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Oh, right. Today's Opening Day. You know, baseball predictions. Remember how I used to lay out the little hats and everything when making these annual predictions? Yeah, well I don't feel compelled to do that again (yet).
Instead, seeing as I'm never right when it comes to Major League Baseball, I'll just pick the teams I'll be actively rooting against all year long to play in this year's World Series with the Boston Red Sox beating the Los Angeles Dodgers. Both teams will win their respective divisions, with the other division winners being the Chicago Cubs, Washington Nationals, Cleveland Indians, and Houston Astros. The Wild Card teams will be the Toronto Blue Jays, Seattle Mariners, San Francisco Giants, and ... oh, let's say the Miami Marlins.
Fear not, hockey and basketball playoff predictions (with fun graphics!) are not far away.
Alas, it appears my pre-season prediction of a Patriots-Packers Super Bowl, while close, was not meant to be. Got one of two right last weekend, bringing me to 6-4 for the playoffs and making this final prediction relatively meaningless. I mean, if you don't count the fact that I picked the Patriots to win it all at the beginning of the year. Again.
The past year in the sporting world has seem some unlikely and historically long-suffering franchises finally win championships. So if you're buying into whatever worked for the Cleveland Cavaliers and Chicago Cubs working here, then the Atlanta Falcons are about to win their first title. That's certainly what I'm rooting for. Do I think that's what will actually happen though?
I've always had some kind of unexplained soft spot for pro sports teams in Atlanta. For the most part, it's just the Braves thanks to my childhood admiration of Hank Aaron and Dale Murphy. But I always rooted for the Falcons when they weren't playing the Bears and I remember doing the "Dirty Bird" with friends when the team last got to the Super Bowl what feels like just a few years ago but was actually nearly two decades.
We've been treated to what, one competitive game in these playoffs? The NFL is overdue for a barn-burner. Let's hope this season ends on a high note.
Got three of my four picks last weekend right, bringing my playoff prediction record to 5-3. Perhaps more amazingly to me, it also makes me look smart in the sense that three of the four teams I had in this round of conference championships back when I made my predictions for the season in September actually got this far. The only question now, of course, is whether I stick to my guns.
At this point, I really don't see any reason not to. In all honesty, this season is pretty much at risk of playing out exactly as I expected (and feared, to some degree). Of course, we saw unlikely underdog comebacks (Cleveland Cavaliers) and historic curses being broken (Chicago Cubs) in 2016, so there's still some small hope that maybe we'll get a couple more surprises.
It's not completely unrealistic, but the NFL has to be salivating at the prospect of two weeks of buildup to a Brady-Rodgers meeting in Super Bowl LI. That's not to say these outcomes will be rigged, as I'm guessing we'll get at least one (hopefully) two close games this weekend. If nothing else, there should be a whole lot of scoring. Still, there's almost a sense that a New England-Green Bay rematch is preordained.
Continue reading, I guess, if you want to see me try to talk myself out of that conclusion.
So I got half of my picks last weekend right, and damned if those games didn't live up to the subtitle of my post. Four games and not one offered a compelling finish.
The small upside for this observer is that three of my originally predicted final four teams are still alive as we get ready for the league to indeed reduce the remaining teams to that number. I'm not sure that getting three of the four or both Super Bowl participants or that game's winner is really worth anything since I don't gamble, but it'll at least make me feel somewhat better about my pre-season predictive abilities now that I've cut back on the amount of time I invest in such posts.
Perhaps what baffled me the most about anything last weekend is that the tournament bracket I originally downloaded indeed needed to be adjusted but shouldn't have required as much work. All of the home teams won last weekend. Why wasn't that assumed and why wasn't the default lowest-remaining seed after such outcomes closer to the top seed's bracket? It makes no sense to me.
Anyway, I've got much higher hopes for the competitiveness in this weekend's games.
Well, looking back on my shorter predictions for the year, it looks like I got five of the eight division winners right and had seven of the 12 playoff teams correct. Three of my final four and both of my Super Bowl teams are still alive, so there's that.
Do I stick with that Super Bowl pick though? That's actually a tougher questions. It's still very much a feasible pick, although the path for my predicted NFC winner is going to be far tougher than the one for my predicted AFC winner. And as usual, I'm pretty much hoping I'm wrong because God, the last thing I need is another Patriots title or the possibility of another Packers championship. Dear God, give us fresh blood, NFL.
This weekend's round of games does very little to compel interest here. Aside from the last game of the weekend in Green Bay, most of the other three contests appears to be either forgone conclusions or simply uninteresting matchups.
This season has not exactly provided me with a lot to root for, what with the Bears finishing with the worst record they've ever had since the league expanded to a 16-game schedule. Cowboys fans have reintroduced themselves as being worthy of consideration for most annoying fans in the sport of football, so a Super Bowl against the Patriots would just be filled with two weeks of awful fans.
Even the underdogs I'd be tempted to root for have seen their chances dramatically hampered by injuries or unfortunate luck. Both the Raiders and the Dolphins lost their starting QBs. The Texans remain a mess at that same position. Perhaps there's some hope for the Chiefs and Falcons, but I remain somewhat skeptical that either team is going to suddenly do better than the letdowns we've come to expect both clubs to deliver.
Then again, 2016 gave us a Cubs World Series and an NBA title in Cleveland. So if the pattern holds true, then maybe there is some hope that we're about to be in store for something special. We can only hope.
