Swanson: Gabriel Pec leads Galaxy’s beautiful barrage back into MLS Cup contention
CARSON — I’m not sure when exactly you’re reading this, but odds are the Galaxy are still scoring.
And I’m not saying one of Greg Vanney’s team’s goals is to score as many goals as there are stars in the Galaxy, but I’m not saying it’s not.
We’ll give them bonus points for that. The first order of business, of course: To win two more matches and net a sixth MLS Cup, and their first in a decade. They’re in a position to do it thanks to Sunday’s impressive 6-2 Western Conference semifinal victory over Minnesota United.
Up next, on Saturday: A Seattle Sounders team that vanquished top-seeded LAFC in the other Western Conference semifinal.
The main thing for the Galaxy: To pull off that remarkable U-turn, a pivot of epic proportions, going in one season from protests and boycotts to sellouts and celebration.
The Galaxy’s six goals Sunday before 26,192 partying fans at Dignity Health Sports Park felt like an explosion of pent-up emotion after 23 days off since between matches. After that long uncomfortable respite, necessitated by the international window, since their 4-1 victory on Nov. 1 that ended a two-game first-round sweep in which they overran the Colorado Rapids by a combined tally of 9-1.
These playoffs so far – with a goal differential of 12 in three matches – feel like a decade-old powder keg tick, tick, ticking … going back to the last time the franchise reached the Western Conference finals.
And – oop, there goes Gabriel Pec again!
The 23-year-old Brazilian winger streaked past us, plowing past guys throwing themselves and the kitchen sink at him.
Like Joseph Paintsil and Dejan Jovelic, Pec scored twice on Sunday. The MLS Newcomer of the Year was flying light, he said, uplifted by the crescendo of noise that rose around him.
Pec scored the match’s first goal in the 28th second of play before his 70-yard jaunt down the sideline in the 50th minute put it away. He strode forth, fending off three defenders and capping the glorious run with his right foot for what he called “one of the most beautiful goals” of his career. It put the Galaxy ahead, 5-2.
“Extremely happy with that goal,” said the Portuguese-speaking Pec, via a translator, who said that though it hurt when a defender kicked him on the play, when he “saw that he just had to keep going a little bit further” he got increasing confident and felt himself moving faster and faster.
He was eager to get home and watch back what we’d all witnessed.
“He’s a handful,” Vanney said. “When you have a winger who is a triple-, quadruple-threat it becomes almost un-defendable. And that goal … that’s just the young man doing some stuff that not many people can do.”
Though Pec shouted out the team – the whole team, from the people who clean to the team president – in his postmatch presser, it’s impossible to overstate how important he has been to the Galaxy’s turnaround. How much pressure he puts on defenders, and what that does to opponents.
When the Galaxy signed Pec in January from Vasco da Gama in his native Brazil for a reported $10 million, SCNG’s Galaxy beat writer Damian Calhoun wrote that “the Galaxy have landed one of their key offensive attacking targets.”
The key that unlocked the magic for what Vanney said a few times Sunday is an especially, astoundingly “locked in” unit, this team that has the No. 2 seed Galaxy positioned to climb back to the top of the MLS that they once dominated.
Going into this season, though, the Galaxy had made just two playoff appearances since 2017.
They’d asked their fans to get behind name-over-game player signings that didn’t work out.
They fell off.
All while the new team across town, LAFC, staked its claim as a perennial contender.
And so Galaxy fans revolted last season, many of them refusing to show up inside for games until team president Chris Klein was ousted.
They were onto something, these people, because when Will Kuntz was elevated to the club’s top front-office decision-maker in December, he signed Paintsil from the Belgian Pro League and Pec from Brazil’s Série A as designated players, pairing them up with Riqui Puig, the Galaxy’s beating heart of a playmaker. And, well, now look.
Pec especially has proved a problem, becoming the Galaxy’s leading scorer, with 16 goals and 14 assists in 33 matches – making him the fourth-youngest player in MLS history to record at least 30 goal contributions in a single season. In this postseason so far, he has three goals and three assists.
He became an All-Star and helped the Galaxy become the Western Conference’s most prolific scoring team, with 69 goals in the regular season. Another 15 now in three playoff matches – and counting.
Because, whoa, did Pec just score again?