Reach back in your memory to early March of this year, and you'll recall two big stories dominating the (multi)national MLS discussion: Minnesota United were impossibly bad, and Atlanta United were impossibly good. The expansion teams were both A1, above the fold.
Things have regressed to the mean since then for MNUFC as they followed an 0-3-1, -12 goal differential start with a 4-5-1, -2 GD stretch that brings us to the present day. The Loons made some good trades and necessary benchings, discovered they had a good portion of what they'd needed all along, and are now merely just part of the team in the Western Conference peloton.
Atlanta United went in the other direction. They were 2-1-0, +8 GD in their first three games, and have gone 3-4-3, 0 GD in the two-and-a-half months since. Part of that is because of their road heavy schedule, and the other part is that they've been missing the hell out of Josef Martinez, whose relentless and direct movement in the final third was what defined Atlanta as a team:
Martinez had five goals in those first three Atlanta United games, and that's the video I made after he was injured. They've still been, at times, ruthlessly vertical without him, but it's just not quite the same.
Now, he's (probably) back. He was seen going full tilt in training on Thursday, and has been upgraded to "questionable" for Saturday's trip to Chicago (4 pm ET; UniMas | Facebook.com). The Fire know well what Martinez brings – he scored a brace against them in the teams' only other meeting, which just so happened to be his most recent MLS game.
I'll also be watching: Vancouver showed a very good blueprint for how to handle Atlanta last week, which they did by dropping their central midfield deep and largely eschewing attempts to build from the back. That's not Chicago's game – they've wanted to possess since Bastian Schweinsteiger arrived. But it might be in their best interest to avoid flying too close to the sun, given how catastrophically things went for their backline the last time Atlanta came to town.
Sporting KC vs. Montreal Impact (Saturday, 8 pm ET; MLS LIVE in the US, TVA Sports in Canada): This looks like a game in which Sporting should roll. They're at home, where they're unbeaten and nearly unbreachable, they've got Dom Dwyer back and ready to start, they showed last week they're now better at coping in midfield without Roger Espinoza, and they're even getting some attacking contributions from the flanks.
Montreal, meanwhile, are missing a ton of guys via either injury or international duty. They can still counter through Ignacio Piatti and Dom Oduro – that always makes them dangerous – but getting a result here seems like a huge reach.
Portland Timbers vs. FC Dallas (Saturday, 10:30 pm ET; MLS LIVE): Dallas did an admirable job of protecting their makeshift central defense last week by having both Carlos Gruezo and Victor Ulloa sit as deep as possible and then try to release runners into space. It obviously worked, as Gruezo had a couple of nice diagonals and Ulloa hit the pass of the week:
But playing RSL at home is a vastly different proposition than playing Portland on the road even if the Timbers haven't been particularly good for a while now, going just 3-5-3 with a -4 GD since mid-March. Expect Fanendo Adi – who has one goal and no assists in the last two months – to try to set up shop in the heart of the Dallas defense, bending both the backline and the deep-lying midfielders to him. When that happens, expect Diego Valeri to get on the ball and do those wonderful Diego Valeri things.
One more thing to ponder:
Get outside and make some friends. Happy weekending, everybody.
