Every day of the playoffs, we’ll get right to the point of the previous night’s action.
Boston ties Toronto: Fucking figures.
Dallas blanks Nashville to tie series at 2: Who even fucking cares?
Colorado goes 3-1 up on Calgary: Jesus fuckin’ christ!
In a very special installment of Live From The Five Hole, we join forces with Jay Zawaski and James Neveau from the Madhouse Chicago Hockey Podcast to bring you a lengthy, verbose, mostly coherent wrap of the the Hawks season that was, and a look ahead at the summer to come. As always, the podcast doesn’t require a subscription, and please give Jay and James a follow.
Game 1 Boxscore: Cubs 7 – Marlins 2
Game 2 Boxscore: Cubs 4 – Marlins 0
Game 3 Boxscore: Cubs 6 – Marlins 0
I suppose, if I were just taking the Cubs words at face value, the last game of this series would be the kind of one they referenced at the end of last year or in spring training this year as the ones that got away from them last season. Where they lost focus or didn’t quite close out the past couple seasons like they did in 2016. They’ve said it, but I’m not sure how much I buy it when you put together 95 wins with a banged-up roster. But whatever, if they say it they probably believe it to an extent. So the Cubs didn’t let up, didn’t check out against a team full of future gym teachers and possibly current squeegee-men. Cole Hamels certainly wasn’t in any giving mood, and the Cubs have their first series sweep of the year and are looking at being .500 with a series win against Arizona.
Let’s clean it up.
The Two Obs
-These are the kinds of trips through the rotation that the Cubs envisioned when this all started. Darvish still couldn’t quite there, as it should not take 96 pitches to get 17 outs against whatever is masquerading around as Marlins these days. But hey, it was only two runs. I don’t think I’m a big fan of him talking about maxing his velocity when he’s coming off an arm injury and what makes him special is the diversity of his pitches, but at this point I think we’re all just going to take the ride with him and be done with it.
-No such problems with Quintana and Hamels, who are as dialed in as it gets. Q spotted that change-up he’s been saying he wants to use more, though not as much as he probably will in the future. Hamels, being the savvy vet that he is, knew he could just pour everything into the strike zone and are this collection of extras to do their worst. Winner winner chicken dinner.
-The Cubs still haven’t gotten anything out of Bryant and Rizzo and are second in the NL in runs. Tell me why you’re paranoid again?
-While his signing was derided simply because it was the only one the Cubs made for the lineup this winter, Daniel Descalso is hell of an upgrade on Tommy La Stella so far. In fact, even if Ian Happ were to get hot I can’t quite figure out where he’d go right now anyway. And no, I don’t want to see him in center or right. Which means, as we thought all along, it might come down to a debate between him and Schwarber in left. But that’s not a problem for now.
-Contreras only had one hit today. What a bum.
-Please don’t make me start believing in David Bote. I’ve been here too many times.
Onwards…
Well that was fun, right? The first two games of this series featured some of the more timely hitting this club has done all year. Of course, by “timely hitting” I mean “Mashing Dongs Out Onto The Dan Ryan.” While the third game…well…we’ll get to that in a minute. Suffice it to say, it was anything but boring, especially with Professional Diva Joe West along for the ride.
Anyways- MOAR BULLETS
-The first game started out exactly like Ervin Santana’s last start. His fastball had the movement of Brent Seabrook chasing down an icing (SYNERGY), and was being clocked at a steaming 89-91 MPH. Pitches like that to major league hitters tend to fly a long way, and that’s exactly what happened. Dingers by Hunter “I’m Not Brian” Dozier, and Chris Ownings quickly put the Royals up 3-0, and a feeling of doom settled in the air. To my pleasant surprise, he pulled himself together, and pitched well enough after that to keep the Sox within striking distance.
-And strike they did, scratching out a couple runs thanks to a timely challenge at first base, and a Leury Garcia double. The Sox managed to give it back by having Manny Banuelos issue a lead off walk to Flash Hamilton who promptly beat a Wellington Castillo pitchout attempt that missed second base by what appeared to be 6 miles and ended up standing on 3rd. One sac fly later and the Sox were down again. Castillo didn’t let it get him down, as he took a Brad Boxberger 2 seamer opposite field for a 2 run shot, and the win after Alex Colome mowed down the Royals in the 9th.
