While everyone wasn't paying attention...

Jason Bay and Kevin Youklis are good as baseball...

Not so good? Lakers Trolls on the Boston.com board dreaming up the Bulls in 5. Guess again!

I live!!!!

Yes, I am alive! Not even the the recovering alcoholics the NBA employs as officials could get rid of me! Not even the worst season of PC hockey in 30 years could finish the job. I just have one thing to say:

Au revoir, les enfants!

Chad Finn 1 WEEI 0

Another shocking upset from the Globe's OT

The only thing that sucks more than WEEI's recent output is the comments defending the station. "Hey Chad, go listen to NPR!" Is that the best you can do? I will gladly take NPR over 3/4's of the stations in this town.

(I didn't think much of the OT page originally, but we might actually be on the same page. Scary, eh?)

Delicious delicious crow...

Pittsburgh (1) 73
Providence 81

Eating crow never tasted so good.

(yes, I am alive. Been very busy lately.)

Rant of the Week: Obsession?

One thing you pick up on really quick if you sit anywhere near the Dog Pound at Agganis Arena is how much the BU kids really don't like BC. While no one in Hockey East really likes the Eagles, I can't think of another fan base that is this specific. PC fans as a rule do not like UCONN, Syracuse, or Georgetown in basketball. But we don't add "Huskies suck" to our chants like BU fans do to BC. The college kids in scarlet not alone: "Clarkson still sucks" at RPI and SLU and "Tech still sucks" at NMU. And of course, we have the endlessly insipid "Yankees suck" merchandising spree outside Fenway Park. But the Grandfather of all mutual antagonism is Scotland's Glasgow derby which has religious as well as sporting dimensions. In one form or another, obsession is rampant in sports.

And let's be honest with ourselves: it gets a little silly. Here's some examples of obsession getting well out of hand.

-In the Globe sports page, why are there Lakers fans on the Celtics blog? The two teams play each other twice all year. It doesn't make sense. It also makes little sense for the aforementioned trolls to continuously put down the Celtics as "irrelevant" when they seem to spend more time commenting on the blog than actual Celtics fans. I feel bad for the people who write these blogs. Some good reporting is getting muddied by garbage.

-I've mentioned this before, but the Providence Journal's message board is dominated by a handful of URI fans who seem more interested in public financing for the Dunkin' Donuts Center than they are in what the Rhody basketball team is doing. I'm not sure why they begrudge the Providence Bruins a chance to play in improved facilities just so they can screw over PC basketball. Seems kind of petty to me.

-This one really gets me: Start with a ridiculously prejudiced conceit (the Steelers are a dirty team). Add in a fan base that has never been able to cope with the idea of losing to the Patriots in not one, but two AFC title games. Then add a dash of ESPN fueled conspiracy theories that are exceeded in lameness only by the idea of Elvis still being alive. You would come up with this.
Hoo boy. The obsession here is multifaceted and quite insane. On both sides. I don't have a problem with Mr. Molori's writing (he's been giving props to the Emmy Award winning John Carchedi for years). But writing about how dirty the Steelers are? Maybe he thought his blog needed some web traffic. And it worked too well.
Steelers fans come across just as poorly as Mr. Molori. Actually, they come off worse because they just make the same moronic points over and over again. Sad. Very sad all the way around.

So I guess the lesson here is to be really really careful at how seriously you take these rivalries. Because if you go too far, you'll end up looking quite deranged and I'll make fun of you.

Random rants:
-Hey, with a seven game winning streak - punctuated by convincing results over the Suns and Magic - I believe the Celtics are no longer in "a rut". Now if only we can convince people that Stephan Marbury would not be a good pick up, we might get through this.

-Speaking of insanity, the Red Sox literally have no better options at catcher than Jason Variteck. And Mr. Variteck has no better option that the Red Sox - despite Satan Boras' delusional attempts to portray the opposite. So why the endless trade rumors on WEEI? Well, it's either that or whine about President Obama some more.

-Speaking of insane situations, the full scale rumble last Friday at Lawler (that just feels wrong. It will always be the Volpe Complex to me) that saw two BU players get injured, a parade of Merrimack players going to the penalty box, and Jackie Parker's angry post game diatribe about the refs not protecting his players has led to yet another half assed attempt to get Merrimack kicked out of the league. When are Hockey East fans going to give this up? The league isn't kicking anyone out. What might happen is that Merrimack might get sick and tired of finishing in the basement every year and drop hockey. And I'm sorry, that doesn't help anyone. Someone has to finish in last place. Umm, I hope not PC.

