Good Trade, Bad Cop

Now that the initial euphoria over TFC's trade for Dwayne De Rosario has died down (just a little), it's time to take a level-headed look at the deal that brings Major League Soccer's top Canadian player to its only Canadian team.

First, I think it's a great trade if for no other reason than it stops reporters like me from asking Dwayne if he'd like to play in Toronto someday. By the end of season two reporters were as sick of asking the question as he was of answering it, but we had to ask just in case his answer changed...which it never did.

But seriously, it doesn't take a soccer genius, or even a humble reporter to deduce that it'll always help your team to have someone who can do this:

Off the field I think the trade works well for two reasons.

One, it shows everyone who follows TFC that Mo Johnston might actually have been telling the truth all those times he said he was working on something big. After two seasons covering TFC I was starting to wonder who this player named "allocation money" was, and why Mo kept trading for him. But now we see why Mo hoarded that cash, and if De Rosario can stay healthy and keep doing what he's been doing then TFC might just contend for a playoff spot.

Who knows. They might even overtake the Montreal Impact as the top pro team in Canada.

And two, it generates genuine interest in the team among the media and sports fans who aren't hardcore TFC supporters but who nonetheless have money and attention that they could spend on TFC if given a reason.

Acquiring one of the top Canadian players ever is a pretty good reason.

Of course, I'm not saying anything my colleague Cathal Kelly didn't say in his column in Saturday's Star

So here's where the role reversal comes in.

In two years on the beat, Cathal's usually been the bad cop to my sometimes good but usually at least not too bad cop.

But today, amid the joy surrounding De Rosario's arrival in Toronto I get to play bad cop by pointing out an important question this trade raises.

How do you spread the money around?

To borrow a phrase from John Carver, I want you to "cast your mind back" to September, when a few injuries and a full schedule of international games gutted TFC's lineup. To fill out their starting XI for a Sept. 6 game against Chivas USA, TFC had to bring in a team scout (Tim Regan), a Vancouver Whitecap (Diaz Kambere) and a volunteer (Ricky Titus, who refused payment lest it jeopardize his men's league eligibility).

The last minute call-ups didn't have to happen. At that point in the season TFC had four unused roster spots, and if they had filled those slots they could simply have promoted from within for that game.

But they didn't have the salary cap space, since the guys already on the roster had consumed all the available cash.

So what does this have to do with De Rosario?

Well, in bringing him on you're adding $325,000 in salary, while shedding about $45,000 in losing Julius James. So if TFC had planned on distributing money and bodies a little differently to safeguard against lineup-gutting FIFA dates, it just got a little tougher. If the team still wants to sign a DP, the $400,000 salary cap will make things trickier still.

But again, these are small issues in comparison to what the team stands to gain with a healthy, happy, motivated De Rosario in the lineup.

And if anything, his arrival and the salary cap dilemmas it might present probably just pave the way for more interesting roster moves.

Stay tuned.

-- Morgan Campbell

Comments

[Still Kicking]

MLS has changed the rosters for 2009 from 18 Senior spots and 10 development to 20 Senior Spots and 4 development.
Perhaps Mo was just ahead of his time by having four unused roster spots. Development spots were hard to fill anywasy as they paid very little.
DeRo represents roughly the same space under the cap as Carlos Ruiz. Many are betting we won't be seeing Ruiz in a TFC uniform in 2009.

[John Dinner]

Glad to see your still kicking it with the TFC Morgan. When do you think we will here from the man himself about all this?? Any time frame for him getting into town?

[alex]

The (sad) reality is that you can harldly find anybody to fill those D-roster spots (12k a year, not great pay). We're just lucky enough to be able to draw guys like Gala and Attakora from Toronto to fill a couple of ours.

The problem with trying to anazlyze trades from a cap perspective is MLS provides very little information. We hypothetically could be paying part of his salary with allocation money, or maybe we aren't. It's impossible to tell.

PS. Diaz Kambere is the worst player to ever suit up for TFC. Why we didn't use our young players on the D-roster instead of him on that day, I'll never know. He was useless.

[palos]

Wasn't DeRosario one of those Canadian players that recently criticized playing National team games at BMO Field because of the artificial turf? Interesting that he'll now be playing a full season (if healthy) & presumably be giving a press conference saying how happy he is to be in Toronto and playing for Toronto FC on the same turf he criticized.

If Toronto FC does not do well and doesn't make the playoffs in his first season (and let's not kid ourselves...DeRosario's signing is all about short term success...not building to the future and a playoff berth now is EXPECTED, not a potential) I can't wait to hear what excuse DeRo will come up with. That said, I wish him and the team all the best. They'll need it.