skip to main |
skip to sidebar
It certainly appears that this year's defense of the Stanley Cup will be nothing like the 2010-11 season in which the Blackhawks had to creep in after grabbing the eighth and final spot in the Western Conference. Unlike the fire sale that followed the 2010 Cup win, this year's team has been kept largely intact and is storming through the NHL 41 games into this season. Consider that Chicago has scored five or more goals in nearly half of their games this season.
Name a player on this team and chances are good that he is having a solid campaign thus far. When a waiter at a local restaurant saw my Blackhawks cap during a recent visit, he asked who my favorite player was. It had been a while since I'd been asked this and I had to think about it. Based upon the very Norris Trophy-worthy season he's having thus far, my reply was Duncan Keith. But it could have just as easily been Patrick Kane. Or Patrick Sharp. Hell, why not Brandon Saad?
Blah blah blah. In short, there isn't a whole helluva lot that 'Hawks fans shouldn't feel good about right now. The champs are playing like the best team in the league, and it once again remains very hard to imagine that any team is going to be able wo win a seven-game series against Chicago come April. If there is one worry, it is undoubtedly the penalty kill that currently ranks among the league's worst after going on an amazing streak of success in last year's playoffs. Then again, with the team scoring as often as it is right now, simply avoiding stupid penalties would seemingly be the easiest fix to that, ahem, "problem."
Oh, and then there's the whole three-week interruption we're about to go through for what I hope and fervently pray is the final NHL player participation in the Winter Olympics. In addition to the fatigue concerns and how the sudden time out of the country will affect the roll the Blackhawks have been on, there is as alawys just the overwhelming fear of a star player sustaining an injury. Sure, Chicago has more than enough contributors right now to possibly make up for the inevitable player loss or two that will happen between now and the playoffs, but I'd still prefer safe than sorry. And it's hard to ignore the fact that the last time there was a mid-season Olympics break, the 'Hawks won the Cup that year.
I see no point in lying. I attempted to listen to the Bulls game last night, but only made it about two quarters in before I decided to watch TV instead. (This, for the record.) OK, I lasted less than two periods.
This is likely to be the story for the remainder of the season. Oh, sure. The Bulls could be hard-working and grindy enough to make the playoffs in an appalling Eastern Conference, but this season's hopes for any sort of deep playoff run were vanquished as soon as Derrick Rose—fresh off missing an entire season—went down a mere 10 games into this one.
The Bulls quickly announced Rose would be out for the season. No playoffs, no nothing. Year over. End of story. Commence talking about the possible draft pick even though management will have to publicly dismiss any discussion about possible benefits of tanking.
It seemed we would get through another painfully disappointing regular season, but things were considerably worsened when Rose talked about a possible return if the "situation is right" in his first public comments.
*SIGH*
Which means for the rest of the year, the media is going to be obligated to have headlines just like these ones. I'm casting my vote early: He won't be back for the playoffs and I'm not holding out any hope for the team even he does. Like many of us thought, this year appears destined to come down to Miami and Indiana in the East, with the rest of the field being a sideshow.
While not yet technically eliminated from the playoffs, it seems to be a safer assumption that this first season of the Trestman era will end immediately after Week 17. For me, it's more or less what I expected coming into this year, although the loss to the Vikings in Minnesota that concluded this most recent quarter of the season was more discouraging than anything I could have imagined. Much of the week on Chicago sports radio has been spent calling to question the logic of attempting a 47-yard field goal on second down in overtime. Indeed, for a guy who has seemingly been as smart and analytically aware as Marc Trestman has seemed to be all year long, his defense of the decision left a lot to be desired. Then again, perhaps a poor defense is the best summary of this Bears season.
The team continues to deal with a set of highly consequential injuries to arguably two of its most important players on the two sides of the ball in Cutler on offense and Briggs on defense. There's been plenty of bright spots on the offense this year (for once), what with Matt Forte's continuing efficiency, Alshon Jeffery breaking out, and Martellus Bennett being a tight end who can actually, you know, catch. Oh, and that McCown guy's been pretty effective too. The defense, however, is even more dreadful than my initial fears about depth led me to fear they would be. Never in my lifetime can I recall Chicago having a league worst run defense.
I don't doubt that the team will continue to battle in these final four games, what with the North being similarly pathetic and underwhelming. Oh, and Jay Cutler has a payday coming up.
