Heath Out, pt 3

Whisper me like one of your French Strikers, Jack

In part one of my Loons’ Heath Era evaluation I talked about my personal interaction with the club’s heel turn under Adrian Heath. In part two, I started to look at the sporting structure of the club and particularly the strategy of uncovering diamonds in the rough that has largely failed. For part three, I’ll stay on the sporting side and tackle the great mystery of the Loons’ attack.

The Striker Whisperer

Adrian Heath’s nickname as “The Striker Whisperer” has now been used sneeringly a thousand more times than it ever was used sincerely to the point that it’s beyond parody. However, it was distinctly the narrative that was pushed from his Orlando City days. He came to the Loons having “rejuvenated” Dom Dwyer, “discovered” Cyle Larin, and… honestly, I can’t remember anyone else (I do know there was a list of unknown strikers that his boosters said by far overachieved under his tutelage). He was a legendary Evertonian striker who had coached two phenoms: Dwyer and Larin. But the joke or cliche was a dead horse beaten.

If we look past scoring cheap points, though, we simply cannot assess the Heath Era without dealing with the Merry-Go-Round in the #9 spot. A goalscoring striker was the Loons’ white whale, a money pit, the elusive good George Lucas dialogue, and the easiest way to review a club that kept grasping desperately at straws, seemingly without a plan.

When Adrian Heath came to the club, he was handed a subpar attacking roster. The centerpiece was a lower-division phenom who hadn’t been proven at an MLS level, Christian Ramirez and the number 1 Superdraft pick: Abu Danladi (though he played a part in this pick). Even if you adored Ramirez as much of the fanbase did, this isn’t the kind of attack any manager would boast about. But in what would be a hallmark of the Heath Era, his first decision was—rather than use those pieces in a strategy that makes the whole better than the parts—to sideline Ramirez and to start Johan Venegas up top in their first MLS game.

Venegas was one of those players we would see a lot with the Loons who came with a real hype (“we’ve been following him for years. I tried to sign him in Orlando”) and then disappeared into the ether. I can remember exactly one amazing pass from his career with the Loons. Ramirez eventually subbed into that first MLS match and scored the first goal in the league for the Loons.

But one chief feature of the Heath Era was a refusal to use the parts on hand and to try to instead play “better” players in miscast roles. Ramirez was always a striker who played with streaks: invisible for three games and then scoring in three straight. And so, wanting to find a replacement or a level up was a completely reasonable desire (Or, I should add, wanting to have a marquee, established striker was understandable). However, it’s quite clear that the team failed to understand Ramirez’s value and to utilize him best. He would fight his way into the starting lineup and then get benched suddenly. After seven years, no striker has come close to beating Ramirez’s 21 MLS goals in 50 appearances. The closest anyone has come was Luis Amarilla, who scored 13 in 57 appearances.

We would see this later with Robin Lod, who originally came into the team miscast as a left winger (he did not play there in his career with any regularity). He was obviously talented and he would be [poorly] used on the left rather than the other options. I’m jumping off the sporting structure topic and onto coaching so I’ll return to this later. However, suffice it to say, the Heath Era Loons never looked at the tools on hand and thought, how can I make these players work together to win. Instead, there was an endless project of “two to three more players” who could finally make this team complete.

The Draft

One of the most-hyped signings of the first few years in MLS was the #1 Superdraft pick, Abu Danladi. Back in January of 2017, 55.1 sent Jeff Rueter and me out to Los Angeles to cover the Loons’ big moment. The excitement around the pick was at a feverpitch: would we take Jeremy Ebobisse? Minnesota kid Jackson Yueill? Centerback Miles Robinson?

It was always going to be a striker. In the early days the Striker Whisperer moniker was still being bandied about in earnest and the team needed a big, goal-scoring name (And Loons were still desperate to be viewed by the media/community as a “major” club, so getting every big media hit was important). Abu Danladi was thought of as a really top prospect but a huge risk. He had a history of injuries and a lot of the experts who write about the draft thought that might lead him to be taken later in the draft.

