Milwaukee Wave players started the final weekend of the regular season knowing they were in the playoffs but little else about what would come next.
The title was in reach. So was fifth place.
How’s that for parity?
After four games involving the six postseason qualifiers, they went to bed on Sunday night one point short behind the San Diego Sockers for the regular-season title and a tiebreaker short of a first-round bye.
“It’s an interesting season,” rookie head coach Marcio Leite said after the team’s 11-7 victory over Utica City FC in the finale March 29 at the UWM Panther Arena.
“For my first season, this has been completely chaos, dramatic, very few ‘easy’ games. Every game has been a roller coaster of emotions. So I’m proud of the team, right? We got 43 points, which is what we won and what we could. I’m still upset about the point we lost last Sunday [by needing overtime to beat Baltimore], because it could have been a very different scenario.”
The MASL dropped to eight teams this season with its four departures. including the three-time defending champion Chihuahua Savage.
The top two finishers among six playoff qualifiers earned byes. San Diego finished with 44 points, while Milwaukee and Baltimore ended with 43. Although the Wave had 15 victories to the Blast’s 14, the first tiebreaker was regulation wins. Baltimore had 11 to Milwaukee’s 10.
The Wave (15-7-2) will meet the Empire Strykers (12-11-1) in a home-and-home quarterfinal series April 2 in Ontario, California, and April 6 in Milwaukee. In case of a split, the series would be settled in a knockout game.
The winner will take on Baltimore in the semifinals.
“The playoffs are a new, different tournament,” said forward Ricardo Carvalho, a veteran of six MASL postseasons who’ll play in his third with Milwaukee.
“If you get two good games, you go on. … You have to come out with fire. Because, you’ve got two options. Win and stay or lose and go home.”
The quick turnaround and long trip mean the Wave won’t have much time to prepare for the Strykers. Empire has won two of the teams’ three games.
“Every team kind of has their style, has their players,” midfielder Max Ludwig said. “But for us, it’s just about getting our best game on the field. Like, when we play our best game, I think we can hang with everybody, I think we can beat everybody, and that’s gonna be our biggest thing, is to make sure that we put our best on the field.”
Since its launch in 1984, the Wave has won seven championships in the various arena soccer leagues, the most recent in 2019.
In a breakout season, Alex Sanchez led the MASL in goals and ranked second in points. With Sanchez (32 goals, 17 assists, 49 points), Mario Alvarez (21 goals, 22 assists, 43 points), Alex Steinwascher (21 goals, 19 assists, 40 points) and Oscar Flores (26 goals, 10 assists, 36 points), the Wave had four of the top goal scorers and three of the top point producers in the league.
“We’ve got to play better defense,” Leite said of the key to the Wave advancing in the playoffs. “We are the best offensive team in the league by a mile. But defensively we’re a middle-of-the-table team.”
Milwaukee finished the regular season with a league-high 180 goals and plus-36 goal differential. But it also gave up more goals than all but one of the other playoff teams.
“In every championship that I’ve been a part of we were the best defensive team so we have to definitely turn and click at this point in the season, the playoffs,” Leite continued. “The team that is going to give up the least amount of goals is going to win the championship.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: High-scoring Milwaukee Wave set for wide-open MASL title chase
Reporting by Dave Kallmann, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
