In mid-February, Baltimore Blast head coach David Bascome was realistic about his team’s performance to that point in the 2022-23 Major Arena Soccer League season.
The Blast’s defensive line was ravaged by injuries and Baltimore sat at 7-5-2, fourth in the Eastern Division, at the season’s halfway point. His team was right where it was supposed to be, Bascome said at the time, acknowledging that injuries were no excuse for poor performance.
In the six weeks since that statement, the Blast turned a corner, winning five of seven games to close out the regular season. Baltimore finished 13-8-3 and locked up the Eastern Division’s No. 2 seed heading into the playoffs this weekend.
The Blast will face No. 3 seed Florida Tropics (12-7-5) in the first round. Game 1 is April 7 at 7:05 p.m. in Lakeland, Fla. Game 2 will be held April 8 at 6:05 p.m. at Towson University’s SECU Arena.
If the teams split the first two games, a mini-game will begin immediately following Game 2. The mini-game features a 15-minute quarter. The team leading after the quarter advances. If the teams are still tied, the game moves to a 10-minute sudden-death period where the first team to score advances to the semifinals.
The Blast and Tropics met three times in the regular season. Florida won the first matchup on Dec. 10, 7-6. The teams split the next two with the Blast winning, 5-4, on Dec. 21 and dropping the Dec. 23 game, 7-3.
Baltimore appears to be peaking at the right time after shaking off some early-season jitters, veteran goalkeeper William Vanzela said. It helps that most of his injured teammates are returning to form.
“Every year we have new players, even if they are experienced, they don’t know our system. It takes time to adjust,” said Vanzela, who won his 100th Major Arena Soccer League game Feb. 11, becoming only the second keeper in the league’s history to reach triple digits.
“The only way to adjust is by playing games. You don’t want to make mistakes but you need to play,” Vanzela said.
Among those new additions were forward Moises Gonzalez, midfielder Ricardinho Sobreira and defender Onua Obasi.
Gonzalez was a revelation, finishing third on the team with 17 goals to go along with 11 assists. The Mexico native provided the Blast some extra offensive firepower Bascome had been seeking to complement returning forwards Lucas Roque, Jonatas Melo and Juan Pereira and midfielder Tony Donatelli.
In the midfield, Sobreira was one of only three Blast players to appear in every regular-season game. Roque and Melo were the other two. And for that durability, Sobreira was rewarded with his best season (8 goals, 9 assists) since he totaled 20 points in 2017-18.
Obasi’s return to Baltimore after last playing for the team in 2015-16 was derailed by an injury that forced him to miss more than a month between December and January. The defender’s absence was one of five veterans on the back line who missed extended time, including Adriano Dos Santos, Jereme Raley and Mike Deasel and Joshio Sandoval.
Nearly all of those players have returned to play save Dos Santos, who suffered a season-ending injury after only five games. One of only two Blast defenders to play more than half of the season was Patrick Thompson, a 31-year-old journeyman who helped settle the back line in 19 regular-season appearances. Thompson, who has played at all three levels of the field during his 10-year indoor career, added eight goals and two assists.
Thompson has played for six teams in 10 years but has only played in three career playoff games, two of which came in a sweep to the Blast in 2017-18. When he signed for the team in December, the possibility of a deep playoff run crystallized into a reality, he said.
“For us, the last six games were playoff games,” Thompson said. “We’ve really go to bring everything to the table and leave it all out there.”
Baltimore will see some familiar faces in the first-round match with Florida. The Tropics are led by former Blast forward Vini Dantas, who spent six years with the team from 2014-2020 and was re-acquired by Baltimore before last year’s playoffs.
In his first season with Florida, Dantas scored a team-high 19 goals and added 12 assists. Dantas’ fellow forward Ricardo Carvalho led the Tropics with 17 assists and scored 17 goals.
Drew Ruggles, who played for the Blast for one season in 2014-15, will also suit up for Florida.
As has been the case for the last several seasons, Baltimore’s postseason fortunes will rest, in part, on the shoulders of Lucas Roque.
A nine-year veteran, the 35-year-old Roque appears to keep getting better with age. After setting a career-high with 26 goals in 2021-22, he reached a new personal record this season with 30, fourth most in the MASL. He also finished second on the team in assists (17) behind Melo (19).
Roque’s offensive firepower could help keep the Blast in most games, as could the second-best power play in the conference (47 percent). The Tropics, meanwhile, boast the best penalty kill in the division at 77 percent. The Blast killed off 48 percent of penalties during the regular season.
Baltimore’s true test will be how well its defense holds up, especially since Vanzela missed the final three regular-season contests due to injury. Backup Mike Zierhoffer took over, and it is unclear who will start on April 7.
During the regular season, the Blast allowed just 101 goals, the fewest in the Eastern Division, and just two more than the league-leading San Diego Sockers (101). Baltimore’s regular-season goal differential of plus-40 was the best in the division by more than 30 goals.
After his save percentage dipped below 70 percent for the first time in his record-breaking career last season, Vanzela finished the 2022-23 season at the top of the MASL by saving 252 of 319 shots (79 percent). It was his best season since he blocked 78 percent of shots in 2015-16. That also happened to be the year the Blast won the first of three straight MASL titles.
But Vanzela, whose indoor soccer experience has run the gamut — from first-round exits to multi-year championship runs — acknowledged that regular-season statistics mean little once the playoffs start. Any team, on any given night, can win a playoff series.
The experienced veteran that he is, Vanzela refuses to look beyond the Tropics, which advanced to last year’s finals before losing to San Diego.
“We can’t look ahead,” Vanzela said. “We’ve been doing that so well over the years. We don’t look to the championship game. It’s one game at a time, one series at a time. How do you get out of that series and move on to whoever we play next.”
Photo Credit: Mikayla Mellis