Got one of my two picks in the last round right, so this last prediction determines whether I finish with a record over .500 for the playoffs. I have no complaints about either of the two teams we ended up with, so I'm mostly just grateful that I won't be spending the next week aggressively rooting against one club or the other.
Both teams have had pretty compelling postseason runs, what with Cleveland's bullpen dominating the American League and the young Cubs stars shining and seemingly oblivious to the omens of the club's past failures. In Francona and Maddon, we're also likely to get some very entertaining strategies employed throughout the series.
Of course, the one thing that we're going to be bludgeoned to death with is the fact that neither of these teams has won a World Series in roughly 5,000 years. I might be a bit off with that figure, but you get the idea.
There will indeed be a level of celebration in one of these cities that hasn't been seen in some time. Well, since June in Cleveland's case. On paper, this one has the potential to be a classic.
Well, I got only one of my four predicted winners in the division series correct, and the only series that went five games was the only one I did not predict to go five games. So after nailing the wild card round, I'm now 3-3 in predictions this postseason.
I think it's safe to say that my predictions are often based on a rooting interest. I picked Orlando to beat the Lakers in the NBA Finals a few years ago, for Christ's sake. That said, it was something of a relief to me to be wrong about a couple of the series in the last round—notably the idea of another San Francisco or Boston championship did not particularly excite me.
We're probably going to now hear a lot about how fans for the four remaining teams are, to some degree, "long-suffering." Since I've seen half of these teams win title in my lifetime (in the case of the Blue Jays, more than once), I think the droughts for the other two clubs are far more significant. So if nothing else, I should be grateful that I won't have to see the Red Sox or the Giants celebrating on a field again in a few weeks (all this coming from a guy who is actively hoping that the Chicago Blackhawks can raise the Stanley Cup for the fourth time in eight years next June, so who am I crapping?).
I got the winners of both of the Wild Card games correct, but I'm not entering this round of the playoffs with any additional confidence—even though we have the exact matchups in the National League that I predicted before the season began. So I'm sitting here now wondering how committed I should remain to all of my predictions, seeing as three of my "final four" teams are still alive.
On a personal note, I'm happy that thus far, the wife's decision to cut the cord in our home hasn't made it completely impossible to follow the baseball playoffs. So thank you for that, internet.
Each one of the four upcoming series has their own fascinating elements, although I think a lot of attention is already being given to the potential intensity between the Blue Jays and Rangers after last year's meeting and what happened the last time they met this season. Oh, and I guess the Cubs potentially winning a World Series might be kind of a big deal. And yet another title for Boston would be quite an achievement.
Anyway, let's see if I stick to my guns or if I'm having some second thoughts about what I said in April.
Looking back at my predictions from the beginning of the year, I guess I should have known the popular Astros pick was going to falter. But, hey, my predicted world champion is still alive! Actually, most of my National League playoff bracket looks pretty good (and even St. Louis only barely missed out), while the American League ... not so much.
Overall, I had a dozen out of the 30 teams' final standings correct, which doesn't sound terribly impressive but I'm willing to bet is probably better than I've done in this sport in most recent years (I'd go back to look up and compare, but as I recently noted, I'm waiting until I'm a really, really old man to do that one day). I still have the nagging suspicion that my initial beliefs about what team wins it all this year could very well be correct, but I'm similarly worried that either the Red Sox (who've already won three titles this century) or the Dodgers (who I simply loathe for no real reason) could end up as champions.
Of course, the Cubs finished the regular season with the best record, and my family's little trip to Chicago at the end of October may end up coinciding with possible World Series games at Wrigley Field. That could be quite a weekend, but the truth remains that at the moment, there's 10 teams that still have chances and, if nothing else, baseball has taught us that a team that gets hot at the right time could very well end up winning it all, regardless of what they did in the regular season.
Two teams are going to be eliminated over the next two nights, so allow me to guess which pair is moving on.
Similar to about a month ago when I was making my NFL "predictions," I'm once again finding it hard to muster the energy to upload and organize a bunch of logos as part of my full season of predicted finished for the teams of the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association (even though neither season begins for more than a week). So, once again, I'll be limiting my thoughts for both sports to just a few sentences.
We'll start with the NBA where there's not usually much in the way of surprises (although I must admit that Game 7 of last year's Finals was one of if not the best deciding title game of any sport I've ever seen). I'll go with the presumable masses picking the Golden State Warriors to regain the Larry O'Brien Trophy, presumably beating the Cleveland Cavaliers. I think both of those teams will win their respective divisions, with Miami, Boston, San Antonio, and Minnesota also winning divisions. The remaining playoff teams will be the Clippers, Thunder, Trail Blazers, Pelicans, and Jazz in the West, and the Raptors, Hawks, Bulls, Pistons, and Knicks in the East.
The NHL is much trickier, but I'm going to go with the Tampa Bay Lightning over the presumably very popular Nashville Predators in the 2017 Stanley Cup Final. While I think Tampa will win the Atlantic, I am going to say Minnesota wins the Central, Washington takes the Metropolitan, and Los Angeles takes the Pacific. The other playoff teams will be Chicago, St. Louis, San Jose, Anaheim, and Dallas in the West (so basically the same eight teams as last year—what could go wrong?), as well as Boston, Florida, Pittsburgh, Carolina, and both New York teams, the Rangers and the Islanders, in the East.
