5 big stories from the 2020 NWSL Draft

The 2020 NWSL College Draft produced plenty of drama, with some massive trades finalized mere minutes before proceedings got underway. As everyone settled in, it appeared that the Portland Thorns would pick first, followed by two selections each for Sky Blue FC and the Chicago Red Stars. As expected, Portland selected Stanford forward Sophia Smith to kick off the draft. But then to everyone’s surprise, a series of three trades laid out a new top five: Portland, Portland, Orlando, Washington, Sky Blue.

A flurry of activity sent 21-year-old USWNT star Mallory Pugh from Washington to Sky Blue, forward Rachel Hill from Orlando to Chicago, and a lot of future picks and cash the way of the Red Stars, Spirit and Sky Blue.

Trying to spell out the entire web of trades here would be more confusing than helpful, but I recommend getting started with the final draft order and picks from All For XI. Here are the big storylines and the specifics of what everyone got in the end.

Last season, Sky Blue FC couldn’t escape bad press. Following revelations that the team provided players with substandard conditions for years, first round draft picks Hailie Mace and Julia Ashley declined to sign for the club. Then-president Tony Novo made a lot of excuses, then left the club not long after. Absolutely everything about Sky Blue’s organization has improved since.

Sky Blue eventually secured adequate training facilities and housing for its players. New general manager Alyse LaHue got to work rebuilding trust among fans, as well as her club’s reputation among players. But as Sky Blue moves into Red Bull Arena — a 25,000 capacity stadium much closer to New York City than their previous digs on the Rutgers campus — the club felt like it needed to make a splash. It pulled that off on Thursday by trading for Pugh.

To get Pugh, Sky Blue first moved down in the draft in exchange for $70,000 in allocation money, according to Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Sky Blue then flipped the 4th, 13th and 17th overall picks in the 2020 draft, along with their first round pick in next year’s draft, to get Pugh from Washington.

Freya Coombe, Sky Blue’s new head coach, admitted that the move was just as much about business as it was about soccer.

“The fans love her. We’re excited to have extra [fans] come into the stadium and she’s going to be a big part of that,” Coombe told reporters at the draft. She continued: “[Pugh] is definitely going to be a draw and attraction. Before, we weren’t always getting the spectators from the city to come out and watch the games because of transport. Now there’s a whole mass of fans that want to come.”

Coombe clearly rates Pugh as a player, though.

“Watching her in some of the games for the national team, she’s absolutely set me alight, and I was like, this player is fantastic,” Coombe said. “She’s got such an upside in terms of what she does on the ball, what she sees. She’s so smart.” Coombe adds, “she’s a player we’ve been looking at for a long time. We’ve been chipping away at it.”

If you’re wondering why the Spirit would trade Pugh so readily, it’s because they believe they got an extremely similar player in the draft. With the No. 4 overall pick, Washington selected UCLA forward Ashley Sanchez. Like Pugh, Sanchez starred for the USWNT at youth level before getting called into the senior squad as a teenager. Also like Pugh, she’s a dribbling machine, usually operating on the left wing and cutting in on her stronger right foot. Also also like Pugh, she hasn’t quite maximized her talent yet, and needs to get better as a decision-maker in the final third.

Ultimately, this is a move that makes sense for all parties. Sky Blue gets the best player in the trade, and who will especially help sell season tickets, so it’s hard to criticize the club for paying a steep price. The Spirit don’t get functionally worse, despite taking a bit of a PR hit, and get to add three draft picks for doing so. Pugh, who has just four goals in her last 24 NWSL matches, gets a change of scenery. In a decade, we’ll likely look at this as a trade that worked out for everyone.

Sophia Smith was a no-brainer No. 1 overall pick for the Thorns, who thought so much of the 19-year-old attacker that they traded USWNT defender Emily Sonnett to the Orlando Pride to acquire the pick. Smith dominated at youth international level, starred for Stanford during the Cardinal’s national championship run, and has a once-in-a-generation combination of speed and technical ability.

Here, have a little sizzle reel. I promise you’ll be sold on her ability instantly.