-Game two featured a battle of the Lopez boys, as Reynaldo took the mound against Jorge in an attempt to get his ERA to a number that wasn’t cleanly divisible by 5. He actually pitched well enough, even though it looked like the wheels were near to falling off in the 2nd with a solo shot off the bat of The Duda. Much like Santana before him, he settled down for a solid, if unspectacular, start. He was able to secure his first win thanks to…
-MONCADABOMBZ! Seriously, I realize that the sample is still small but it’s hard not to watch Yoan at the dish and get super excited about what he could be. His first dinger was awesome, as he worked the count in his favor, then was able to take a good looking 2 seamer tailing out of the strike zone opposite field about 5 rows deep. His second one he took a hanging breaking ball and scorched it into right field. He’s displaying pop to all sides of the diamond, and his eye for pitching combined with a newfound aggressiveness at the plate is awesome to see.
-Timmy continued his assault on major league pitching, raising his average over .450 going into today’s game. The same game where he took a Brad Keller fastball and atomized it behind the Sox bullpen. He then had the sheer AUDACITY to be excited about vaporizing Keller’s shitty fastball and gave a bat flip that would make a Korean-leaguer blush (If you don’t get that reference, google “Best Bat Flips in KBO,” it’s worth your time). Wouldn’t you know it, the next time Timmy came up in the 6th inning, Keller drilled Anderson directly in the buttcheek. Tim walked down to first very slowly as the benches cleared jawing at Keller the whole way down. Then some more shit was said, and baseball tempers flared again and there was some light pushing and shoving which resulted in both managers getting tossed. Then, just because he couldn’t stand that it wasn’t about him yet, Joe West decided to toss Anderson out for having the temerity to turn his ass towards West’s general direction.
-There’s a lot to unpack here, but the fact that it’s still acceptable in baseball to hurl a stone at a human being 90+ miles an hour because some dumbfuck unwritten rule got broken or your fee fees got hurt is absolutely asinine to me. If MLB wants to market these amazing young players to a dwindling fan base then they need to take shit like this and fine/suspend it into oblivion. Who’s more important to MLB’s future, Tim Anderson or some slack jawed John Lackey lookalike who’s gonna end the season with a 5.22 ERA and 4 wins?
-Anyways, the Sox couldn’t buy a hit after that, and still managed to lose in extra innings, so…progress?
-Finally…….fuck Joe West into the sun. If you think he tossed Anderson today because of something he did on the field and not what he said 2 days ago about him (“everybody knows he’s terrible”) then I have several bridges and penny stocks to sell you. Umpires have hard jobs, and 9 out of 10 times I feel for them, but 99% of the time, Joe West is the 1 out of 10 where I throw my hat at the tv and he needs to waddle off into the sunset.
Anyways another series win, and with the moribund Tigers looming this weekend a chance to make it 3 in a row. I’d also like to point out the Sox are 2-0 in series where I do the recap, so you’re welcome Ricky.
“How did it come to this?” Jon Cooper asked, as he removed his chaps and put on a robe, a little alarmed at the amount of scented massage oils on his hands and elsewhere. He looked out the window of his yacht, and no it wasn’t him wondering how he ended up with this curious yet staid housewife of Tampa, who not only wouldn’t leash him but didn’t even know what it was, but why he wasn’t working at the moment.
And that’s how most of Tampa will spend the next month or two, because God knows there’s nothing else to do there. How did the best team of the recent era go poof! before we even had time to get drunk? Move over, Leftovers, HBO is going to have a new show about a mysterious happening that no one can explain. Except the fallout will still be everyone living in Tampa or St. Pete, wondering how they got there and yet never figuring out a way to leave. Vibrant, this show will not be.
Let’s dispel the myths that will hound the Lightning through all of next year. That somehow dominating the league left them unprepared for games that meant anything. Hmmm…seems to me when you’re chasing a points and wins record, every game means something. You’re not just going through the motions. And seeing as how the last two relevant Hawks teams and the two Penguin champions basically took March off, this doesn’t hold much water (or in Cooper’s case, water-based lube). You’re professionals, almost everyone on that team was in last year’s conference final and a few before that, so to act as if they were unprepared for the playoffs is a stretch at best, an absolute falsehood at worst. It’s a foothold for the stupid.
