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De Rosario named MLS MVP

DwayneDeRosarioDC1 (ISIPhotos.com)

D.C. United star Dwayne DeRosario has enjoyed one of the best careers in MLS history and is widely regarded as one of the best players the league has ever seen. He has won multiple championships, and most recently a Golden Boot, but the one honor he hadn't won before was MLS Most Valuable Player.

That changed on Friday as De Rosario was named MLS MVP, beating out Houston's Brad Davis, FC Dallas' Brek Shea and LA Galaxy's Landon Donovan for the honor, MLS revealed on Friday morning.

De Rosario finished the year with a league-leading 16 goals to go with 12 assists, statistics compiled with three different teams, though most of his stats came with D.C. United, which he brought to the brink of the playoffs.

De Rosario finished in first in MVP voting by a comfortable margin, topping the lists in voting among MLS team officials, media and players (for a combined score of 72.72). Davis finished second with a combined voting tally of 43.66, while Shea garnered 27.59. Shea finished second in the player voting, with Davis finishing tied for third with Landon Donovan.

What do you think of De Rosaro winning the award? Who had your MVP vote?

Share your thoughts below.

Comments

  1. Thank You, there’s this guy named Rosales who is more dangerous than both! He just got hurt from hackers in MLS

    And he came in late, had been able to play the same amount of games the whole year as say Davis or maybe even Beckham cause I think he played less than Becks, he might of lead the league in assists. and he was sure to be in double digits in scoring as well, they had a great offense with him

    DeRo is the pick, not sure how anybody questions it?

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  2. So you use one criteria to say how Davis accomplished more with the Dynamo but the refute it when confronted with how Beckham did more with the Galaxy?

    And you say that Houston improved a ton, well is not like Davis improved a lot, he had what about 11 or 12 assists the last 2 seasons? or 3 maybe?

    Davis was okay, and lets face it, this Dynamo team was underachieving big time, and they peaked at the right time, end of story, this is not the “Whole season MVP award”

    So the whole romantic argument about how he got them to the Final, which I might add he didn’t exactly have a hand in the semi considering the goals came after he went down… regardless that argument is mute, it’s about the regular season, take DeRo out he has a bigger impact

    End of story, there’s a reason why if he had gone back to Houston he would of been the one the offense would revolve around!

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  3. Dude I love Barca too, but you are dreaming if you think Kinnear deserves to be Coach of the Year, what tha hell has he done? Other then get lucky at the end of the year?

    If Dallas wasn’t such a choker they would of never won their 1st road game until Portland and in that game Hall prevented them from going down or Portland pulling back or tying the game.

    I love him and I will admit I was one of the ones calling Glenn Davis’ radio show (Dynamo commentator and writer) but it was because of stubborn decisions like keep playing Freeman when he was obviously headed for a “he’s getting waived or traded” kind of season and also kept playing Cameron at Center mid when it was obvious the defense needed to be shored up.

    Especially with Taylor there and Sarkodie and Ashe not to mention Hainault lol

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  4. This is the kind of creative thinking the league needs — anyone who works his way to be an MVP or a Golden Boot winner should be rewarded in creative ways. Kudos to your idea — please do write to Mr. Garber.

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  5. you don’t care if its about cap reasons…well wake up, that is the reality. His cap hit is 18.6% of the salary cap. DeRo was very valuable to Toronto, his move led to Toronto bringing in Torsten Frings and Danny Koevermans. Without those two, Toronto never would have made the CONCACAF Champions League Quarter-Finals.

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  6. this is the reality of a guy making $500,000 a year on a 2.65 million dollar salary cap.

    New York does not trade him if they have salary cap space to plug that leak in the thing called a goal (ala Frank Rost, which I don’t think worked out as good as they hoped).

    Toronto does not trade him if the salary cap allows them to sign Torsten Frings and Danny Koevermans without going over the cap. Freeing up some cap room allowed them to bring in those two players, which ultimately had a great effect on them making the CONCACAF Champions League Quarter-Finals

    He gets a “valuable” vote from Toronto just for being able to free up that cap room

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  7. you are being short sighted…had TFC not traded DeRo, TFC would have never signed Frings and Koef, TFC would have never qualified for the quarter finals of CONCACAF Champions League

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  8. Uh, CD9- 11 goals, Chris Pontius- 7 goals 5 assists, Andy Najar- 5 goals 6 assists, Josh Wolff- 5 goals 7 assists. That’s a significant amount of goals, and no, the reason we finished where we did was almost entirely due to defensive mistakes.

