Last-moment hero­ics from Lalas Abubakar saved the Rapids from last place Wednes­day night. Down one, Col­orado kept pep­per­ing the Hous­ton net until the Rapids’ sec­ond-year cen­ter back net­ted his first goal in bur­gundy five min­utes into stop­page time.

“Sam Vines played a great ball to me because he saw me. I took off and he gave me a good cross and it took a lit­tle bit of com­po­sure there, took a touch, and then fin­ished it,” Abubakar said. “I’m hap­py that I got my first goal for the club, but ulti­mate­ly dis­ap­point­ed, espe­cial­ly because we gave up a goal.”

Col­orado drew the Hous­ton Dynamo 1–1, but remained win­less since March 7.

Here are three take­aways from Wednesday’s match:

Four-letter words for forwards?

The Rapids offense has dropped from third-best in MLS last year to third-worst in the West­ern Con­fer­ence through nine games. Col­orado hasn’t pro­duced a mul­ti­ple-goal game since July 22. In those four match­es, Kei Kama­ra is the lone for­ward to score.

Kama­ra and Diego Rubio each scored in dou­ble-fig­ures in 2019, and Andre Shinyashi­ki won MLS Rook­ie of the Year for his sev­en tallies.

The offense buzzed Wednes­day in gen­er­at­ing 26 shots, sev­en of which were on tar­get, while con­nect­ing on 88.3% of their pass­es and pos­sess­ing the ball 65.3% of the match. Still, the Rapids’ prob­lems with fin­ish­ing con­tin­ued, with the club get­ting its only goal on a play involv­ing a left back and cen­ter back.

“We need to be a lit­tle bit more coor­di­nat­ed and a lit­tle bit more effi­cient,” Robin Fras­er said. “We’re close, but we need to get bet­ter at being more clin­i­cal in order to fin­ish some of these poten­tial opportunities.”

Big off­sea­son acqui­si­tion Nico­las Benezet subbed on against Hous­ton after miss­ing three games. In total the winger has missed five games and has only start­ed three.

“It was good to have him back,” Fras­er said. “Nico’s been out for a while. It was good to see him get through the min­utes that he did, and with­out any incident.”

Defense settles in

The Rapids have only con­ced­ed one score in each of their last three games. Wednes­day was the only time they made a change in the unit, opt­ing for the more ath­let­ic Aus­ton Trusty over of the expe­ri­enced Dan­ny Wil­son who had start­ed the pri­or two match­es. It was Trusty’s first start since a Decem­ber trade brought him to Col­orado from Philadelphia.

“We have a lot of guys who are good play­ers and have been play­ing well,” Fras­er said. “We have a lot of games com­ing up and we cer­tain­ly feel like we can rotate play­ers and keep our lev­el the same. I thought Trusty was sol­id, won some big head­ers for us, his dis­tri­b­u­tion was clean. For some­one who hasn’t played a game in a long time, I thought he grew into the game quite well.”

It was Trusty’s first start in over a cal­en­dar year after he fell out of favor with the Philadel­phia Union coach­ing staff. The 22-year-old already has 57 starts in MLS and is thought to be a part of the future in Colorado.

Mean­while, the one goal the Rapids did con­cede came eight sec­onds into the sec­ond half and seemed to be par­tial­ly William Yarbrough’s fault. Either way, it was a momen­tary lapse that cost the Rapids.

In a three-game stretch ear­li­er this sea­son, those laps­es last­ed for about 10 min­utes and end­ed up result­ing in mul­ti­ple goals con­ced­ed. Stop­ping the dam­age at one may be a tiny sign of growth.

Back at it

The Rapids don’t get any breaks in the sched­ule soon.

On Sat­ur­day, they’re in Utah for the sec­ond leg of the Rocky Moun­tain Cup. To win the com­pe­ti­tion for the first time since 2015 the Rapids would need to score five goals and win by three. But even a vic­to­ry would be big as it would be the club’s first in Rio Tin­to Sta­di­um and put the Rapids right back in the play­off picture.

Next Wednes­day the Rapids are in Dal­las. The final 12 games of this season’s slate, which will start Sept. 19, are expect­ed to be announced in the next few days.