They aren’t tough enough, that’s what every breathing-too-hard-after-three-stairs media person in Canada and in hockey will say. They lack grit. They lack heart. And Columbus doesn’t because Brandon Dubinsky yells a lot or something. Again, this is a Lightning team that’s been within no more than five wins of a Cup three times in the last five years. It must know something about advancing in the spring. Perhaps it forgot, as most residents of the area tend to with a lot of things. Or wish they could. Perhaps it’s contagious.
No, eventually, between planning his next swingers’ club outings to Tampa’s one cocktail lounge, Cooper will come to realize he just got out-coached, and his goalie barfed up a poltergeist or two. The Bolts still wanted to weave their pretty passing patterns through an amped-up and moved-up trap of Columbus. They wanted to Quenneville, when Quenneville hockey was shown to not work anymore three years ago. And it was especially silly with a battered and then absent Victor Hedman, and Mikhail Sergachev’s legs more and more covered by his own urine. Out and up was the order of the day, which is also what they tell you to be aware of when walking into Cooper’s office.
Even that doesn’t explain it all, not as much as Vasilevskiy’s .855 SV% for the series does. Whatever plan you have or the opponent has doesn’t matter much when your goalie looks like Gumby in the freezer. Pair that with Game 7 last year against the Caps, and suddenly there’s a lot of baggage in the young man’s head. Baggage he can’t do much about until next spring. Makes for a fun follow-up season, with no questions at every stop or anything.
In the end, it might be nothing more than the perfect storm of a bad week, a goalie slump, an injury or two, and every opponent getting hot. The thing with hockey is that it defies explanation a lot of the time, and trying to stab the smoke of reason it has is what lands organizations in bigger trouble than it already was.
The questions now of course will be do the Lightning panic and change things in search of the more and more nebulous “grit and heart and fire and passion and FAARRRRRTTTT?” Are players who are considered to have snuffed it on the big stage this past week all contenders to be moved along? Could there be something wrong with a group that put up the best regular season in recent memory? That’s a pretty tidy list, consisting only of Stamkos, Kucherov, Palat, Vasilevskiy, Sergachev, Point, Johnson, and Hedman. Should be easy to move all of them along, no?
Luckily the GM who was hailed a genius for trying to reconstruct the 2014 Rangers blue line isn’t around anymore, so he can’t be hurled overboard. Then again, it was his replacement who actively sought Jan Rutta, so there must be some kind of gas leak in the GM office at Amalie Arena that causes one to see a blue line as a place for surrealism. Seriously, Braydon Coburn, Rutta, and Ryan Callahan played playoff games in 2019. When you have to absolutely play at high speed, the first or second call probably shouldn’t go out to Dan Girardi or Ryan McDonagh. Maybe it’s not all that mysterious?
You know how this goes. Tampa could easily hold everything together, win next year at a canter, and then this flop will be cited as their rallying cry and inspiration among the champagne and confetti. It can be the chip on the shoulder everyone seems convinced you have to have to succeed in April and May. Hockey is nothing if not filled with people angry at figments, or their struggle to cope in the every day world.
But that will be just another Cup win. What the Lighting have done here is truly unique. Never happened before, in fact. A Cup win next spring just adds you to the list. Here you stand alone. It’s all yours. Everyone will remember this one. Which is just about the only thing memorable to happen to Tampa, ever. They say the Bucs won a Super Bowl once, after they got to play a team too stupid to change its signals to avoid detection from their old coach who just happened to be on the other sideline. All that got us were Hooters ads and some of the most awkward exchanges on Sportscenter ever seen with confused and impatient college kids. And that’s saying something. Still, I don’t believe it actually happened. I know it didn’t matter if it did.
No, this should go on all the signs. Next to Magic Mike and the reasons for not going to Rays games which consist only of, “Well, it’s over there.” (which would have made Tampa the perfect landing spot for the White Sox, come to think of it)
“Welcome to Tampa, the site of the only Presidents’ Trophy Winner to belch themselves inside-out in less than a week.” Now that’s something. They’ll come from miles to see that…or to avoid whichever machete-wielding neighbor escaped his basement dungeon that day in some podunk Florida town. Either or.
Goodnight, Tampa Bay Lightning. You are history. No, literally, you are. An accomplishment, a touchstone, a benchmark. No one else can say that this spring. Just make you take extra care to knock on Cooper’s door this summer. He’s got a lot to work out.
Well, this offseason is off to a great start.
