Impressive Knicks, Wemby the lackluster rebounder, the most important player for the rest of the Red Sox' 2026 season, thoughts on A.J. Brown and Stefon Diggs, NHL Finals, Raymond Berry and Bob Horner

Saturday 6/6/26

Most impressive for the Knicks to take the first two games on the road against the Spurs. The Celtics should be paying attention to what this Knicks team is doing. They don't have the most fantastic roster. But they play as a team and their style is conducive to winning in the playoffs. The Celtics have more talent than the Knicks, but the Knicks are a better team.

Unlike most, I don't think this is over yet. I wrote here yesterday that Wemby isn't a particularly strong rebounder. He had 9 boards last night. With his height, he should have a lot more than 9 boards. And in a gotta-have-it game, too. 2 assists as well.

I just don't believe he's anywhere near the player that people are hyping him as. I'm not saying the Spurs can't come back and he can't be the biggest reason they do. I just don't see a guy who is going to be among the top thirty NBA players of all-time when he's done, or the top fifty. Maybe not the top seventy-five.

The Red Sox went on the road to face the Yankees in the Bronx and won, because they can mostly only win on the road. If the Red Sox were a normal Red Sox team at Fenway and doing what they're doing on the road, they'd be ten or eleven games over .500 here on June 6.

I mentioned that at this point you're looking for bright spots and any positives. Sonny Gray was decent last night, giving up 3 runs in 6.1 innings. He's 7-1 on the season with a 3.20 ERA. I am the lone person who believes that wins for starters matter--they matter a ton.

These aren't robots. This isn't playing out in a computer program. Baseball is situational, the same as life. You give some extra here, you take off a bit here in order to have more later. Context matters. And throughout baseball history, great pitchers on terrible teams have found ways to win games and rack up win totals. Is no one else aware of this other than myself? A team will be thirty games under .500 and still that great pitcher has 20 wins.

Unfortunately, you can't count Grey as that much of a bright spot for the Red Sox. They're finishing last this year. Grey is thirty-six-years-old. You didn't get him for the future, you got him to win now. You're wasting what he's giving you, and he won't be able to give it to you (or anyone) much longer in all probability. He's not the future. He's for this year.

The bright spot the Red Sox have going for them is Payton Tolle. Connolly Early, too, to a degree. How Tolle does is probably going to be what's most important from here on out as far as this Red Sox season goes.

I had mentioned that Craig Breslow was likely going to be fired either this season or shortly after it's over. He could be gone before the trade deadline if they don't want to leave him in charge of handling that.

I wonder, though. And I wonder if it's best to let him go. I think he's bad. But you also can't just keep going through these guys every two or three years. No one wants to come to Boston for this job as it is. Who else are you going to get? They may have to stick with him for a while yet. Another two years, say.

The Patriots consummated their A.J. Brown trade. They had to give up a first round pick to do it. Felt like they were the only team in this market. Brown couldn't return to Philadelphia. He torched that bridge. This is a guy who can be a problem when things aren't going well. I put on NBC Sports Boston for two minutes--which is about all I can ever last--and heard the hosts talking about Brown getting 1000 receiving yards in 2026 and wouldn't that be nice.

These people do not know sports. People don't know anything now. They don't learn, they don't think. They don't know what things are. If A.J. Brown gives you something like 1015 receiving yards, that ain't good. How do these "experts" not know this? It's a 17-game season. It's a league in which the rules have been changed, the game has been changed, to increase passing--and therefore receiving--yardage.

This isn't 1974 when running backs ruled and you played 14 games. If you're supposed to be one of the best receivers in the league, you better have 1400 yards. And your quarterback is the guy who finished second in the MVP voting the year before?

A true number one wide receiver can take a B quarterback and make him look like an A quarterback. Goes up and gets those fifty-fifty balls that you just heave up there, piles on the yards after the catch. This player could make Drake Maye look better than he is. Could be big for them.

I'd like to see Stefon Diggs come back. The NBC Sports Boston people said there's no way that would work, but I don't believe that. Diggs in the slot, racking up 850 yards, bunch of touchdowns? I could see him being okay with that. Team leader, they're winning.

Just my feeling with that player and where he's at right now in his career and how he felt about his year here. He's not a number one anymore and I don't think he thinks he is. I bet he wants to win a title, he believes (erroneously in my view, but no matter) the Patriots are close, he likes the fraud that is Mike Vrabel, he liked his teammates and they liked him.

