Has there ever been much of a correlation to the pre-season buzz and what eventually happened in the DP market? Besides Henry?
I'd group player signing buzz into three categories: a.) Fans speculatively saying, "Our GM knows this continent and this club; we could totally sign this player who's there and would fit in" b.) An agent saying the team is interested in their player c.) The team looking into a player and word of that getting out.
The last one being the only one I'm talking about, and the second one sometimes being difficult to distinguish, so one just has to accept that some percentage of even mainstream buzz is nonsense.
We're probably all talking about media reports not related to fan speculation, and I'd have to look back to see how much of a correlation there has been. There've surely been a truckload of fizzles, because of it being fabricated by an agent or someone else, or because it just didn't happen, or whatever. Even though I can't remember if it was Angel, or Rost, or Cahill, or Marquez, or Reyna, I feel like some of those names were in the wind for months before. I'll fish up old reports at some point.
My memory is that every other time we had slots open, the team was clearly poking around to fill them, and there were reports of it from the onset of the offseason. Some will always be unsubstantiated, and I'm sure something unsubstantiated will come up soon to confuse things, but there being zero DP rumors right now, for the first time in my memory, with the likelihood reasonable that all of our DPs will be gone in 2015, suggests to me that there really might be nothing brewing. I still think there's hardly any chance of no high-profile DPs being here in 2015, but if that happened, it would be earth-shaking, in the world of MLS.