Sidenote: Take a second to go back to Will Parchman’s draft preview. He ranked Danladi #1, saying “Ebobisse is the safer pick between the two, but Danladi has more boom (and, admittedly, bust) potential.”

Danladi did score eight goals that first season and put in two game winning shifts against Montreal and Atlanta. But injuries plagued him and he faded out before moving to Nashville. Then, of course, he came back to a completely unremarkable second chance in Minnesota (he’s playing in Albania now).

The Loons took a big gamble and it didn’t pay off. A year later, they would take less of a gamble and grab Mason Toye as their next drafted striker. Toye scored eight goals in 27 appearances (compared to Danladi’s 13 goals in 87 appearances). Toye, at least, garnered a small transfer fee of $600k in MLS Bucks. Meanwhile Jeremy Ebobisse, the player we didn’t draft, has scored 61 goals since 2017.

I bring these up not as failures. I think both picks were decent—they both scored goals, several of them memorable and game-winning goals! But they didn’t have a lasting benefit to the club (they didn’t contribute to a squad attack over a long period).

More Lists

It is important to start in 2017 to look at how the decisions in that first season affected and shaped the decisions that would come later. If anything might best summarize the Heath Era, it would be the endless pursuit of strikers. But not just a particular kind of striker, the club’s desire for a striker could take any sort of shape: target man, poacher, speedy counter-attacker, ball-playing forward, or Foster Langsdorf.

Since we like lists here, let’s do two lists: squad guys and marquee signings. On that first list, over the years we’ve brought in a number of players who are there to help with the goal tally. Every club needs these guys, the Doms Badji of the world, and when it’s done best then you have a Will Bruin understudying for the far flashier (but not always fit) Ruidiaz. For us that was Kei Kamara, Aaron Schoenfeld, Foster Langsdorf, Brandon Allen, Marlon Hairston, Fanendo Adi, Juan Agudelo, and Cameron Dunbar. This is an absolute sickos list of Remember That Guy trivia. And it’s very clear that the team has absolutely failed to create a squad of usable strikers. (Honestly, the inability to get Kei Kamara to put up 7 goals for you is an indictment on the coaching staff.)

But the second list is more important (so far I don’t think we can consider Bongi or SBJ in this group):
Angelo Rodriguez
Luis Amarilla
Ramon Abila (TAM)
Adrien Hunou
Mender Garcia
Teemu Pukki

Only one of these players (Amarilla) ranks in the top 10 goalscorers in the last seven years.

There are two important things to note about this list: the resources put into fitting this position and their styles of play. First, five of these players were designated players (Abila was TAM). The Loons have only ever signed eight senior designated players, so 63% of our designated player resources have been spent on filling one position. Five of those six players were either botched signings or at best under-performed. None of them can be considered a success, except for Teemu Pukki.

Even Pukki’s success still has a bit of a TBD asterisk. Yes, he scored 10 goals, but 4 of them came in an absolute school yard bullying of the sad sack LA Galaxy. He is also the highest paid Loons player in history and a 33 year old veteran, so I think coming in and scoring 10 goals in that first season is a good baseline. (I think beyond the goal tally, he looks like the best striker, so I’m very hopeful.)

The important part of this list for me is the lack of coherent strategy behind it. There is a whiplash feeling as you think about moving from Christian Ramirez (poacher), to Rodriguez (big-bodied target), to Amarilla (fast, ball-playing forward), to Abila (big dude who will punch people in the balls), to Hunou (poacher? ball-playing forward?), to Garcia (fast, counter-attacker), to Pukki (all-around goal scoring forward).

What is Heathball?

I wanted to try to expand my thinking on the striker evaluations so I called up two really smart guys, Colin O’Donnell and Dan Wade, to get their thoughts. But the three of us really honed in on the same basic problem: “What is Heathball?” Or, how does this team want to play and more germane to this topic: what kind of strikers fit this system?

