Hastily retired in order to take over as Real Salt Lake coach, the legendary striker initially seemed lost, unable to negotiate the myriad challenges of his new job. He stumbled over rules and procedures he did not fully understand, incurred embarrassing fines from the Major League Soccer office (including one for tampering) and almost immediately traded away the reigning league scoring champion - arguably the team's best player who nearly led it into the playoffs the previous season.
Did this guy have any idea what he was doing?
Turns out, he most certainly did.
Not even 18 months after replacing the fired John Ellinger and commencing a massive roster overhaul, the 35-year-old Kreis has RSL in the playoffs for the first time - a momentous achievement for a once-embarrassing franchise that until this season had been 21-50-23 overall.
"It's huge," Kreis said.
And though he gave "full credit" to the players after their playoff-clinching draw at Colorado last weekend, Kreis would seem to deserve a fair amount himself, for overcoming his initial missteps and private doubts and outlining with general manager Garth Lagerwey an effective blueprint for success.
Not that he's accepting any. "I've always taken the philosophy that it's a players' game," he said. "We do what we can as coaches, but at the end of the day, it's the players who perform on the field and so I kind of feel like it's the players who deserve the credit. The players have exceeded our expectations."
Indeed, Kreis acknowledged not expecting to become a serious contender until next season. He had come to grips with the prospect of missing the playoffs, had his team lost at Colorado, thinking it unfair to judge the progress of an entire season by the outcome of a single game.
"We had already succeeded," he said.
The playoff clincher merely confirmed it, to everybody else.
Former college and pro teammates, Kreis and Lagerwey had set out to transform the team by changing the losing culture in the locker room - Lagerwey was hired near the end of last season, to replace the departed Steve Pastorino - and importing better players to foster competition within the team. They also wanted to build a core of American players who had experience playing in Europe, something that has worked out well and illustrated that the RSL leadership has a far more astute eye for talent than the administration it replaced.
Of the 16 players Kreis has used during the five-game unbeaten streak that closed the regular season, for example, 14 were acquired since he became coach - including three in just the last three months.
"One thing that we did that really not a lot of other clubs have done so far is that we really took into account character," Kreis said. "And that was a big, big factor for us."
Yet the job is not finished.
While reaching the playoffs represents a sound achievement, and Kreis said the team is "very, very close" to being the championship contender it aspires to be, RSL still ended the regular season with but a 10-10-10 record, perfectly average and good for only third place in the MLS Western Conference.
The team needed several clutch performances down the stretch to just barely qualify for the postseason - "the first tangible proof that I've had any positive influence," Lagerwey joked - and expects to lose a good player, perhaps even a starter, in the upcoming expansion draft to stock the new Seattle Sounders.
Still, the first concrete proof that Kreis has known all along what he's doing came when striker Yura Movsisyan knocked in the rebound of teammate Andy Williams' shot in the 90th minute against the Rapids - a playoffclinching goal the entire organization views as a landmark event.
"There were certainly difficult times," Kreis said. "There were a lot of times when I thought: 'Well, we don't have big enough players here. We don't have the guys with the right kinds of egos to play in these very big games.' But at the end of it all, I still firmly believe that good things happen to good people, and for me, Saturday night was a little bit of a vindication of that."
Chivas at RSL
SATURDAY, 4 p.m., Fox Soccer Channel Game 2
RSL at Chivas, Nov. 8, 8:30 p.m., Fox Soccer
Tickets for Saturday's game are on sale at www.RioTintoStadium.com or by calling (801) 924-8585. Tickets by phone will be available on extended hours today. Individual tickets to the home playoff match begin at just $20 per seat, while groups of 20 or more can purchase tickets at various discounted rates.