No one expected Portland to make a move for the No. 2 overall pick as well, but that’s only because very few people knew how highly Thorns head coach Mark Parsons rated Washington State striker Morgan Weaver. He went to December’s USWNT ID camp to get a closer look at Smith and some of the other draftable talent, and came away with the conclusion that Weaver, who dominated during Wazzu’s Cinderella run as an unseeded team to the College Cup, was easily No. 2 on his board.

Parsons credited general manager Gavin Wilkinson with successfully navigating a convoluted maze of trades to get his coach the player he wanted.

“Gavin Wilkinson gets an A-plus-plus-plus, because he got a deal done 30 minutes before,” Parsons told reporters. “Someone said, ‘Why do you look so chill?’ It’s because our wonderful redhead is running around trying to make us better.”

The trade was completed using a mechanism that didn’t exist two months ago: allocation money. Teams can buy up to $300,000 in allocation money, which can be used to buy down the salary cap impact of star internationals or NWSL Best XI players. It can also be used on operational costs, though the league has not yet specified which uses outside of player salaries are permitted.

Portland, who turns a profit every year, had no problem buying $70,000 of allocation money to trade to the Chicago Red Stars, along with the 15th and 16th overall picks. The Red Stars, who like their current roster and are not profitable, needed the money more than the high pick.

North Carolina Courage head coach Paul Riley was asked about this mechanism in his post-draft presser, and expressed some concern about how teams are able to buy picks.

“My biggest worry about allocation is that some teams are going to buy the first and second picks every year, which is going to change the league completely,” Riley said. “I don’t want that in the future for the league, I think that’s bad, that teams can buy [picks] like the Yankees. Allocation is good to keep the better players, if it’s used for the right thing, but I don’t think we should be using allocation to buy draft picks.”

A rule change will likely be hotly debated next fall, but Portland took advantage of the rules as they’re presently written and signed two of the best young players in the country.

No one is better at manipulating the draft trade market than Chicago Red Stars head coach Rory Dames. His squad finished as runners-up in NWSL despite him trading away enough quality players to accumulate four first round draft picks, and he flipped them for even more value, like that dude who was able to turn a paperclip into a house.

Thanks to a flurry of moves, he ended up with a quality player in Rachel Hill, a reported $85,000 in allocation money, five quality players from this draft, and another 2021 first round pick to add to his collection. The Red Stars now have four first round picks in what is expected to be a loaded 2021 class. Stockpiling those picks also gives Dames assets to trade to potential expansion teams in exchange for a promise to not pick any of his players in an expansion draft, or that he get those players back after they’re selected.

Thursday’s trade with Orlando, in particular, looks like a coup. Hill and cash for the No. 3 overall pick probably would have been a fair trade. Chicago managed to get a first round pick in next year’s potentially better draft to go with it, and moved up from 26th to 19th on Thursday. Dames figured out that Orlando had its eye on a player it wanted desperately, and he got every last drop of value out of that pick.

In addition to making good trades that repeatedly let him turn 75 cents into a dollar, Dames put together a sensible, high-value draft class. Defender Camryn Biegalski, defensive midfielder Zoe Morse and utility player Aerial Chavarin are the type of steady, reliable players who can fill backup roles immediately. Attacking midfielder Ella Stevens and left back Julia Bingham had some notably poor games during their senior seasons, but their best performances stood out above players drafted before them. They’re longer-term projects with very high ceilings. Chicago’s balanced approach makes a lot of sense, and the assets Dames has accumulated give him a ton of options going into a 2021 offseason when a lot of teams will be resigning themselves to losing star players.

The Orlando Pride sucked last season. They finished dead last with 16 points from 24 games, and an embarrassing minus-29 goal differential. Head coach Marc Skinner and general manager Erik Ustruck are clearly trying to address the team’s problems, and made some aggressive trades, most notably flipping the No. 1 pick in a deal for Sonnett. But Thursday’s moves were perplexing.

As mentioned above, the Pride got poor value out of the deal for the No. 3 pick. But the pick itself was surprising too. Skinner opted for Colorado midfielder Taylor Kornieck, a player who isn’t a stylistic fit for the type of soccer Skinner said he wanted to play last season. He has talked extensively about wanting to play beautiful, artistic soccer, in contrast to the style of soccer most commonly played in the NWSL, which he perceives to be physical and tactically rudimentary. Kornieck, while physically one of the most talented players in the draft class, is statistically one of its worst passers.

