2020 Season Preview: Houston Dynamo
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Point-above-replacement values are explained here. Non-penalty expected goals + expected assists are explained here, and you can see all players’ xG+xA in our interactive expected goals tables. Touch percent is the percentage of total team touches by that player while he is on the field, which can be found in our interactive expected passing tables.
By Harrison Hamm
Mauro Manotas and Alberth Elis are still in Houston.
Despite numerous rumors extending back multiple years, neither of the Dynamo’s attacking duo was sold this offseason. The Dynamo, then, will mostly run it back this season with this being perhaps their last shot to maximize the value of their attacking stars. Outside of a handful of acquisitions, this will mostly be the same team that has missed the playoffs the last two years.
One key difference: Tab Ramos, not Wilmer Cabrera, is the coach. Ramos is more likely to incorporate young players and is expected to play a more cohesive, front-foot style. Cabrera spent the first year of his tenure playing a counter-attacking 4-3-3, then switched to a more possession-based style in 2018 and 2019, with unfavorable results.
From what we know about Ramos, we can expect a 4-3-3, or a close variant, and a system focused on counter-pressing and ball-movement. Dynamo fans will hope that Ramos provides better tactical coaching than Cabrera, who at times struggled to get the most out of his team.
Ramos will get to play with a talented attack. Manotas scored 13 goals and provided eight assists last year, and Elis has an even 20 goals and 20 assists in the past two seasons. They’ll need more from the midfield and the backline, which was the clearest problem for the last couple of seasons.
Offseason In Review
Much of the Dynamo’s offseason involved making moves around the edges. On defense, they traded depth right back Marlon Hairston to Minnesota, let AJ DeLaGarza and Kevin Garcia walk, and saw longtime left back DaMarcus Beasley retire. To replace them, they traded for a couple of veteran MLS defenders in Zarek Valentin and Victor Cabrera, and also signed center back Kyle Adams from USL affiliate Rio Grande Valley FC.
Additionally, they brought in two new goalkeepers. The two keepers who started last year, Joe Willis and Tyler Deric, are gone — they dealt Willis to Nashville for Valentin, and declined Deric’s contract option. 24-year-old former Croatian youth international Marko Maric will likely be the starter this year, with Cody Cropper as the backup. Cropper has never been rated well by analytics, allowing over eight more goals than expected in 2017, his only full season as a starter.
Houston’s biggest offseason move was essentially swapping attackers on the right wing. The mercurial Romell Quioto, who fell out of favor last year, was traded to Montreal for Victor Cabrera and $100,000 of General Allocation Money, while Darwin Quintero is the biggest haul of the Dynamo’s offseason. Houston rated Quintero very highly, acquiring him for Hairston and a combined $600,000 of allocation money, split evenly between GAM and TAM over the next two years.
2020 Outlook
Defense
A key strength of Houston’s backline is depth. They are a solid two-or three-deep at every position, with both MLS vets — Zarek Valentin, Victor Cabrera, Maynor Figueroa — and international transfers.
Depth, though, does not inherently mean the players are good. It will be interesting to watch the competition for the left back position where Adam Lundqvist is the incumbent starter after having essentially been groomed to take over for Beasley. Valentin has been an acceptable every-game starter at the outside back position in the past, and Jose Bizama should be locked in at right back. Bizama, a summer transfer from 2019, has been capped by the full Chilean national team. At 25, he should be a core piece. If Lundqvist struggles, Valentin is a capable option.
It appears that right now the likely center back pairing is Aljaz Struna and Figueroa, a relatively immobile duo that probably will not be in the mix for Defender of the Year consideration. Figueroa was better than expected in 25 starts last year, but he is getting older, and Struna will have to become close to an elite defender to live up to his hefty paycheck - he was the highest-paid center back in the league last year, excluding Bastian Schweinsteiger.
Struna does fare well in some underlying distribution metrics. He completed 4.5 passes per 100 over expectation despite one of the highest expected pass completion percentages among center backs. Among central defenders with at least 1,000 passes, he was third in pass completion percentage. He also fared well by Expected Buildup, a good sign. But his expected pass completion metric also indicates that he was fairly risk-averse as a passer. It will be interesting to see if he becomes more aggressive under Ramos.
Behind Struna and Figueroa is a collection of depth pieces. Given Figueroa’s age and likely decline, the Dynamo might need significant minutes from a couple of them. Cabrera is better as a backup than as a starter, the role he played in Montreal. Alejandro Fuenmayor, a versatile Venezuelan, will try to break back into the lineup after sitting on the bench for most of last year. Adams and 19-year-old Homegrown Erik McCue are farther down the depth-chart.
Midfield
If there is an area that the Dynamo could have improved this offseason, it was in midfield, where they lack a talented, refined ball-mover who can set up meaningful possession in the final third. Boniek Garcia, as hard-working and useful as he might be, is not that guy.
