Here are the best two-year assist totals in league history:
- Carlos Valderrama still holds the record with 41 assists in 1999 & 2000
- Second place is held by the great Marco Etcheverry, who had 36 assists across the 1998 & 1999 seasons
- Valderrama also had 36 assists in 1996 and 1997, and then 31 assists in 1997 & 1998 (he was pretty good)
- Steve Ralston -- as Pibe's sidekick -- had 35 assists in '99 & '00
- Mauricio Cienfuegos had 33 assists across the 1998 & '99 seasons
- Preki had two separate two-year totals of 30 assists, since he went 13-17-13 from 1996 through 1998
- Guess who else had two separate two-year totals of 30 assists? El Diablo, who went 19-11-19 from '96 through '98
Pick out a pattern there? Yup – literally every single one of those seasons came before the assist rule was adjusted in 2003.
I'm going to plagiarize from a column Andrew Wiebe wrote two years ago, about the "second assist" – his shot at explaining both how and why assist tallies are lower now than they were from 1996 through 2002:
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... second assists have been given out since the beginning of time. Or, more accurately, since Major League Soccer first kicked a ball in 1996...
Ahead of [the 2003] campaign, MLS went away from its original objective definition of an assist – the two passes prior to a goal regardless of context, akin to the NHL rule – and transitioned to the subjective one you see below.
"Assists shall be credited to the player(s) whose pass(es) contribute significantly and directly to the scoring of a goal or the creation or development of the scoring sequence. An assist shall only be awarded when it is determined that the pass in question required a reasonable amount of skill, vision and accuracy. A maximum of two assists shall be awarded on any goal."
From 2003 onward, second assist could no longer be construed as statistical parlance for safety-first square ball to the player who actually delivers the incisive pass, a point further emphasized in the MLS scoring rules by the insistence that "continuous possession alone does not mean two assists should be awarded."
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Those guys were all great, and Valderrama will go down as one of the best passers of the ball ever to stand on a soccer field. But the record books for what they did are a little inflated.
If we throw away all the pre-2003 assist numbers, what's the best two-year run of any playmaker?
Well, it was 28. Landon Donovan managed that in 2013 & '14, while Brad Davis hit that number in 2011 & '12. Sacha Kljestan's current two-year run puts him at... 29, right there with Sebastian Giovinco (who's going to win his second straight MVP). And they're both within shouting distance of the great No. 10s from a previous era of MLS, the guys who defined so much of the league back in the late '90s and got the benefit of the doubt in a way that modern playmakers – including all four named in this paragraph – never have.
So given that, Kljestan's call-up to join the USMNT this week should not be considered remotely shocking. And given the lack of creativity from central midfield that's been part-and-parcel of Jurgen Klinsmann's gameplanning, you could argue that Kljestan is exactly what the doctor ordered.
That was the case for the Red Bulls in the wake of Thierry Henry's retirement. With qualification for the Hexagonal on the line this weekend, who's to say it has to be any different for the US? He may just be the left back Klinsmann's been looking for all along.
