Denis Bouanga was one of the last players to leave the field Sunday and when he finally got to LAFC’s locker room, he found teammate Maxime Crepeau waiting to wrap him in a warm bear hug.
The two men have become close over the last year, with the Paris-born Bouanga often relying on Crepeau, a French-speaking Canadian, to translate for him. The rare journey they shared this season speaks for itself.
When LAFC general manager John Thorrington signed Bouanga, 29, in August 2022, he was playing for Saint-Etienne, a second-division side in France for which he had scored as many as 10 goals only once. With the lone score in LAFC’s 1-0 win over the Seattle Sounders in the MLS Western Conference semifinal Sunday, Bouanga has 37 goals for his club in 2023; only four players in the world — among them Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappe — have done better. And his 20 goals in the regular season led MLS and made him a finalist for the league’s MVP award.
Crepeau, meanwhile, started this season on crutches after breaking his leg making a game-saving challenge deep in stoppage time of last fall’s MLS Cup final, a game LAFC won on penalty kicks as Crepeau watched from the back of an ambulance. It would be more than 10 months before he was back in an MLS game but Sunday he made seven saves — his best performance in nearly two years — to preserve the win.
“To win big games, you need players having big performances,” said LAFC coach Steve Cherundolo, whose team won in Seattle for the first time in five years while handing the Sounders their first playoff loss at home since 2013.
But to get to big games, you need players having big seasons. LAFC got that, especially down the stretch, with Bouanga scoring 10 times in the last six games.
“Goal scorers are irreplaceable in this game and Denis has come up with some big goals for us — and a lot of them,” Cherundolo continued.
So many that Bouanga’s 37 scores are just one short of the MLS record for a calendar year held by teammate Carlos Vela. The most recent goal came in a flash, with defender Ryan Hollingshead gathering a loose…