Sport

Mackin Celebrini will be a San Jose Shark, which is kind of cool since his dad works for the Warriors.
 

At least he didn’t go to Chicago. 

55 minutes ago, ruttep said:

 

Who's your conference final and Cup picks? 

 

I'd say FLA/NYR and DAL/EDM

 

NYR over DAL

 

Chalk ass playoffs indeed.

My picks were close. Stars > Oilers and Rangers > Bruins and then the Rangers beating the Stars in the final. 

I think I would change it now that Dallas had to tough out 7 hard ones while the Avs have been sitting and waiting after averaging over 5 goals per game against the Jets. They look formidable again. Personally I'll be pulling hard for the Oilers to go all the way. 

I went 7/8 on my picks. Would've gone 8-0 had I not changed from Panthers to Lightning, but I felt like my bracket was Chalky Studebaker so I switched it. Turns out it was the most chalky first round I can remember. 

Where's our guy who always complains that the NHL playoffs are too unpredictable and then goes into the NBA playoffs thread and gripes that they're too predictable? 

Obituaries were flying around for the Leafs after game 4 and I thought it was incredibly premature because the Leafs don't ever let their fans off that easily. This series going to game 7 was the least surprising outcome. What has been surprising is how messy the Bruins have looked the last two. They skipped the first period entirely last night and were structurally all over the place last night. I was baffled how much time they spent chasing the Leafs. 

Good for William Nylander to come through. Feels like the "Core 4" of the Leafs never seem to get it done in these big games that count and he did last night, especially with the dagger on the breakaway. If the NHL was covered the way the NBA is we'd have two straight days of Ewing Theory debates with Auston Matthews. Personal anecdote about William Nylander: I sat in the second row in a game in Columbus last December. There was a very attractive woman seated in front of me. Nylander skated by our corner and gave her eyes during every single TV timeout. LOL. 

Fascinating thing about this game 7 is the team that wins will exorcise a demon and the team that loses is going to take on even more emotional baggage. Bruins are trying to avoid blowing a 3-1 lead in the first round for the second straight year and I think that'll infect this core with a stink that'll be hard to wash off. The Leafs, experienced in blowing a 3-1 lead in the first round themselves, are trying to finally overcome the Boston Bruins, not lose in the first round for the 6th* time in 8 years, and redeem themselves for choking the 3-1 lead to the Habs in 2021. I can't wait. 

*doesn't even include the play-in loss in the bubble.

This social media strategy also feels outdated. It was funny and subversive in 2012 when the Kings were one of the first teams to use a punchy voice in their official team tweets, but now it's just tired and annoying. It feels as calculated and studied as anything. Eventually the Canes will lose a series, which is hopefully this next one, and they will have earned the ratio of people who tweet "Cry" at them. I hope the Rangers wipe the ice with them.

5 minutes ago, BBTV said:

I’m not sure there’s a person on these boards that takes even the slightest reference to his teams as personally as you do. My gods, anyone even quips about the bengals or shows a picture that was about a rule and not a Red, and the guns come out. 

Wasn't personal until this. The only thing this has to do with the Reds is because I happened to watch the moment in question live and knew the tweet was misleading and wrong. Happy to dump on umpires whenever they deserve it, but that wasn't it. 

If you're going to say something like this at least quote me so I get the notification. 

16 hours ago, BBTV said:

 

TF is with this?  He was out by a full foot.  The knee didn't even come into play.

The hell it didn't. That picture is deliberately deceiving. He wasn't "out by a full foot" because Sosa missed the tag. Sorry, but it was the correct call.

Here's a picture of Sosa missing the tag and De La Cruz's hand running into his knee. From the other angle you can see De La Cruz's hand touch the base under Sosa's knee before the tag anyway. He was safe with or without the obstruction call.  But this play is exactly why the rule exists. The batter went on to strike out and the following batter grounded out to first for the last out of the inning so De La Cruz didn't even score from third anyway.

I officially declare this grievance from Philadelphia Stupid. 

10 hours ago, kimball said:

 

I won't lie ... I had the same thought.

 

Plus, Salt Lake City MORE so in the mountains than Denver is. Denver is basically Kansas.

I was surprised by this for both cities the first times I went there. Entire drive into Denver I kept waiting to scale a mountain and then I was in Denver while the mountains were still well in the distance. Then in Salt Lake City you fly over and then down a mountain to get to the airport. The mountain is like RIGHT THERE the entire time you're in the city. Not sure why Denver became known as THE mountain city when SLC is more mountainous. 

8 hours ago, infrared41 said:

 

Not enough people to make any real difference.

