What a difference a week makes. A week ago I wrote about the young heart of the Sounders and this week, two of those players are now Impactioneers. (Hey, it sounds better than Impacters.) Much has been said in the aftermath of The Trade. But one comment in particular struck a chord for me. Arbeck77 made a strong analogy about grading the trade using poker terminology. Any move in a poker game can be assessed through statistical analysis. But there is another side to professional poker that is equally apropos. In addition to the element of chance, poker is a psychological contest. At the end of the day, all players are subject to the same odds within poker. Yet not all poker players win consistently. Professional players know the odds, but play their opponents. A lowly pair of twos is a winning hand if your opponent has a busted flush and you know it. Reading your opponent is often more important than knowing the odds.

It all comes down to betting on yourself and not just the odds. Making it in the world of professional sports is a long shot. Lamar Neagle wasn't drafted and Mike Fucito was a 4th Round pick out of Harvard. Both men defied the odds and are now solid professional soccer players. Their professional life fulfills a childhood dream. How many of us would have bet our livelihood on their success three years ago reading the odds? These men bet on themselves and worked until their dream became reality. Part of our attachment to them as fans lies in this aspect of their success. I will miss seeing both of them on the pitch wearing Rave Green. But a part of me knows that they have a better chance to grow this year in Montreal. They are apt to get more time on the field playing in the roles that suit them. I hope they flourish.

One year ago Mauro Rosales bet on himself. He signed a contract to play in a league he didn't know and in spite of his pedigree, he agreed to play for the MLS league minimum salary. His performance earned him $42,000 and the MLS Newcomer of the Year award for 2011. It also earned him a DP caliber contract for 2012.

Betting on yourself as a player is easy to understand. Betting on yourself as a coach or sports administrator carries a different level of risk. Creating a tactical system or locating talent both depend on whether the talent actually performs. The MLS salary cap creates a situation akin to the odds in poker. All of the teams are subject to the same basic odds. Statistically this should result in no team building a dynasty. But dynastic aspirations are alive and well in the world of MLS because not all coaching staffs and front offices make intelligent decisions when they bet on themselves.

Sometimes the job is easy. A player like Steve Zakuani or Andrew Wenger is a relatively safe pick as a first round draft choice. Using your spot in the allocation order to bring in Kasey Keller to finish his career in front of his hometown fans constitutes a reasonably sure bet. But administrators who only get the easy decisions right do not succeed overall. They are paid to make the tricky decisions and they must rely on more than just the odds. They are paid to see the gems that everyone else thinks are merely coprolites.

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Back before the first ever Seattle Sounders FC match in 2009, it was fairly clear who the veteran leaders would be -- Kasey Keller, Nate Jaqua, Tyrone Marshall and Peter Vagenas. Each had long careers and, except for Keller, those careers were primarily in MLS. Just three seasons later, none of those players are on the roster. Three left just this last offseason along with eight other players. It is the greatest amount of roster churn the young club has had and it could create challenges for Sigi Schmid. The current roster is at 33 players, and if each make the team, 14 will have less than a season wearing Rave Green.

Schmid knows who he will lean on to show the newcomers his system and the culture of the Sounders per his statement in yesterday's conference call:

There’s now the Alonsos, the Monteros, the Evanses, the Hurtados, and Parkes. There’s guys that are here that know what it means to be a Sounder, that know what it means to go out and train hard every day and be dedicated and be professional. Even though there’s turnover and there’s new players coming in...you still have a core...

That core is younger than the 2009 leaders, but still has experience and time. All (except Jeff Parke) were with Seattle for the 2009 win over the New York Red Bulls that launched the team, as were Zach Scott, Roger Levesque, Patrick Ianni and Steve Zakuani. Between those nine players, they have 52 years of experience playing in North American professional soccer. Their average age is 27. While there is youth in that group, the two 24-year-olds (Fredy Montero, Zakuani) have been focal points of the offense when healthy.

Even on top of Osvaldo Alonso, Brad Evans, Jhon Kennedy Hurtado, Parke, Montero, Scott, Levesque, Ianni and Zakuani there are a couple other players with more than a season in Seattle. Sigi talks quite a bit about having multiple leaders on the field and in his discussions about who will be the captain, only Mauro Rosales is a name not mentioned in the above list. Few would be surprised if he gets the armband.

The Sounders are certainly younger now then when they ended the season. A majority of the roster churn saw an older player replaced with someone with fewer years on their calendar. And yet, the core of the team has experience. Together they managed a strong three seasons only clearly surpassed by the LA Galaxy. The hunger of the fans for just a bit more than consistently being in the top third of the regular season and US Open Cups is shared by these men. They were there for the failures in the MLS Cup Playoffs and the 2010-11 CONCACAF Champions League. They were also there for the succeses.

