The Portland Timbers’ up-and-down odyssey of a 2021 will be largely defined on the field on Sunday and in the weeks to follow, as the club begins its playoff journey with a match against Minnesota United.
This marks the Timbers’ club-record fifth straight playoff appearance and fourth straight under the management of Giovani Savarese—an accomplishment that Caleb Porter never came close to achieving during his time with the club.
But where Porter’s best teams more often than not made a substantial amount of noise in the playoffs, Savarese’s Timbers, have not won a playoff game since the second leg of the 2018 Western Conference final in Kansas City. They lost in the first round of the 2019 playoffs to Real Salt Lake and were defeated in last year’s opening round on penalties by Dallas in a vacant Providence Park.
This year, expectations are higher. The Timbers enter the playoffs on a roll, having won three straight games by multiple goals and averaging more than 2.2 points-per-game over the final two-and-a-half months of the season.
By going back to a tried-and-true formula—sitting compact defensively and pressing forward with tenacity—the Timbers closed as one of the league’s hottest teams.
The result was an ultimately comfortable fourth place finish in the West and hosting rights for this year’s first round playoff matchup with Minnesota United, with the Colorado Rapids waiting for the winner in Commerce City on Thanksgiving Day.
The Timbers aren’t an appealing matchup for anyone right now. But despite their outstanding form, this match against Minnesota may be a battle.
Adrian Heath’s Loons came within a game of reaching the MLS Cup last year, returned a substantial amount of playoff experience, and have one of the league’s finest playmakers in Argentine Emanuel Reynoso.
They also have a tremendous record against the Timbers in recent years. Most recently, the Loons beat Portland twice over the summer, once at Providence Park on a scorching June day and then again in St. Paul in July.
Of course, those two games came during one of the Timbers’ poorest stretches of the season, when Sebastian Blanco was not yet playing significant minutes and Jeremy Ebobisse was still the club’s starting center forward.
Much has changed since then. It feels like this will be a contest to see whether the Timbers’ high-powered attack can overwhelm Minnesota’s defense—or whether the Timbers’ defense, the second-poorest of any playoff team in either conference, will be exposed on the playoff stage.
Elsewhere in the West…
The winner of the game in Portland will face the shock Western Conference winners from Colorado on Thanksgiving.
On the other side of the bracket, Seattle hosts Real Salt Lake in a matchup that will see RSL face their former manager, Freddy Juarez, who walked off the job in the middle of the season to become an assistant with the Sounders.
RSL closed the season in chaotic fashion under interim manager Pablo Mastroeni, losing two straight games before sneaking into the playoffs thanks to a dramatic stoppage time winner from Damir Kreilach in Kansas City.
The Sounders, who are among the favorites to reach and win MLS Cup again, are getting healthy. Raúl Ruidíaz and Nicolás Lodeiro are back in the fold, and Jordan Morris, who tore his ACL last winter, played 45 minutes in the club’s regular season finale—and should play a significant role in the club’s postseason run.
Sporting Kansas City hosts the Vancouver Whitecaps in the other game on that side of the bracket, with the Whitecaps having become one of the stories of the season under their own colorful interim manager Vanni Sartini.
Sporting, like Seattle, was a juggernaut all year, playing excellent, clean Peter Vermes soccer and leading the conference in goals scored. But Sporting has also had a mostly appalling playoff record since their MLS Cup triumph in 2013, and a fair bit of that failure has come at home.
Seattle and Sporting are heavy favorites to advance, and if the Timbers join the Rapids on the other side of the bracket, it will be the West’s four best teams standing in the conference semifinals. But this being MLS, it’s dangerous to pencil those matchups in too soon.
And in the East…
The Supporters’ Shield-winning and record-setting New England Revolution lie in wait for the winner of New York City FC and Atlanta United at Yankee Stadium, with the road team in slightly better form after their horrific start to the season.
Atlanta has a manager who experienced plenty of playoff success as a player and assistant coach in Seattle in Gonzalo Pineda, while NYC boss Ronny Delia’s only prior playoff experience came last year when his team was defeated on penalties by Orlando in its first game. Delia’s team is dealing with a pair of significant injuries, while Atlanta is healthy.
But NYCFC has a significant home field advantage due to the oddities of playing at a baseball stadium, and they play more cohesive soccer than Atlanta has at any point this year. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
On the other side of the bracket, Nashville hosts Orlando.
The Lions, as has been their wont in recent years, are sputtering down the stretch.
Orlando has a few match winners, namely Nani, who hasn’t played in weeks and should be well-rested, but Nashville is as solid as any team in the league: consistent, strong defensively, and nearly impossible to beat at home.
The winner of that game will get the winner of an all-Northeast matchup in Chester between the Philadelphia Union and New York Red Bulls.
The Union, one of the stories of last year, quietly put together a very nice second half and enter the playoffs as one of the teams to beat in the East.
But their second half was not nearly the surprise that the Red Bulls’ was. Gerhard Struber’s team was given up for dead over the summer, sitting near the bottom of the Eastern Conference and playing rather miserable soccer in front of paltry crowds. They turned it around, though, high pressing with aplomb and stringing together 1-0 wins.
It remains to be seen whether the Red Bulls have the quality required to compete in the playoffs, but it is remarkable that they are here at all.
All the drama starts Saturday—the final act of a season unlike any other in MLS history.