The Vancouver Whitecaps can potentially improve their playoff seeding and circumstance with a win in their regular-season finale at Real Salt Lake on Saturday night in Sandy, Utah.
But more important for the Whitecaps (13-12-8, 47 points) may be establishing some momentum after a nasty six-match winless slide has taken Vancouver down to eighth place in the West.
“I think obviously we’ve had a bad run of results recently,” said Vancouver forward Brian White, who leads his club with 15 goals. “So it would be great to go into playoffs with a little bit of more positive energy, a win and see what we can do from there.”
White and company could reach the seventh seed with a win and a Minnesota defeat, which would see Vancouver avoid the West wild-card match.
If the Whitecaps finish eighth, they’d host the wild-card match against Portland. The Timbers could also pass Vancouver and earn the right to host the wild-card match with a win on Saturday combined with a Vancouver draw or loss.
Meanwhile, Salt Lake (15-7-11, 56 points) is on a five-match unbeaten streak entering the finale. That stretch does include three draws against Portland, Austin and Minnesota.
But after Diego Luna scored his seventh goal of the season in a 1-0 win at San Jose two weeks ago, RSL coach Pablo Mastroeni is hopeful his side has some of that positive energy White’s Whitecaps are seeking.
“We haven’t been, obviously, happy with the ties,” Mastroeni said. “But now we go five undefeated and we bookend that five-game stretch with two wins. And so now, all of the sudden, the mindset changes. And so we’ve got to keep doing all the little things that go unnoticed that make our team who we are.”
Fourth-place Salt Lake is even with third-place Seattle on points, with a chance to move one spot higher on the final day and no risk of falling lower.
A secondary objective might be trying to get Cristian Arango back in the scoring column. The Colombian forward was once one of the favorites to win the MLS Golden Boot after he reached 16 goals on June 1. But he’s scored only one goal since then while battling nagging injuries.
–Field Level Media
