the 2011 draft picks can’t even smoke yet and it could be 15 years before we really have a good handle on what their career has been like. Luckily for us, I think the Sounders have struck a good balance between using the draft to add talent to the roster and moving picks around to get other resources (like allocation money.)