For the link-shy, what that says there is Ian Mitchell is returning to Denver University for his junior season. That has been speculated on these pages and elsewhere, but now it’s official.
Which puts the Hawks in something of a bind. Of their magic quartet of defensive prospects, Mitchell is the closest to ready and probably could have cracked the Hawks lineup and skipped the AHL next year if he so chose. Certainly in the current configuration, and depending on how (or if) the Hawks make any changes there this summer. Adam Boqvist may have the highest upside, but Mitchell is probably the surest thing. Highest floor, let’s say.
It could be as simple as Mitchell telling the Hawks he wants to play just one more year, making up for Denver’s national semifinal loss last week, and then come over and almost assuredly walk onto the NHL roster. Except the Hawks wanted him in the system after last season, certainly after this one, so it doesn’t appear Mitchell is inclined to be all that interested in the Hawks’ interests. Which is his right, and mostly what you hear is that he wants the education, which one day will make him one of about five NHLers who can read and write above a 7th grade level. Fair enough, his life.
It does put the Hawks in something of a quandary. As we’ve said over and over, they’ll never fit all of Mitchell, Boqvist, Henri Jokiharju, and Nicholas Beaudin on the roster together, not while they still have a chance of being relevant at least. Five years from now doesn’t matter.
But Mitchell staying in college drops his trade value through the floor. After his junior season he’ll only be another year removed from being able to sign anywhere he chooses, and if he truly does like being at college and getting a degree and he’s already defied the Hawks wishes twice, there’s little reason to believe he’s not going to see it out. No one’s trading for a player they can’t sign eventually.
So he’s not helping next year, he’s 50-50 to help the year after that, and he’s not going to help via trade. That doesn’t make him a useless chip, but the only hope the Hawks have is that he still comes after three or four years in college and plays for them. That’s about it.
Which punts Boqvist and/or Jokiharju more into the trade window, if indeed the Hawks are serious about getting good next season. They’ll have the most value, they’ll have really any value (it’s just a hunch that Beaudin’s is lower). And they may be expendable depending on what the Hawks do with the third pick. Say, if they decide they’re taking the surest thing of all in Bowen Byram, as in he’d vault right to the top of their defensive prospect tree.
It also might push the Hawks even more to Byram, as he does seem a surer bet than either The HarJu or Boqvist and now Mitchell’s future is murky. Again, a lot of this depends on what the Hawks really want to do and not just what they tell you they want to do. If they’re looking at a serious turnaround next season, then one or both of the two above have to go. Or the third pick has to. If the Hawks are still embarking on a multi-year rebuild, then they don’t really have to do anything and we don’t have to pretend that next season is worth anyone’s time.
Who’s excited?
And now the Penguins have their own 2017 Predators series. We’re not alone.
Two years after their third Cup. Swept out. Looking out of ideas, out of energy, out of speed. Those who had been pillars of historic success simply nowhere to be found. A GM floundering and picking up slow, past-it d-men, holding onto methods that no longer apply. A former playoff chew-toy rising up and vanquishing those that hadn’t even considered them an adversary before. A raucous crowd behind them, swinging wildly between euphoria and disbelief that it’s finally happening (though let’s thank Isles fans for finally stealing European soccer songs instead of just college chants, a la Music City). A sense of of it truly being over.
Sound at all familiar? The difference here of course is where the Predators simply sped past the Hawks at every turn, the Islanders boa constrictor’d the Penguins from the off, and there wasn’t any air anywhere for them. You can’t really blame the Pens. After the past three years, it would take an utter miracle to find the energy to get through a Barry Trotz team. Especially when you’ve run into a Barry Trotz team the previous three seasons. At some point, everyone just says, “Fuck this, I’ve had enough.” Victory has defeated you, as they say.
It seems every defining team goes through this. The Hawks in ’17. The Kings missing the playoffs altogether after their second Cup and then being utterly destroyed by the Sharks a year later. The Wings being flattened by the same Predators in 2012. The endings are never clean or graceful. As Sick Boy put it, “At one point you’ve got it, and then you lose it and it’s gone forever.” In the NHL now, that moment where it switches doesn’t let you down gently. It goes upside your head with a mace.