Yes, 11 Sounders are Rave Green no more and a dozen are new this offseason. The numbers indicate high turnover. Sigi Schmid thinks that might be a bit misleading though.

I don’t think it’s bad as maybe it looks when you look at numbers.

Maybe in the past, or with other losses, the churn would be a red flag. This team seems to be banking that by being just a few years older those young kids are now men capable of more than ever before.

With each passing day, it seems we learn a little more about the Eddie Johnson trade. On Monday, Seattle Sounders coach Sigi Schmid seemed to indicate that health and fitness concerns with Sammy Ochoa and O'Brian White were motivating factors behind the deal.

"I think certainly if O’Brian White wasn’t injured and hadn’t gone through what he went through last year, maybe we’re not talking about this trade," Schmid said during a teleconference. "But that wasn’t the situation, that wasn’t where we were at, and we have a concern certainly as to when O’Brian is going to be able to play again or come back. That’s something that we’re still in the final stages of trying to draw some conclusions on.

"Sammy Ochoa is a player that I thought came on very well for us at the end of last year and can still do some good things. But he’s a player that needs to continue to work and work on the physical side of his game as well. So he’s probably left the door open a little bit, per se, and that’s the way it is in professional sports and we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got our bases covered and we’ve got possibilities. I think O’Brian being out injured and Sammy maybe not being quite as sharp as we had hoped at this point, yeah, had an impact on us a little bit. "

There has long been speculation that White's condition could be serious enough to keep him off the field forever and that Ochoa was one of the players Schmid was talking about when he said spoke of fitness concerns earlier in camp. White still hasn't been able to train with the team and it's starting to look more and more likely that he may not even be close enough to justify a spot on the injury list. In the case of Ochoa, it at least brings up the issue of whether or not he'll be able to start on March 7.

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Halfway through their preseason the Seattle Sounders shook up the old depth charts quite a bit. It isn't just about the trade for Eddie Johnson (after which Sigi basically confirmed a return to big/small forward pairing), but there are talents better than expected who are rocketing up in our perception. Some are also falling. This is our current best guess of Sigi Schmid's vision of the depth chart. It is based on an ideal First XI where "if there was a must win today and everyone who is healthy is fit?"

That ideal doesn't exist in reality, but it gives us a bit of an image of where things stand. Moving up the chart are Christian Sivebaek, Patrick Ianni, Bryan Meredith, David Estrada, and Marc Burch. If Seattle plays in 40 or so games Sivebaek could have 35+ appearances, even if only a dozen or so starts. His skill set is pretty unique and really the only question is about adaptation to physical play. Ianni seems to be used more like he was in 2010, rather than his 2011 down year. Meredith is a young keeper beating out a vet. Estrada's preseason impresses more every week and his make/break year could raise league wide judgements of Schmid, et al's college talent evaluation. Burch had a bad rap coming from D.C. United, but his skills may translate better to the Seattle system. He's better in the attack and should see more time than previously thought.

Falling down the chart either from lack of fitness to play in training games or just flat getting beat out by players with more 2012 upside are a mix of older and younger players. Sammy Ochoa, even before the trade, was losing playing time and now looks to get even less. Michael Tetteh is rarely seeing the pitch. Babayele Sodade is in the same situation and at best is the 3rd target forward and overall may not start even in a Reserve heavy match. Two veterans aren't getting long looks and are in their post-peak period so it isn't a surprise that Zach Scott and Roger Levesque's playing time in training is on a downward trend. They are known quantities and at this point both are expected to be in a gameday 18.

Let's review the structure. The title of the post is a play on 311. Don't read too much into it, maybe a little though. The top half is the role at which we see the player getting the most starting minutes in competitive (non Reserve) play. It also now shows players in bold who would be in that ideal 18. Players in orange are currently injured and not training fully (Steve Zakuani is on the edge of leaving this status). The lower portion is ranking of players in roles with regards to flexibility. Bold is an indicator that said player would be a starter in that role on a majority of MLS sides. Standard script means that the player could start in secondary competitions on a team with a chance to win. Italics means they would be a reserve role or emergency usage. There is a also a table showing a short list of possible Homegrown Player signings. These are roughly ranked, but primarily it is a list of names so you can get use to these names, and maybe see them play for Sounders U23s.

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One of the factors in yesterday's trade that got little notice was that the Seattle Sounders shipped out two more American players in Mike Fucito and Lamar Neagle. Of course they got an American in return in Eddie Johnson, but, in addition to that transaction, the list of Americans the Sounders have lost this offseason is substantial. This includes the retirements of Kasey Keller, Terry Boss, and Taylor Graham; the Expansion Draft losses of James Riley and Tyson Wahl; and the Re-Entry Draft releases of Pat Noonan and Nate Jaqua. Erik Friberg is the only international of significance that the Sounders lost. In exchange, they added Michael Gspurning (Austria), Adam Johansson (Sweden), Christian Sivebæk (Denmark), and Cordell Cato (Trinidad and Tobago). Marc Burch was the only significant offseason American addition other than Johnson and a handful of SuperDraft picks who may or may not make the team.

