2015 Player Profiles: Sebastian Jaime shows skills, form suffers

Sebastian Jaime had a much better second season with Real Salt Lake than his debut year. In 2015 he had five goals and two assists in 20 games played. He also had a full off-season with the club and ended up playing about 1,000 minutes more with RSL than he did in 2014.

An unfortunate injury kept Jaime out for about a quarter of the season to start things off which slowed his progression and integration with Salt Lake. Not too long after he was back on the field, Jaime had some incredibly bright moments in the summer months and really got on a hot streak for a while. He was the one guy that was able to make things happen for a stretch of about seven or eight games.

It looked like he had found his rhythm and that the vision that then-GM Garth Lagerwey had for Jaime who in Lagerwey's words made RSL a "mid-market team." Jaime seems to play his best when he is in the central position. Otherwise, he seems out of sorts more often than not.

Whether or not Jaime has reached his potential in MLS is still up for debate, however. His marking on set pieces is suspect, as evidenced against Colorado Rapids. Jaime scored a big goal towards the 80th minute which seemed to seal the deal for Salt Lake. Within just a couple minutes, Jaime lost his man who scored a goal and Jaime then lost his cool and got sent off which then allowed the Rapids to take control and get a couple more goals to rob RSL of the full three points on the road.

Soon thereafter, Jaime seemed to lose his form and Devon Sandoval began get get more and more minutes when towards the end of the season we did not see much of Jaime at all. It was an odd way for him to end the 2015 campaign.

It was definitely more of a low note than a high one and it will be interesting to see what his role is with the club in 2016. Perhaps if he was healthy from the beginning he would have had a more consistent season and would have padded his stats a bit more. At the end of the day, you can only judge a player by what happens when he's on the field.

Some national pundits like Matthew Doyle claim that RSL's biggest need is a true scorer at the center forward position. A decent amount of RSL fans would agree. Going forward, Jaime needs to prove that he is the right person for the job there, otherwise, I think we would all have to agree that his acquisition will not have lived up to the hype when he was brought in.