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Portland Timbers forward Maximiliano Urruti takes a shot on goal against Vancouver Whitecaps defender Tim Parker during the second half of Sunday’s game in Portland, Ore. The game ended in a 0-0 draw.Troy Wayrynen

On Monday, Jeff Mallett was ensconced in his home office in the hills above Silicon Valley. The one-time president of Yahoo had, the day before, been in Portland, Ore., where, as co-owner of the Vancouver Whitecaps, he watched his squad play to a 0-0 draw in the first leg of a Major League Soccer conference semi-final playoff game.

The second leg of the Western Conference semi-final is Sunday in Vancouver when the Whitecaps face the Portland Timbers. It is the first playoff game the Whitecaps have been host of in their five MLS seasons. It has been a half-decade marked by an awful beginning and, thereafter, slow, steady gains.

Mallett, the chairman of a hot tech company called GameTime, which makes a mobile ticketing app, made his name and money in the hyper-growth early years of Yahoo, from the mid-1990s into the start of the 2000s. The kind of confidence such dizzying gains spark were evident in the earliest days of the Vancouver Whitecaps. In the months before the team opened its expansion season in 2011, club leaders were talking about a moonshot goal: to rank among the top 25 soccer clubs on earth.

Reality interceded. The Whitecaps won their first game – and promptly imploded. The coach was fired 10 weeks into the season and the team finished the year dead last.

For Mallett – alongside co-owner Greg Kerfoot, another wealthy alumnus of the technology business – it was humbling. It was also a key lesson in the business of sports. From the failings of the first year, the pillars of the current Whitecaps coalesced: everything from working the byzantine rules that govern MLS for the team's benefit to smart scouting of players, particularly in South America.

"Because of the nature of who we are, we had high expectations," Mallett said of the expansion season. "With Greg and myself being technology guys, we like to speed it up. We like it a little faster. In our world, life can go five times faster than the regular clock. But in the sports world, you really can't speed up the clock. Everything takes time."

The owners, said Mallett, "doubled down" – and invested more time in the team, and the league, such as on various subcommittees. Mallett leveraged his other roles, too. As a co-owner of the San Francisco Giants, where he was on the club's executive ownership committee, he spent time with Giants trainers and ticketing staff to get ideas for the Whitecaps.

A little luck helps, too. The move you try to make, and fail, when the right one is standing directly in front of you.

The Whitecaps made the playoffs in their second season, in which they lost in the first round, but in the third they missed the postseason, although the team did have an improved record. The Caps fired the coach – but the search for a big-time new boss didn't succeed. The team turned to Carl Robinson, then 37, a Whitecaps assistant coach.

Robinson has been key. The Welshman's on- and off-field instincts have been a perfect fit for the Whitecaps, an MLS mid-tier power. There's the likes of Toronto and Los Angeles up top, with single players making more than the Whitecaps' entire roster, and then there are teams such as FC Dallas, a successful squad with among the lowest payrolls in the league. The Whitecaps have found a place in between and Robinson has been the essential orchestrator.

The Whitecaps made the playoffs again last season, but were again knocked out straightaway. Solid play extended into this season as the Whitecaps challenged for the league's No. 1 spot, before Vancouver was waylaid by injuries and finished second in the west.

Robinson's work was recognized when he was chosen one of three coach-of-the-year finalists this week. And the Whitecaps, one of the best defensive teams in the league, were twice more recognized: Kendall Watson was a finalist for defender of the year and David Ousted was a goalkeeper of the year finalist.

Goal scoring is a weakness.

The Whitecaps, regardless of the playoff result, will be shopping in the offseason, searching for a scorer. In the team's earlier seasons, management made a number of mistakes in their bigger investments in designated players. There, too, Vancouver has improved.

"We do our homework better now," Mallett said. "We haven't wasted any signings. We think it through. We think about chemistry. We're better at it."

The Whitecaps ascend at an interesting time in the MLS. The big-money L.A. Galaxy won three of the past four MLS Cup finals. This season, the regular-season conference champs, New York Red Bulls in the east and Dallas in the west, were the two lowest-spending teams, both roughly around $3.5-million. The Whitecaps spent about $6-million, led by the $1.4-million paid to designated player Pedro Morales.

As part of Vancouver's balance, the team fosters youth: The Whitecaps had the most minutes played from players 24-years-old or younger in the league. And the team, through its extensive residency program, has a solid contingent of Canadian players. It is a playbook Dallas has used, too.

"There'll be two or three formulas, approaches, strategies, in the way to build a competitive club," Mallett said.

The owners in Vancouver remain closely involved. The team is governed by committee. Robinson is essential but the table is round. When the committee became broadly known, as the team stumbled to the end in 2013, it was laughed at as foolish and unworkable. But it has, five years in, worked.

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