Hello,

Hello, everybody, and welcome to a playoff preview edition of The Total Soccer Show. My name is Taylor Rockwell and with me today to preview the start of the 2024 driven by Continental Heineken Landon-Dadevon-Dott of an MLS playoffs is Mr. Bakkeld himself. It's Joe Lowry. Hello, Joe. Did I get all the sponsors in there?

Did I get the commemorative naming in there? I'm not sure. No, I'm really proud of you, Taylor.

That's not easy to do to get all those out so really in this show. I've been doing, as listeners might know, I've been doing the color commentary for Phoenix Rising home games this year in the USL championship. And I'm not the one. It's my playboy play guy, Killian, who who has to do the ad reads.

But there's like a lot of them that you had to sneak in in the first half there's a lot of them you got to get in the second half in the intro and the post I mean all of it you did well knocking them all out in the first 20 seconds of this episode that is how it should be right you just get them all in a row and then we're're good to go. That is how it appears in writing.

Like, I kind of forgot or just missed entirely that the most valuable player is now the Landon-Donovan most valuable player. Sure. So to read, like, the Landon-Dunovin most valuable player, like Lujo Custer or whatever, it's just like, wait, hold on. What? Liannon Donovan is the most valuable player, and it's also this guy.

Oh, I see what happened here.

The one that's going to break me, Taylor, is when inevitably Leonel Messi wins this year's MVP award in Major League Soccer. Reading the Landon Donovan MLS MVP award winner Leonel Messi is going to break my brain because those two names should be flip-flop in the order of importance that is signified by someone owning the MLS MVP award. It does feel like that is the order of operations. As soon as Linole Messi wins it, it's forever his silverware to award, and that's how we will see it from now on. But Joe, we've talked sponsors, we've had Decision Day. We've talked a little bit about on Weekend Review. We can talk about it some on today's show, though I'm choosing not to acknowledge the franchise to the North of Richmond for the time being. Instead, let's talk playoffs up front, Joe, on a very basic level. For those who are maybe tuning back into the playoffs, I'm going to ask you a simple question that could get convoluted very quickly. What is the structure of this year's playoffs? I hope I'll be able to explain this in a way that's not convoluted because it's not very complicated. There are nine teams from each conference, the Western Conference and the Eastern Conference that make the playoffs. The first bit of playoff action are the Wildcar Games. And that's the eight and nine seed from each conference. They play against each other. So this year, in the Eastern Conference, it's Montreal, Atlanta. That game is tonight in Montreal. In the Western Conference tomorrow, it's Portland hosting Vancouver. It's a one-off game. The winner plays the top seed from each conference. Then you've only got eight teams alive in each conference. the first round is a best of three series, sort of like we'd have in Major League Baseball with their series or the NBA with their series. That was a new edition last year. Best of three series, Top Seed has hosting rights for games one and three. Should it go to three games? And then it goes to the conference semifinals of four teams in each conference, and it's single game elimination from the conference semifinals all the way up to MLS Cup. If you play your cards right, all you got to do is win five games in the playoffs. If you're a wild card team, you might have a little bit more than that, but at the very least, all of these teams are going to have to win five games between today or this

Saturday this Friday I should say with Miami and I'm a less cup on December 7th. And if you are

one of those playing teams as you said then it's a little bit more work. Joe, we've got a couple of

those to discuss in the east. It's Montreal hosting Atlanta in Montreal. That makes sense. And in

the west it's Vancouver hosting Portland and Portland. That makes almost too much sense, Joe. Yeah, this is a bizarre situation.

Vancouver do not own their home stadium, BC place up in British Columbia. And they got

booted for this wildcar game on Wednesday evening. Can we talk about why for a moment?

Please do. Please begin. I don't know why, but I was immediately drawn to, well, what was the thing that booted them out of the stadium? There doesn't seem to be anything happening midweek. I didn't see anything on the weekend. During the week, on the weekend, there is the World Supercross Championship, and I'm assuming they have to prepare for that in the week leading up to it, or maybe they have to do trial runs

or whatever. So something hilarious about a soccer team getting kicked off their field so that

dirt bikes can be prepared is wonderful to me. Yeah, at least this is a soccer, soccer's made it

really in Canada. Like everybody's behind Supercross.

Everybody's behind it.

So soccer is just like all these other sports.

It's a horrible situation for Vancouver to the point where I think this, them having to

fly to Oregon and play at Providence Park, one of the most difficult away atmospheres,

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