Seattle Sounders' MLS championship run was strange but not undeserved

Going into preseason, it was accepted as common knowledge that the Seattle Sounders would be relying on Obafemi Martins to score the goals. Clint Dempsey would be setting him up, and tallying plenty of his own. Rookie Jordan Morris would bring energy off the bench, provided Designated Player Nelson Valdez left any playing time for him. Sigi Schmid, of course, would be managing them, just as he had in the club’s seven previous MLS campaigns.

By the final day of the season, however, when MLS Cup kicked off in Toronto, Martins had been gone for 10 months – sold to China in February. Dempsey hadn’t played in a game since mid-August with an irregular heartbeat. Valdez had been a bust, failing to score a single regular-season goal until finally contributing in the playoffs. Morris had led the team not only in scoring but also in appearances. And Schmid had been fired midseason, replaced by his longtime assistant Brian Schmetzer.

[ MLS Cup: Seattle wins on PKs | MLS Cup as it happened | Match stats ]

And that day, Dec. 10, the Sounders would become MLS champions for the first time in their history, capping the longest and strangest of trips to a final yet.

They bunkered all game long, letting Toronto FC come at them and run themselves ragged, keeping things scoreless until penalty kicks, when Roman Torres bagged the winner in sudden death.

The Sounders, the second-lowest scoring team to reach the playoffs, didn’t take a shot until the 74th minute. They didn’t get a shot on goal all game. Toronto overwhelmed the Sounders in that statistic 7-0. The Reds outshot their guests 19-3 overall. It was a particularly cruel fate for TFC, which is a competent franchise at last, actually producing a good team only to fall short in a final it controlled completely.

Mostly, it came down to the heroics of Sounders goalkeeper Stefan Frei, who made seven saves whereas his counterpart Clint Irwin wasn’t asked to provide a single one.

The final, too, hadn’t gone as the Sounders had expected. Morris was a non-factor. Nicolas Lodeiro, who had helped to turn the club’s season around, was marked out of the game by Toronto captain Michael Bradley.

But then all of this was fitting for a weird and wonky year.

A Sounders team that had never posted a worse record in MLS than 12-7-11 got off to a 6-12-2 start, sinking to ninth place in the Western Conference and putting themselves in peril of missing the playoffs for the first time in club history. But Morris stepped up and Lodeiro proved worthy of his sizable $6 million-or-so transfer outlay.

Under Schmetzer, the Sounders finally coalesced and went on a 8-2-4 run the rest of the way, climbing up to fourth place – albeit with the same number of points as sixth-place Sporting Kansas City – and even getting the home-field advantage for the knockout round.

Against SKC, the Sounders were fortuitous to advance. Their 88th-minute winner off the head of Valdez was clearly offside. Until then, Seattle hadn’t put a single shot on goal and Frei had kept them in the game with seven saves – sound familiar?

In the conference semifinals, the Sounders hammered regular-season champion FC Dallas 3-0 at home. And so it didn’t matter that they lost the second leg 2-1 in Texas. In the conference finals, their come-from-behind 2-1 win in the first leg at home allowed them to sit back and absorb the Colorado Rapids’ pressure, before Morris, who had been on bedrest for 48 hours with the flu, nabbed a goal that sealed it.

A template had been built. And the Sounders followed it again to claim a championship in the only year in which they didn’t sport a winning record during the regular season – going a perfectly balanced 14-14-6 instead, with a goal difference of exactly plus-1.

This was the story of the 2016 Seattle Sounders. They were bad. Then they turned it around. And then they figured out a winning formula in the playoffs.

All that’s left to unpack is what that says about Major League Soccer’s format. Is it damning that a team that had twice as many losses as wins two-thirds of the way through the season could be its champion? Perhaps. It is concerning that a team that was outplayed in four of its six playoff games can win anyway? Maybe.

But then those are the way things go when a(n overly long) regular season culminates in playoffs – as they absolutely should – that necessarily reward the team that’s the hottest or the most cunning, not the one that was best over the course of the season.

The Sounders figured out what it would take to win in 2016 and they executed. And as such, they deserved their championship for their strangest of years.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.