Oh, I’m sure Penguins fans will scream until they wretch up an Iron City that as long as Crosby and Malkin are around they’re never out of it. We said the same thing around these parts, and look where it got us. If Sidney dyes his hair purple and tells the assembled press in September he’s really gotten into writing his own poetry, you’ll truly know where you’re headed. They’ll pout and stamp their feet about how Jim Rutherford will figure it out. The same Rutherford who signed Jack Johnson and traded for Erik Gudbranson and then wondered why they couldn’t bust a Trotz trap. And remember, that was all for a still useful Carl Hagelin, who just happens to still be playing. I’m sure Rutherford has a real master plan here. After all, he wasn’t responsible for all of the Canes playoffs-less decade. Just most of it.
Oh, they’ll tell themselves that Jared McCann and Nick Bjugstad will put it together at The Confluence. That they just need to be in a winning atmosphere and suddenly they’ll blossom. Sure thing, that’s why the Panthers are so good. Maybe they can bring back Matt Cullen again, assuming they can find enough virgin’s blood between now and training camp to keep him upright. Signing centers over 40 is always such a keen strategy.
Next year will be the 54th straight that Olli Maatta is going to have a breakthrough. Or maybe next year is finally the one Justin Schultz can make it through without catching legionnaires or having half of a construction site fall on him. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. Maybe if you try hard enough, Pens fans, you can close your eyes and focus and suddenly Marcus Pettersson will just become Elias.
Matt Murray is still young, they’ll tell themselves. Really had a surge in the second half of the year. All that’s true, except he just put up his second subpar playoff performance to go with his two good ones. Are they ready for another Marc-Andre Fleury roller coaster? They didn’t like the first one much. There are no answers here either.
No, realizations like Patric Hornqvist proving that if you’re an asshole power forward and you take the power forward away, you’re just an asshole, aren’t going to get any better and brighter when he’s 33. Come December the Pens will have their very own Milan Lucic! They must be so excited.
And there’s little salvation to be found. The only big contract coming off the books soon is Schultz’s, and that will mostly be insurance after he’s eaten by werewolves. This is entrenched. This is what you are. It was good enough not so long ago. It’s not now, and it won’t be again. There are glories past to be celebrated, and you’ll have to hang on tight, because what comes next isn’t very fun. Ask us. We know. Keep the DVDs close.
So fare the well, Pittsburgh Penguins. Don’t worry, the NHL will keep shoving you in outdoor games and on national television. The name recognition doesn’t fade. But that only shines a brighter light on what isn’t there any longer. Believe us, we got here first. When all you want is to remain in the shadows so no one will notice you trying to white-knuckle through another Gudbranson shift, the masses will keep coming back to scoff and mock, and try to remember what it was like before, while decrying that they still have to watch and pay attention to you. And you’ll tell them you don’t want them to either, but NBC keeps bringing you back. Everyone is going to know your pain when all you want is to be left alone.
It’s a dark ride from here.
All you need to know about the last night of the first week of the 2019 NHL Playoffs.
Columbus sweeps Tampa: Holy fuck.
Islanders sweep Penguins: Fuckin’ whatever.
Jets tie Blues 2-2 in OT: Blues fucking up right on time.
Knights go 3-1 up on Sharks: That’s some fucking goaltending ya got there.
I’ve written this post a couple times in the past two seasons, at various outlets. Or at least it feels like I have. Maybe because I want so badly for Jason Heyward to be something. To be anything, which he hasn’t really in his time on the Northside. Or at least not at the plate he hasn’t. He’s always been great in the outfield and it seems like he’s a pretty damn good teammate to the point the whole team felt the need to create this narrative around him along with the greatest moment in the team’s history and most of our lives. It certainly didn’t help that Tom Ricketts not-so-subtly pointed a finger at Heyward’s signing as an excuse to turn his pockets out. And while Heyward isn’t the type to shove anything up someone’s ass, there has to be a part of him that’s thinking it. And every winter we break down the changes we think we see in his swing, and then there’s a really hot week or two and we think, “Yes, salvation!”
And then there’s 429 grounders to second.
So I’ve been holding out on J-Hey this time around, even though he’s basically been the Cubs’ best hitter on the young season. I won’t be fooled again. My heart is too scarred, and one more slice to it and I very well may never love again. I have to hold out hard, because I only have so many times I can give myself away again. I will not waste it on yet another false dawn.
And yet, this might actually be the time. You can follow my downfall into the pit of despair and disconnect and isolation again. That’s always fun for everyone else. But there are some things to suggest that this isn’t a mirage. It might be real, and I’m just as frightened as you are.
