After last weekend’s matches, there was only nine points separating the second to eighth spots in the West. Real Salt Lake have pulled ahead a little with the comfortable win over Montreal on Thursday night and Colorado did themselves a whole heap of good with the win over Chivas on Friday.
You want to say that San Jose and Chivas are out of the mix but as history has shown us, a string of good summer results can get teams right back up there and as the Whitecaps know to their peril, any slumps can do serious damage. San Jose are stringing together results and strengthening their team, so may still have a role to play.
The Whitecaps are definitely in the thick of it all though. They had chances to move to second in the West in each of their last three matches. They didn’t take those opportunities and instead fell out of the playoff places.
But before the Rapids win on Friday they were in a three-way tie for 4th (albeit in 6th place) and a win over Dallas on Sunday will see them leapfrog the Texans.
These are the how tight the margins are likely to be till the end of the season but the competitiveness of the Conference hasn’t surprised Caps' coach Carl Robinson in the slightest.
"I thought it would be," Robinson told reporters at training this week. "One win takes us second or third and one defeat maybe takes us seventh or eighth so as long as it's like that towards the end of the year and we're still in contention, I'll be more than happy."
There is no doubting that the Dallas game is huge. You don’t really want to say 'must win' as early as July, but after dropping six points in the two matches against Colorado this season, Vancouver simply cannot let another playoff rival get the better of them in their head to head matches.
"It's really important," Caps’ keeper David Ousted said of Sunday’s game. "It's tight in our Conference. There's not a lot of points between second and seventh, so we have a good opportunity against Dallas to get three points and get up the standings."
As a fan and as media, it’s easy to get caught up in looking at the standings, carefully watching all the other results come in, working our permutations and what would be the best result for the Whitecaps to see in those other games.
For the players, Ousted feel that focussing too much on the league table can sometimes have a more detrimental effect.
"I think it's dangerous to look at the league this early because it's November that's important to where you are," Ousted told AFTN. "We're trying to build on the concept we've got going here. We're trying to build on the things we need to be better at and we want to get in the win column again.
"Right now the standings are not that important to me. We need to be in a good position come November and I think we'll get there."
It was a view also echoed by Harvey.
"You don't want to get caught up in that," Harvey told AFTN about looking at the league table. "You do every once in a while to see just to see how many games teams have played but you don't want to get caught up in that because at the end of the day it comes down to, honestly, the last few weeks.
"You don't want it to, but for the majority of the seasons that I've been in the league it does. Everybody has a hard road trip here and there, so if you start looking at everybody's fixtures, week in week out, you'll probably drive yourselves nuts, so we're going to just focus on getting three points this Sunday."