Deals Gone Bad

With the events of the past week, you wonder if perhaps the Fire should have picked a band called "Bargaining Leverage" to record the punked-up version of one of their cheers, rather than the eerily prescient Bad Deals. As it turns out, the Chicago squad were forced to give up their captain for a song.

Last week, as many of you probably know, was when all ten MLS teams were required by the league to comply with the salary cap, currently estimated at about $1.7 million. Fire fans with their ears to the ground and their eyes on their computers were expecting to see the departures of forwards Hristo Stoitchkov and Josh Wolff, but then the news suddenly got worse. Captain Peter Nowak was going to the New England Revolution for a conditional draft pick in 2004.

In the interest of full disclosure, I dismissed the Nowak-to-New England rumors that reared their head earlier in the week, but in my defense, the guy who started that going on BigSoccer didn't make it sound too convincing, and had you told me it was for a conditional pick, it would have seemed even less so. And while I'm at it, I got the Metrostars' allocation situation wrong last week. They already had two, and didn't pick any up from the DC trade.

Anyway, the Nowak news was then followed by the not unexpected news that Wolff was, indeed, heading to Kansas City, with the Fire picking up the #3 overall pick in next week's Superdraft in return. Finally, there is still the lingering rumor, or, as the Brits like to say, rumour, that Hristo Stoitchkov is headed to DC as a player-coach, ostensibly as incentive for 27-year old Bulgarian defender Galin Ivanov to sign with the club as well. After the smoke clears, new Fire coach Dave Sarachan will have more than a few pairs of cleats to fill, and a fan base that desperately needs proof that these moves won't prove fatal to the franchise.

The first question is, how did it come to this? While it was certainly common knowledge that the Fire were significantly over the salary cap going into 2003, it seems that the team and fans alike underestimated how negatively that affected our ability to deal our way out of the hole. The notion that one of the pillars of this squad could be removed for a conditional draft pick seems absurd on its face, but General Manager Peter Wilt has said that it was the best option he had. Later, on an Internet radio broadcast, he elaborated that some of the other deals on the table involved either Chris Armas or Carlos Bocanegra, and losing them would hurt us as much or more, but for a longer period of time.

Which brings us to the next question. Now what? As I said last week, the team perhaps needed to start preparing for life after Peter Nowak, and now they have no choice. And if you look at the 2002 statistics, the four players we've lost only scored six more points than Ante Razov alone, and three FEWER goals. Granted, last year is not necessarily the one you want to model after, but that only begins to tell the story. One could argue that the only real impact player of the bunch was Nowak, and it's probably true that his absence will hurt the most. At the same time, the team's struggles when their captain was out with injury were predicated on an offense built around him, and what's more, built by now-departed coach Bob Bradley. A new-look midfield with a new coach may play an entirely different game, which could mitigate the loss even further. And as much as we want to wish our former captain success, it's not out of the question that he'll have a similar fate to our last end-of-an-era, end-of-the-world salary-cap-induced move, where defender Lubos Kubik went to the Dallas Burn and proceeded to be only moderately effective before retiring. With apologies to Diego Gutierrez.

The point being, yes, this is a sad time for Fire fans, but it's far from the end of the world. If you try to divorce the emotional bonds, we may have, at the end of the day, let go of three injury-prone players, two of whom were getting up in years, and a card magnet for a promising young midfielder in Justin Mapp, the third pick in what is being touted as a strong draft, and some other picks that could turn out in the long run. There may be lemonade in Fire fans' future if Sarachan can parlay the lemons he's been handed into a strong season.