Why men's Olympics hockey doesn't matter, baseball's upcoming problem, the overrated Connor McDavid, the aging Joe Burrow, and Jack Hughes doing figure eights

Saturday 2/28/26

There isn't a lot less interesting than Patriots off-season talk in February. Wall to wall Patriots off-season talk. As we become ever less intelligent, football becomes more and more the only sport that produces a cry of "Is good!" from out of our drooling mouths.

Joe Burrow is considerably older than I think everyone believes him to be. Am I the only person who knows this guy's age? Because everyone else talks about him like he's twenty-five. This will be his age thirty season coming up. I believe most people would be shocked by that and think I have it wrong.

Jarren Duran has always been thought of as a "kid," in part because he's so immature, but he's one of those guys who will be a child at fifty-seven. Sure, that's most guys. But he's a guy you don't know that you see it with both on the field and with his comments. He is going into his age twenty-nine season.

Unless they got really hot, the Florida Panthers aren't making the playoffs, which would be a pathetic ending to their run, and I hope it happens. When you win multiple Cups in a row, you need to have your title defense end in the playoffs, or that's a huge black mark to me.

The Celtics hung 148 points on the Nets last night. No Celtic had 30 points. Rare to see that many points and have that be the case.

BC men's hockey lost to BU at Agganis last night and are right back on the bubble as to making the NCAA tournament. And right after BC finally got back into the top ten.

I thought maybe I'd try and go to a BC men's basketball game today, but they're playing this afternoon in the Miami. Was watching them play Wake Forest on TV the other day at Conte. There was hardly anyone there. Tickets must be cheap--I'm thinking like ten bucks--and I haven't gone in a few years. They probably only have like one home game left but I'll take a peek at the schedule.

I've written for years in these pages about how Jeremy Swayman and Charlie MacAvoy sicken me as players and as people. I told you. How do you do something like march in a Pride parade in Boston and then have this big, beaming smile on your face as you're about to shake Donald Trump's hand after you chose to go to the White House? Because Charlie MacAvoy did both, and I think it's pretty obvious that ethically the two are mutually exclusive, unless you're a hypocrite, a fraud, and an idiot to boot.

I think the Olympics mean nothing and that NHL players have no business playing in them. They're just exhibition games. Winning doesn't mean anything. You end up with two All-Star teams that are trying hard. But that's all it is. Then a bunch of players get hurt and don't return to their normal jobs and that changes the real season. To me, it's just stupid. It doesn't mean much to the expert hockey historian and is barely worth bringing up after the fact, despite what the hockey "fans" who either watch hockey once every four years or are mouth-breathing modern day Cro-Magnons who need to live vicariously through men thirty years their junior think.

The World Juniors are a more compelling tournament. Better reason to watch, too, because you see how future NHL players stack up against other future NHL players.

I haven't written about what went down on the men's side of the Olympics in hockey here because I've been too disgusted on account of what followed after. I was going to have this separate entry about the on-ice aspects, but I don't think I'll do that. I may refer back to some of that in the context of other things I'm writing about.

I will say that if a game matters, you don't want Connor McDavid on your team. Selfish player, a loser player.

You see this with more athletes now, how they obsess about their legacy. How they look. Their brand, but the legacy version. Jayson Tatum is this way, which is why he's hesitant about coming back. He could help his team, but he might not be the player he wishes to be, and he would rather not have a diminished version of himself feature as a line in the official record of his career, rather than aid his team while not at his best in getting to the NBA Finals.

McDavid wants to win. He doesn't really care about his team winning. It's a him thing for him. That's why he tried to score some glorious goal by taking on multiple defenders at once all on his lonesome, ultimately helping his team to lose by being a selfish prick.

A grossly overrated player. Doesn't score enough goals, either, for someone who is supposed to be this hockey Messiah everyone holds him up as. He isn't. He's kind of like Mike Trout. Better, but still like Mike Trout. McDavid will never be anywhere near hockey's Big Four of Gretzky, Orr, Howe, Lemieux. I'll save more of this, though, for an entry on here about what others would consider my most controversial views on sports, which I've had in mind for a while now.

Wemby could be the NBA MVP. The 65-game rule means that the best players won't be in the running for the MVP this year. Wemby is becoming one of the best players. But Jaylen Brown could win the award, and he's not one of the best players. It's interesting how your scoring can go up when the number one option is out and you're the new number one. Brown has had a nice year, but that's a factor. It's like how someone has to average twenty point a game on bad teams, but this is the better team version, this bump. A certain amount of points will be scored. So then it's about this redistribution effect. Trickle down scoring, but more like trickle up, so to speak.

I have been more into this Celtics season than the Patriots season that just passed.

The ball-and-strikes challenge component to baseball is really going to suck this year. MLB finally figures out its pace of play problem and then it adds this idiocy, which will create lag, add time, and disrupt flow. It's so arrogant, too. And anti-human. Like, these games are so important that humans, with the chance of human error, can't freely adjudicate that thing that thing--pitches, I mean--that are so common that there are like 300 of them in a game?

It's not like there's the one pitch and it determines all and lives are at stake. And we have to cede over everything to machines? Art, writing, our very souls, and even the officiating of children's games? Because this is a child's game. It's a game. A game. Where are our priorities? Where are our brains? They're going, going, gone.

