Build Versus Buy

As of this moment, the Chicago Fire have exactly five years of experience at forward. That's it. While I'm somewhat notorious for my blank slate-based cautious optimism at the beginning of nearly every MLS season, this time around, I'm a little worried. Something like half of all the players on the Fire roster were acquired via the draft in the last three years. Only two players on the current roster were signed to new contracts or acquired via trade, not counting some Mexican guy I keep hearing about.

On paper, I can reconcile the replacement of Tony Sanneh with Bakary Soumare, that of Nate Jaqua with Jerson Monteiro and, finally, that of Andy Herron with Chad Barrett. But two out of three of those players are still untested at the professional level, and Barrett isn't exactly a sure thing, entirely aside from the part where you then have to replace his spot three or four down on the forward depth chart as well.

There is a fair amount of conventional wisdom about Chicago skipper Dave Sarachan's being a draft wizard, but that's more a matter of finding guys that other coaches missed, about getting that diamond in the rough. It's not necessarily about quantity, which makes the current roster a little too green to be red for my taste. Factor in that we clearly drafted a guy someone else knew about and wanted this time, as we jettisoned Herron in order to move up a handful of spots on draft day and grab Soumare. Either Dave really wanted Baku, or Herron was on somebody's shit list.

That being said, depth matters, and I think the Fire made a strong case for that last year. Particularly in the early stages of the Open Cup run, we saw a fair amount of playing time making it quite a ways down the roster. But has the team maybe taken this concept a little too far?

This is a concern because the team right now may be lacking a steady, dynamic presence. When you look around the league at guys like Amado Guevara, Dwayne DeRosario and even Freddy Adu, the common thread is a combination of audacity and unpredictability. You're probably not going to find that in a rookie, Damani Ralph and maybe Sacha Kljeistan notwithstanding.

Justin Mapp and Chris Rolfe have shown flashes of these qualities, but not enough to feel like they can take over a game when the team needs them to. Rolfe, in particular, became too much of the go-to guy too early last year, to the point where he'd get the ball in too many tough spots because the offense was trying to run nearly everything through him.

The more reductive version of this is that it's unclear who's driving and where the goals will come from. Rolfe needs to be given the chance to pick his spots better, which means it's going to be incumbent upon both his strike partner and the rest of the midfield to help move and possess the ball effectively in the attacking third. Which, in turn, is going to require that the midfield take up a more aggressive posture than might be expected from the quartet of Logan Pause, Chris Armas, Diego Gutierrez and Ivan Guerrero. The real danger is that the Fire lineup as a 3-4-3 but end up playing a 7-1-2, and just boot long balls up to the forward line as a result.

What I'd like to see is Justin Mapp take a lead role in the attack. He steps up to this challenge in fits and starts, but I don't know that anyone has ever explicitly said "here are the keys, Justin" -- except for during the USOC run last year, and he responded very well to that experience. If Mapp can emerge as a leader, pairing him with both Pascal Bedrossian when he gets healthy and Cuauhtemoc Blanco when he arrives in July could make for an offensive unit equal parts crafty and speedy, and when you throw in some combination of Rolfe, Barrett and speedster Calen Carr as well, we may wonder why we ever asked where the goals would come from.

I haven't said anything about defense because, at the moment, I'm pretty confident in who we've got in the back. That's one area where atheletic, tenacious rookies can contribute early and often, and it looks like Soumare and Osei Telesford fit that bill nicely. And that's only if the veterans don't get the job done. This is both where the Fire look very good in isolation and where they look downright superb relative to at least the rest of the Eastern Conference. I just don't think anyone else's defense stacks up.

So if the conventional wisdom and assumptions about who is playing where hold up, we're looking at a team that may not score a lot of goals, but may allow even less. The biggest concern is that the assumption about the defensive fortitude might be too generous. If the defense can hold up their end of the bargain and not make some of the boneheaded lapses that have plagued the team in the past, a second- or third-place finish in the East should be very doable. If the offense clicks better than expected, consensus front-runners DC United may have to watch out.

Conversely, if the offense can't score and the defense is lacking, particularly through the first ten games or so, things could get interesting in terms of personnel both on the field and on the bench.

All of this is pure conjecture based off of a handful of preseason press releases, really. I can't wait until Saturday, when we finally get something real to chew on. I reserve the right to change anything and everything I've said so far once I have, you know, actual evidence.