The Boston Bruins are playing playoff hockey tonight. I repeat, Playoff. Hockey. Now lets all ignore the fact that this is a little weird for Round 1 to be starting on August 11th and lets also ignore the fact that the Bruins were far and away the No. 1 team in the NHL for months only to get relegated to the four seed after a bad 3 game stretch. Because none of that matters now. It’s playoff hockey time which means I get to booze out of my Stanley Cup glass once again.
Now, the last playoff game the Bruins played in was a crushing letdown on home ice to let yet another Cup slip through their fingers, but this year’s team was the best team in the NHL all season long. So hopefully the boys can shake off the rust and get their shit together tonight or this COVID interrupted season could be over for good before anyone even realizes they were back.
Make sure you’re properly hydrated for tonight’s game and just start watching this on repeat until puck drop.
Okay, so maybe the C’s didn’t get the W we were all hoping for. To be honest, if you had to pick one game the Celtics were likely to lose out of the seeding games, this was clearly the one. Yes the Bucks were without Eric Bledsoe and Pat Connaughton, but it’s not all bad. As a matter of fact, I feel pretty good about the first game back. Here’s why:
The Bucks are a great team. There’s no denying that. On the surface they don’t appear to be much more than Giannis throwing down Stretch Armstrong dunks and Kris Middleton chucking 3’s, but they are. They have great depth, plenty of shooters, they protect the rim (how many times did Tatum get stuffed at the rim? 4? 5?), and they get out fast in transition. But, despite all of that, Kemba’s minute restriction and Jayson Tatum playing the worst game of his professional career, this game was tied with 90 seconds to go. And I’m good with that.
Bearing that in mind, here are my takeaways from the game. I’ll start with the things I liked:
-Mike Breen saying BANG! -Jaylen being aggressive. I always love to see JB attacking the paint. He didn’t shoot the ball well, but he got to the line 9 times, hitting 7. -Going off that, the whole team did a good job of getting to the Free Throw line, something Celtics teams of the past have struggled at. Smart shot 8 FT’s, and the team as a whole went 27-34. That may be an off night for James Harden, but it’s good for the green. -Marcus being Marcus. Whether he’s flopping, knocking down 3’s that make me say “don’t shoot!”, or turning defense into offense, I love it all. If I had to put money on one Celtics player not missing a beat, it would be Marcus Smart. The guy is an animal and I love it. -Gordon Hayward doing a bit of everything. Gordon got off to a slow start in the first half, but he finished with 17 points, 9 boards and 6 assists. The Celtics are at their best when he contributes in every facet of the game and quietly fills the stat sheet. He did that last night. -Kemba looked unimpeded in limited minutes. His burst was there, he hit three 3’s, got to the line, and made a few nice passes. Brad has indicated that he will increase his minutes tonight, so I look forward to that.
-Not a Celtic, but Sideshow Rob-in Lopez. Man, I wish this guy was a Celtic. His game is ugly, but he’s entertaining to watch. The way he moves makes me think of some weirdly athletic combination of Sideshow Bob and Jason Segel. He knocks down 3’s with his feet together, hits post moves with arms rotating like helicopter blades, and mean mugs the entire time he’s doing it. Hilarious.
There was a lot not to like as well, with these two plays being the most obvious. Now, I have to agree with the Bucks that the second play was a block. Smart was there before contact, but he was still moving out of the restricted section when Giannis rose into his shot. That’s why it was called a block.
In my opinion, that play never should have happened because he punched Theis in the kidney a minute earlier. Wanamaker had a foul for less contact on a screen earlier in the quarter and he got called, so it’s not hard to believe the refs simply didn’t want to foul out Giannis. A minute after the first no call the block happens, the Bucks go up 3 with 90 seconds left, and that’s the game.
Some other things I didn’t like:
-Mark Jackson. -Fouling jump shooters. I think this was a product of being rusty because both teams did this early and got better as the game progressed, but please stop. -Everything about Jayson Tatum’s game. Yikes. He SUCKED. The stat sheet says he went 2-18, but that’s generous considering the first basket should actually have been credited to the Bucks when two players failed to make a rebound and knocked it in themselves. That means Tatum actually shot 1-17 (a solid 5.8%), was a team worst -13 and made one of the dumbest defensive gambles in that unnecessary reach that led to the play above. DO NOT REACH ON GIANNIS WHEN HE’S 5 FEET BEHIND THE ARC!