So generally, the first thing I look for when a player has a hot streak, or to see if changes are really helping or he’s just had a heater and will soon walk out of the casino with nothing but three cigarettes and a longing glance at what’s behind him and what’s lost is BABIP. Quickly, BABIP is Batting Average Of Balls Put In Play, and it’s akin to what we use shooting-percentage and save-percentage in hockey to measure luck. Almost always, a batter’s or pitcher’s BABIP will even out to somewhere around .300. There are exceptions, but generally 30% of the balls you put in play go somewhere where someone ain’t. So if someone’s carrying a .360 BABIP, it’s probably going to deflate and bring batting averages and slugging percentages with it.
Well, J-Hey’s on the year is a solid .306. Which is hardly abnormal. It’s not that much above last year’s .297, which helped him get to a better-than-I-realized, league-average 99 wRC+. So Heyward isn’t benefitting from a rash of flares and cracked-bats that just happened to land apologetically in the outfield to the bemused look of outfielders. He’s on course.
You could actually argue that Heyward has been a touch unlucky when it comes to BABIP, because he’s smacking eight different kinds of shit out of the ball. His hard-contact rate is 37.5%, which is way above the 29.7% he had last year. Now, 37% hard-contact is what baseball is doing as a whole this year, and last year the average was 35%. But for comparison, Javy Baez routinely carries a .340 BABIP or higher and his hard-contact rate is only a tick-higher than Heyward’s.
There’s definitely a change in approach. One, Heyward hasn’t shown much interest in pulling the ball this season. What he has done is up the amount of balls he goes gap-to-gap with, almost half at 42.5% (up from 32.% last year). It’s almost all at the expense of his pull-contact, which hints that he’s seeing the ball better, waiting on it, and not getting out ahead which results in rolled-over grounders to second which we can all see from memory at this point.
And when he goes up the middle, he’s getting the ball in the air far more than before. Half of his contact that way are fly balls, way over what came before. When he does let it loose and try to pull a ball, his hard-contact rate has doubled to over 60%. Which is the idea of pulling a ball, that you hit it the hardest you can. It’s somewhat the same story when he goes to the opposite field, though that doesn’t come with the same hard contact. But 80% of that is in the air, so clearly J-Hey is the latest member of the Launch Angle Revolution (opening for Russian Circles this summer). That’s borne out by his average launch-angle being 18 degrees this year, exactly double the season before.
You’ve heard Jim Deshaies reference that Heyward has taken something of a Yelich-like approach this year, which is he’s more than satisfied to eat your heart after a pitch or two. That’s true. On a 0-0 count, Heyward is swinging at 40% of the fastballs he sees, up from 24% in his first three years in blue. That’s also true on sliders and curves, which again, indicates he’s just seeing the ball better because he’s hitting them well when he goes after them. It’s the same case at 1-0 and 0-1. The pitches he’s seeing per plate-appearance are the lowest of his career. He’s not waiting around.
Which of course, leads to discussion of his swing. Previously, Heyward seemed to have this big loop and dip to his swing, where his hands came out and around and were behind his body. This year, you’ve heard comments about how he’s using his legs far more. It’s all more congruous. Which is resulting in greater bat-speed, which is resulting in greater exit-velocity (91.6 average).
I told myself I wouldn’t be fooled again, and yet I feel myself slipping….
As the Lightning sit on the precipice tonight, I haven’t been able to shake this stat ESPN presented on Sunday night when they went down 3-0:
The Lightning are one loss from being eliminated and joining this list…
The teams with the most wins in the regular season in MLB / NBA / NFL / NHL history all failed to win a championship. pic.twitter.com/6CWFcNgqIG
— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) April 15, 2019
This would seem an excellent time for me to get on my European soccer high horse and proclaim it to be superior because it has no playoffs (at least in a league season), and thus excellence is always rewarded. But let’s save that for another time (you know I’m going to at some point though). It’s just the most curious thing.
All of those teams are considered some kind of footnote, or shrouded in what came before and after, or an outright failure. If you were asked what was the best all-time regular season record in baseball, you’d probably remember the Mariners just because of Ichiro. But it would take you a second. And if you were asked the best baseball team of all-time, you’d probably refer to an “era” of the Yankees in the late 90s, without picking one out individually. And none of them managed the 108 wins the Red Sox did last year. There isn’t one that sticks out. You wouldn’t say the Mariners of 2001, but factually they are.
