Darlington Nagbe may be the strangest highly controversial person in sports. Quiet and unfailingly polite, Nagbe is about as far as you can get from the love-them-or-hate-them personalities that soak up the conversational oxygen in the sporting universe.
Yet, whether hot, cold, or somewhere in between, there is nobody on the Portland Timbers — and there are are few players in the U.S. Men’s National Team player pool — that generates as many takes as Nagbe does.
And the reason for that is relatively straightforward: Nagbe is as technically talented as he is positionally ambiguous. His prodigious pace stands in stark contrast to his far-from-prolific production.