Lose my hands to use my heart: What Chicago gave to Louisville
When the summer games end, and the snow begins to fall, and you hear the soft trumpet of expansion calling across the blanketed meadow, all one can cling to is the hope that you will not lose someone beloved to you.
Like all trades, the asset value of Chicago’s move today to send Yuki Nagasato and Savannah McCaskill (along with the 5th pick in the 2021 College Draft and two international slots) to Racing Louisville in return for Expansion Draft protection won’t be known for some time. Louisville has acquired their promised pound of flesh, and now Chicago can look towards the future with clear eyes. So why does this wound feel just a little too deep?
There’s sound logic to executing unpreventable loss this way, to reach out to the looming darkness first and ask it directly what it wants from you. No one else on the Red Stars roster has to worry about where they’re going to be living next year, Nagasato and McCaskill also have their path cleared for them, and the Red Stars know exactly what assets they have to continue to build their 2021 roster into one that can compete for a championship.
This is what they still aim to do, as owner Arnim Whisler and coach Rory Dames said not long after the trade was announced. Protecting Chicago’s core and making sure the team can afford to pay them what they deserve is key to Chicago’s short-term future, in addition to its long-term health. Two to three more years is the lifespan of the rest of this particular talent window, according to Dames, and the Red Stars felt a responsibility to the pieces they had to give them the opportunity to see that out. The Red Stars still have the 4th, 6th, and 8th pick in this upcoming draft, they have signings still to make, and they still believe in this group.
And yet, I’m ill-prepared to write an ode to Yuki Nagasato on this sleepy, snowy Monday morning, as I didn’t realize her departure was quite so imminent. I knew something was coming today, but the names and the faces attached didn’t take shape until I saw the same announcement as everyone else. Yuki Nagasato. Savannah McCaskill. What was this year for again?
Throughout the 2020 non-season, Chicago held fast to their principles and evaluated their depth, openly not participating in result-based goals but in long-term health. And then they sent two of their best eleven players to Louisville. One of those players had made a long-term home here, and had a life with other interests based around this city. And she was special, and she was beloved, in every sense of the word. Being beloved doesn’t necessarily make a player run faster, though I’d like to believe it sometimes can. It makes fans yell louder, and it encourages teammates to sacrifice themselves, and it builds the story of a team that can never quite finish the story definitively themselves. It’s hard to tell the narrative of a team of almost-winners, I should know, but having someone like Nagasato to wrap our arms around helped. We asked ourselves ‘what is a Red Star?’ and we pointed to her.
In that light, I’m not sure entirely how useful it is to say today that Nagasato will be 34 next year, and that her role positionally going forward for the Red Stars was unclear, even after she spent some time in the central attack during the Challenge Cup. It’s true that she was out of contract in this offseason, and that status likely influenced Chicago’s decision to move her elsewhere, but I’m not sure it’s relevant. It’s unfair to highlight a player’s limitations in the context of their departure - it feels like the bargaining stage of grief, and it’s unnecessary and ill advised without a clear look at the future.
The funny thought that I have about Savannah McCaskill is that a large factor in my own personal buy-in to her development was that I genuinely believed the team had bought-in themselves. Even after her famous misstep in the 2019 NWSL Final we were told to be patient, and so we were. Dames spoke highly of McCaskill when the team acquired her from Sky Blue, and his praise of her growth only continued in 2020. She is a player who was brilliant at times, though those times were never quite with the Chicago Red Stars. She was a wrecking ball in South Carolina, and she took over games to win a trophy with Sydney FC in the W-League. She was tumultuous and highly rated, and the future of the attacking midfield, and she is now also gone. In a flash of on-field arguments and bad fouls and immense work-rate and growth and change, Savannah McCaskill’s once-bright future with the Red Stars is over.
It’s probably useful to issue a reminder that part of why this is all so painful is simply because Chicago has gone first. Other teams are going to lose their own beloveds in time, and they’ll have less of a say in it than the Red Stars did. There’s no avoiding it, if not this year then it will happen in the next (and the next, and the next). But for me, the dread comes from so many of these questions having answers if you look at them with your eye on the way Chicago is handling its money. Selling draft picks for money, trading players for money, protecting allocated players not only for what they do on the field, but for the financial stakes they represent to a club that has gone through a hard year - Chicago has done all of these things. Chicago has always been a staunch independent beacon, a large-market team with small-market savvy and smarts. But sometimes small is just small, and as more big fish jump into the water you keep giving up more just to be able to show up and play. After today, the burden of proof lies with the front office to show that this isn’t just the price of continuing to exist. And then it’s up to the fans to decide exactly how much loss is worth bearing.
It’s good to remember and celebrate what the Red Stars do still have, as is the club’s intention. Their defense remains perfectly intact, they have big plans for a growing ever-more-sophisticated midfield, and they have cap space to find the right answer in the attack. These are all really good things, and I wasn't willing to let any of those players go either. There is no reason to think the team can’t still win games, and win games well next year. I dislike the moving of assets because I do not think they always accurately reflect what is going to happen on the field, and much of a players value comes from what is asked of them. I still think Chicago has an advantage in that realm.
And yet this team became a little less beloved today, and I’m going to be thinking about it for some time.
It’s perhaps fitting that this moment, and this feeling, is occurring on the one-year anniversary of the eve of Chicago’s 2019 Championship defeat. That game was a terrible reminder that you can put together the most special and diverse group of people, drummers and aerobats and hustlers and artists, and still have to absorb the price of failure.
Those consequences include embarrassment maybe, and the sting of defeat, but at their worst they continue to haunt you when the troupe finally disbands. I remember the flight home to Chicago on that other emotional Monday morning, pulling my sweater up over my face in the middle seat to hide a rush of tears; not so much mourning the result of a single made-up game but because I knew that this, as we knew it, was over. It was going to take weeks, and months, and ultimately a year to complete the process of letting go, but that ghost was haunting this team the moment the final whistle blew in Cary a year ago.
There is a price to never going back, only forward, and yet we must. I already miss Yuki Nagasato so much. It was an honor to make music with her, and I hate that she is no longer ours. I also hate that Chicago fans no longer get to go on Savannah McCaskill's journey with her.
But at least now the dirty business is done, if only for this year, and we can begin the process of letting go again. Stay safe everybody, we've a long winter ahead.