Several Big Names Picked, But Not All, In Second Stage Of MLS Re-Entry Draft

Perhaps lost in all the action on Wednesday was this little nugget: With the loss of Jeff Cunningham, FC Dallas has just one player who made a MLS appearance on the team prior to coach Schellas Hyndman’s hiring. Brek Shea, who is apparently drawing interest from Atletico Madrid, is the only significant holdover from the pre-Hyndman era.

As Daniel Robertson of Big D Soccer points out, the recent departures of Atiba Harris and Dax McCarty in the Expansion Draft and Cunningham in the Re-Entry Draft also clears about $500,000 of salary cap space. That’s money Robertson would like to see spent on re-signing David Ferreira. Combined with the acquisition of goalkeeper Chris Seitz - in exchange for a 2012 fourth-round pick - it was a day filled with promise despite the Toros not selecting a player in the draft.

The Re-Entry Draft was pretty clearly a step forward for MLS. For the first time in the league’s history, players are free to reject a team’s offer and still have a reasonable hope of finding employment.

Unfortunately, the draft did not play out in a particularly easy to watch or follow format. The whole thing took less than 15 minutes and players were moving around faster than any outside observer could reasonably follow.

The two players made about $450,000 between them last year and it’s looking like that money may actually end up going toward a second Designated Player, as coach Peter Vermes alluded to today.

All players that went unselected in the draft are now essentially free agents and can sign with teams on a first come, first serve basis. If teams can not come to terms with players they selected within seven days, those players will also essentially become free agents. If the selecting teams made a “bonafide” offer, they will retain the chance to match other teams’ contract offers.

In all the talk of who is available and how much they’ll cost, there have been some smaller details easily overlooked about Wednesday’s second stage of the MLS Re-Entry Draft (2 p.m. Eastern). At this point, we know about the 32 players who are available. I even tried to make sense of how much salary cap room each team has remaining.

Now, we’ll look at how those players are going to be picked:

It really shouldn’t have been all that surprising that the first stage of the MLS Re-Entry Draft was a snoozer. Supposedly, many of the players were due huge raises if their options had been picked up and most of them were already making significant money.

In the second stage, however, picking teams can renegotiate the contracts. With that in mind, Black And Red United’s Chest Rockwell sees some attractive targets.

If the teams and players can’t come to terms, the teams will retain rights of first refusal, but the players are free to seek other deals. The Re-Entry Draft and this small step toward free agency were two of the major concessions players won during their Collective Bargaining prior to the start of last season.

In previous years, if players and teams could not come to terms, the teams retained the rights of those players into perpetuity unless they chose to relinquish them. This considerably limited players negotiating power. While this is still a far cry from the free agency we see in almost every other American sports league, it does give MLS players an opportunity to test their market value.