Colin laid it out well: “The chronic problem was that he’d switch out different personnel without adapting to their different styles. Angelo and Toye faced more crosses into the box than Kei Kamara in 2019! They passed to Hunou the same way they passed to Schoenfeld (which tanked Hunou’s reception metrics). They never learned how to pass to Mender after Luis and Pukki would run to soften the defense versus cutting with speed.” And Dan added that the team didn’t want to (or couldn’t afford to?) pay for an expensive multi-dimensional striker (until perhaps Pukki, but even then, they didn’t pay a transfer fee for him and got him at the end of his career). He pointed out: “They were dealing with limited players and asking them to be more than that, which guaranteed that they'd be failing more than succeeding.”

These are great comments and perhaps jumping ahead, so let me go back to the basic question of “Heathball”: “What does Heath need a striker to do to be successful in his system?” Score goals, sure, but does he need them to occupy the centerbacks so that the inverted forwards can sweep in and score? Does he need them to help pressure high up the pitch so they can score quickly? Because Angelo Rodriguez might make sense to sign in the first situation, but absolutely not in the second situation. And while having a bullpen with more than one type of striker makes complete sense, having multiple DPs at the same time (so you would expect them to both play) who play very different styles and can’t be easily used together is a really bizarre decision.

At the time, the signings didn’t quite make sense, and gave the impression of a team without a coherent strategy or philosophy. If we have to use them to analyze seven years of roster building, that impression becomes an unfortunate reality. The Heath Era Loons knew they needed someone to put the ball in the back of the net, but didn’t know how to get it there and so they adopted a system of throwing every kind of striker at the wall to see which stuck.

Once Reynoso came onto the scene, the Loons knew how to be dangerous, but the goals often came from everyone else: Lod, Bongi, and on occasion Fragapane. Were Hunou and Amarilla that bad or unlucky or just miscast in the wrong roles? As Colin and Dan point out: the system never really adapted to them. The 2019 season, for example, saw our attack led by Angelo Rodriguez (1745 minutes, 5 goals), Toye (823 minutes, 6 goals), and Danladi (718 minutes, 2 goals).

I went back and watched Angelo’s five MLS goals that year (did you remember that he scored a hattrick in the 6-1 Open Cup demolition of New Mexico?!). Three of them were counter attacks where Quintero loosed him upon goal (Quintero drew the opposition and Angelo made good runs) and two of them were Metanire crosses finished with his head. Toye’s goals that season came from four speedy counter attacks, a poached rebound goal, and a cross finished with his foot.

And yet. Would anyone have ever described Minnesota United as a counter-attacking team? Up until 2023, when the team distinctly started to adopt a pressing game and tried to finish on the counter (why we were so successful only away from home), Minnesota was a possession team. Some of their best results were smash and grab wins (such as Toye’s Point Break-esque robbery at LAFC in 2019) and yet they often tried to settle into a possession-oriented attack with Darwin (and later Reynoso) pulling the strings.

If you could describe a typical Loons attack in those days it was: a dogged central defense held up by Ozzie Alonso, who would turn the ball over and send out wide, where an adventurous Metanire would push deep into the opposition and then send a cross in for a striker to finish. And yet that attack only produced three of our strikers’ goals in 2019.

In Short

If we take just a strikers-only view of the Heath Era, the bizarre irony is that despite having the technical direction and coaching aligned into one vision by one person, there was a profound lack of coordination between how the team was assembled and how the team played. The team’s quixotic pursuits of successful strikers was undermined by an inability to recognize those strikers’ individual talents and weaknesses.

What we can’t have in the future is a cobbled together sporting structure based on one personality and with a complete lack of accountability. It’s a wonder the club continued to write checks for new strikers without saying “you don’t even play with the toys we bought you last Christmas. Play with those first before we buy you a new LEGO set, Adrian.”

At the end of this series I’ll try to wish-cast my way into the Loons future, but here’s the preview: people are talking about who might be our next head coach. I’m more concerned with who will be our next technical director. Head coaches come and go (well, not in Minnesota, but normally) and sometimes good coaches fail to produce in certain situations. But a technical director (I’m looking at Cincinnati here) can lay the groundwork for long-term success where even a B-Level coach can thrive.