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  9. Bad use of statistics, correlation does not equal causation and there are plenty of actual reasons why DCU did not make the playoffs and none of them include Dero.

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  10. No, this does not make Pontius an MVP – the best results came when BOTH Pontius and DeRo were in the line up. What JoeG fails to the account is how many quality players (Pontius is one of them) DCU lost to injury. Having to start several rookies down the stretch and having to play several players out of their natural positions, as DCU did, usually results in rookie mistakes and losses.

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  11. Brad davis was so valuable to his team that they won the East Finals without him. Another player on his team made an excellent cross for the goal. How ironic.

    DeRo made plays in the run of play that Davis would only dream of.

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  12. It’s just a few fans online, not the majority, and they are idiots. DeRo is not a GM, he is not responsible for the overall quality of the team, and whether they are good enough to make the playoffs or not.

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  13. That’s circular logic.

    He’s a bad player. How do we know that? B/c he was traded and no team would trade a good player.

    But we see good players traded all the time.

    DeRo did fine as both a goal scorer and assist/distributor.

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  14. First, DeRo was man of the match 7 times after joining DCU. That does not sound like an inconsistent player to me.

    Second, he scored 3 game winning goals for DCU. He provided 4 game winning assists. Let’s put that another way, he scored or assisted the critical goal on all of DCU’s wins after he arrived.

    But hey, here’s what John Spencer said: “If [De Rosario] doesn’t get MVP of the league, there’s something wrong. Plain and simple. For the last three months of the season since he came here (DC) he’s been the best player in the league by far – a country mile. He needs to win MVP.”

    Here is what Henry said: “In this league I haven’t seen anybody better than Dwayne De Rosario…For me, he’s the face of this league”.

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  15. “if he was that valuable he wouldnt have been traded. The guy just had a hot streak for a handful of games.”

    And yet shockingly, the people who do this for a living (players, club reps, and soccer media) disagreed with you hands down.

    I’m sure you’re still right, though. 😉

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  16. Exactly. DeRo was simply outstanding, like he has been in several other seasons. I’d love to have him on my team. He can change a match single-handedly, and has done so on many occasions through the years. But he added little value to his team and, by definiton, couldn’t be the Most Valuable Player.

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  17. First, I understand the rationale for trading DeRo from both Toronto and NYRB. TFC was rebuilding from the ground up and moving him created cap room. NYRB wanted cap room as well (though it should be noted that NYRB was on a roll when DeRo was there, they traded him and had 2 months of down play be Backe decided to play a far more defensive/physical style).

    Second, it’s simplistic to say DCU didn’t make the playoffs so DeRo wasn’t that valuable. DCU was historically BAD in 2010. Najar and Allsop tied for the team lead with 5 goals a-piece. Quaranta led the team in assists with 2. They added Davies who had some lovely games but was incredibly inconsistent as a player and didn’t really contribute the last 2 months. The defense still had problems (2nd worst in MLS this year). Yet the team went from the worst in MLS to one that was in the playoff hunt until the last week. What could you attribute that to? It wasn’t defense. Davies and Pontius were non factors the last 2 months, Boskovic missed almost the entire season. If it wasn’t DeRo, then who on offense would you say kept DCU in games and in the playoff hunt?

    I can understand arguments in favor of other candidates. What I don’t get is bashing any of them. I can argue for DeRo but that doesn’t make Davis an unworthy candidate. The strong opinion within the league (players and staff) was that DeRo was massive this year. Spencer himself said that it would be crazy if DeRo didn’t win. This guy put the team on his shoulders and carried them to playoff contention.

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  18. That’s an uninformed response. Last two months of the season, Jakovic and Pontius were both gone, the defense was a sieve and Davies never recovered from his injury against Columbus–his form was terrible the last 2 months and he ended up on the bench.

    Every team that played DCU knew that if they stopped DeRo then they easily beat DCU. And yet most teams struggled to stop him.

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  19. Native New Yorker. Idiomatic speech. I was being deliberately colloquial. Just offering the pedantic a chance to chime in.

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