Deshorn Brown Wins Player Of The Week After His Best Match Yet

Prior to Sunday, it was easy to point to Deshorn's best day as a Rapid. It had to be the two-goal outing that he had against Seattle during the 5-1 whipping that the Rapids served up late into the 2013 season. Certainly, that was a fantastic performance, but it was the kind of thing that Deshorn had been doing all year up to that point — he was a bit lucky to go up against an off-night version of Deandre Yedlin who he could roast and toast every time the ball was lofted to him. This match featured a whole lot more variance in Deshorn's attacks, and showed the signs of the young man molding into a complete striker.

I said prior to this season that Deshorn legitimately had one of the highest ceilings of any striker in MLS, and I meant it. His physical tools have always been there, and it's only some other limitations that have held him back: tunnel vision, finishing, and off-the-ball movement were all issues in 2013, and some of that has carried over to his sophomore year — to expect it not to would be silly — but Deshorn seemed to be having no issues with any of that against Houston. It wasn't just that he scored two goals this time; it was how he scored them that impressed me.

Let's take a look at the first goal.

Or, of course, he could simply take advantage of the fact that the entire defense is ball-watching and instead barely move a muscle.

His usual issues with finishing and tunnel vision were well dealt with on the second goal. The build up was a classic (I don't care if we're not even 1.5 seasons into their careers, this has happened enough times to be considered a classic) Powers to Brown play.

This is nothing new for Brown. He's able to find space in the channels just as well as anyone in MLS, and he made Powers' job easy by not only getting into the space, but also getting the angle on the defender closest to him so he can run into the ball with as little potential for interference as possible. (It is worth noting that yes, he was a touch offside there.)

Instead…

A calm and collected finish that appeared to catch Hall completely by surprise. Not only a finesse finish that we're not used to seeing from Deshorn, but one under duress as well. Once again, a smart goal, and a sign that he's slowly starting to turn into a more complete forward than the straight-up speed demon scoring mostly ridiculous goals that we saw last year.

There were plenty of other great tidbits from Deshorn this match. His passing was pretty good for a center forward, and he actually helped to create chances for other forwards instead of swallowing all of them up himself. He only took four shots all match, but made the ones he did take count.

He's obviously not going to be this good every single week, and we can probably expect to see a lot more growing pains as the year goes along. However, getting to see occasional flashes of his immense ceiling of talent in more and more frequent bursts, and this time for a full 90 minutes, is enough to make you salivate at the thought of his future for the Rapids.