5 things we learned in MLS Week 26: Lampard's 'comeback' tale

Week 26 of the MLS season provided only six matches to enjoy since it took place during a FIFA scheduled international window (we'll get to that later), so while eight teams enjoyed a break and the U.S. Men's national team stole the spotlight, 12 MLS sides competed over precious regular season points.

Here's what we learned this week:

Lampard is the 2016 Comeback Player

At the end of each season, MLS hands out a "Comeback Player of the Year" award, given to the player, as voted by media, as having improved the most after suffering adversity, whether injury or otherwise.

After Week 26, the winner of the award is clear.

No player has turned around their fortunes as immediately, consistently and with as much dominance as New York City FC midfielder Frank Lampard, who went from being the target of the NYCFC boo-boys to single-handedly propelling the team to the top of the Eastern Conference.

After scoring his 300th goal on a night the club mistakenly dedicated to his 300th goal, Lampard will most certainly take this prize back home with him to England.

Canada has only a handful of quality players ...

... and half of them didn't get called up.

Canada has certainly improved in the four years since an 8-1 loss to Honduras eliminated the team from World Cup qualifying, but four years on, Les Rouges has new issues to deal with; namely, a manager in Benito Floro who leaves some of Canada's best players out of the team, despite the national pool already stretched pretty thin.

Floro may be old school and he might have reasons for not calling up Jonathan Osorio or Will Johnson - players who actually play regularly for their club - but Canada cannot afford the sort of ego games or motivational strategies Floro seems to be employing here.

Whatever Floro's motivation was for leaving the two off the team might have cost Canada in a 2-1 World Cup qualifying loss to, you guessed it, Honduras.

When you're a country like Canada, you call up the best 23 players you have available to you ... period. Otherwise, you end up replacing Cyle Larin with Nik Ledgerwood, a substitution that makes less than no sense when down a goal.

MLS should break for the international window

The reason we're talking about Canada, and the reason why several prominent U.S. internationals were entirely absent from this week of league action, is because, despite the year reading "2016," MLS still doesn't break for the international window.

And it really should.

The rest of the world, by and large, halts league play to observe the international break but MLS plows through, with some teams enjoying bye weeks and others competing shorthanded. It's a strange circumstance, one that doesn't lend itself to the concepts of parity and fairness the league touts and diminishes the product, too.

All it would take is a few midweek matches scheduled throughout the year in order to compensate.

The Cubo Experiment is over

Erick "Cubo" Torres' unfortunate disappointing spell with the Houston Dynamo is over, after the promising Mexico striker returned to Liga MX on loan with Cruz Azul, and all that can be pondered is what might have been.

Torres first made headlines as the one competent piece of a very poor (and soon to be defunct) Chivas USA team and the league managed to hold onto the young star by sending him to Houston. It was, on paper, a smart move and one that the league was heralded for; keeping young talent isn't easy, folks.

The Dynamo are in the tail end of perhaps their worst-ever MLS season but Torres never really found his scoring boots this year either, failing to score in 22 appearances for the Dynamo.

We're not quite sure why Torres failed to replicate his fine form with Houston, but it seems the club is no longer willing to find out.

That's gotta hurt!

We're going to cheat here on this section, because technically this incident didn't happen in MLS - rather, in the NASL - but it's worth watching because, well ... see for yourself: