What if, in 2015, Ottawa hadn’t rested its players on the final weekend of the regular season? Would the team be leaping towards USL for the 2017 season?

At the end of the season, he said the players were told that they should go out and try to find new teams — but, if things changed, they could get a call back to come to Atlanta. So, Porter headed home to the Toronto area, where he worked out with a group of Canadian players who had dubbed themselves “Free Agent FC:” that group included former FC Edmonton players John Smits and Alex Semenets, retired MLS great Dwayne De Rosario and defender Nana Attakora.

On Monday, NASL announced that Atlanta — which was funded by owners in 2015 — would not return in 2016. Had the owners opted to fund the Silverbacks for another year, the burden would have been especially tough on the Ottawa Fury and FC Edmonton. The Canadian dollar is currently worth just a little over 70 cents US, so the exchange rate on funding an American team would have been brutal.

But, then, why are so many of us so despondent after getting a point in Central America on a field so choppy, it made pastures seem like Bundesliga-level playing surfaces? Is it because we assumed that El Salvador’s “B” team would be little better than a PDL side?

But, it’s got to pain people in Ottawa — and at NASL offices — that the final won’t be held in Ottawa. The semifinal at TD Place set a league record for post-season attendance, with 9,346 fans coming out. Had Ottawa hosted the final, the 10,000-tickets-sold mark would easily have been eclipsed.

As MLS began its playoffs, NASL finished the final week of its regular season. So, this will be the final instalment of our power rankings.

If Kyle Porter plays 22 minutes or more for Atlanta in the final week of the NASL season, he is guaranteed to be the Canadian minutes leader in MLS or NASL this season.This is the penultimate instalment of the Power Rankings, with the MLS regular season having wrapped up this past weekend and NASL having just one week to go (save for FC Edmonton, which has a bye on the final week of the season).

As we head into the final week of the MLS regular-season schedule and the last two weeks of the NASL regular-season slate, only four players remain mathematically alive to be the top Canadian in terms of minutes played in either division one or two.

With NASL having a shorter schedule than MLS, this was basically a catch-up week for the second division, which gives us a better idea on how NASL teams rank against the MLS sides when it comes to giving first-team minutes to Canadian players. And, we see Toronto FC’s Jonathan Osorio fall out of top spot in the Canadian minutes-played ranks. Atlanta’s Kyle Porter retakes the lead.

As we get into the final weeks of the MLS and NASL seasons, the minutes-played-by-Canadians numbers continue to trend downward.