Thornton: "Mr. Chicago" Goes to Colorado

With the ever-thorough Climbing the Ladder posting a list of the Major League Soccer (MLS) players who have played the most games for a single club - he dubs this "The 200 Club" because that seems to thin out the crowd quite a bit - today seems as a good a day as any to mention the trade that sent long-time Chicago Fire goalkeeper Zach Thornton's arrival in Colorado.

Even if I'm relatively neutral to Zach Thornton as a 'keeper - I mean, I like him well enough and think he's good enough - seeing him in a "Rapidsenal" uniform will still take some getting used to. He's just one of those players who comes awfully close to being "Mr. Chicago Fire." And, if you look at a number of names on the list compiled by scaryice, you'll see a lot of names like that: I still think of Jason Kreis as a Dallas Burn player (there's something else I haven't fully adjusted to) and, in my head, Chris Klein has never stopped prowling the right wing for the Kansas City Wizards.

Is it a coincidence both players now suit up for Real Salt Lake? You be the judge...

In any case, another interesting thing about this trade is Thornton's relative silence. One of the first articles I read on this contained this passage:

[Well...never mind. I'm experiencing technical difficulties with the Chicago Sun-Times site. If memory serves, the gist of the comment was that Thornton declined, through the Chicago organization, to speak about the trade with anyone.]

I don't doubt for a second that Thornton's a bit pissed about how things ended with Chicago; I also wouldn't be surprised if he's operating on a "if you can't say something nice" kind of principle. Whatever's happening, I'm two or three articles and a Google search into looking and I still haven't seen a word out of Mr. Thornton regarding his new place of employment.

This will be an interesting adjustment to watch - not least because Colorado could really use some competition at the back.