Taking inventory of the LA Galaxy's abrupt exit from MLS's playoffs

Yes, the LA Galaxy defense was an absolute disaster Wednesday night in Seattle, a real cascade of calamity. Yes, goalkeeper Donovan Ricketts was a mess -a predictable mess if we’re being honest. (See Item No. 4 here, written back in August.) Yes, Steven Gerrard’s performance in midfield was a dud, a highly predictable dud, one that appropriately punctuated his entire dead-on-arrival appearance in MLS.

The champs are out; there will be no fourth crown in five years. If you watched Seattle’s 3-2 win, helter-skelter start to finish, a victory by a team with its own injuries and flaws to sort out, you know why Bruce Arena’s team has packed away the gear until January. Arena was pretty clear himself, calling the team’s collective performance near goal “atrocious.”

SEE MORE: Why the LA Galaxy should have benched Steven Gerrard.

But let’s look closer at what happened weeks and months ago, unpacking the origins of Wednesday’s downfall. Frankly, some of this is on the LA Galaxy deciders. Not all of it, but enough of it.

Ricketts and Gerrard were the obvious weak points in the Galaxy title defense. So why was Ricketts there in the first place? Well, Jaime Penedo wanted his money in the summer, and you can make an argument either way about the Galaxy’s decision to shrug shoulders and let the Panamanian No. 1 go. His 2015 salary was listed as $175,000 as a base, which falls under “just OK” as a veteran MLS ‘keeper.

That’s about what Stefan Frei earned this year with Seattle, but well below 2015 base salaries for Vancouver’s David Ousted or Portland’s Adam Kwarasey. Hypothetically, if we needed a goalkeeper for a new club to debut in 2016 and could choose between Penedo, Frei, Ousted and Kwarasey, the former L.A. Galaxy ‘keeper would probably fall toward the bottom of the pickings.

Still, perhaps the Galaxy could have moved things around and found a little more cash under the admittedly tight cap. Better yet, they should have chosen a better replacement than the 38-year-old Ricketts (whom they acquired from Orlando in a summer trade). Promising young goalkeepers are all over MLS, along with a few veterans who might not be game-changers, but are solid choices that won’t fumble-bumble away matches the way Ricketts did on a rainy Wednesday in the Pacific Northwest.

Exacerbating the back line issues was Omar Gonzalez’s season of curious regression. He wasn’t a bad defender in 2015, but he certainly wasn’t a dominant force worthy of a Designated Player salary. Something went wrong.

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Gonzalez may need a career re-set, one that will goose better performance. We saw this with Bobby Boswell, who had gone a little stale in Houston but was reenergized after a move to D.C. United. We saw it with Chad Marshall; his performance was wildly inconsistent in his last couple of seasons at Columbus, but he made a move to Seattle and deservedly claimed another Defender of the Year honor in 2014.

And all of that is exacerbated, of course, by Gerrard’s inability to provide more protection to the back line. Go back and watch Erik Friberg’s game-winner and ask, “Where is Gerrard!?” He’s a central midfielder and yet he’s nowhere to be found as Friberg emerges from the midfield, from the very area where Gerrard needs to be tracking. All the problems we all saw with Gerrard were right there. It needs no more dissecting; he could possibly be a role player in L.A., but relying on the 35-year-old Liverpool legend to be an MLS force (and paying him to be one) should now be seen for what it is: pure fantasy borne of nostalgia and nursed by outdated perceptions of MLS.

Which brings us to the bigger point, one that reaches across the league: the DP dynamic is shifting fast in MLS.

It’s not enough to go get a brand name who will fill seats and sell jerseys at $90 a pop. It’s OK to sign a brand name, but GMs, technical directors, sporting directors (or whatever you call the man with making the significant personnel calls) had darn sure better get a brand name who actually makes sense within a bigger plan.

SEE MORE: Why knockout round teams will (or won’t) win it all | Capsules

Yes, we’re looking at you, NYCFC. Andrea Pirlo might make some sense. And so might Frank Lampard. But in tandem, it was clearly a fiasco.

Same with Gerrard, who was always a risk. He was slowing dramatically in those waning days at Liverpool. As for the move from there into MLS, some of us wondered whether his heart could truly be in it? After all, he’d been a Liverpool man for life.

“MLS as a retirement league” is a popular narrative. And it is absolutely true that some older, talented players can extend their days as difference makers by moving into MLS. Didier Drogba certainly is.

But the equation is changing. More and more, the mid-level foreign stars closer to their best years (Sebastian Giovinco is the obvious example, but also see Obafemi Martins, Clint Dempsey, Sacha Kljestan, David Villa and others) will be better choices for splashing the bigger bucks.