Griezmann Took the Last Player of the Month. Evander Owned the Rest.

The last Player of the Month award of the MLS season went to Antoine Griezmann on Tuesday. The next thing in front of him is a win-or-go-home game against the man who won it twice. Orlando City host FC Cincinnati on Thursday night in the Eastern Conference Wild Card match, and for all the noise around the fixture, it runs through two playmakers who spent 2026 taking turns as the hottest player in the league.

Griezmann's closing stretch is the reason Orlando are still playing. He started all seven matches in October and November, tied for the league lead with six goals and ten goal contributions in the period — and all ten came inside a five-match span from October 10 to 28 that stretched his goal-contribution streak to twelve straight games, just the fourth single-season streak that long in league history. He is the first French player to win the award since Thierry Henry in March 2012, and only the third Orlando player ever, after Daryl Dike and Joe Bendik. Zoom out and the whole half-season reads the same way: 14 goals and eight assists in 18 starts since arriving in the summer, the first summer signing in MLS history to reach 20 goal contributions in the second half of a club's season, and the second-fastest player ever to 20 — 15 games, one more than Lionel Messi's record 14. Orlando went 9-4-5 in his appearances and climbed from outside the playoff line to the East's No. 8 seed.

Decision Day underlined it. Orlando beat New England 1-0 at home on Saturday to lock the seed: Braian Ojeda volleyed in the winner at 45 minutes off a cleared Griezmann cross, Maxime Crépeau kept his fifth clean sheet, and the club reached a seventh straight postseason — the longest active streak in MLS. Griezmann arrives at Thursday with the award, the form and the home crowd. What he does not have is the deeper body of work in this league. That belongs to the visitor.

Evander won Player of the Month in May, then won it again for July and August. He finished the season with a club-best 31 goal contributions for Cincinnati — 14 goals, and 17 assists in MLS's accounting — a third straight season clearing 30. And he has already done this to Orlando specifically: in May, at home, he scored twice and assisted three more in a 6-2 win that tied Cincinnati's club record for goals in a league match, a five-contribution night no Cincinnati player had ever produced. Kévin Denkey scored in that game too. Denkey closed with a team-high 17 league goals and walks into Thursday one short of tying the club's single-season MLS record of 18, shared by Brandon Vazquez, Brenner and Evander himself.

Our own Stats Hub puts the two attacks side by side. Griezmann: 14 goals and eight assists in 18 appearances. His running mate Martín Ojeda set Orlando's club record with 16 goals. Denkey: 17 goals in 32 appearances. Evander: 14 goals of his own. The headline pairs scored 30 league goals for Orlando and 31 for Cincinnati. Then look at the other column, because it decides what kind of night Thursday is: Orlando scored 63 and conceded 78; Cincinnati scored 67 and conceded 75. Per MLS, those are the second- and third-most goals conceded in the league this season, attached to two top-ten attacks. The teams finished level on 46 points — Orlando host on wins, 13 to 12 — and the all-time series is dead level too: five wins each and five draws in 15 meetings, never once in the postseason. The last meeting in this building, in August, finished 1-1. Thursday cannot finish level.

The supporting details tilt both ways. Cincinnati lost at home to Nashville on Decision Day, Sam Surridge scoring twice in the second half, and slid from seventh to ninth — but they got Miles Robinson back for the second half of that game after his injury layoff. Orlando's 19-year-old Justin Ellis, who has 11 assists this year, spent this week with the U.S. national team for the Nations League quarterfinals against Haiti; the international window closes on Tuesday, two days before the game. Griezmann, meanwhile, has played himself into the league's Newcomer of the Year conversation on top of everything else.

So the bracket's cruelest first assignment is also its simplest: Thursday, November 19, 7:30 p.m. ET at Inter&Co Stadium on Apple TV, tied after ninety minutes and it goes straight to penalties. The winner's prize is a trip to Nashville on Sunday, November 22 — the 77-point Supporters' Shield winners, a league points record, and the team the market MLS published on Wednesday prices as the favorite to win the whole tournament. Follow Thursday night in the Game Center. Griezmann against Evander settles it Thursday, behind two defenses that have leaked all year.