NWSL week 1 preview: Will a new coach make Portland a contender again?

This time two years ago, Paul Riley was a beloved coach. Though his Philadelphia Independence team never won a WPS title, Riley was the man who had brought them to two straight championship games -- first as an expansion side in 2010 and then again in 2011. He had a reputation for getting the most out of his players, whether it was helping fallen star strikers rise again, or giving a home and a role to other teams’ castoffs, imbuing confidence in a team of spare parts and taking them straight to the title game.

And so when Cindy Parlow Cone left the Portland Thorns after guiding the team to a third-place finish in the regular season and the inaugural NWSL championship in 2013, Riley seemed like a pretty solid choice as far as replacements go. Sure, he’d never won a championship, but look at how close he’d come in Philly with a team full of players whom you’d probably mostly never heard of. Imagine what could come if all that “getting the most out of your players as a team” Paul Riley-ness got put into a blender with the stacked roster that was to be the 2014 Portland Thorns.

It turns out, it just breaks the blender. The three-piece suits and Alex Morgan’s pink headband and that classic Christine Sinclair scowl and Nadine Angerer’s World Player of the Year award and Tobin Heath’s too-low socks get all tangled up in the blades and it’s a whole thing. It’s another third-place finish, sure, but it comes much harder this time, with your team failing to produce much offensively for stretches that seem too long considering who’s supposed to be responsible for that production. It’s getting back to the semifinal for a second straight year, only to find that the fight that had propelled your team through to the final and then a trophy a season ago has evaporated into the Midwestern air, leaving you on the wrong end of a game of keep-away for far too many minutes and then flying home goalless and with your dreams of repeating dead.

But was Riley’s inability to turn a totally stacked Portland team into something more than an also-ran really all that shocking? There are good teams, and then there are 11 people who are good at soccer and who all also happen to have the same shirt in their closets. Riley struggled with turning the latter into the former, often tinkering too much with something that wasn’t particularly broken to begin with, and that lack of consistency and cohesion was what ultimately did in the Thorns in both 2014 and 2015.

That place of building something out of nothing is where Riley found his success, and so far it’s where Parsons has too. But this place, this Thorns team that’s the opposite of the Spirit sides Parsons brought up from the bottom, is where he is now. And it’s where -- and why -- Riley failed. Paul Riley may still be a very good coach, and he’ll have another chance to prove himself this season at the helm of a Western NY team that’s more suited to his style, but he wasn’t right for Portland. The Thorns can and should be a title contender, but getting back to that championship game will depend largely on Parsons being able to do what Riley couldn’t -- find the right blend of that something-from-nothing style and a pretty impressive list of names.