To reiterate what I said at the start of this post, I’m fine with the way things went. Sometimes you get calls, sometimes you don’t. The Bucks are good and this wasn’t a playoff game, so I’m not worried about it. Tatum and the rest of the team have 7 more games to find their shots, hopefully starting with the Blazers tonight. Until then, go green!
After getting brained by the ghastly Orioles over the weekend, the Sox got right back to it immediately going down 7-0 to the Mets. In normal times I probably would have fired up the PS4 and checked the boxscore later. With the pandemic though I literally have nothing else to do and I’m worried that baseball might get cancelled before the end of the month after the Marlins COVID outbreak. So I persevered and the Sox actually made it a game, but the only real entertainment Sox fans are getting this year is in the form of Dennis Eckersley. I’ve made no bones about my stanning for Eck over the years. He is a legitimately excellent broadcaster. Eck is also uniquely hilarious in the way he speaks, but also because he doesn’t give a single shit about ripping the team.
Dont’a Hightower now becomes the fourth Patriot to opt out of 2020, joining OT Marcus Cannon, FB Danny Vitale and OL Najee Toran. https://t.co/NzfDCxgXEh
And so Patriots RB Brandon Bolden also is planning to opt out of the 2020 season, which would make him the fifth New England player to miss this season.
Today has been a rough day for the New England Patriots and I haven’t even finished my morning Iced Tea from Dunkies. This was bound to happen as the guinea pig that is the MLB showed everyone just how quickly an entire sports league can turn into a disaster with this bastard that is coronavirus. The Marlins have had 17 guys test positive and because of the six degrees of separation other teams like the Phillies and the Yankees had to cancel games as they awaited their own COVID test results.
So if you’re an NFL player watching this quickly unfold, it has to make you think. Is this worth it? If you’re Dont’a Hightower and you’ve already made millions and millions of dollars and won three Super Bowls and you just had a baby, do you want to risk bringing that infection home with you? Even if you’re Clay Travis and you think the risk of getting into a car crash is worse (seriously), do you want to have the anxiety of worrying about that every day for the next several months? It seems like a lot of Patriots players are saying hell no.
Bert Breer was on Toucher and Rich this morning and half jokingly wondered aloud is this the price the Patriots pay for having a team comprised of a bunch of smart, thoughtful veterans. It’s a good question because if you’re a young player or a fringe roster guy you might not have secured the bag yet and you may never get another job that pays nearly as much as the NFL. So thats a risk you are a lot more willing to take than an established/paid veteran in this league. Especially when the average NFL career is like 3.3 years.
The question now is how much are the Patriots in trouble and what if even more players opt out? If you’ve listened to the McCourty brothers at all you have got to be worried about whether they’re going to play or not. Those two are intelligent and vocal guys and they have expressed valid, legitimate concerns with resuming play. Right now the Pats have lost their starting Right Tackle, their best Linebacker, a key special teams and depth RB, plus their fullback and another OL. All of this after the team was already tasked with replacing Tom Brady as well as key veterans like Jamie Collins, Kyle Van Noy, and James Develin.
To be brutally honest I don’t expect most of these leagues to finish the season. There’s just too many people interacting with one another and especially in the MLB with teams flying all around like its no big deal. Now imagine that with rosters triple the size in the NFL. The leagues that went with the bubble are the only real shot we have of seeing a completed season this year, but even the NBA has dudes hitting up the strip club for some drums and flats. I don’t know about you, but a strip club is one of the last places I’d want to be during a freaking pandemic. The NHL may be the only league to get through the year as they have a bunch of historically laid back homebodies in hockey players quarantined up in Canada.
Now I’m not going to panic about the Patriots just yet because I tend to agree with my friend here below, even if it is because I’m wearing rose tinted glasses that Belichick and Brady fused onto my face over the last 20 years.
