Friday 4/19/24
I have quite a few entries regarding sports history to get to which I should set about doing. There's just so much to write away from these pages, and then all there is to get to with them. I like sports history as I do because it seems to me more valuable in its way than current sporting events. The latter is more like news; the former, akin to something less perishable, that is possessed of a greater life with which it continues to burn. There's a deathless nature to sports history, as there are to characters in literature. It transcends the Twitter feed--it's simply beyond it.
But I'd like to touch on a few thoughts pertaining to the sports of right now. So let us do that efficiently.
It's strange to see the Golden State Warriors not in the playoffs, having lost their play-in game. You figure they'll be there and a run will be possible. That championship from a couple years back becomes more surprising as more time passes, I think. Just as it makes me think that the Celtics really blew it that year.
Speaking of the Celtics: I had expected them to have a tricky first round match-up. Something that could go six or seven games, given that they were likely to draw Philadelphia or Miami. It won't be Philly, and if it's Miami, it will be Miami minus Jimmy Butler, which is a whole different deal, of course.
Bob Kraft hasn't left the news because Bob Kraft is a sad, desperate glory whore. People only know who Bob Kraft is because of two people who are not Bob Kraft.
In perusing the Bruins' final regular season stats, I see that Jake DeBrusk tallied 40 points in 80 games. With Jake DeBrusk's abilities, do you know how how Jake DeBrusk ends up with only 40 points? By playing with his head up his ass a goodly amount of the time.
The Bruins' two goalies ended up with nearly identical stat lines, the difference being, one guy was better earlier (Swayman) and the other guy was better more recently (Ullmark). Sports media being the waste dump that it is, I heard multiple people yesterday saying, with total certainty, that Swayman would start Game 1, and as many people saying, with equal certainty, that Ullmark would.
I have no idea, personally. Nor does anyone else. Neither choice would be more surprising than the other. I bet that they're not basing it on what's happened so much as what Bob Essena--who they regard as this goalie god for some reason--sees in practice leading up to the game. I really wonder, though, what happens if whomever it is plays well, the Bruins, and it's time to name someone for Game 2. Would you really sit the guy? I think that would be crazy. Then again, these guys don't play two games in a row, and I thought it was crazy to get here and have what I consider a problem. If you did go with the other goalie, and you lost, you look like clowns. But keeping the guy in there would be having him do something he hadn't done during the year, which seems crazy.
Don't tell me that Pat Maroon is going to be in this line-up.
The Maple Leafs' goalie, meanwhile, has a save percentage under .900. The Bruins better be doing some serious twine-tickling this series against a goalie like that, because that's porous.
I don't like when teams think about who they'd rather play. You shouldn't care. Winners don't care. They look at it like they'll beat whomever is there. When you start thinking about who you want your opponent to be, or trying to engineer a match-up, you become less of a prospective winner. You are hurting your own cause by chipping away at an important component: attitude and belief. The best teams do not give a fuck who they're playing.
The NFL draft is one of those things that is almost totally uninteresting to me, like gambling and golf. What I want to ask all of these participants in such talk is whether they have ever, in their lives, looked back on past drafts after the fact. See how many of those guys at the top of the draft did nothing? It's a huge amount. The draft is like gambling. There's no knowing. And you're essentially evaluating guys on how they played one sport and trying to determine how that means they'll play another. College football and the NFL are basically different sports.
Earlier in these pages, I had written about the staggering amount of errors committed by the Oakland Athletics. Good news, Boston fans--the Red Sox now lead the majors in that category. That is just so Red Sox right now.
I almost went to the game yesterday because I was nearby, but it was chilly and I lacked a coat and despite tickets being cheap, I thought, "I'm not going to freeze for three hours for that."
The other night, Red Sox pitcher Tanner Houck threw a shutout in a game that lasted one hour and forty-nine minutes. Games used to be like that. Relatively fast affairs like a basketball game. One will notice that when someone throws a shutout--which is all that needs to be said--this gets reported as a "complete game shutout," which is redundant, because a shutout is necessarily a complete game. But it speaks to how surprising it is when someone actually completes a game, which is depressing. Let's be frank: It's surprising when someone goes seven innings.
