Week Five-ish MLS Power Rankings

Another week of MLS is in the books, as is another scoreless draw for Sporting Kansas City. Bastian Schweinsteiger, Minnesota United won a game, and the Kurt Onalfo coached LA Galaxy are starting to look... well perhaps a bit familiar to us.

With five under our belt to pull from, along with using the sorting hat at the start of the season to best guess whereabouts teams would fall, I’ve compiled what I think is a pretty okay-ish rankings of teams. It feels like there’ve been a lot of draws this season and that’s maybe something I should run to ground, but maybe that’s just an artifact of being a Kansas City guy... At any rate, Sporting are now one of just three teams without a loss. So that’s neat. And with a 0.25 GAA I think it’s safe to say that by and large the defense is clicking (PK saves and some fortune not-withstanding). Where does that put SKC in the big picture? Here’s... an attempt.

1 Portland Timbers - 10 points, 3W-1L-1T

2 FC Dallas - 7 points, 2W-0L-1T

3 Houston Dynamo - 9 points, 3W-1L-0T

4 New York Red Bull - 7 points, 2W-2L-1T

5 NYCFC - 7 points, 2W-1L-1T

6 Columbus Crew - 10 points, 3W-1L-1T

7 Toronto FC - 6 points, 1W-0L-3T

8 Atlanta United - 7 points, 2W-1L-1T

9 Orlando City - 6 points, 2W-1L-0T

10 Sporting Kansas City - 6 points, 1W-0L-3T

11 San Jose Earthquakes - 6 points, 2W-2L-0T

12 Seattle Sounders - 5 points, 1W-1L-2T

13 Colorado Rapids - 4 points, 1W-1L-1T

14 Chicago Fire - 5 points, 1W-1L-2T

15 New England Revolution - 4 points, 1W-2L-1T

16 Vancouver Whitecaps - 4 points, 1W-2L-1T

17 DC United - 4 points, 1W-2L-1T

18 LA Galaxy - 3 points, 1W-3L-0T

19 Montreal Impact - 3 points, 0W-1L-3T

20 Philadelphia Union - 2 points, 0W-2L-2T

21 Real Salt Lake - 2 points, 0W-3L-2T

22 Minnesota United - 4 points, 1W-3L-1T

Some stray observations, Sporting are still right there in the middle of the pack and there’s honestly not a lot of distance between the middle bunch of teams right now, and it’s definitely too early to really say who’s hot and who’s not. Minnesota got their first win over RSL but their very poor goal differential wasn’t enough to pull them entirely out of the basement. LA Galaxy seem to be floundering, while Portland have looked quite good. Big surprise may be the system is still ranking NYRB pretty high. We’ll see if that’s predictive or just lagging.

At any rate, there’s some CONCACAF Champions League tonight and tomorrow. Could we get an all MLS Final? We... could. It’d be neat.

Tune in next week after Sporting take on a rested Colorado Rapid at home on Sunday.