Dark days for Boston sports

Saturday 6/28/25

The Red Sox came home from a dismal road trip and got it handed to them last night at Fenway 9-0 by the Toronto Blue Jays.

How long does this go on?

Well, it could go on a while. Years. John Henry has no interest in this team being successful anymore. It's just a part of his portfolio. Tickets to Fenway will always sell because the ballpark is itself a destination and tourist spot. They cut payroll, and the money rolls in.

Henry's interests are elsewhere. On Liverpool football, for instance. No GM wanted this job, so the Red Sox got "fucking stiff"--as one now former Sox employee described him--Craig Breslow, automaton. Talk about having not having any social skills. Or a plan. Or a clue.

When Henry bought the team, he was like a spoiled rich kid with a new toy. Over time, he lost interest in the toy. Now it's stashed way back in one of the rich kid's many closets full of toys, not to be played with again.

Could be in for a classic dark age of Boston sports. You have the breaking up of the underachieving Celtics. Already I can see the excuses being made for next year. The "well, we don't have Tatum, time to pack it in" attitude.

You have what would be the irrelevant Patriots, save that football is king in dumbed down (and getting dumber by the day) America, so interest happens automatically.

I don't believe in Drake Maye. Frankly, I don't think he's intelligent enough to be a top tier NFL quarterback. If he is able to do that, it'll be on the back of his physical skills, and I'm not sure that's enough or that he has enough of them anyway.

I see a soft, unintelligent player at a position where you need--almost always--to have some on-the-field brains and leadership abilities. I think this upcoming season could kind of/sort of look okay--like with 2021--but that won't be built upon and a regression to what is closer to the norm--for however long that persists--will occur.

Then we have the Bruins. I was going to write on here yesterday in advance of the NHL draft that for the love of God, the Bruins shouldn't draft James Hagens, and that's exactly who they did draft last night, and fans are thrilled.

You can always be wrong about sports--and perhaps I am--but in my view this guy is so not the guy. You don't want this player. I have watched him a lot at BC. Probably twenty games' worth.

His hockey sense is poor, and you can't teach hockey sense. He's tentative, he doesn't know when to shoot, he passes up shots more often than he takes them. Rhythmically, his game is off. A pass has to be made boom now. He's a beat too late. A shot has to be taken boom now. Again, a beat too late, or the beat doesn't occur to him.

I watched Ben Smith and Macklin Celebrini come in and dominate Hockey East their freshmen seasons, and Hagens--who averaged exactly a point a game, when it should have been a lot more--was often an afterthought. He wasn't a difference maker. Not a play driver. Too often a passenger, and one who frequently pulled a disappearing act. The points he got, in my view, were a result of his more talented teammates. Or at least more talented at the college level in the there and then.

I can see this pick eventually resulting in Don Sweeney losing his job. Because Sweeney needed a good draft. And I think he fucked it up already. I would have stayed the hell away from James Hagens. I was hoping, as a Bruins fan, that some team would have picked him first so that he wasn't available by the time the draft got to the Bruins with the seventh pick, because if no one did, I knew the Bruins would be right there waiting to do something stupid.

Hagens was the consensus first pick at this time last year. That's how much he underachieved at BC. He was, what, the fifth center taken? This is a mistake. I don't believe that Don Sweeney can draft well. The Bruins are good at keeping soft, complaining, choking guys around and overpaying them, but they're poor at drafting.

If Hagens doesn't go back to BC for his sophomore season and put up fifty plus points and be a Hobey Baker finalist, I can all but guarantee you that he won't come anywhere close to being the player that every other Bruins fan save myself apparently thinks that he is. And if he leaves BC and goes pro this coming season, he'll fail. He isn't good enough right now. I don't understand the rational for this pick at all.