This accelerates a trend that we've seen across MLS over the last few seasons. As the league has aggressively tried to both expand itself into hot markets and improve the quality of play, it evidently has outstripped the supply of suitable American talent. It was clear in the Portland and Vancouver expansions when those two teams (particularly Portland) used the Draft not to acquire players but largely to acquire assets to trade off in exchange for international roster spots and allocation money to bring in foreign talent.

It's also something the Sounders have been aggressive about since their 2009 launch. The early additions of Fredy Montero and Jhon Kennedy Hurtado exposed a substantial international scouting effort and the team has always been assiduous about getting green cards for the players as soon as possible, which opens up international roster spots for more foreign additions. The result is that next season the expected starting roster will likely include only three players who developed in the American system — Brad Evans, Jeff Parke, and the newly acquired Eddie Johnson.

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Eddie Johnson's career displays some significant red flags. He was last an effective goal scorer with his club in 2007, albeit in Kansas City. It was a dominant season. His 15 goals and 6 assists in 24 MLS matches (all starts) resulted in a 1.50 PP90. That season became his ticket to Europe. But in Europe he struggled to find a place where he fit. Fulham held his contract the whole time, but he didn't fit as a regular starter there and was loaned down to Cardiff City of the Championship (scoring twice in 30 matches) and then to Aris in Greece (5 goals in 16 appearances) and then to Preston North End on their way to being relegated out of the Championship (0 Goals in 16 matches). There was then a near signing with Major League Soccer, an exploration of a deal with Puebla which went sour through some combination of a lack of agent, front office politics and possibly fitness. His four-year-plus detour to Europe went far from well.

Yet, he stayed in the United States national team picture, but ultimately was not on the 23 man roster for South Africa 2010. Even his scoring in an American kit has an MLS flavor, with 7 of his 12 goals coming in MLS grounds and another 2 within national borders. His 2007 season, his national team experience and even his 2004 season (12 & 3) are the signs of how good EJ can be.

Sigi Schmid, in yesterday's conference call, noted that Johnson is a type of forward missing from the roster:

He’s got pace, which is something that we wanted with a forward up front who can stretch the opponent’s defense. He’s shown his ability to finish in our league, as well. He’s good in the air. He’s a guy who can get on the end of crosses. As you know, we’re a team who does well with our wide play—we get to the end line and we create opportunities in the box—and I think Eddie’s going to be able to take advantage of those opportunities and make us a more dangerous team. We’re very excited, and I’m very excited as a coach to be able to add a player of his ability to the group that we have. It’s just another step forward for us as we try and win more things.

Schmid was also hopeful that this would mean a more regular pairing with Fredy Montero at the top of the Seattle Sounders formation. Rather than rotations for tactical needs, the ideal is now a First XI pair of forwards that are different enough and good enough to become partners. It is a potentially potent offense.

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Even before the news officially hit, emotions were running high in the world of the Seattle Sounders. Shortly after the Montreal Impact used their top spot in the Allocation Order to pick Eddie Johnson, they announced he had been traded. It only took a few minutes for rumor to spread that it was to the Sounders. It was only a few moments after that when people began to suspect that the trade involved Mike Fucito.

When it was finally announced that the Sounders had not only traded Fucito, but also local boy Lamar Neagle in order to acquire a player four years removed from his best years, reaction among Sounders fans was swift and overwhelmingly negative. With a night to let it all sink in, the Sounder at Heart crew decided to weigh in.

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Since the loss of Blaise Nkufo, the Seattle Sounders are unsettled in their choice for the primary forward partner with Fredy Montero. By the end of 2011, the choice was a tactical decision between speed and size in Mike Fucito and Sammy Ochoa respectively. With O'Brian White's status still unknown, the search for Montero's partner is continuing and expanding.

In the Sounders win over the Columbus Crew, the following players played at forward - Montero, Fucito, David Estrada, Christian Sivebaek and Babayele Sodade. Ochoa is still mentioned in the mix as well. Each offers different combinations of size, speed, strength, endurance and soccer skills. Asked about what he's looking for in the "other" forward, Sigi Schmid said it was not about a "target" man, but how the player helps get Montero space to operate.

We’re looking for a forward who’s going to allow us to stretch the defense and so forth. I think there’s times where Mike [Fucito] has done that. I think we have enough talent that is here. It’s just a matter of seeing who’s playing well and who’s on top of their game.

Sivebaek's opportunity was not part of the original design, as he recovered more quickly than expected from an ankle injury, but it did allow Sigi to try him in a new role.

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