NWSL Week 9 preview: Get ready for Seattle Reign to make a run up the table

This is an unfamiliar place, but it’s not a totally unrecognizable one. Like going back to your parents’ house after you haven’t lived there for a while -- you know where the kitchen is, but have no idea which cabinet they’re keeping the plates in these days. Seattle’s been to this house before, it’s just been a while since they’ve visited and maybe their old bedroom now contains a treadmill and a computer that’s almost inexplicably still running Windows 98. Lest we forget, there was a time when the Reign was one of the worst teams in the NWSL. It wasn’t even that long ago.

What, then, was a struggling team to do? If you’re Laura Harvey, you go shopping, and nothing -- or no one -- is off limits. Harvey spent the offseason assembling a collection of some of the best, and in some cases wildly underrated, players an NWSL team had ever seen. While Portland had managed to wrangle many of the biggest (or at least most familiar) names in North American soccer, and as teams like Chicago and Washington turned their focus toward building from within and developing players drafted out of college, the Reign spent the time between the final whistle of the 2013 season and the 2014 opener making trades, picking up free agents, and crossing oceans to scoop up talent from European clubs. By the time the second NWSL season kicked off that April, Seattle was an almost entirely different team from the one that had walked off the field as the league’s second-worst club the previous August.

Kawasumi was never the flashy hardnosed player that Fishlock was, was never as famous as Solo or Rapinoe, and never got the credit quite the way Little did, but she was, without question, a major reason the Reign got so good so quickly. Naho, as she is known, racked up nine goals and five assists in 20 appearances for the Reign in 2014. She also put 71 percent of her shots on goal, a better average than anyone else on the Reign with the exception of Little. And Naho committed just a single foul all season (Fishlock, for comparison’s sake, committed 23). All told, only Little scored more goals for Seattle in 2014, only two players -- Fishlock and Little -- tallied more assists, and Naho made fewer appearances than both of them.

But now, two years removed from that almost-worst to first turnaround, Seattle looks like a team that’s finally come back to Earth. Part of it may just be a slow start, something Seattle also struggled with last season. Seattle’s also dealt with some absences due to injury -- Rapinoe still hasn’t played yet this season as she continues to recover from a knee injury sustained while training with the USWNT in December, and Fishlock only recently returned after missing several games due to a fractured tibia. There’s also another key piece missing from the Reign team that lost just twice en route to the 2014 Shield win, though, and that’s Kawasumi.

Naho had been on loan to Seattle from Japanese club INAC Kobe for the 2014 season, and didn’t return to Seattle the following year. Of course, without her, the Reign still did fine in 2015, still won the NWSL Shield and still made it to (and lost in) the championship game. However, it never seemed quite as effortless or as much of a sure thing as it had the season before.

Now, with eight games played this season, things seem even less effortless and sure thing-like than they did a year ago. The Reign are a mid-table team, and they haven’t impressed much in those eight games, or at least not with the consistency that they once did. But this week Harvey took a big step toward correcting that and starting the process of bringing Seattle back to its former glory. On Thursday, the team announced they’d signed Naho for the remainder of the 2016 season. It’s not on loan this time either, which means she could be in Seattle for the long term.

Naho is the last missing piece from that 2014 team, which was one of the best in the league’s short history. And with 11 more games to go this season, her return is a big move and one that could make a huge difference for Seattle through the rest of the season, especially with Rapinoe’s status still something of a mystery. Kawasumi won’t be available for the Reign this weekend, but Seattle says that she’ll join the team sometime in the next 10 days, pending receipt of her P-1 Visa and ITC. That means Naho should be available for the entirety of the second half of the season, and that could be enough for Seattle -- no one does comebacks or turns it on late better than the Reign.

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