The Patriots’ “failure” gets shrouded in that they won three Super Bowls before that and then three after that. So their 16 wins just join a list of secondary yet impressive accomplishments, somewhere above their run of AFC East titles. They also did something unique, in that no team has won six Super Bowls in what you’d call one stretch. The Steelers are broken up between the 70s and then a couple more recently. And yet shouldn’t the 16-0 stand out more? We haven’t seen it since, and we might not see it again (until the Bears this year of course, my frent). But it doesn’t, because it didn’t come with the crown on top.
The Warriors are almost certainly the greatest team ever to play (sorry Jordan fans, but deep in your heart you know it’s true), and even after last night they’re going to waltz to their fourth title in five years and probably barely breathe hard to do so. Yet everyone still tries to beat them over the head with 2016, even though they did something no team has done and it took the greatest player of all-time (this time I’m not apologizing to Bulls fans) at the peak of his powers to thwart them at the absolute final hurdle. And yet for me, the 73 wins is what I’ll remember, but most don’t or even use it as a cudgel. That’s the team that wowed you on a nightly basis instead of bored you with their efficient greatness.
It’s even murkier in hockey, where the best team rarely wins. Of course, thanks to the goofy standings system, it’s hard to discern clearly who the best team is most of the time. Not this year, obviously, and look how that’s going. If you’d asked me the best team I’d seen or best team of the NHL’s history, again I’d probably wave at an era of Wings teams in the 90s or Canadiens in the 70s, without one sticking out. When the Hawks won their first Cup, they were third in the league that year standings-wise. Their third Cup saw them finish third in their own division. And yet no one points it out because of course, they won their last game. And they knew as well as anyone else that seeding didn’t really matter to them that much.
Only the ’13 team is seen as an all-conquering force that scorched the Earth behind it, and even that’s derided a bit because it was only a 48-game season. And it’s hard to think of another team that comes close to that label. The Penguins didn’t win their own division in their last two Cup runs. The Caps did, but that was mostly considered a footnote or outright fluke as no one else was any good in that division. The Kings never did either. Are we really going all the way back to ’13? ’10 before that? The ’08 Wings? And even the latter is considered something flat because they only had the one out of three or four truly great teams.
I suppose that’s the oddity of North American sports. Hell, people my age probably remember the 103-win Giants that didn’t even make the playoffs in 1993 than we do most champs (I have a certain friend who is going to murder me for mentioning that). Never mind that the ’93 Braves and their 104 wins were then stomach-punched by the drunk and hairy Phillies at the first jump. Did you immediately remember that the Jays won the Series that year?
So it’s kind of funny to me that teams like the Warriors now, one or two other NBA teams, the Hawks teams of a few years ago or Penguins now or whoever else get shit for taking some regular season games off. All of them have the scars of great teams that didn’t win, whose regular season accomplishments are labeled meaningless, and yet when they put the playoffs and titles over everything else they’re “cheating the fans.” It’s an impossible needle to thread.
I can’t help but think sports have become to binary. You either won the title or you failed, no matter if you did something literally no one else had done before. After all, the regular season is the largest sample we have of what teams are, and sometimes historic accomplishments are wiped away or dismissed because of a bad week? Seems strange.
Then again, maybe that’s what makes it special. We have this slog of a regular season in every sport, find out who the best is, and then ask them to survive this pressurized crucible right after it. It makes for a better story at times when these teams fall.
Still, it does make it feel pointless. We spent six months or more being wowed by all of these teams, having it proven they were five steps ahead of everyone else. And then it’s gone. So why did we bother? If those results don’t mean anything, why have them? On the other side, if the playoffs were just a confirmation of what we’d seen, there wouldn’t be much drama (the current complaint about recent NBA playoffs, which is easy to understand). Doesn’t seem to hurt the NBA’s popularity though.
I’m on the side of always rooting for greatness, for things I haven’t seen before. The Warriors winning four of five and 73 games in the one they didn’t is the kind of thing I’ll remember forever. Hell, it was only two days ago a lot of us were willing the greatest golfer of all-time to another victory, because he does things we hadn’t seen before. At least where I’m not emotionally involved, that is (so you can fuck off with all your City remarks, Hess).
Maybe it’s just a quirk. And yet we keep racking these up.