Am I a piece of shit because I still believe that in the current NFL climate, the Patriots will be better than most people expect because Bill Belichick will have them far better prepared and everyone else will be a mess by comparison?
But that’s assuming we even get to the start of the season. Players weren’t even due to report yet and the Patriots had five guys opt out. Lets watch this Marlins story play out a bit more and see if MLB can get back on track because we’re less than a week into the season and it already has the makings of a doomsday scenario.
However, if MLB can’t stem the outbreak and more importantly assuage any player concerns, it could be the harbinger of bad news for the NFL in 2020.
Breaking: Mookie Betts and the Dodgers are finalizing an agreement that is expected be for 13 years at more than $380 million, sources tell @JeffPassan. pic.twitter.com/NUEKWVloge
I am kind of shocked of the size of this deal if the reports saying it’ll be $350-$400 million are true. That number, while absurd, sounded completely likely 6 months ago, but then when COVID cancelled sports for half the year a lot of people like baseball Hall of Famer Peter Gammons speculated this could tank the Free Agent market. A lot of teams are eating a lot of money and with no fans in attendance for the foreseeable future they will be eating a lot more. So a $400m deal seemed unlikely even for a free agent of Mookie’s stature. But then again it’s the Dodgers so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The Dodgers don’t know the meaning of fiscal responsibility. They are the Yankees of the mid 2000s without the actual success.
I am still OK with the Mookie trade. I saw a ton of sad Sox fans on Twitter this morning as the rumors of the deal spread like wildfire, going so far as to compare it to losing Jon Lester. The Lester comparison is lazy and not even close to the same thing. Lester was an excellent, home grown, fan favorite and a reasonable guy by all accounts yet the Sox still lowballed the shit out of him with a $70m contract offer. He would rightfully so be insulted by the offer, get traded to Oakland, and then sign a 6-year $155 million deal with the Cubs. Thats the definition of misreading the market. With Mookie he is looking to reset the market and become the top 2 or 3 highest paid player of all-time. And the Sox have been offering him deals north of $200m for years, but the former MVP doesn’t want to take a penny less than top dollar. And thats fine! Get your money dude, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense for the Sox to just give Mookie a blank check.
I seem to be in the minority around here, but I don’t think there is a shot in hell a $400m Mookie deal ages well. I love Mookie, I own a Mookie shirt, and he’s arguably the best homegrown prospect the Sox have produced since Roger Clemens. But, he’s also a 5’9″ 180 pound guy with massive up and down seasons on his resume. Over the last four seasons Mookie’s batting avg has been .318, .264, .346, .295. I know batting avg is an old guard stat, but even his WAR has been all over the place (9.5, 6.3, 10.6, 6.9). Those are still great numbers (Betts finished No. 8 in WAR for position players in 2019), but those variances would give me concern if I’m writing the check.
For $400m you need to produce power consistently and to be honest you need to be built like a linebacker so I won’t worry about your body breaking down. Obviously you can never predict injuries and big guys are just as likely to break down (Mo Vaughn, A-Rod), but I have more faith in a big guy continuing to hit for power than I do in a 180 pounder hitting 30+ home runs a year into his late 30s. Mookie’s true value is in being a five tool player. He hits for average, power, steals bases, throws well, and plays elite defense, but 5 tool players rarely age well so while I love Mookie I’m not banking $400m on him being the same player in 2032 (!) that he is today.
I’m not going to give John Henry and the Sox credit for this because they fell ass backwards into it, but with a 60 game season this year the Mookie trade looks even better. You’re essentially trading 2 months of a guy who was not going to resign here for promising big leaguer Alex Verdugo and a top prospect in Jeter Downs.
I know Big Z accuses me of being a prospect hoarder, but I’m playing the odds here and with arguably the worst pitching staff of my lifetime I don’t think the Sox were a threat to win it all this year anyways. Theo Epstein stepped on a hornets nest when he coined the term “bridge year,” but its true you can’t just pay everyone all the time without taking a step back every one in a while to retool and reload.
Let me just sit here and enjoy the one thing that makes me a little bit happy…this fresh, delicious, tasty, meaty, turkey-filled…Cold Cut Combo. I eat three every day to help keep me strong.
