Seattle Waits on a Verdict, LAFC Waits on a Hospital Report

Decision Day was six days ago. One tackle from it is still deciding things. Seattle hosts Real Salt Lake in the Western Conference Wild Card on Thursday night, and the Sounders still do not know whether Jackson Ragen, the center back who anchors their line, will be allowed to play in it. The tackle he made in the 76th minute against LAFC last Saturday drew a yellow card from referee Filip Dujic and nothing more. It also put LAFC winger Jacob Shaffelburg in a hospital with broken ribs and a collapsed lung. The league's review of the play has not landed. Sounder at Heart reported on Friday, from the club's training ground in Renton, that a suspension for Ragen now looks likely — and Brian Schmetzer described the wait plainly: "We're sitting on pins and needles."

That is the shape of this week in the West. Seattle's playoff opener may lose its most important defender to a decision made in an office. LAFC's playoff run starts without a winger whose season was just getting going, because of what that same play did to his body. Neither club can plan its way around a fact it does not control.

Seven minutes, then a hospital

Shaffelburg's Decision Day lasted seven minutes. The 26-year-old Canadian international came on in the 72nd minute for Armindo Sieb, collided with Ragen four minutes later, and was replaced by Tyler Boyd in the 79th, finished after a single short shift in the biggest game of LAFC's regular season. He was taken to a local hospital. RG.org reported this week that LAFC had confirmed the diagnosis to the Southern California News Group: multiple rib fractures and a collapsed lung. The club gave no recovery timeline. For an injury of that kind, there rarely is one worth printing this soon.

His year had already been interrupted once. LAFC acquired him from Nashville last December in a trade built around $1 million in allocation money, he needed groin surgery in January, and his club debut did not come until April. The playoff availability question now hanging over him is not really a question. Canada has already lost him for the games in front of it: according to TSN, Shaffelburg and Jonathan Osorio will both miss the Concacaf Nations League quarterfinal against Guatemala, which opens tonight in Guatemala and finishes Monday at BMO Field in Toronto.

LAFC opens its postseason on the road, at St. Louis on Monday, November 23, and the club will build its attack for that series knowing Shaffelburg's status is, at best, unresolved. Follow the series in the Game Center, and see Shaffelburg's page on Previously's Stats Hub.

Seattle is sitting on pins and needles

Nothing about Ragen's tackle looked season-altering in the moment. It was a caution, one of four Seattle bookings in a physical game, and play moved on. What changed the temperature was the diagnosis that followed from the hospital, and the fact that MLS reviews plays like this one with the power to add a suspension the referee never gave. Sounder at Heart's reporting out of Renton on Friday put it directly: Ragen seems reasonably likely to be suspended for the Wild Card game. The club is preparing for Thursday both ways, because it has no other choice.

The timing is the cruelty of it. A Wild Card game is not a series. It is ninety minutes, and if the score is level, penalties. There is no Game 2 in which a returning defender steadies things, no week to absorb a reshuffled back line. Seattle earned the right to play this game at home by climbing from tenth to eighth on the final day, in front of 40,171 people, the largest home crowd of its season. Losing the middle of its defense six days later, by envelope, would be a strange tax on that afternoon.

Rusnák's race home from Kazakhstan

The second question over Thursday's lineup is measured in time zones. Albert Rusnák is with Slovakia, who hosted the Faroe Islands on Friday and play at Kazakhstan on Monday in the UEFA Nations League. According to Sounder at Heart, the trip home from Kazakhstan takes somewhere between 18 and 26 hours, and Schmetzer expects his playmaker to land back in Seattle with about one day of limited training available before the Wild Card, and whether Rusnák starts will depend mostly on how many minutes Slovakia asks of him on Monday. "We've got a deep squad," Schmetzer said. "Let's just see how it pans out."

Seattle needs the version of Rusnák who played last Saturday. He scored inside the first minute, the Sounders' fastest goal of the season, and his assist on Sebastian Gomez's goal at the half-hour was his 16th of the year, tying the club's single-season record. That was the performance this site wrote up on the night: the game that carried Seattle into the postseason was, to a large degree, his game.

The kids are staying home

Two younger Sounders had a decision made for them, and the club is glad of it. Sebastian Gomez and Snyder Brunell were excused from joining the United States U-23 team for its friendlies in Spain, against Scotland on November 15 and a closed-door match with Ukraine two days later, so they can stay in Seattle and train for the Wild Card, Sounder at Heart reported on Friday. The decision, Schmetzer said, was "decided by people levels higher than me." He called it a good one — it lets both players train with the team all week: "we're going to need them."

He will. Gomez scored Seattle's second goal last Saturday, his third in five games, and Brunell was the man sent on for Rusnák after 66 minutes. The attack they are reinforcing is already missing Jordan Morris, whose quad injury has cost Seattle its most experienced forward for this game. Depth is not an abstraction for this roster right now. It is the plan.

The keeper nobody put on a ballot

If one Sounder can be said to have carried the club here, it is the goalkeeper. Andrew Thomas made seven saves against LAFC, finishing the season with 127, and he played all 3,060 minutes of it — only the third player in club history to play every minute of a season, after Stefan Frei and Kasey Keller. Seattle took five shots last Saturday. LAFC took 24, with 12 corners to Seattle's two, and lost anyway, because the man in the yellow shirt kept saying no.

The league's voters did not return the compliment. When the Year-End Awards finalists were named on Thursday, the only Sounder on any list was Paul Arriola, a Humanitarian of the Year finalist. Schmetzer made Thomas's case himself on Friday, and Sounder at Heart reported the numbers he pointed to: 12.8 goals prevented, a 72.9 percent save rate, eight shutouts and a 1.4 goals-against average. A keeper playing at that level is the reason a team outshot nearly five to one can still be standing in November.

All of it resolves on Thursday. Seattle and Real Salt Lake kick off at 7 p.m. PT at Lumen Field on Apple TV, level scores go straight to penalties, and the winner travels to Vancouver for Round One on Sunday. Follow the Wild Card in the Game Center. By then, Seattle will know about Ragen, will know what Rusnák has left, and will know whether the deepest squad Schmetzer has coached in a while is deep enough. LAFC's answers take longer. Hospitals do not work to a fixture list.