Per the official Whitecaps Twitter account, the Vancouver Whitecaps have acquired American midfielder Lee Nguyen by winning a weighted Major League Soccer lottery for his rights.
Nguyen, 25, is a 5'8" attacking midfielder who was known for his playmaking as much as his scoring and has capped three times for the American national team, although not since he was twenty years old. He has spent the past two years playing in the Vietnamese league, though prior to that inglorious standing he had spells in Denmark and the Dutch Eredivisie.
The Whitecaps were one of six teams that entered the lottery along with Toronto FC, FC Dallas, Houston Dynamo, Real Salt Lake, and the Los Angeles Galaxy. The lottery was weighted based on a team's crappiness, meaning the Whitecaps had a 47.6% chance of winning the lottery.
Earlier this morning I looked at Nguyen in depth and I haven't changed my mind on him since then. He seems unlikely to be a worthwhile addition to the Whitecaps lineup in spite of the massive fan club he has south of the border from those remembering his former potential.
However, Nguyen is known to be sought-after by his hometown club in Dallas. Martin Rennie has been willing to trade horses already this autumn, swapping Shea Salinas to the San Jose Earthquakes, getting a draft pick for would-have-been-released Jay Nolly, and trading his second-round re-entry draft pick. Hopefully the Whitecaps are looking at doing something similar with Nguyen because I can't for the life of me imagine what we'd do with him on the field.