Matias Vera played more minutes than anyone for the Dynamo last year, and he is the centerpiece in defensive midfield. He mostly solved the problems caused by Juan David Cabezas’s spate of injuries, which essentially doomed the team in 2018. There are signs that Vera is a positive distributor, in addition to being a plus defender. He ranked second in MLS, behind Darlington Nagbe, in completion percentage on long balls, and he was similarly efficient on medium-length passes, per FbRef.
But Vera rarely ventured farther upfield. He tended to stay back in his role as a No. 6, which is perfectly practical for a team that needed someone to fill that spot. However, he won’t have the same effect on a team’s ability to rotate the ball and create positive possessions as other defensive midfielders like Diego Chara, Haris Medunjanin, or Alexander Ring. Houston needs a guy next to him who can take on more of that load and complement Vera’s defensive skillset. (It wasn’t realistic, but imagine if the Dynamo had been able to acquire Nagbe to play as their No. 8.)
Vera could grow into an elite backstop of the Dynamo’s midfield. He was successful 63 percent of the time when players attempted to dribble past him, a figure that compares favorably to elite MLS d-mids. He was one of five players to face 150 dribble attempts this past season, and while he was third in tackle percentage, he fared considerably better than Ring and Jonathan dos Santos, both considered elite No. 6s.
Garcia is the likely box-to-box partner for Vera. While he is fine defensively, it’s hard to expect Boniek to be an average MLS ball-moving central midfielder. One idea that would be fascinating to see: Tomas Martinez as a No. 8 next to Vera. The obvious concern there is defense, given that Martinez’s natural position is as an attacking midfielder. Yet Martinez has shown to be hard-working off the ball, and there are ways to overcome defensive issues — for example, by pushing Quintero centrally and find a winger who can pick up the slack. Tommy McNamara or Niko Hansen could handle it. Memo Rodriguez is due for another leap.
As it stands, Martinez provides little in the way of on-goal production. ASA defines 22 players who played at least 1,000 minutes in 2019 as central attacking midfielders, and Martinez ranked 21st among them in xG+xA/96. It could be smart to shift him back and let him be a ball-mover from a deeper position, helping the Dynamo generate progressive passes and adding scorers to the attack.
Quintero might be too weak defensively to play on the wing anyway. Minnesota United found that out last year and benched him for stretches. If Quintero has to play in the center behind Manotas, it’s an invitation for Ramos to at least try Martinez as a No. 8 next to Vera.
Forwards
On the surface, Manotas’s goal-scoring dipped last year, from 19 goals in 2018 to 13, but he also went from one assist to eight, and he underperformed his xG by a goal a year after over performing by four. He had the best xG+xA/96 season of his career in 2019.
Manotas is an elite MLS striker right now, and it is a bit surprising that the Dynamo have not sold him yet. Given his track record of improving season-to-season, it’s likely that his value will only go up, and with Elis still on the roster as well, this season is an opportunity for the Dynamo to win with their stars. That’s why Ramos is there.
Elis can be a bit of an enigma. He is undoubtedly productive, with 0.76 xG+xA/96, and he is electric on the ball; he attempted 119 dribbles last year, 12th-most in MLS, and managed to meg seven people. But his success rate on those dribbles was a ghastly 42 percent. Of players with at least 60 dribble attempts, Elis had the lowest win percentage in the league, so much so that he was one of two players (the other being Diego Rossi) in the top 20 of attempted dribbles who finished with a success rate under 50 percent.
Rossi’s plus passing offset his missed dribbles. The same can’t always be said for Elis, who has a tendency to miss open players and opportunities to combine. Houston’s attack lacked cohesiveness too often last year, and Elis is an understated reason why.
The presence of another creator and true attacker in Quintero should take some of the burden off Elis. Quintero, for his part, had 10 megs last year, second only behind Carlos Vela. He also had a 55 percent success rate on 137 dribbles last year.
Elis can be a high-value specialist, a player who can be counted on to create at least a couple quality chances on goal per game with his ridiculous pace and straight-ahead dribbling skill. The game doesn’t have to funnel through him. With Elis taking space generated by Quintero, the left winger (perhaps Rodriguez) can pounce at the back-post.
2020 Outlook
Most predictors have the Dynamo missing the playoffs. That is a fair projection. The defense is not good enough to win games on its own, given the obvious issues with a Figueroa-Struna center back partnership, and while there are fewer outright incompetent presences on the backline now, Houston likely doesn’t have the personnel to cut its goals allowed number significantly.
The attack should be solid, and Manotas and Elis should stuff the stat sheet. Quintero will have to avoid the aging curve (he’s 32) and find a way to not be a traffic cone on defense. There is concern about the No. 8 spot — if the Dynamo make any moves midseason, it should be either at that spot or at center back. Ideally, Martinez is the answer next to Vera and Rodriguez becomes a double-digit scorer at left wing.
There is a world in which Ramos figures all of these issues out and wins Coach of the Year. Maybe Elis thrives alongside Quintero and makes an MVP push. Even then, the Dynamo’s absolute ceiling is somewhere in the fourth or fifth range of the Western Conference, with a chance to make a 2017-style playoff run. In what could be the last season with Manotas and Elis, the urgency to win now should be there.