Fire call 1-1 draw a win

Chicago Fire coach Veljko Paunovic spoke as forcefully as he ever has during a postgame home news conference after an animated day on the sideline.

Fire forward Michael de Leeuw declared his club "the winners today." Twice.

But no matter how the Fire tried to gussy up Saturday afternoon's result at Toyota Park, it couldn't obscure the final score line: Fire 1, New York Red Bulls 1.

New York scored first, taking a 1-0 lead in the eighth minute on a Bradley Wright-Phillips goal. It stayed that way until the 66th minute, when forward Nemanja Nikolic scored his 17th goal of the season, ending a nine-game scoring drought.

And then the Fire seemed to lose momentum again.

"I think we're the winners today," de Leeuw said. "We could've won the game, but at the end you see they were pushing. So at the end I think 1-1 is the correct result. I think we're happy with it."

Playoff teams are supposed to be disappointed when they drop points at home. The third-place Fire (13-9-6, 45 points) almost surely will earn its first playoff berth since 2012, but results like this suggest the club will back into the playoffs with little momentum. Six games remain for the Fire in the regular season.

The Fire - playing without injured superstar Bastian Schweinsteiger - did outshoot New York 14-5, but only 4 of those shots were on target. The Fire had just 47.3 percent possession, with a passing accuracy of just 66.3 percent.

"I think as I remember we had more opportunities in this game, as I can remember it," Paunovic said, still speaking forcefully. "I think we were the team that was pushing hard to get that tie and then we were still pushing to win the game. ... You have to earn it and we earned the point today. We did it well. We did well. I think the team worked hard."

The Fire might have worked hard, but it didn't work well. As the clocked ticked toward the 90th minute and beyond, New York (12-10-5, 41 points) pressed for the winner, while the Fire defended with 10 or 11 players.

When a home draw is considered a win, it's a sign a team is just happy not to lose. That's not a good sign, especially for a team playing for playoff seeding.

Despite ending its four-game losing streak last week at Montreal, the Fire still isn't playing like it did in May and June during its 11-game unbeaten streak.

"We're taking points again, so yeah, that streak is gone," de Leeuw said. "We don't want to think about that anymore. Just keep moving forward, keep doing what we're doing and the points will come."