Bill Belichick spending a good part of the day on the Branford Green! The @Patriots head coach & 8-time Super Bowl champ filming a spot for @SUBWAY. More tonight on @WTNH at 6pm! pic.twitter.com/DCqyUshcbp
Unless that day off includes a delightful afternoon on a park bench crushing a 5 dollar footlong. What’s Bill’s go to sandwich? It’s gotta be something efficient, not too exotic, but probably a great value loaded up with veggies. No bacon because thats like a flashy WR thats overpriced and doesn’t ever actually help you win the Super Bowl. My official guess is an Italian BMT with everything on it.
In all seriousness though I am waiting with bated breath to see the finished product of this commercial. It could literally just be Bill sitting on a bench with no music, no voiceover, no context. Just Bill housing a sub on a bench for 20 seconds as the Subway logo fades in. I mean, hell I’m craving a sangwich right now. Brilliant marketing.
And no, I can’t go more than a couple of days without making a reference to a 24-year-old Adam Sandler movie.
The Boston Marathon has officially been cancelled for the first time in its 124 year history. The marathon won’t be held for the first time since 1897 and that is a shocking headline. Not because I am a diehard marathon guy (I did lead my track team in points senior year NBD), but because the Boston Marathon is an institution in this city. I don’t know if New York and Chicago feel the same way about their marathons, maybe because they are gigantic cities with multiple professional sports teams and a billion other things to do, but the Boston Marathon is a huge deal in this city and that was only magnified after the bombings in 2013.
It’s something that brings the city together every year, signifies the start of spring, and even lets us celebrate Patriots Day with a few beers at Fenway before noon.
I understand why Marty Walsh and the city are uncomfortable hosting an event that would pack a million people together in the streets. I wish they had waited a little longer to make the announcement, but maybe there was a drop dead date that would have made it impossible to wait. It’s already impossible to predict that everything will be good to go in September.
I’m a borderline germaphobe to begin with so I wasn’t going to be running out to the marathon this year either way, but seeing an event in the city like this would have helped bring some sense of normalcy back to our lives. For now we’ll have to look elsewhere, but it doesn’t seem like there are going to be any large events this summer or maybe even the rest of the year and that is crazy to type.
Obviously I’m fortunate to have the Boston Marathon being cancelled be one of my only coronavirus problems, but shit COVID really has just taken 2020 and broken it’s back like Bane.
To the runners that have been training for months and months to raise money for charity, honor a since passed loved one, or to just challenge themselves with an absurdly long run; keep grinding, it’s a marathon not a sprint.
Yahoo – Boston Red Sox legend Manny Ramirez’s time in the majors may have ended in 2011, but he’s not done playing baseball. Ramirez, now 47, told the Taiwan Times he’s hoping to make a comeback in 2020.
Ramirez has set his sights on returning to the Chinese Professional Baseball League, where he spent time in 2013. Ramirez performed well in a 49-game stint for the Rhinos, hitting .352 with eight home runs. He left the team because he missed his family, and because he wanted to try and return to Major League Baseball.
Manny is the greatest right handed hitter I’ve ever seen.
To make that proclamation it definitely helps that he was the No. 3/No. 4 hitter for my favorite team for nearly a decade. But it also gave me the opportunity to watch the guy play every day (Ha!) and rake year after year. Just look at this stat line from his eight years in Boston.
It’s one of the greatest statistical runs a Red Sox player has ever had.
Manny had an absolutely effortless swing that produced moonshots as he hit 30+ home runs 12 times in his 19 year career. He wasn’t just a pure power hitter though as he finished with .312 career batting average. The guy was just never off balance at the plate.
(You’re welcome for the 13 minute loop of Magic Stick)
And nobody knew when a ball was going YABO quicker than Manny. Well, maybe Dennis Drinkwater, but you get my point.
With that being said he could be a childish prick at times like the time he took three straight strikes in a Yankees game back in 2007 because he had to pinch hit after being told he would have the day off.
