The Vancouver Whitecaps have acquired Ralph Priso in a trade. Priso (21) was once seen as an extremely bright prospect but his star has faded a bit recently. Here we will investigate the likelihood that Priso can get back on track and fulfill his potential.

A first look at the stats is not particularly promising. American Soccer Analysis’ G+ model is not fond of Priso, rating him as slightly below the average MLS defensive midfielder across the board. His Fbref page also has a lot of red on it. The only area that pops at all is on the defensive side of things but a below-average dribblers tackled percentage and a high number of “challenges lost” suggest a not particularly efficient defender. I also reported on Priso for Target Scouting last season and was not particularly impressed.

But there are some mitigating factors to these struggles. Priso has spent the vast majority of his career playing for teams that were absolutely terrible. He got his first serious MLS minutes in 2021 on a Toronto F.C. team that came 13th out of 14 in the East. He then split 2022 between TFC (13/14) and Colorado (10/14) and in 2023 he was part of the Colorado team that earned only 27 points in 34 games. You can see the effects of this in the data. In 2023 Priso was in the 17th percentile for progressive carries and the 16th percentile for progressive passes. That’s bad! But he was also in the 12th percentile for touches and the 11th percentile for passes received. It’s hard to progress the ball if you never have it!

Additionally, if you look back at the small number of minutes he played on better (though still bad overall) teams in 2021 and 2022 his stats are a lot better. He got a lot more of the ball and, would you believe it, progressed it a lot more. Some people point to an ankle surgery in 2021 as the point where things started to go downhill for Priso but I am not sure that tracks because his 2022 numbers (admittedly a very small sample size) look terrific for a player in his age 20 season.

Now, none of these mitigating factors make Priso a slam dunk to succeed on a better team. The fact remains, in the one MLS season he played over 1000 minutes he was not that effective. Whatever upside he might have, it seems he is not such a transcendent talent that he can stand out even on a bad team. Being on a bad team probably also inflated his defensive numbers a little bit, simply because he would have had a lot more opportunities to make tackles.

This seems like as good a time as any to discuss the price that Vancouver paid for Priso. At first glance, it seems like they gave up quite a lot for a player that is far from a sure thing. Vancouver sent a first-round pick, a third-round pick, and up to 150k in GAM to Colorado for Priso. But the terms of the trade are highly conditional. The first-round pick will be the lower of the two first-round picks (their own and LAFC’s acquired in the Maxime Crepeau trade) that the Whitecaps hold for the upcoming draft. This pick is not likely to be particularly high. I’m certainly not going to say that it’s impossible to find value later in the draft but historically speaking your chances are not that high outside of the top 10. The GAM is also conditional, on what is not specified, but we have to assume if Priso is playing enough to trigger conditions then this trade will have ended up being worth it. Priso also has quite a bit of value from a salary cap perspective. He’s considered homegrown and his salary was less than 100,000 last season. He is, of course, also Canadian and a lack of usable Canadians has made Vancouver’s last two Canadian championship victories a little more uncomfortable than you would have hoped for. So Priso doesn’t have to become Canadian Andres Cubas to provide value to the team. Even if he’s just a squad player his low cost means he would free up a lot of resources that could strengthen the team elsewhere.

There’s a small chance this goes fabulously well and the Whitecaps have a really good cost-controlled midfielder for years to come. There’s also a chance (probably a slightly bigger one if we’re being honest) that Priso’s career just fizzles out. That wouldn’t be good but the conditions of the trade mean that it wouldn’t be such a great loss. The true result will probably be somewhere in the middle of those results and I think for the price the ‘Caps paid, that’s probably fine.