2015 NWSL season preview: Looking at all the teams before Friday's kickoff

What will NWSL look like in a season sure to be seriously altered by the World Cup?

Head Coach: Tom Durkin, second season.

Where we left off: There is no polite way to put this, so let's just go ahead and say it: last season's Boston Breakers were terrible. That Durkin's team didn't finish dead last is some kind of small miracle, praise whoever decided that 2014 was the year NWSL needed its first expansion team. And that said expansion team -- oh, you poor, mighty Houston Dash! -- would somehow be worse than the Breakers. Granted, only two points worse, but whatever. Small miracles.

Alyssa Naeher won Goalkeeper of the Year honors and Boston allowed a league-worst 53 goals. That's the kind of season it was. The Breakers finished 2014 with a 6-16-2 record, good for 20 points and eighth on the table.

World Cup woes: Naeher was Boston's best player a season ago, the one stable thing in an otherwise perpetual earthquake. The good news? She'll be back for 2015. The not-so-good news? With the retirement of Jillian Loyden and Nicole Barnhart apparently falling out of favor with Jill Ellis, Naeher's been getting called into USWNT camp more consistently. Add to that the requirement that teams must bring three keepers to the World Cup -- It's a good thing that second-year backup Jami Kranich has been getting in some time in preseason.

Oh defense, where art thou?: Somewhere far, far away from Boston. Guam maybe? Nunavut? Wherever it was they flew the house to in Up? All that was missing from Boston's defense a season ago was "Yakety Sax" on a loop. And, like, consistency and anything even sort-of resembling organization, but maybe we shouldn't get so hung up on those little details, you know?

The offseason saw the retirements of Courtney Jones and Nikki Washington, the latter giving up on her quest to get every team on her WoSo Punch Card, and when she was this close to the free car wash, too. Cat Whitehill, Julie King and Mollie Pathman are back, and Boston picked up Amy Barczuk from Western NY in November, but the Breakers still don't have much in the way of depth in the defense department. And now there's a good chance they also won't have Naeher around full-time to clean up the mess.

Hey, wait. Where are you going? Guys? Guys? Anyone?: If the league table was based on goals scored instead of actual wins, Boston would have been a mid-table team in 2014. The Breakers still wouldn't have made the playoffs, but they would have been in fifth, which is, like, way better. But alas.

The bad news, and there is almost nothing but bad news here: Heather O'Reilly, who led the Breakers with nine goals a season ago, is now a member of FC Kansas City. Jazmine Reeves, the team's second leading scorer, retired to take a job with Amazon. Lianne Sanderson, number three on the goals scored list, is now playing with Arsenal Ladies. Jones was the fifth leading scorer, Joanna Lohman is now in Washington and we've pretty much run out of players at this point. Boston does return number four on its top-five scorers list in Katie Schoepfer, as well as Kristie Mewis and Nkem Ezurike, and has added a trio of Brazilians in Ketlen, Rafinha and Bia. Of course, Ezurike is an allocated player for Canada, and Rafinha and Bia only ended up in Boston as replacements for two different Brazilian players. Those players were originally signed by the Breakers but then Brazil was all like "wait, no we're doing a residency thing and you can't have them because, guys,, seriously we can't keep getting knocked out of World Cups in increasingly dramatic and ridiculous ways," and then the Breakers had to give them back, because, well, Boston, dead horse, etc.

In conclusion: In a season where every team will take at least a few hits thanks to the World Cup, Naeher's potential absence looms particularly large. Add to that the relatively little Boston has done to actually rebuild following the loss of The Law Firm of Jones, Sanderson, Washington, Lohman, Reeves and O'Reilly, and the Breakers could be in for another rough year. Maybe Reeves could get them all a deal on Prime though. Transparent is really good, you guys. And The Americans is on there and -- wait, what were we talking about?

Or maybe just accept it and replace all the game day music with "Entrance of the Gladiators" and at least finish atop the self-awareness table. Plus, you can stream like 12 different versions of it with a Prime account. Just saying.

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