But it sounds like Skinner is perhaps changing his tune on how he expects his team to play. Chelsey Bush of The Equalizer asked Skinner what he has learned in his year at the helm in Orlando, and his answer suggested that he is adopting some of the tactics that he bemoaned less than a year ago.

“Sometimes you’re very stubborn in the way that you approach a team, and the way that you want a team to play,” Skinner said. “With the players and pieces that we had last year, I was unable to create what I wanted to create. I’ve had to adapt, and we will have to adapt. We’ll have to encourage the physicality and mentality of this league. The biggest thing that I think will be the difference for the Orlando team this year, there will be a grit and determination to grind out results even if you’re not playing at your best. Any team that wants to be considered to be a playoff team has to have the ability to do that.”

In addition to Kornieck, the Pride drafted a ton of other players who are physically elite, but average or worse technically by current NWSL standards. Defender Konya Plummer, forward Abi Kim and midfielder Chelsee Washington all have the athleticism and tactical intelligence to succeed in NWSL, but they’re not as technically adept other players Orlando could have chosen at the same positions with those picks.

Skinner specifically spoke about Kornieck’s physical qualities when he was asked why he wanted to move up to select her. He compared her to two of the league’s biggest stars.

“I thought that she’s a beast,” Skinner said. “If you look at North Carolina and Portland, that have Sam Mewis and Lindsey Horan, they have an outstanding physical threat, and also the ability to play. To find a player of that stature physically, that has the ability to play, is awesome. If you scout the world for them, there’s not that many.”

There’s a really critical difference between Kornieck and players like Mewis and Horan, however: They’re two of the best passing midfielders in the world, and Kornieck’s passing is currently bad. That’s not to say Kornieck can’t become an elite passing midfielder in the future — Horan wasn’t much of a passer when she first turned pro, for example — but she’s not even in the ballpark at the moment. Skinner seems to fundamentally misunderstand what makes those players great. It’s really not their size.

Skinner appears to have abandoned his principles and done a complete 180-degree turn on his coaching philosophy in under a year. That doesn’t inspire confidence.

Utah Royals, Reign FC, and the Houston Dash were either content with what they have, or woefully uncreative in trade negotiations. All of these teams are far from being awful, but they’re equally far from competing for a championship. These are the teams that should be taking big risks. They should have been competing with Portland to get a top pick, or trying to package their picks to get a high quality player. Instead, they did very little.

In order from least to most egregious lack of activity:

Reign FC — Given that the Reign made the playoffs last season despite Megan Rapinoe contributing very little to the team, one could make the case for running it back. They also don’t have a head coach or full-time GM in place following the departure of Vlatko Andonovski and a recent ownership change, so maybe it’s a bad idea to make dramatic moves before a new regime has settled in. But this is also a team that might be a couple trades away from giving their rivals in Portland some problems. Instead, they’re falling farther behind.

Houston Dash — I think you can make a reasonable case for internal improvement for the Dash. Jane Campbell and Rachel Daly are genuinely great players. The Dash had a lot of rookies and second-year players who improved late in the season. Ally Prisock and Haley Hanson, most notably, should make a leap from being good contributors to above league average starters this season. Kristie Mewis will enter the season fully fit, not in ACL recovery mode. Sofia Huerta is almost certainly better than her 2019 form. And finally, the draft selections of Bridgette Andrzejewski and Chloe Castaneda, a pair of extremely hard working winger-to-fullback conversion projects on either side of the defense, suggests a consistent line of thinking from head coach James Clarkson.

But all that said, the Dash won’t be a playoff team if they don’t add another extremely dynamic attacker. Right now, it’s hard to guess where they’re going to find one.

Utah Royals — Given that Christen Press is at her absolute peak and Becky Sauerbrunn is probably in one of her last years as a world-class center back, the Royals’ lack of movement is indefensible. This is the team that has to be willing to make risky moves and spend money to give their two mega stars a chance to maximize what could be their best chance to compete for a title together. They’ve done nothing to improve on last year’s team. No. 8 overall pick Tziarra King is a massive creative talent, but an extremely raw one that is likely to need a couple of years to become a reliable contributor for a playoff squad. They have just over a month until preseason starts to improve their roster. As of right now, it appears the Royals are squandering a massive opportunity.