I saw a video the other day of Jack Hughes with the Devils. There was no sound and the camera was at a low angle, so you mostly saw his lower half and the ice surface. He was cruising around near the blue line, like he was out for a leisurely Sunday skate, doing some figure eights. I thought, oh, must be warm-ups. Then an opponent swoops in, steals the puck, covers the short distance to the goal, and beats the goalie with Hughes not even giving chase.

I was dumbstruck. It's been a while since I've seen a hockey player dog it like that. Guy was in his own fucking world twirling about. Sometimes you'll see that kind of thing in baseball. Manny Ramirez would jog slower than some people walk after a ball that reached the fence in some game tied in the eighth. More of a baseball thing, though. The player who decides not to run at all to first base on a presumed double play. It's like this idiot was day dreaming about his "Golden Goal." It was a wrist shot in a prime scoring spot in an exhibition game.

That's the thing, too, about these players and the Olympics, and I've said this repeatedly about Charlie McAvoy. They care more about those exhibition games than they do their jobs and the teams they play for. Look at the Panthers. You can't convince me that they didn't have guys who cared more about the Olympics than trying to win a third straight Cup.

Think about that. There should be no comparison. Three Cups in a row? That's a big deal. That's a history books deal. The Olympics aren't. Not as what they are now hockey-wise. It's basically the same thing as last year's ridiculous Four Nations tournament. Or, what, you think France and Germany had a shot? France and Germany are the like the Northeastern of this type of deal where it's the Huskies versus the Red Sox in spring training.

Barring a surprise, it was going to be USA and Canada for the gold. It's just an All-Star game with effort, no more than that. You can be someone without a clue who knows nothing about the sport, history, and the sport's history, and talk out of your ass like it's the biggest deal in fifty years, but that's just ignorance. You can want it to be this thing it isn't, but that simple speaks to the needs of someone who has little in their life and has to try and live through others and other things regardless of what those things actually are.

I don't even consider men's Olympic hockey men's Olympic hockey now. The thing it was before isn't what it is now. They're different things wearing some of the same clothes. You can put a dress over a fire hydrant or a person. Same idea. Doesn't mean a fire hydrant and a person are the same thing. It's like having two Dream Teams, to borrow the basketball term, instead of one. You put them in a tournament, and they'll likely meet up in the championship game. These Dream Teams of players who are millionaires many times over.

You think that's the Olympics? That's the Olympic spirit? How is it different than an All-Star game except the players are invested? Because some other teams serve as speed bumps along the way? What does Canada beating France 10-2 mean? The match-up is just a formality. Same deal with the basketball Dream Teams. Yes, there are teams that can knock you off, but again, if that happens, that's a surprise.

This is shoehorned. Forced. Fake. Then, because people are so radically, aggressively stupid, you have slobs saying, "It's literally the biggest victory in forty-six years in all of hockey," except they're usually too stupid to even get the math right or know that it's 1980 they're trying to reference, because they don't know what year the whole Miracle on Ice thing happened. The whole idea is contrived. The tournament is contrived. As presently constituted. Then, it's just people saying shit that they want to say, for, as usual, other reasons. Other reasons than reality, I mean.

And what do you think people know about history? Do you think they know where the country was in 1980? What the Cold War situation was? The price of gas? The economy? The hostage situation? People don't know when World War II was, man. They don't know who was president during the Vietnam war. They don't know who gave the go-ahead to drop the atomic bombs. They don't know when the Civil War was. Honestly, how many people do you think you'd need to go up to on the street before you could find a single person who could correctly answer you over what years the Civil War happened? You'd be out there for days. Weeks. Months. Unless you got lucky and ran into a history teacher or professor. But anyone else?

But someone's going to situate something that happens now in correct historical context?

The hell they are. You have a better chance of making a Weeble fall over.

It's not as significant, but sports history works in much the same way. You need to know. Understand context, motivation, the deal, the set-up, the times, the intent. The intent here is to get USA and Canada in a gold medal game. To have stars versus stars. Then you trump it up like it's this thing it isn't, for glory and all of that bullshit. It's not real. It's a forced creation, and people are dumb. They also live vicariously through others and the parasocial dominates our idiotic, soulless world of perpetual contrivance and nullity. People living lives without any purpose, going through the motions until death without any vision, any questing spirit, any individuality.

That's why these games--and I'm not just talking the Olympics now, but all sports viewing--means so much to people. Which isn't even truly meaning anything to them. Negative space is taken as space when it's all there is in your life and to you. And you can't and don't think. You can't find substance. You don't even look. You plop down, you stuff your face, you watch, and you live vicariously. Then you say and post things like, "That's my captain!" talking about Auston Matthews. You're pathetic if that's who you are. Your captain? He's your captain? You're a morbidly obese middle aged man on a couch. Or whatever you are. He's your captain?

You have to grow up and be a person. Get an identity and some self-respect and some purpose. See things clearer. For what they are. Not what you want them to be or feel like you need them to be. Or just say that they are, because hey, why the hell not? Who's stopping you when nobody knows? It's like blasting pucks into an open net, no one else out there, and you thinking it's you knocking off the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens single-handedly.