Your Monday Kickoff: Can LA Galaxy win MLS Cup without Riqui Puig?

Riqui Puig will miss MLS Cup and likely miss the majority of the 2025 season after tearing his ACL in LA Galaxy’s Western Conference win on Saturday. It’s the most influential absence possible for this year’s title-deciding match. We have a few thoughts and we’ve decided to publish the publishable ones that aren’t just us yelling profanities.

Let’s start with that assist…

Puig apparently played the last 30 minutes of Saturday’s match with a torn ACL. It’s an injury that presents itself in different ways in different circumstances for different people – some folks are unable to walk immediately, some can go until they win the Western Conference final – but let’s just all go ahead and agree Puig’s game-winning assist in the 85th minute is an all-time great assist in MLS history now. It becomes especially legendary if LA go on to win MLS Cup. Regardless of how he felt at the time, winning the conference with half of your anterior cruciate ligaments is gutsy as hell.

It’s hard to overstate Puig’s influence in attack

We’ve talked about it a ton over the last couple of years, but it’s worth repeating just how often Puig is involved in LA’s attack. American Soccer Analysis keeps track of “touch percentage.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: A measure of how often a player gets on the ball relative to the rest of his teammates. When Puig played this year, he took 14.6% of LA’s total touches, the highest mark in the league. More than 1.1% more than second-place Héctor Herrera for Houston Dynamo FC.

If we look at just the attacking and middle third of the pitch, Puig took a league-high 18.4% of his team’s touches. The next highest player, Carles Gil (New England Revolution), took 16.2%. There are only two seasons in ASA’s database (back to 2013) that saw a player take more than 18.4% of his team’s touches in the middle and attacking third. Both belong to Nico Lodeiro, who took 18.7% and 18.5% of Seattle’s touches in 2019 and 2018,…