He was a make-do number one last year, but not a true number one. His season--in which he crept just over 1000 yards--was a bunch of games where he piled up yards, in between games where he was barely there statistically. That's the statistical difference between him now and what he used to be. Slot receivers are more valuable anyway.

The Canes' OT win in Game 2 the other night may have determined the Cup winner. Series tend to have a swing game. Or series' between two good teams do. A game where, if it had gone the other way, the other team that ended up losing the series would have won instead.

Swing games are more than results. There's an emotional impact. Or there can be. You think, "How did we let that get away? We could have been up 2-0" or something along those lines. Not necessarily, though. Some teams shake it off. They're a squad that is able to keep things separate. It's a great quality to have.

I still like Vegas in this series. But that was a golden opportunity the other night, no pun intended. The Canes may have saved themselves.

As I've written before, the biggest swing game in any series is almost by definition is Game 4 of a 2-1 series that goes to overtime. That next goal is among the single biggest difference-makers in sports.

It bothers me, though, this idea of John Tortorella showing up for the last half dozen plus games of the regular season and then getting another Stanley Cup on his resume which will make him an automatic Hall of Famer. They would have probably put him in anyway with the one, but now it becomes a slam dunk and he's not a good guy. But obviously still a lot of hockey to be played.

I do think this will be remembered as a series no one remembers. No one will even recall the match-up. Canes and Knights? No historical buzz, not hockey hotbeds, and despite what the fans of these teams would surely say, they're just not big deals to that many people.

Look, for instance, at these Knicks fans. People really care about the Knicks. They haven't won in a long time, but you know how far and deep that fandom goes. Through generations. People who left that area decades ago and live in Tampa or wherever now are still diehard Knicks fans. You wouldn't get with the Knights and Canes.

I've been meaning to mention a couple people who have passed recently. One of them was former Baltimore Colts receiver and New England Patriots coach Raymond Berry, who made it to ninety-three. We were just talking about receiving yards. In 1960, Berry had 1298 of them in 12 games for the Colts (obviously it didn't hurt that Johnny Unitas was under center). The Weeb Eubanks Colts, who went 6-6.

Berry had 178 receiving yards in helping the Colts win the 1958 Championship Game (in overtime) against the New York Giants (a game which saw future John Madden broadcasting partner Pat Summerall open the scoring for New York with a 36-yard field goal).

That game has long been considered by historians as the greatest football game ever played. It's to football what Game 7 of the 1960 World Series between the Pirates and Yankees is to baseball (or Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Reds and Red Sox, if you prefer).

Locally, Berry is best known for being the coach of the 1985 New England Patriots team that won three games on the road in the playoffs--which had never done before--to advance to the Super Bowl where they were destroyed by the Chicago Bears, as basically any team that has ever existed would have been.

You can't overstate what a big deal that run was at the time. The whole New England region was swept up in it. In a very organic, pre-internet way. You know what it was very much like, though it's never described this way? The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox. Berry's tenure with the Patriots came to an end in 1989. He was never a head coach again. His last gig was as the quarterbacks coach for the Detroit Lions in 1991 and 1992. These were the Barry Saunders Detroit Lions, so you know where the emphasis was going to be.

Bob Horner, who starred at third base in the 1980s for the Atlanta Braves, also died, aged only sixty-eight, so that was particularly sad.

Because of TBS, a lot of people watched a lot of Bob Horner. He was always discussed in these tones of disappointment, like he fell short of expectations. This was sufficiently the norm that you'd think Horner ought to have been Mike Schmidt-like. He hit four home runs in a game, which seemed to provide occasion for people to say, in effect, "See? That's the kind of ability he has if he'd only take better care of himself!"

I always thought this was unfair because what Bob Horner (who looked a little like Dan Blocker of Hoss of Bonanza fame) gave his teams most years was pretty good and it would have been better to be accepting of that. He was a star but not a superstar, and that was never enough for people. There was this "yeah, but" implication if not the outright words that went along with any discussion of him.

He finished in the top ten in home runs six times. Jim Rice did it seven times. So, you know. Back then, as I've said, 20 homers made you a power hitter. 30 was kind of a big deal. Horner was second in 1980 to Schmidt. What was he supposed to do? Out homer Mike Schmidt?

He finished in the top ten in RBI four times (that's the same amount of times as Mike Trout, by the way, and I bet you Trout never does it again) and had a career 127 OPS+. He may not have been what people most wished him to be, but this guy was good. Won the Rookie of the Year. Only a one-time All-Star, curiously. He didn't play past his twenties, for the most part.

Again, he wasn't in the best shape and could have done better with that, but he was knocked too much for what he wasn't rather than credited enough for what he was.