The Portland Timbers and Real Salt Lake will meet Saturday for the Western Conference Final in what is both simultaneously one of the biggest and most improbable games in the history of Providence Park.
To say that neither team should be alive at this advanced stage of the MLS postseason is nearly reductive. That the Timbers were seeded fourth and Salt Lake seventh for this tournament does not begin to communicate just what each team has survived to keep playing into December.
RSL, for its part, may be the single most extraordinary story in major American sports right now. The club hasn’t had an owner all year. Their manager quit in the middle of the season to become an assistant coach for a conference rival. Their interim manager was the former captain and manager of their biggest rival. They snuck into the postseason with a stoppage time goal on the final day of the regular season in Kansas City. They then went to Seattle in the first round of the playoffs, failed to register a shot in roughly 125 minutes of play, and knocked out the Sounders on penalties.
They then went back to Kansas City, fell behind in the first half, pulled themselves level in the second half, and got another stoppage time winner from ex-US national team forward Bobby Wood to advance to the conference final.
They’ve won both postseason games with their best player and captain, Albert Rusnak, missing due to COVID-19. To make it to MLS Cup, RSL will have to travel to the most intimidating environment in MLS and beat a team that has already handed them three losses this year.
This stuff just doesn’t happen in other leagues. Not with the regularity that it does in MLS, where the top seed in each conference fell in their first postseason match and unfavored road teams have won four of the last five playoff games.
It simply doesn’t sense. Any of it. And that is why plenty of neutral observers like Salt Lake to upset the Timbers in the West and NYCFC to upset Philadelphia in the East and MLS Cup to be contested in a baseball stadium by an ownerless team and a team owned by the City Football Group on December 11.
Thing is, while the Timbers’ arrival at this stage of the postseason is not nearly as unexpected, the suddenness of the club’s surge and amount of adversity they’ve overcome this year is similarly extraordinary.
Individually, this Timbers team has relatively few standout performers as compared to other Timbers teams that have made playoff runs. Beyond Diego Chará and Sebastián Blanco there are only a handful of above-average players, and plenty of average ones too.
But like a number of other Giovani Savarese teams, the Timbers have refused to die this year. Their second-half revival started when they went to Seattle and beat the high-flying Sounders 2–0 in the game in which Eyrk Williamson tore his ACL a week after getting trounced in Austin, and that victory set the tone.
They went undefeated for the next month and a half before imperiling their playoff positioning with three straight losses in October. They responded to that adversity by winning their final three regular season games by a combined score of 8–1. They’ve now conceded only two goals in their last five games after conceding seven in the three games before that.
The underlying numbers hated the Timbers all year. It didn’t matter. They over-performed those numbers and have continued to over-perform them right into pole position to host MLS Cup.
Of course, the Timbers’ resurgence in the fall coincided with Blanco’s return to full fitness—and when he pulled up clutching his hamstring in Colorado on Thanksgiving in a scoreless game, it seemed very much like the team’s season would go down with him.
But it very much did not. With Blanco’s season likely over, the Timbers didn’t miss a beat. They only grew in strength and belief throughout that second half against the Rapids, and by the times Larrys Mabiala jabbed home the winning goal, it was entirely deserved.
Now the Timbers will be without both Blanco and Dairon Asprilla, undeservedly red-carded in the dying moments of the semifinal victory. They’ll have to rely on a pair of young, mostly unproven backup wingers for offensive punch on Saturday, or recall aging club legend Diego Valeri. No matter how Savarese decides to play his curtailed hand, the Timbers will relish the opportunity in front of them. The higher the level of doubt this year, the better they have played.
It is perhaps little wonder that it is two likable, fiery, longtime MLS battlers in Savarese and Mastroeni who will square off on Saturday. There may be better soccer minds in the league, but there are few people better equipped to ride the maelstrom of chaos that defines so many playoff runs. Some managers seize up under that pressure. Even the great Bruce Arena was slow to change a failing plan in New England’s loss on Tuesday night. These two have, somehow, figured it out so far.
Savarese has a big personnel decision ahead of him this weekend with Blanco and Asprilla out. Mastroeni does too. His DP Rusnak should make the trip to Portland and be available for selection on Saturday, though it’s an open question whether he’ll be inserted back into a starting lineup that has momentum after a long layoff.
RSL will also be missing their ace defensive midfielder, Everton Luiz, who was booked in both the Seattle and SKC games. He’ll be a big absence for the visitors, whose defense, now set up in banks of four, has been their calling card so far.
What happens next in this off-the-hook, quintessentially MLS postseason? You tell me. The form book says Portland. Past history says Portland. Home advantage says Portland. And it said Seattle and Kansas City before that, so there is no reason to believe that Salt Lake will arrive cowed.
But the Timbers have played with, dare we say, an air of inevitability about them for much of the fall. Timely offense, timely defense, and, when they’ve needed it most, a steadfast refusal to be knocked off stride.
It has not, it is worth highlighting again, been an easy year in Portland. Investigations into GM Gavin Wilkinson for his role in the Paul Riley abuse coverup are ongoing, as is the pandemic that has devastated so many lives and kept so many away from the stadium. This, though, what we’re about to see on Saturday, is a reminder of what makes this sport such an unparalleled thrill: a proper occasion featuring two teams that have played so far beyond reasonable expectations that expectations have ceased to be reasonable.
They think they might just win it. This year.