PORTLAND, Ore. — By the time the staff walked into Providence Park’s KeyBank Club, Thursday had already changed. The objectives for the Portland Timbers’ assembled crew — general manager Gavin Wilkinson, technical director Ned Grabavoy, head coach Giovanni Savarese and six other staff members — had shifted away from first-round pursuits. What was once the search for a new player transitioned to one of the small reliefs of a sport’s salary-capped world.
That’s the context for the $100,000 in General Allocation Money (GAM) the Timbers acquired Thursday morning. GAM is one the mechanisms in Major League Soccer that allows teams to transcend their salary caps.