There's better pictures out there of the championship baaner ceremony, but few of them fit very well in the quarterly graphic. So there ya go. (You can go here to watch the ceremony, or get a better range of images here.)
When the NHL dropped the puck on this 2013-14 season, it seemed to come up on a lot of people sooner than usual. That was partly because we were coming off a shortened season that didn't begin until January last time around and partly because this season did start a little sooner than usual thanks to the three-week interruption we'll get courtesy of the Homophobic Hockey Winter Olympics over on the other side of the planet.
So whereas I was quite the dedicated fan last year who listened to or watched every single 'Hawks game, this season's competing with playoff baseball and regular season NFL as well as us finally cutting the cord with cable has ultimately seen me only pay passing attention to the developments of games I get in the form of various push notifications on my cell phone. And the one thing that has been an annoying constant thus far this season is being informed that Chicago will be up 2-0 or 3-0, but then later that evening I will be told to tune in because the game is tied and is going to overtime. Sure, the Blackhawks end up winning a majority of these contests (I'm a little stunned to read that the 'Hawks are 1.000 when leading after one and .917 when leading after two, but are 3-4 in overtime), but the defense late in games is my foremost concern.
Some of that has to do with goaltending issues (possibly because of new equipment?), largely because Nikolai Khabibulin thus far has not shown any signs of being anywhere near the backup that Ray Emery was last year. However, another aspect concerns a penalty kill that has essentially been the complete opposite of the dominance showcased last year. Still, none of these are issues that cannot be corrected.
And it's hard to complain too much when Chicago sits atop the division standings.
Even during the conclusion to the last quarter of the season, there were signs that this year's Bears defense was going to be one that was going to struggle. Still, it was hard for me to imagine that Chicgao's D would be as awful as it has been, and things only got worse this past quarter when Lance Briggs became the latest player to sustain an injury. Oh, and Jay Cutler went down too.
I was preparing to search for a very frumpy-looking Marc Trestman photo to use for this quarter's graphic after the team suffered a convincing loss to New Orleans, came up with on the losing end of a shootout with the woeful Washington Redskins, and barely beat a then-winless New York Giants. Then suddenly, lo and behold, this past Monday night in a game that the rival Packers were supposed to basically have wrapped up by the end of the first half, an incredible thing happened: Green Bay's star quarterback was not only sacked, not only suffered an injury that forced him from the game, not only will miss several weeks of action, but all of this was the result of a play by much-maligned first round draft pick Shea McClellin.
Not only did the Bears pull off a stunning upset on Monday night to stay above .500, but Chicago now sits in a three-way tie for first place. With Jay Cutler expected to return in a matter of weeks, the playoffs still seem like a very real possibility for many fans. Perhaps that's fair, but I say slow down. After all, the Lions were my Super Bowl pick. Still, there is one Wild Card out there.
When a Nationals-Tigers World Series was more or less the consensus pick at the beginning of this season, I said in my predictions that it reminded me of 2011. I once again brought up a 2011 reference when the Braves concluded their third quarter. And so at year end, who should happen to win the whole thing? The team I picked to win it all in 2011, of course.
As I mentioned before, I was far from being the only person who didn't have either of these teams in the Fall Classic, seeing as none of the 63 "experts" recorded by PunditTracker had Boston or St. Louis. In fact, I was like most in relegating Boston to the basement of the American League East, so the fact that the Red Sox instead ended up winning it all is quite incredible. And while I wasn't really rooting for either one of these teams, I certainly did take some joy in knowing how miserable the loss made Cardinals fans. Thanks to the Baseball's Best Fans Twitter, we got to see every single racist, homophobic and plainly insensitive tweet from the St. Louis faithful, many of which referenced the Boston Marathon bombings (one particular lowlife actually got arrested). So I can wholeheartedly endorse the city finally getting to savor a championship, you know, considering the additional pain residents endured this past summer.
My skepticism about the Braves heading into this postseason appears to have been justified. Sure, I was cheering for the thought of a possible Game 5 in Atlanta during what turned out to be the final game of the year in Los Angeles, but it was clear I had a bad feeling even when the Bravos were holding a lead going into the bottom of the eighth inning. Witness this tweet as Juan Uribe came to the plate with a man on:
Sure enough, you know how that turned out:
And with that, the Braves suffered yet another immediate exit from the playoffs, leading to immediate criticism that Fredi Gonzalez should have brought in Craig Kimbrel for a two-inning save and that David Carpenter was somehow representative of a bullpen that couldn't be trusted. Hindsight, as the old saying goes, is always 20/20. Truth be told, there's no guarantee Kimbrel would have been able to get six outs instead of three, and Carpenter had earned his opportunity to be entrusted with the eighth inning opportunity.
