Quick. Which of these things is not like the other: Boston Bruins, Boston Celtics, Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots?
This should be easy. The Celtics, by virtue of going down to Philadelphia over the weekend and taking care of business, are the only team of the aforementioned that did not disgrace itself recently. Seriously. Has the collective entity of men’s Boston sports ever had a worse stretch? I can’t remember a time when so many of our professional athletic organizations have fallen on their faces so stunningly.
The Bruins put together one of the four or five most uncompetitive games in their history Sunday. They didn’t just lose spectacularly to the Sabres, a team that last made the Stanley Cup Playoffs when many of their current players were in preschool. They didn’t just pull a no-show. They acted as if they’d just found out there was even a game five minutes before puck-drop.
The 6-1 final score doesn’t tell the story. All four first-period Buffalo goals came off Bruins’ turnovers. There had to have been rubber repellent on Boston’s sticks.
Buffalo is the better team. I swear coach Marco Sturm’s team did it with mirrors this season. The Bruins punched well above their weight to get this far. But once you do, you owe it to yourself and everybody else to expend maximum effort once you hit the ice. Instead, the players had to have been dosed with Ambien before the game.
Good for the Sabres though. They still have never won the Stanley Cup. They almost folded at one point. The Bills keep tripping over their shoelaces. If there was ever a city in need of a parade, it’s Buffalo. I’d love to see them catch fire and get this done.
Turning to the Patriots, this one’s a real mess because there are multiple components to it. First, as a person who learned to swear by the set of rules and ethics I learned from the Northeastern University journalism school in the 70s, I am appalled that the publisher of the New York Post allowed this story to even happen. The public may have a right to know if their president (in a general sense, people!) is committing malfeasance on the job, or committed serious crimes in the past. But two people whose actions affect nobody outside their immediate circle? Uh-uh. Out of bounds. That’s pure clickbait.
But …
Once you’re sussed out, you’re sussed out. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Coach Mike Vrabel would have been better off coming up with a way of admitting it that generated some real sympathy for the massive invasion of privacy this was. Admitting an affair with Dianna Russini would have been excruciating, but there would have been nowhere for The Post to go after that. Shoveling more mud on the situation would have been viewed as piling on.
Of course, the thing spiraled out of control once the second set of pictures saw the light of day. Vrabel missed one day of the draft, dragged the organization down a rabbit hole it never signed up for, and provided fodder for comics everywhere.
But at the end of the day, and this is coming from someone who tried as best as he could to live by those ethics (admittedly without success sometimes), this is one of those incidents that makes me ashamed of my profession.
We save the best for last. The Red Sox. Ugh. Who in this organization is responsible for misreading the room as often as it does? Is it Sam Kennedy, the president? General Manager (and smartest person in the room) Craig Breslow? Or is owner John Henry really Oz, the great and powerful? The man behind the curtain, the one we’re supposed to “pay no attention to?”
I have no problem if they wanted to fire Alex Cora. Though I like him, it would seem it was time for a new voice in that clubhouse.
But gee. Finding out Breslow made the ultimate decision on who to fire is a little bit like finding chickens missing from the henhouse and asking the fox to find out why.
And didn’t Kennedy do a great job throwing Breslow under the bus by naming him the architect of this Saturday Night Massacre?
Cora didn’t put the team together. Breslow did. Cora is not the one who refused to pull the trigger on players who could help this team. It was Breslow. No power hitter. STILL no second baseman. Seventy-six outfielders for only three spots? Breslow, not Cora.
If I were an up-and-coming manager, I’d refuse to work for this team.
