Charlie McAvoy: The Passenger King and additional recent sports items

Saturday 1/3/26

The biggest story in sports right now--which no one is talking about, too--is the Colorado Avalanche being 30-2-7. Do you understand how difficult it is to have only two regulation losses through thirty-nine games of an NHL season? They are on pace to have less losses than the 1977-78 Montreal Canadiens. The two best hockey players in the world are on this Avalanche team. You could be watching history right here.

Team USA was eliminated from the World Juniors by Finland in OT yesterday. This USA team didn't have the talent of the last couple of squads. People won't connect the two, but I do: Hockey East is down right now. Hockey East being down means Team USA at the World Juniors is apt to be down. But this season there isn't as much elite underclassman talent in Hockey East. The conference will bounce back soon enough, I figure, and that talent will be restocked and restored.

It's going to be interesting to see how many teams Hockey East is able to get into the NCAA tournament this season. The conference champion, obviously, but beyond that nothing is guaranteed. Could be just the one team. We still have no Hockey East teams in the top ten, but a bunch of Hockey East teams filling up the spots from eleven to twenty. Would like to see Boston College make a push. A Beanpot championship could really serve them well as a stepping stone.

I guess I'm not surprised that the NHL still does this outdoor game at the beginning of the year. It was in Florida yesterday? Okay. I didn't pay any attention. It's a gimmick game and a lousy TV product meant--insofar as it has any purpose--to rope in people who don't watch hockey, don't care about hockey, but can make a post on social media that they're into hockey now, and then never watch again, until, maybe, the next outdoor game if that happens to be on wherever they are at. Let it go, NHL. It's always been lame and contrived.

Exactly as I predicted, it's a redux of last year's off-season with the Red Sox and Alex Bregman. They're too cheap to spend on free agents, so they're once again--to quote Yogi Berra, it really is like deja vu all over again--treating this C+ player in Bregman like this Mike Schmidt-level third sacker.

If they sign him for a second time, they'll treat and tout what's essentially retaining an under-performing player as a big-time acquisition. Bregman is better than what they got, but he isn't that good. He's certainly not some star. You might get 21 homers and 73 RBI out of him. Cool.

I don't know how the Red Sox expect to compete in this division. You'd need to finish in the top three, right, to be a Wild Card. I mean, I guess technically you could finish fourth and be the third Wild Card, but that's if all of the Wild Card teams are from one division, and what are the chances of that? Do the Red Sox finish ahead of the Yankees? The Blue Jays who were just in the World Series? The Orioles have spent. And Tampa tends to be a factor.

The plan--which isn't a real plan--is that everyone from last year gets better and is healthy. The flower just hadn't ripened. But now it will. Behold. I think you could see a real regression here. Last place is a possibility. Again.

People--including Boston sports fans--are sleeping on the Celtics. They're having a nice season, and they're a contender for the top seed in the East minus Jayson Tatum. Or before getting Tatum back, which I expect them to with time left in the season. Jaylen Brown has been better than I would have believed he could be. Credit where credit is due.

Boston sports fans are like most sports fan in that they fixate on the NFL. Sports-wise, football is the lowest common denominator. A person whose favorite sport is baseball has a greater likelihood of being intelligent than someone whose favorite sport is football. I'm imagining right now the people who'd read such a sentence and think, "Fuck you! Die! My favorite sport is football." It was qualified. "More likely." Not "is." Which, of course, would help prove the point.

Football really does add to brain rot, though. The downfall of culture and the rise of the NFL to where it stands towering above everything now isn't some coincidence. There's a relationship between the two.

The Patriots have a real shot at the number one seed. Even if they don't get it, I could see Denver being knocked off in their first playoff game. As it stands, Denver has a tough game to close the season against the 11-5 Los Angeles Chargers. It's in Denver, though. Patriots win, Broncos lose, New England gets the top seed and a bye. I don't see the Patriots losing at home to Miami, but hey, you know never until it's done.

My disgust with the passenger-player that is Charlie McAvoy is well documented in these pages. His reputation is the product of an age in which people can't tell what anything is, no matter how simple it ought to be, and instead say what they believe they're supposed to. I see thousands of comments online each week about sports, and you know what I never see? An insightful one. Or even any indication that someone can see something they just watched for what it is.

And this is sports. Doesn't get much simpler, really, than sports. We're not talking the depths of the human condition and the why and what-for of us and the point of it all. By all means, show me a single insightful sports comment out there from anyone. Something that isn't said by a million other people. Any real insight at all.

Charlie McAvoy's slot on this team was made official many months ago. He was automatically on the team. Before this season began. Why on earth? Why is inclusion on these national rosters treated like some divine birth right for an overrated, average defenseman like Charlie McAvoy?

Plus/minus doesn't tell us everything, but it tells us some things. For the Bruins, defenseman Mason Lohrei is a +4. Most people don't think he's any good. That he's more of a negative than a positive. Bruins defenseman Nikita Zadorov is a +9.

You know what Charlie McAvoy--he of a single goal on the season--is? He's a -5.

This guy is gross. He got (over) paid, then he quiet quit, as they say. He atrophied. Willingly. And he wasn't great to begin with. He kills you when it matters most. When there's a big goal to be given up, Charlie McAvoy will have a hand in doing so. That's defensively. Offensively, he's Rod Langway, who was thought of as the definitive defensive defenseman with no offensive game. And yet, his offensive game matched McAvoy's.

I'm sure it helps that the coach of Team USA is McAvoy's father-in-law. Wow, what do you know about that.

I will say this: McAvoy plays much harder for Team USA than he ever does for the Boston Bruins. I don't think his actual job means all that much to him. He doesn't play like it does.

I know why McAvoy is on this team. Automatically on this team. The father-in-law in coach Mike Sullivan. That people have no clue, including the people who ought to. And also the expectation that McAvoy will lay someone out at some point, which the USA brass crazily overvalues, like that's going to mean jack to, say, a Team Canada squad with the talent that they have.

McAvoy is also apt to injure himself in the delivering of this big hit, and then hockey fans and Bruins fans will later lionize him as a hero, as he's once again inactive, and then make excuses for him when he returns and is his usual ineffectual self.

Unlimited free rides for the very limited passenger!