And beyond the inevitable letdown of another first-round ouster, there appears to be the additional fact that just like we said goodbye to Chipper last year and Bobby two years before that, it seems likely that we may have seen Brian McCann in an Atlanta uniform for the last time too. While the Braves catcher made innumerable contributions to the team over the year and I suspected he would step up to become the new team leader, McCann instead this year became more responsible for helping Atlanta earn the reputation of the "baseball police" in MLB. Hopefully next year will provide more reasons for the team to be more like those clubs accused of celebrating too much, you know, the ones that actually advance in the playoffs.
When I made my NBA predictions a year ago, the Miami Heat were more or less already presumed 2013 NBA Champions. They were wire-to-wire frontrunners, and despite a couple close calls in the playoffs, they inevitably emerged as repeat champions. It makes perfect sense that they would begin this year again as the intital favorite to possible threepeat.
I was initially going to subtitle this year's picks, "Who Will The Heat Beat This Year?" But truth be told, there's just so many things yet to be determined this year. Any number of rosters could look completely different by year's end. In addition to the fact that LeBron James is set to once again become a free agent once the season concludes, there will also be an NBA Draft class that is sure to make teams outside the playoff picture consider trading away assets to stockpile more picks. And while a threpeat isn't unheard of in the NBA, four consecutive Finals appearances is rather rare.
In addition to the usual plethora of new faces in new places, there's questions about whether Pau Gasol ends the year as a Laker. What about Rajon Rondo? DeMarcus Cousins? A whole number of players could be likely to be moved, and a whole number of teams thinking they're only one piece away from contending—especially in the Western Conference—means that whatever I type now, I'm incredibly likely to have a completely different feeling come April about which team hoists the Larry O'Brien in June.
I could really go balls out and predict who's going to end up where based on trades that haven't happened, but for now, this year's predictions represent my opinion based on the rosters as presently constructed. Which is to say that I'm nowhere near as confident as I might've been, say, last year.
Aside from one series and a couple of games, my postseason picks this year have been fairly right on. Of course, seeing as we've wound up with the two best teams in baseball in this year's Fall Classic, it's not as though I really took any tremendous risks along the way. Additionally, I'm sure to note in my year-end Final Thoughts post that this year's conclusion is pretty far off from my original predictions before this season began. Then again, it looks like this was a series that absolutely no pundit saw coming at that point either.
As this season draws to a close, we're also left with a World Series that many fans simply have zero rooting interest in. As Will Leitch put it, many fans will be "cheering for the meteor." As Leitch also noted, the winner of this series will also be the first team to win three championships this century. Furthermore, it will also mean that these two teams have won half of the World Series titles over the past decade. So a lot of people can be forgiven for being tired of seeing either one of these stadiums of red-clad fans.
While I was tempted to create a graphic using some of the most egregious examples of obnoxious fandom from the Red Sox or the Cardinals, the truth is that we have been treated to some really good baseball in this year's playoffs and I'm looking forward to what should probably be a thrilling conclusion.
My strategy of picking against my rooting interest proved to be fairly accurate, as I nailed not only the winners of three of the four series in the last round but the exact number of games too. My only miss was Oakland, a team that by now appears to be jockeying with my beloved Braves for postseason infutility. The final thoughts on this once again disappointing Atlanta season are forthcoming down the line, probably after I return from the vacation next weekend.
The downside to having as many teams I'm by no means a fan of advance last round means that, of course, my wife may finally have a point when breaking out the annual "You don't even like these teams" argument when I have any sports playoffs on TV. Still, I'm not about to tell her that and I'm more than likely still going to make playoff baseball appointment viewing since we are still given two fairly good matchups.
As you can tell by another vanilla graphic for this post, I still don't have the time to construct a more creative image to accompany this post—not that I've necessarily got any particularly compelling ideas dreamed up anyway. Unfortunately for me, these "final four" remaining teams are all quite familiar faces—well, logos, at least. Still, only one's going to be called champions this year, and damned if I'm not still interested to find out which club that will be. Perhaps I'll have developed a more passionate rooting interest by the time I'm posting my World Series picks.