So yea, Manny Being Manny may as well have been Spanish for “baggage,” but my lord could this guy put the bat on the ball. He anchored the greatest team in Red Sox history in 2004. (Thats not debatable, they had a Batting Champion hitting 9th and two HOF pitchers at the top of the rotation) Manny hit .308 with 43 home runs and 130 RBIs that season. He also had a Slugging Percentage of 1.009, won a Silver Slugger and finished 3rd in MVP voting.
Granted that was 16 years ago, but even in 2013 he hit an absurd .352 in the Chinese Professional Baseball League. So do I think he could be a serviceable player in the CPBL right now even at 47-years-old?
But hey if things don’t workout in Taiwan, he can always play for the local independent leagues. Hell, I saw Oil Can Boyd pitch for the Brockton Rox when he was 45 and he was mowing guys down.
The movie we’ve all mocked for the past 15 years and cringe whenever it comes on TV is actually surprisingly delightful right now. This movie just hits different when sports are banned.
I openly admit that this is a sign of Quarantine SZN starting to take its toll on my sanity more so than this movie actually aging gracefully. But when nobody has been able to drink a beer on Jersey Street in nearly eight months you take what you can get.
Watching this last night I legitimately started to feel like I had moved out of Boston and hadn’t seen Fenway, Cask n Flagon, Landsdowne Street etc. in YEARS.
You do start to notice little things though when you rewatch old movies, especially ones filmed in your backyard. Lets forget for a second that Jimmy Fallon is supposed to be some broke ass school teacher that has a sweet apartment in the North End and season tickets to the Red Sox. The thing that really stuck out to me was the bar that Jason Varitek, Johnny Damon, and Trot Nixon are having dinner at after the game just a few feet away from Fallon and his buddies.
Really? Had anyone involved in the writing, filming, or production of this movie ever actually been on Landsdowne Street?
Their slogan should be… "Bill's Bar: Where You Go When You Can't Get In Anywhere Else" https://t.co/8Sj44SaU27
Hey don’t get me wrong it’s a fine establishment to knock back a few Bud Lattes, but it’s not exactly the lap of luxury that the players would be having dinner at. But, I digress.
Fever Pitch is loosely based on an old Nick Hornby story about his obsession with an English soccer team. Rejiggered to focus on the Red Sox, the original script just kind of assumed the Sox would lose yet again in some brutal fashion, which really sticks out like a sore thumb when the movie peaks just before Dave Roberts’ steal in Game 4 of the 04 ALCS. Then they slap on a 30 second ending explaining the greatest comeback in baseball history and the Sox actually winning the World Series capped off with the most cringeworthy memory of the entire thing; Fallon and Drew Barrymore celebrating on the field with the players.
But hey I’ll take whatever Red Sox content I can get at this point, which is why one of the principals of marketing is that nostalgia is a powerful weapon. I haven’t been to a Sox game in slightly longer than usual and my body is already starting to go through withdrawals. And the team wasn’t even going to be good this year!
John Henry has us by the balls and he knows it. Now I’m not going to be the first guy there when the quarantine is lifted, but when the dust settles on all this I will be more than happy to buy a few a dozen $11 beers at 4 Jersey Street.
The Bruins had the best Quarantine Content of the year last night in the form of a livestream Zoom call with the 2011 Bruins as the team watched Game 7 of the Cup, crushed beers, busted each other’s balls, and crushed some more beers. This is the kind of content we need more of while we’re all locked away in our houses. You always hear that hockey players are the most normal, down to earth guys, but this was like being a fly on the wall in the locker room as they F bombed former players, tip toed around NSFW stories, Gregory Campbell laid into Marchand, all while Lucic polished off a couple bottles of red. As would be expected this got more interesting as the night went along as everyone got more sauced up.
The hardest I’ve laughed in a while was watching Tuukka bemoan the fact that he just had a third daughter. When someone else said they just had their third son Tuukka yelled into the camera “HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT HAPPEN?!”
I am *shocked* that the Bruins haven’t scrubbed this from the internet yet, so definitely check it out before the PR team gets to it.
Lucic interjects in a conversation about how goalies are more protected in today’s NHL: “I wonder what happened to them being so sensitive.” pic.twitter.com/KIgZYGMv78
The 300s 