MLS’s 14-team playoff picture is set following another dramatic Decision Day, and while some of the major developments and the majority of the playoff berths had been sorted long before Sunday, there was still room for intrigue on the final day of the season.
The big news is out west, where after seven straight years of either the Portland Timbers or Seattle Sounders making MLS Cup, the Western Conference will have a new entrant in the league’s final. Seattle’s 13-year run—its entire MLS existence—of making the postseason had been snapped before Sunday’s finale, but Portland’s omission from the playoff field was confirmed following a 3–1 defeat to Real Salt Lake, which leapfrogged the Timbers into the single-elimination run for the Cup by a single point (RSL needed Decision Day heroics to reach the playoffs last year, too).
Other drama was reserved in the east for U.S. Open Cup champion Orlando City, which denied Columbus a playoff berth and cemented one of its own on Facundo Torres’s 84th-minute penalty kick.