But you’d rather have more than less, right? My point was to show that in addition to having a small metro area (47th last I checked) they’re also kind of geographically isolated. 

NHL Hitz ass arena. Can't believe they let this happen for even one home game, let alone two full seasons. 

7 minutes ago, BBTV said:

Wait who’s driving 200 miles to an NHL game? 

Me, people who live in a city that doesn't have an NHL team. 

16 hours ago, The_Admiral said:

I don't think we touched upon this, but Salt Lake City was the Golden Knights' biggest secondary market and now that's gone, along with most of the rest of the Intermountain West that they'd been allowed to squat on.

I'm kind of nervous about SLC for this reason. Found this website where you can find population inside of a certain radius. 

https://www.statsamerica.org/radius/big.aspx

I set Salt Lake City and drew a 200 mile radius, which I figure to be about the edge of where a normal person would drive to attend a game. The tool says about 3.7 million people live in that circle. Sounds like a lot of people, but consider that little small market Columbus, Ohio using the same radius is over 28 million (that doesn't even include Chicago) and it feels like trouble.

Here's some other markets not clustered in the Northeast using this same metric:

Nashville - 17 million

Raleigh - 16

St. Paul - almost 8

St. Louis - 9.5

"well the West is big and people are spread out" Yeah, still. There's 7.8 million people within 200 miles of Las Vegas. Denver, Colorado - 6 million. Seattle - over 9, etc. All way more than SLC. Phoenix's is 7.3, for the record. 

They're moving the team to a place on the map where there just aren't that many people, the closest NHL team to pull in visiting fans from is in Denver 500 miles away so they're not going to get the natural visitors gates like Columbus does from Penguins, Red Wings and Blackhawks fans. Plus they already have the NBA, College sports, and MLS teams. They're probably over-extended as it is. I wish them luck. 

Good! Maybe the new guy can come up with a less annoying/stupid victory call. 

Tonight is Jeff Rimer's last game on the call before he retires. He's been the TV play-by-play guy for the Blue Jackets since the 05 lockout, but also called games for the Panthers, Capitals, and Candiens before that. Once famously got in a clubhouse fight with Pete Rose during the 1984 Expos season. 

I hated Rimer at first because I didn't get him. He was unpolished, messed up names, never seemed to know what team the penalty was against, but I've grown attached to him over the last 20 seasons. Really loved all his little character moments, his genuine love for hockey, his small thesaurus of favorite phrases, and I get what he is now. He's a character. And as his time with the Blue Jackets got longer his homerism for the team got bigger and it came through over the air. A newer franchise without any success, it's nice and novel to have a homer in your corner.  Also developed a great ham and egg rapport with Jody Shelley. I'll miss him a lot. Wish he got to cover better teams in Columbus.

Hope the new person doesn't suck. 

15 hours ago, The_Admiral said:

I think Phoenix would have had to have been an expansion for it to work. Acknowledge that there's not an NHL arena and build one. Take time to assemble a decent hockey-ops staff and business staff (whatever they inherited from the Jets was not it) and most of all, an owner who knows exactly what he's getting into. Not Minnesota guys who got derped by the worthless goddamn Timberwolves, not real estate speculators trying to get rich off a strip mall, not Wayne Gretzky, and not the parade of dopes who came in after the league. It needed to be a conscientious, from-the-ground-up project, but it wasn't, so it failed.

I think their ceiling if they'd built an arena on the east side of downtown would be Dallas' floor. It wouldn't have been a smashing success, but they'd still be around. The Westgate Entertainment District was like intentionally walking into quicksand and they've only lasted this long because the league dragged them along. But I believe if you took any hockey market in the league and plopped the team on the other side of the city away from the bulk of the money then they would also struggle. It was suicide doing it with a team with no roots established in the city. 

There's been so many bad moves with them it makes the Blue Jackets look like the Lightning. Remember when they hired a math-whiz middle schooler to be GM who thought he could moneyball the Coyotes to success and then threw a diaper tantrum and quit? Probably best known now as the guy with the hot sister. 

On 4/11/2024 at 5:58 PM, The_Admiral said:

 

I have no excitement for this. I have major reservations about a market of 2.5 million with heavily directional sprawl where the only other team in the market runs concurrently and is almost as established as the Church of England, where hockey does not have a long history of success, where the arena has the same NBA-first sightlines that doomed Phoenix in the first place. The only advantage Salt Lake City has over Quebec City is staying on Mountain Time.

I have no excitement for Utah either and I think we're all kind of blindsided by that being the location that ultimately landed the Coyotes after the dozen other markets that got close in the last decade. It reminds me of Jacksonville getting the Jags because the NFL needed to expand by two teams, but the bids in better markets all tripped over their own butts so the Jacksonville bid was picked by default. 

