How calm at the top, a lot of goals and a little bit of defense saved the Portland Timbers season
It's been quite the ride for one of the hottest teams in the MLS.
BEAVERTON — TV news was at Timbers training on Tuesday.
This isn’t a daily occurrence, then again, it’s not annually that the city’s soccer club places a member on the MLS’ all-star team. It had been five years, in fact, without Portland representation before Evander was named to the MLS roster earlier this week.
It was a warranted inclusion: the Portland midfielder leads the Timbers in goals (9) and assists (11), with his 20 goal contributions ranking fifth overall in the MLS.
It was also a celebrated inclusion: Evander’s performance this season has helped pull Portland from the bottom of the Western Conference table and into the race for home-field advantage in the MLS Playoffs. And as the player spoke with reporters Tuesday after training, the man who brought him to Portland couldn’t help but note the significance.
“It’s well-deserved, you know,” Timbers general manager Ned Grabavoy told The I-5 Corridor. “This season is what we thought he was capable of. That’s a player who can score goals in multiple different ways. It’s a player who can also change the game with some of the different service and final ball quality that he can provide that I think few others in this league can.
“Credit to him. Our club is proud to have some representation again.”
Grabavoy’s club has put its supporters on quite the ride through the season’s first 21 games. Only two months ago, the Timbers seemed listless, a club with a new manager that scored a lot of pretty goals and allowed even more ugly ones as they tanked to the bottom of the table during a nine-game winless streak. Today, the Timbers have won three in a row and have taken points in all seven matches since May 25. And yes, credit to Evander who has been the fulcrum behind Felipe Mora (8 goals), Jonathan Rodriguez (8 goals) and himself being the only trio of designated players in the league with eight or more goals each.
But also some credit should land on the shoulders of the executive who put them together and didn’t freak out when the wheels fell off at the start of the race.
Evander was better last season than people give him credit for, Grabavoy said.
Sure, he’s already surpassed his goals and assists totals from his debut with the club in 10 fewer games, but Grabavoy said the team was still in the process of putting the right pieces around the Brazilian.
The Timbers in 2023 were a club in transition. Portland was a year clear from the departure of former MVP Diego Valeri, while team stalwart Sebastian Blanco was finishing the last of his injury-plagued years with the team. The club missed the playoffs in 2022, Grabavoy replaced Gavin Wilkinson, who was fired that offseason after 13 seasons, and his first item of business was finding the centerpiece — not the finishing piece — of the puzzle.
See, Grabavoy said he had a couple of options when it came to addressing that team’s needs at designated player.
“We were trying to figure out if it was a player who was going to be almost a second forward [to support the now-departed Yimmi Chara] or if it was going to be a player that plays a more center/midfield-type role that can still impact the game in and around the goal.
“We opted for the latter,” Grabavoy said, in a decision that would pave the way for the key acquisition of the following offseason when the Timbers signed Rodriguez in March. With Evander set as the team’s table setter, Grabavoy said it really narrowed the focus of how to shape the 2024 roster in the vision of the offense-happy Neville.
“The thought process with Jonathan is you bring in Jonathan because you already have a player like Evander,” he said. “The team needed an established player. A player that already had a solid career in terms of places they played and the level of success that they’d reached. We needed it right away. We had signed a lot of really talented young players and sometimes the timeline for those players to help the club start winning games takes longer. And in my opinion, we need to win now. We need to be competitive. We need to be in the playoffs. We need to do that now.
“And he was a big part of that.”
The problem for the Timbers was, for the first half of this season, they weren’t winning.
At all.