The Right Price

Ives is reporting that the Red Bulls have offered Dane Richards, either Jeff Parke or Carlos Mendes and cash for Wilman Conde, but the Fire turned it down.

There are a couple possible reasons for this, I would guess. The first is that they simply will not trade Conde to the Red Bulls. It's one thing to lose one of your better players. It's another to lose him to a conference rival that already poached your head coach.

The second is the offer itself. The player side of it is pretty much as good as you can hope for, although I would consider canceling my season tickets if they picked Mendes over Parke. He's just that bad. So the open question is how much money? I think I read somewhere that Conde cost the Fire something like $300,000 in transfer fees, so my gut feeling is that any deal that does not recoup those dollars in total isn't going to fly.

And I'm amused by John Guppy's quote about the Conde situation. It makes me want to go find the quotes where he says he's confident the Fire-Celtic match will sell out, he's confident Juan Carlos Osorio will remain Fire head coach, and he's confident Matt Pickens will play for the Fire in 2008.