I was just correcting our guy up there who said that people were hypocritically celebrating the Utah Hockey Pucks using public funds to build an arena when A. nobody is doing that because B. that would require that anyone be fired up for Utah at all. 

On 4/11/2024 at 5:58 PM, The_Admiral said:

But the Coyotes have been on life support for 15 years, the league has cockteased four or five different cities now only to keep doubling down on stupid, and every owner since the days of league control has run out of money, not paid taxes, or both. Enough already. I'm old and tired. Just let this end.

A thing I think is interesting is most people's response has been "ahh yeah well probably for the best" Very few people defending Phoenix.

At least now we get to stop following their endless relocation saga. It's a bit of a relief. 

Just now, spartacat_12 said:

 

Look I'm well aware that I've taken the unpopular side of this debate over the years. Part of it is because I've personally seen a couple of my teams get relocated (including one I was working for), and part of it is just playing devil's advocate to try and balance things out. When they lost the Tempe vote I assumed that would be it for them, and I'm still a little confused as to why the league didn't just get the relocation wheels in motion as soon as that happened.

 

What I'm pointing out is the hypocrisy within the hockey community (not just on here). Any time a new arena/stadium is announced people complain about public funding and talk about how it never actually helps taxpayers, yet there's suddenly all this excitement about Utah having a new publicly funded arena planned. 

I don't think that's happening. People don't seem that excited for Utah (I know I'm not). Utah might as well just be NOT PHOENIX right now. I've seen excitement from some people that the Phoenix experiment is finally coming to an end, but the where and the how isn't what people are worried about at the moment. 

Just now, TBGKon said:

Theres always these....

That logo is trash though. 

Always thought "Coyotes" as a team name is really cool. You can abbreviate it to Yotes or Dogs, comes with a fun howl cheer the fans can do. Plus it's got good logo potential. I wouldn't mind if they kept it for Utah. The kachina logo doesn't make much sense there, but neither does Jazz. 

I actually think the problem is UConn isn't dislikable enough. They're also not lovable. They're nothing. I can't be moved to feel one way or the other about them. The only thing I know about this current team is Hurley is for some reason a lifelong Bengals fan, which is weird because he's from New Jersey. 

Getting out to big leads or not being tested isn't a knock on them as a basketball team - That's just what good teams do. What a dumb piece of criticism. 

Another problem is the game started at 9:30 last night. I learned about UConn's victory on my phone this morning when I woke up as I was fast asleep before the second half. I say this every year, but you cannot convince me that starting the national championship game after 9 on the east coast is helpful for ratings. 

On 4/2/2024 at 2:24 PM, SFGiants58 said:

That and it’s a gimmicky “old timey” font that you’d find on Creative Market for $20.

It's so gimmicky and I hate it. It was novel in 2007, but it looks extremely 2007 now. It's got all the superfluous flourishes, dialed up to 11, completely unrestrained hallmarks that Brandiose became known for. 

To make this worse is that using the faux 1870's number font means they're not using their perfect block font. 

4 minutes ago, jerrylawless3 said:

You're actually on to something here. It's now a 'cast' shadow now instead of a 'drop' shadow. You can really see it in the serifs of the I and Ns.

 

The wordmark also looks slightly less tall before. I don't know, but it's definitely not the same mark as before.

Good catch. I expanded the picture of Spencer Steer and now I see it. 

I guess that's an improvement because now it matches the numbers, but it feels like it's heavier on the black, which I don't like. 

1 hour ago, MNtwins3 said:

Reds have desperately needed to drop black for like 20 years at this point

It would be hard to find a Reds fan at this point who disagrees with you.

The black drop shadows look even worse with the larger sleeve cuffs. Also, it felt like the drop shadows are slightly larger now. 

compare previous years

and last night. 

hard to say. Something's different there. 

On 3/9/2024 at 8:00 PM, BBTV said:

 

This is how I feel.  How many cities in the States would very few people have ever have a reason to hear about if not for pro sports?  Like Cincinnati for example.  Nothing at all against the fine people of Cincinnati, but if not for the Reds and Bengals, would >90% of Americans have any reason to know about it or even where it is? 

Probably true, but wouldn't that also be true of most cities, even large ones? Like if sports didn't exist I don't think I would need to know anything about Atlanta. 

On 3/9/2024 at 8:08 PM, The_Admiral said:

There's something kind of grounding about Kroger and Procter & Gamble being headquartered in li'l ol' Cincinnati and not somewhere back east, but also, Kroger is terrible.

 

Also GE Aerospace where a very handsome, smart, funny guy I know works.