MLS Draft 2011: Taking A Final Look At Who Came Out On Top

By Chest Rockwell

All in all, United improved the depth of a thin defensive group for 2011, and in Kitchen might have a future MLS Best 11-caliber player on their hands. Olsen seems to want to make his team harder to beat, and Caleb Porter called Kitchen and Korb his “most competitive players.” That kind of winning attitude was sorely lacking from last year’s Black-and-Red. At worst, DC’s draft day performance appears to be in the top three around MLS, and you could make a strong case that we did the best of anyone.

By Andy Edwards

Sporting KC: C+

By Zach Woosley

Team That Did the Least: LA Galaxy

By Daniel Robertson

Big winner: I really liked what New England did in the draft getting Soares and McCarthy, two physically big players who can step in and play right away while in Perry and Kinne they got two workmanlike forwards who seem to always flourish under Steve Nicol’s system.

Three more rounds of another off-season draft are in the books. Fifty-one more players (believe it or not, three teams passed on their final pick) have been assigned to new teams. But there’s still another week or so before training camps officially open.

In the meantime, we’re going to have to bide our time by doing things like assessing the relative perceived successes and failures of the various teams. I’ve asked the various managers of the SB Nation team blogs to weigh in on how their teams fared and give me their impressions of which teams did particularly well and which ones didn’t.