Garde was with Les Partants yesterday
Garde prudent au sujet du mercato, louange Piette - TVA Sports
He said the mercato is a direct factor of the financial means at his disposition, but that he's not complaining about the funds allocated to him. When asked what his teams needed most, he said to learn how to control the play offensively at home (which is encouraging because he recognizes the problem), but it would have been nice to hear him say a #9 too.
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Impact rank 14th in MLS roster construction management according to TheAthletic. They're in the 3rd category (ranks 9 to 14), which they label as Flawed but manageable.
Tier III: Flawed but manageable
14. Montreal Impact
Montreal has a somewhat confusing roster. There are very good players at the top (Ignacio Piatti and Saphir Taïder) and then a lot of not-so-good contracts at the TAM level (Maxi Urruti, Rudy Camacho, Bacary Sagna and Harry Novillo). Those TAM deals really hurt. Montreal doesn’t have any awful contracts in the dead zone ($350k-$530k), and they’ve got some nice value in players like Evan Bush, Anthony Jackson-Hamel, Samuel Piette and Daniel Lovitz. If the Impact had a higher hit rate among its TAM players, things would look a lot rosier. As of right now, though, it’s a middle-of-the-road roster that is outperforming that status early this season in a weak Eastern Conference. There should be some cap space and TAM flexibility to improve.
Here's how the list was created, and the comments on the Impact
It isn’t hard to figure out which MLS teams have the best rosters—a quick glance at the league table reveals those answers pretty quickly. Sussing out which teams have the best squads relative to their resources is a bit of a different question, however. A low-budget team might not be as high in the league table as a deeper-pocketed rival, but that doesn’t mean they’re not getting more bang for their buck than a richer counterpart.
Unfortunately, shining a light on those kinds of situations is often a bit difficult in MLS. As we detailed here on The Athletic just the other day, a lot of the nitty-gritty details that are so central to MLS roster building and cap management remain opaque. The MLS Players Association releasing salary information for every player in the league certainly helps clear things up, but even their biannual list leaves out plenty of relevant data.
Thankfully, we’re more than willing to fill in the gaps. We don’t claim to have all the info, but between the MLSPA’s salary dump and years of our own reporting, we have enough of an idea to rank how every team has built their roster relative to their budget. We did our best to take everything into account.
Total spending was naturally a huge factor, as was the performance of individual players relative to their acquisition costs. Roster balance also played a big role; Teams that are overly reliant on their highest-paid players got docked, while teams who get solid contributions from the middle and lowest earners on their rosters gained points. We also weighed how many contracts teams have in what has become a dead-zone of cap management: salaries below the maximum budget charge of $530,000, but above what is considered a manageable general allocation money (GAM) buydown, around $350,000. (There are barely more players in this category, 43, than there are players making more than $1.5 million, 39.)
We feel the resulting ranking does a pretty good job of highlighting which teams have done a great job building their rosters and which ones have dug themselves into serious holes. But we didn’t do this for us; we did it for you. So go ahead, dig in. Enjoy the first edition of the MLS roster construction rankings.
I find it interesting to hear that the 350-530k contracts are in a dead zone, and it is surprising that the Impact have done fairly well in that zone. I'm not sure I'd put Sagna in the bad contract category, but other than that their evaluation seems fair, although a bit thin. As always, the analysis on the Impact always feel rushed compared to the others. Taking a quick glance at the paragraphs for each team, it does seem like the Impact had the smallest one. They seem to think the team will have some cap flexibility to acquire TAM players, which is the complete opposite from what we hear from local media outlets. Hopefully they're right.
Here's the full list
Top tier
1. LAFC
2. Houston Dynamo (Managed by Matt Jordan, btw)
3. Atlanta United
Good and Balanced
4. Seattle Sounders
5. D.C. United
6. NYRB
7. Portland Timbers
8. Philadelphia Union
Flawed but manageable
9. FC Dallas
10. LAG
11. NYCFC
12. SKC
13. Columbus Crew
14. Montréal Impact
More bad than good
15. Minnesota United
16. TFC
17. Real Salt Lake
18. Chicago Fire
19. San José Earthquakes
20. NE Revolution
21. Colorado Rapids
22. Vancouver Whitecaps
23. Orlando City SC
24. FC Cincinnati (JP's favourite)