Monday 7/3/23
Can tell you this about the 2023-24 Boston Bruins: They're going to lead the league in nostalgia and warm fuzzies for infantilized adults.
I'm disgusted by what I've seen this offseason. I cannot believe--well, I can--that they brought back Milan Lucic. In Lucic, you have one of the slowest forwards in the league, if not the slowest. It's a speed game. More than ever. It's a low contact speed game now. It's not 1978. You can't even knock someone's damn stick out of their hands or you're in the box. He is also in the bottom 5% of forwards in the league, and that might be generous.
Bruins management has this unhealthy obsession with their core group. I'm sorry, but you are a loser organization. You are a choking organization. Patrice Bergeron is a loser (in the sports sense). He doesn't win. I fear he might be coming back. Move the hell on. This hasn't worked. Bergeron's twenty year career has one championship to show for it. Enough. Enough of the cuddles and the footsie pajamas. And both goalies are apparently coming back, which is also sickening. I don't want to see two guys who are supposed to be in competition doing ceremonial, performative hugs for television cameras and social media at the end of regular season wins so that everyone can pretend that they're a Care Bear.
If you are a true competitor and great at what you do, you want that position for yourself. For you and you alone. It's your net. No one takes you out of it and you want it to be clear to everyone that it's your net. You're the man, the one who rips out throats. Not someone who does ceremonial hugs. That sickens me. The whole operation sickens me right now. Moronic adults who tweet that they're crying because "Looch" has come back home sicken me. Grow up and move on. Trying having balls. I hate loser shit. Looking back, nostalgia-driven, hugsy-wugsy loser shit.
Here's something else: the Bruins are more of a loser organization now than the Red Sox were. They have pulled ahead in the aggregate over the history of both franchises.
I didn't think the Red Sox could be surpassed that way in Boston in my lifetime. That was the Red Sox' reputation--they choked. Found a way to lose. My beloved grandmother loved them and lived into her eighties and never got to see the Red Sox win. But as frustrating as they can be, they have won it all three times this century.
The Bruins just out-gagged the 1986 Red Sox, which speaks to what a legendary failure that was. What about the collapse in the final moments of Game Six--at home--to the Blackhawks in 2013? Or the total no-show in Game Seven--at home--to a Blues team that never should have beaten them in 2019? And those are behind what just happened.
So part of the solution is Milan Lucic, all for nostalgia and warm fuzzies? Hell, this guy might be the worst forward in the league. Why is this being done? But people, being simplistic idiots, love it.
As I wrote the other day, we have devolved such that people can no longer even understand anything as basic as the workings of sports. Sports themselves are so simple, and no one can understand them. I see these awful writers for The Athletic. They have no clue. No one knows. They don't know why things happen as they do in the games. They never know the history. They don't know how the games are played. They share factoids. Why do you think everything is so numbers driven? Because people have nothing else to say. They don't know what is happening. So numbers have replaced words and actual explanation and insight.
Look what so-called sports writing is. There isn't anyone else out there who isn't terrible at it. I know what everyone is going to write before it's been written. Someone like Chad Finn. The damn formula every time. I know when you're going to make an unfunny joke and reference, what it will be, the whole thing. I see it before I get to it, then I just confirm and laugh over how bad the writing is.
Then a big chunk of sports writing becomes "breaking news." Someone reports that someone has signed for this amount of money and years. But 20,000 other people also "reported" it.
So why bother? This is it? This is all anyone has? That's your skill? How is that a skill? Why do we need humans to do this?
How is this different than the weather? I look at the weather app on the phone, it tells me the weather today in Boston. Tells me the humidity. That's all I need. Do I need someone to tweet that? Then I need to follow them to get more tweets about the humidity percentage when I can just look down at the app? What's the difference? Adam Schefter. "Woj." Why? You don't do anything. Someone tells you they signed a contract, and then you tweet this thing and that's your life? Does it matter if people know this exact same piece of information at 11:38 instead of 12:11? Does it matter if they know it at all? But it's better when they know it at 11:38 instead of 12:11, and that is the entire point of someone's whole professional life who is paid millions and millions of dollars so that everyone can know at 11:38 what they were going to know at 12:11?
Value, value, value. Always ask yourself: What is the value? What is the value in me saying this? What is the value in me writing this? What is the value in this book I'm doing? What is the value in bringing up this point?
Every single thing in your life should be a decision of value. There is no value in any of these sportswriters or these super-platformed news breakers. There are no news breakers. Everything just comes out from thousands of people, millions of people, fourteen seconds later.
And then sports becomes what I said: it's like someone's creepy relationship with their pet, where they humanize the animal to make up for the lack of viable human relationships they have--including with themselves--because hardly anyone has a single real human connection in their life, given that no one can be themselves with anyone else and be brave enough to be open and vulnerable. That virtually doesn't exist in human life anymore. So pets have been moved up to fill in the void. All of these disturbing people talking about their dogs like they're kids and calling them fur babies and that they're a dog mom. Love your pet. Enjoy and be grateful for the time you have with them. But they're animals. They're not substitutes. You have to do the work as a human. You have to do the work on yourself and you have to do the work to connect.
These are the kinds of people--and it's no shortage of people--who are excited to have this plumber who skates like he's in four feet of water coming back to the Bruins after the biggest choke in hockey history. People who have no idea about why teams win and why teams lose, and how games are played, and what this person does on the ice and what that person does, and what makes for success and what doesn't and simply just what is actually happening and what matters.
Thirty-five-year-old Milan Lucic. Are you kidding me? Bertuzzi left. I don't blame him for blowing that joint.
