Will more and more teams be willing to give away their draft picks? Are NCAA players becoming less and less relevant year after year? MLS now allows its member teams to bring in as many players from their academies as they want, allowing teams to bring in players when they are teens and skip the NCAA route altogether.

The shop window featured a heck of a lot of high-priced talent. The Vancouver Whitecaps weren’t buying.

Here are some of the interesting possibilities out there for Vancouver and Portland in Wednesday’s expansion draft. Here are five names that really jumped out on the lists of unprotected players released Monday.

DPs for sale or rent... rooms to let 50 cents... OK, apologies to Roger Miller for that one. But, when Major League Soccer released the lists of players its existing 16 teams had made available for Wednesday’s expansion draft, the Designated Players jumped off the page. The Vancouver Whitecaps and Portland Timbers could each max out the three DPs allowed on their rosters in the first three rounds of the draft. Not that either would do that.

As the Colorado Rapids gathered on a platform placed at the centre of BMO Field, jumping up and down, surrounded by sky-blue confetti, holding the MLS Cup aloft, FC Dallas midfielder Dax McCarty stood on the field, staring at the celebration. The rest of his FC Dallas teammates, losers of a 2-1 decision after extra time in Toronto, had left the field. But McCarty stood and stared at the Rapids’ celebration. Wondering what could have been. Wondering what would have happened if a ball off the foot of Colorado sub Macoumba Kandji hadn’t taken a strange deflection off defender FC Dallas George John in the 108th minute and looped past the goal line. What could have happened in penalty kicks had John’s last-gasp effort at redemption, from point blank range, not been stopped by the outstretched hand of Rapids’ keeper Matt Pickens.

MLS commissioner Don Garber said Tuesday that the league has been in talks with the Canadian Soccer Association, and that he foresees “for next year, no changes” to the Canadian roster quotas for Canadian MLS clubs.

FC Dallas coach Schellas Hyndman admitted that the weather is an advantage for the Colorado Rapids, who played in freezing temperatures in Saturday's Eastern Conference Final triumph over San Jose. "I don't really think you can prepare for anything like that [cold temperatures] unless you go two or three weeks early... with the weather, Colorado has a little bit of an advantage."

For Toronto FC fans, who the team and league hope will fill BMO Field for next Sunday’s FC Dallas-Colorado final, the game will feature a heck of a lot of familiar faces.

Jürgen Klinsmann blew into Toronto this week to meet the local media. It was a super photo op for a Toronto FC club desperately needing some positive press. With a season-ticket holders’ revolt on their hands — and another season of broken promises of playoff success in the books, the Reds need the German soccer legend more than he or …

That’s why this column is coloured when I state that Teal Bunbury made a horrible decision. A wrong decision. On Thursday, he committed himself to the United States national program.