-Aside from Merrimack, is there any more depressing group of fans than Mainers? Even PC fans were convinced they could win ONE game. Despite a record that's much better than PC's, the Black Bears are "cursed" and need to get rid of Tim Whitehead post haste. Maine has been crappy for about a year and a half. PC has been stumbling in the dark wood for about 7 years. Yet we're the optimists. Go figure.

-Two shootouts for the Bruins this week are two too many.

-Hi Mark!

A tale of two sports teams

This week once again proves the difference between PC ice hockey and PC basketball.

PC hockey, all but given up for dead, picks up a goaltender (I'm still not sure how the NCAA allowed this to happen, but whatever), and proceeds to go on a 3-0-1 streak, getting improbable wins at BU and UMASS and grabbing a tie at the Graveyard of the Skating Goons, Alfond Arena - all of this despite taking a crazy amount of penalties, and being soundly outplayed in most of these games.

PC basketball, with a good record and an undefeated record in the Big East, travels to Georgetown (one of the three or four places in this conference where this team never gets a win) and gets physically man handled by the Hoyas, losing by seven even after a late run cuts the lead to one. They then proceed to go home and play another ranked team - Marquette - where they play the game of their lives for 30 minutes. And then revert to the awful form that lost them the Georgetown game. They lose again.

This is the difference between PC ice hockey and PC basketball. PC ice hockey overachieves. PC basketball under achieves.

Then the calender turns to March and they both lose.

I love these teams, but God (Shammgod?) help me...

Rant of the Week: Obfuscation and you

Obfustate: verb 1. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand:

One thing I noticed about the Friars are their near miraculous three game winning is that each team that lost to PC managed to give the Friars credit for their play without failing to criticize their own team. To me, this seemed like a fair and honest assessment - there's two reasons your team loses a game. The first is that they were outplayed. And the second is that your team failed to do what they were supposed to. To me, this is how most conversations about sporting events should be.

Sadly, this is not the case. It seems that in the vast majority of cases, a fan of a losing team will find some reason(usually idiotic) to not feel bad about losing the game. The most common excuse for losing is that the officials were "out to get you". I've made this excuse myself about 1,000 times. I'm only human. And sometimes, bad officiating seems to get out of hand. But looking at the situation rationally, I don't think the officials are out to get any team I root for. They're human, and they certainly do make mistakes. But unless David Stern really REALLY wants your team to lose (at least 30 sets of NBA fans should agree with me here) that's not a valid excuse. If the officials are bad, it usually affects both teams equally.

But the obfuscation people use to make themselves feel better that really gets me is the issue of "class". It's a fairly transparent ruse, but some people, in order to make themselves feel better for rooting for a team that lost will attack the players and other fans for being "classless". How pathetic can you get?

The purpose of sports is to win within the confines of the rules of the game. It is not to impress other people with your class. That has nothing to do with sports. While it would be nice if everyone could comport themselves like a reasonable human being, there are idiots out there who don't. And while these people should be criticized, it does not - I repeat - it DOES NOT suddenly mean that you're the better team because your team has more class. It just means that you're a classy loser. Hey, there's nothing wrong with losing a game. It's just a game, after all. And most of us will see more losses that wins. That's life.

I realize I have blogged about this a few times before. The overblown Spygate nonsense was obfuscation to make people feel better about losing to the Patriots. The Knicks tried to obfuscate losing to the Celtics by kvetching about "trash talk". And the Canadiens insane preoccupation with beating up Milan Luccic was a handy distraction, but was really much ado about nothing. But I just thought I should re-iterate that when you lose and you start complaining about class and so and so being a "dirty" player it's pretty obvious that you're trying to take the focus off of losing.

Ultimately, if your team loses, they lose. Obfuscating the issue by bringing class into it does nothing but make you look sad. Don't do it. Give credit to the teams who beat you and ignore the fools who attempt to change the subject when you beat them.

Random Rant:
-Only one this week. Hi Mark! Keep those comments coming!