Q&A: Timbers GM Ned Grabavoy on Evander's status, MLS Draft and offseason additions
Portland's roster should start to take shape in the coming weeks.
Ned Grabavoy said it was going to be a busy holiday season.
The Portland Timbers general manager had just finished up the three-round MLS Draft last week when he was asked if he was going to get a little time off in the coming days for Christmas.
“No, no,” Grabavoy said with a laugh. “I always say this time of year that I at least get to choose where I work from, including my house at home, but I’ll be here in Portland. We have a few things right now that we’re working on that I feel a bit better about, but that’s a big, big objective of mine here in the next two weeks as we come out of the New Year is to hopefully move a couple of these things along so we feel confident heading into the preseason.”
Coming off a 12-win season that saw Portland finish ninth in the Western Conference standings and fall 5-0 to Vancouver in the Wild Card round, the Timbers are just a handful of weeks away from the start of 2025’s training camp. And while the Timbers have slightly altered their roster — in the days after this conversation, Portland would sign veteran winger Ariel Lassiter — the club’s projected lineup doesn’t look much different than last season. Specifically, the lineup still features Landon Donovan Award (MVP) finalist Evander, who led the team in scoring in 2024 but whose standing on the team was thrown into shaky waters following a locker room dust-up after the team’s season finale.
Before turning the calendar to the new year, Grabavoy spoke with The I-5 Corridor about where the club goes from here with its star, how their new draft picks fit on the roster and how things are looking heading into 2025.
The draft just finished up. What are your impressions of your selections?1
Over the last few years we’ve kind of been in the middle of a pack in that first round, right? So it’s tough to determine and dictate exactly who is going to be available with that first selection. So we had a way of looking at it in two ways, some of it is just top players that are available in the entire draft, and then with a little bit of thought into positional needs within the first team.
We feel like we accomplished that with the first pick.
We have not had much depth at left back and it provides us at least with an opportunity to bring in a younger player and give them a chance with us as we start out in preseason. I think most of these players will have to go in with their clubs and try to impress to earn a contract. With that one, we’ll see as we move forward.
And then we took a goalkeeper in the third round.
We feel really good about the goalkeeping2 group that we have within our first team. But for some of the younger goalkeepers, the ability to get additional games and even games at a Next Pro level is very beneficial. That position sometimes takes a bit longer to develop for players to come along. So we saw that as a player dropping into the third round that we had highlighted as being one of the better players at his position.
So we were happy overall. I think everyone is probably usually happy coming out of a draft, right? You’re drafting names and players and everyone is looking for something different, but a lot of credit to our group here, our director, Jack Dodd, who has led our college scouting, and then the help in collaboration from a lot of other staff has been really important to us.
You have just a few weeks before training camp opens. How do you feel about where the roster is right now?
Every time the offseason comes, whether you lose an MLS Cup final or you get knocked out in the way that we did, which was emotional and painful for so many reasons, it can take away from some of the positives that happen throughout a season. I still think there are a lot of really good pieces within our group. I still think there’s a lot of very good players within our group. We’ve been locked into a lot of contracts over the last three or four years, and so we’ve continued to try and tweak and make some changes and refresh the group — bringing in some competition, finding some higher quality and higher level players, to drive the team. I feel we’ve accomplished that, but then we still have work to do. We still have to improve this team overall. From where we were a month ago, there’s two or three things that we’re working on and we’re further along with that I feel positive about in terms of those potential additions to the group. We still need to get those finalized. We still need to add a bit of depth in a few spots within the team as well. So, we’re working our way towards that. I still think that in the MLS, you get a lot that happens in the month of January, so we’re mindful of that. But I feel like we’ve got a number of things in place that could be exciting for our group next season.
What were the positives you took away from last season?
The last three or four weeks were really, really bad. We fell short of where we thought the roster and the team should have been within the table of the Western Conference. But there were a lot of things we wanted to accomplish, and having [manager Phil Neville] in Year 1 we wanted to bring an exciting brand and an exciting team back to Providence Park. It felt like for long stretches of the season it was one of the must-see teams within the league with our ability to excite and play well, but it’s a long season. It’s 34 games plus playoffs and you’ve got to be strong for longer stretches. You’ve got to be strong throughout and you have to also peak and be in form and have confidence at the right times, and we didn’t. That’s professional sports. Results are important. Wins are important. So we’ve got big things to try and achieve next season. But I think there’s still a good group that we have here.
Where are you guys at with Evander?