Celtics' start, uniforms, Craig Breslow, post-Germany Patriots

Thursday 11/9/23

Celtics lost to the Sixers last night. Does anyone believe in the Sixers? I don't. Nor do I believe in the Celtics that much either, though.

This franchise hypes itself like no other in the area, and about as much as any team in professional sports. (Other teams, like the Dallas Cowboys, have a lot of the hype done for them.) The Celtics are always telling you how great the Celtics are. To date, this "loaded" squad has been a disappointment. Played two decent teams and lost. Barely beat the Knicks in the much-ballyhooed opener. Same old so far.

People get strangely into uniforms. I think it's because they don't know anything about sports and uniforms are easy to talk about. I don't much care beyond liking a classic uniform design (Red Sox, for example, which they monkey around with too often, or the St. Louis Cardinals, the Montreal Canadiens) and that the post-Brady Patriots uniforms look atrocious--you'd think they were trying to resemble Auburn. But those 1980s throwback Bruins uniforms look pretty great. I also like looking up and half expecting Keith Crowder to come over the boards. I did like the White Sox uniforms of the 1950s/early 1960s--like what you see on the Nellie Fox and Luis Aparicio Hartland statues. That red around the black. It was said to be a nod to Stendahl. I jest. It was not a nod to Stendahl. But it looked very cool. Vikings also have a neat uniform--so well suited to those 1970s teams.

After hearing Craig Breslow's introductory press conference, I thought that this wasn't going to work. Here come additional years of sucking. The more I hear from him, the less I think it will work. I'll be surprised if the Red Sox don't continue to be bad until he's gone (and Cora, too--fake tough guy/alpha).

He reminds of a publishing person. This guy thinks he's so smart because of where he got a piece of paper, but he opens his mouth and you know he's a joke. You internally jeer at him with every sentence he says.

It's funny how easy it is for people with "elite" degrees to trick each other that they're smart, but it's only because almost all of them are idiots. They're less able to actually think than the average person on the street, which is saying a lot. They just fool each other--"Oh, you have that piece of paper? Very good," and "Did you see how I used what people think of as a noun as a verb?"

Breslow is awkward, insincere, no social skills. A dim person who believes that if you add "ity" to a word it makes you smarter than the dirty folk. If you had told me instead he was replacing Meghan O'Rourke--who is all of these same things--as editor of The Yale Review, I wouldn't have been surprised.

The thing the Red Sox do best right now is make it hard for you to root for them.

Best thing the Patriots could do right now is clean house after they get back from Germany. Start on the future now. Few people realize that good teams become good teams well before they're good teams, if one knows what I mean.

Use this time in 2023. Leaving the present regime in charge, keeping the quarterback on the field, simply burns away the time. It's doing nothing for you. Get started on what's next. You can't fix it right now, you can't overhaul the roster--which will take time anyway--but you can start doing some things the right way, setting a tone, and you can see what you have, to a degree, with various people, both between the white lines and outside of them. If you're a contender in 2027, it may well be in part because you used this time in 2023.

I don't think it will be 2027. I think it could be a long time, and things are going to have to fall into place after a bunch of other things didn't work. You never know, of course. It can change fast. I just don't expect that it will. The Patriots are about as far away right now as any team in the NFL is, save a team like the Bears, perhaps, who've been bad for so long that it's almost an annual given. It's actually sad that the Bears are so bad. A franchise like that shouldn't ever fall this far and become a perpetual also-ran.