Dorian Gray, may he rest in fictional peace, can relate to San Jose’s deformities of creative impetus lo these last several years.

Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray finishes with the protagonist confronting his own depravity in the form of a grotesque, gnarled painting of himself. Throughout the novel the magically-imbued painting assumes Gray’s lesser virtues, and by its end Gray is so horrified by the result that he attempts to stab it into nonexistence. Gray, though, is ultimately stabbing at himself, and in his fit of madness he inadvertently brings about his own demise.

This has largely been the San Jose Story for the last three years. KinnearBall has never been particularly reliant on direct assists, and the 2012 Quakes were about as English as MLS is ever liable to get – all mad scrambles to second balls, boot-and-chase into the box, wildly swung headers on crosses and a lethality on free kicks that tested the bounds of credulity. But even still, the service provided to Chris Wondolowski in the last three seasons has been… shall we say… abysmal?

In 2014, the Quakes finished a 30-point season – the second-worst in the league – with a meager 22 assists. It was also second-worst in the league, exactly 40 assists behind league leaders LA Galaxy. A year later, the Quakes again finished second-bottom in the league in total assists, this time with a modest uptick to 26. They missed the playoffs again. In 2016 (I think you can see where this is headed) the Quakes, incredibly enough, finished second-worst in the league in assists again, falling back to 24 as a team throughout another season without the playoffs.

That’s an average of 24 assists, per year, as an entire team since 2014. Nobody in the league has been worse at providing a helping hand to its goal-scorers over the past three seasons. To make matters more confusing, in 2016 Kinnear shipped Matias Perez Garcia, one of the only attacking players in that frame who’s even approached a double-digit assist year (he had seven in 2015), for Orlando City defensive midfielder Darwin Ceren. The Dommest of Dom trades.

This was the essential context for Herculez Gomez’s recent comments that the Quakes are wasting perhaps the best pure poaching goal-scorer in MLS history.

“Honestly, San Jose is wasting a generational talent,” said Gomez, who became an ESPN soccer analyst last month after a 17-year career. “You have a player who in three, four years has scored almost 100 goals. A player like that comes once in a generation and you’re letting him go to waste. It can’t happen anymore.”

San Jose did not take this comment, shall we say, in stride. Newly installed Quakes GM Jesse Fioranelli, who perhaps himself represents a wipe of the canvas after management realized its painted image was deteriorating rapidly, noted that San Jose is most certainly not wasting Wondolowski because… reasons, perhaps.

“There’s no truth to that,” he said flatly. Wondolowski “is as close to a volcano as it gets inside in terms of his energy and his commitment to the team and making sure all the young players are fitting in. I can’t see how he is being underused. Could he score more goals? Even Chris would say yes. But that has nothing to how he is being utilized.”

Fioranelli does not seem to have understood the nexus of the criticism. The GM’s assertion that San Jose is not wasting Wondolowski precisely because he has scored goals and won games for the club is well founded. But it’s also not what Gomez meant by wasting. Wondolowski is certainly a volcano in the box, and he is undoubtedly committed, and he’s most definitely not being underused. But that isn’t Gomez’s argument. The crux of the issue isn’t underuse, it’s misuse via supplementary acquisition. It has nothing to do with Wondolowski’s production, which has hardly dipped no matter what spare parts the club dumped into his engine block. It’s that, by not surrounding Wondolowski with playmakers and dervishes and setup men, the Quakes are driving one of the MLS greats into retirement in the front seat of a derpy 1988 Buick LeSabre.

San Jose has set Wondolowski up to fail, and the fact that he’s been as productive as he has even in the midst of this is a sign that Wondolowski is perhaps greater than we even acknowledge. But you can only push a LeSabre so far.

This brings us, in a roundabout way, to Tommy Thompson. The inimitable, ever-promising and perennially overlooked Tommy Thompson. And we need to, of course, start here. With the preseason.

Thompson has never had Wondolowski’s ability to push through the noise and produce regardless of the circumstance. He is a serviceman, a second ball artist and a box-crasher from wide places when you let him be. He has a significant amount of Nagbe in him, but he’s perhaps a bit more vertical, even. Nagbe’s classification belies any set standard for wide players, but “linking winger” is a good place to begin the conversation. This is Thompson, essentially. But pushed high enough, Thompson is a visionary, capable of seeing gaps and subtle motions in the defensive set.

The trouble with Thompson in San Jose has, in large part, been a lack of dagger-toothed instinct. Some of that certainly falls on the shoulders of Thompson himself, who has taken far too many opportunities to turn and run vertically and simply deferred. But it’s also an issue of fit. And Thompson, to date, has not fit in San Jose.

Partially anyway, this is through no fault of Kinnear’s. Thompson’s spent a good many of his 2,000 minutes in San Jose as a wide midfielder on the right, and Kinnear’s wingers are often asked to hug touchlines, provide width and press fullbacks at speed. This helps explain why Thompson’s yet to find the scoresheet, but at least a subsection of that bullet point is somewhat out of Kinnear’s hands.

Wondolowski is a dropping forward, and he prefers to loop backward into the framework of the attack – sometimes all the way across the halfway line – before stampeding into the box as the attack cascades forward and then crescendos. It’s how he gets so many of his goals so easily. He simply ghosts into the box as though he were wearing velvet shoes, which poses strange questions of defenders who often end up overlapping and running into one another like a ballet set to Megadeath.

Thompson, ideally, is a second forward or a collapsing wide player. He’s a rover, ideally occupying the central channel and pressing defensive midfielders into space-revealing mistakes with his intricate latticework on ball. It was in this capacity – the second striker in a 4-4-2 – that Thompson made his name at Indiana, and it was under its auspices that he scored in the 2015 Homegrown Game against Club America. Where, interestingly enough, he was paired with a dropping forward in Bradford Jamieson.

He can’t do things like this out wide.

You feel for Kinnear in this, staring at his whiteboard as crease lines ripple across his face. Can you afford to start a natural, dropping second striker next to a man so prone to wandering backward as Wondolowski? His answer to date has been no, and it’s not likely to change. Wondolowski will probably be the second striker for Danny Hoesen, meaning Thompson has to make it work on the right. So long as he’s takes ownership of the position and is given the green light to pinch in at length – watch back tape of the 2015 U20 CONCACAF tourney to see how good Thompson can be in a central winger role – Thompson can make it work. In a word, he has to make it work.

Thompson’s 2017 is critical, albeit perhaps made slightly less so by a new multi-year contract Thompson penned in January. He remains in a system that has not favored him – Kinnear does not seem to be anywhere near the block despite somehow missing the playoffs now for four consecutive years – with a team haphazardly built around funneling the ball to Wondolowski through any means necessary. That, as Gomez can tell you, has largely been a mismatched failure since 2012.

Thompson has the ability to spring open space like a jack-in-the-box, but not marooned on the right, and certainly not in a system that insists on launching him on raiding runs underneath over-the-top balls. Fioranelli’s interest in No. 6 draft pick Jackson Yueill is perhaps a positive sign that DomBall is getting a refresher. Here’s hoping that means a reset button on Thompson’s career, because players with his unique skill set – at least in American parlance – deserve a system that works.