Nashville's continuing evolution, NYCFC's catalyst & more from Matchday 3

Three weeks in and the season's already giving up some answers. The teams with structure look comfortable living in the right spaces, arriving to second balls, and managing games. The ones without it are chasing shadows by minute 10 and stretching themselves into problems they can’t solve by minute 30.

Early season doesn’t crown champions: you can't win the Supporters' Shield in March. But you can lose it.

More pointedly, these early games tend to expose which clubs spent the winter building a repeatable way to play, and which ones are still hoping talent and good intentions will be enough.

In we go:

Someone Great

If you watched Nashville last year, you know that this was a good team trying to evolve into a great one. And if you watched close enough, you could probably figure out the blueprint:

• The foundation, of course, was their attacking DP pair of Sam Surridge and Hany Mukhtar.
• The most important part of their evolution was the way they, under then-new coach B.J. Callaghan, used the fullbacks to not just support the attack, but as platforms for sustained stretches of possession.
• What they’ve tried to do this year is add a layer of control to that identity, but also to build positional fluidity and dynamism into that control.

The idea isn’t to turn into a methodical, positional play team, but to get more comfortable living on the ball so they can decide when the game speeds up instead of letting the game decide for them. They are, in short, Vancouverizing themselves.