Just a quick post today, as I’m in the middle of a hectic real-life week…

For the second straight game, the Boston Bruins took it to the Detroit Red Wings, and emerged with a convincing 3-0 shutout win. The Bruins now hold a 2-1 series lead.

It seems though, that the Bruins have reached Patriots-level analysis standards. For some people *coughFelgerMazzcough* every win is picked over for faults and deemed to be “meh” -unimpressive. Power play goal? You SHOULD get those. Caron goal? Lucky. The third goal was empty net. They were lucky to win!

Now, I realize these clowns are the minority, but they’re also the most influential people in the market, at least Felger is. It’s annoying. It’s repetitive (as are my complaints, I’m sure), unimaginative and it makes them look dumb. The latter issue they apparently have no problems with. Mazz is still worried about the 2013 Red Sox.

After last week’s Shaughnessy column breakdown where it was pointed out that the lead columnist for Boston sports had not written a column about the Bruins in over 100 columns, further research showed that his last Bruins column had been after the Blackhawks beat the Bruins for the Stanley Cup. He hadn’t written about the team since then despite the Bruins having been the best team in the NHL this regular season. Naturally, when the Bruins lost game one to the Red Wings, guess who had a column on the Bruins the next day?  Lame.

Get the coverage from last night’s Bruins win at BruinsLinks.com.

The Red Sox were pounded by the Yankees last night at Fenway Park, as Jacoby Ellsbury took it to his former team. The fan reaction to Ellsbury was mixed, with plenty of boos pregame and for his first at-bat, but then after a video tribute by the Red Sox, there were some cheers of appreciation for what he did here.

Check all the Red Sox news at RedSoxLinks.com.

Published by Bruce Allen

Automattician.

33 thoughts on “Bruins Again Unimpressive in Dominating Win”

  1. I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it. Turn off most sports talk radio shows and just simply watch and enjoy the games on their own merits. Save time, irritation and, this is the important part, brain cells. There’s NOTHING the likes of Felger and — especially — Mazz can possibly offer that the average sports fan doesn’t already know. Read and listen to the folks you like/prefer and stop subjecting yourself to the trolling, inane rants of these DBs. It’s all a very tiring act.

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    1. This man speaks the truth.

      I made the mistake of listening to Felger and YARM on my way home from work yesterday. I figured that hey, they’re usually pretty good with the Bruins (at least Felgie is…) and I wanted to listen to some Bruins talk.

      What I got was Tony Mazz explaining, again, that the Bruins play better when their backs are against the wall. Wait, no… it’s the odd numbered games that really matter, Mike! Damnit, no. That’s not it either, Tony wanted to see them control the pace of a game because they’ve been “chasing” Detroit all series.

      Apparently chasing means scoring a game winning goal in the third period of a 0-0 game.

      All during their cup run their PP was a singular focus. How can you win the Stanley Cup with such a flaccid PP, they screamed at me. Now they’re going well on the PP so we have to shift focus.

      Goddamn, I have run out of reasons to bother listening to that afternoon show.

      Celts? Hahhahahaha.
      Sox? Learned my lesson last year.
      Pats? I enjoyed the Pats coverage for the first year and change but now it’s just trolling.
      Bruins? Used to be the best spot in town for some hockeytalk and now I’m just being yelled at and trolled more.

      Shame of it all is that they won’t change because they’re kicking everyone’s asses, but this is reminding me far too much of the Big Show now.

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    2. could not agree more…as big a sports fan as I am, I find “the TALK” about sports, to be boring as hell. At least what we’re subjected to around here. I listen to about 5 minutes a day (D&C as I’m getting ready for work) …talk about the same ol’ shit…

      Let’s see, they’ve deemed the Bruins/Red Wings series to be OVER. The biggest thing they got out of the game was “Brad Marchand was FAKING” (and or FLOPPING) and Albert Pujols hitting his 500th homer led them to their favorite subject, STEROIDS!!!…..SOS

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  3. According to Phony Strawmanotti, the Bruins are (now) “the favorites to win the Cup.” Lest we forget that Phony, Adam Jones, Johnston, Haggerty, et al., strongly declared after the trade deadline, that the Bruins would not win it all. But I digress, I did catch the last 20 minutes of the Mike and Yes Mike show today.

    The Phony Mazz and Bertrand “Who me?” game was fairly entertaining, if you enjoy mocking the hosts. They desperately want to, but just cannot figure out why any Bruins fan (according to Phony, the complainers are pink hats, because diehards KNOW that the sky is always falling) could possibly be annoyed with them. Didn’t we just go through this two weeks ago when Phony told us the Bruins winning streak (i.e. playing very well over a fairly long period of time) was meaningless?

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    1. Mazz has become so useless and miserable to listen to on the radio it’s kind of embarrassing. If it’s a sunny today, Mazz is too busy telling us it’s going to rain again someday. If not tomorrow, then the day after.

      Iginla had a 30-goal season, but half those goals don’t count because they came against non-playoff opponents, bad goalies, coverage breakdowns, young defensemen, deflections, etc.

      The Bruins have that extended winning streak, but Mazz discounts half the wins because they came against TOMATO CANS.

      It truly is nothing short of amazing how that man can put a negative spin on absolutely any news item or game result.

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  4. “He hadn’t written about the team since then despite the Bruins having been the best team in the NHL this regular season. Naturally, when the Bruins lost game one to the Red Wings, guess who had a column on the Bruins the next day? Lame.”

    Now that is funny. Well done, Bruce.

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  5. Isn’t it amazing now that the NFL Schedule generates more buzz than the NHL/NBA playoffs?

    Put best:

    @YahooSportsNHL Matt Cooke suspended for putting pine tar on NFL schedule. OR, my Twitter timeline is scrolling way too fast to make sense of anything…

    The worst of it? Seeing not just fans but media people doing the W/L/W/L thing next to each week, even though their team hasn’t gone through camp nor even hit the draft.

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  6. The reaction to Caron’s goal is the prime example of why talk radio is of no value. The storyline was that it was an easy goal that any player or talk show host could score. Imagine the reaction if instead of a spoked B on his chest that scenario played out with any Bruins opponent and instead of talking about how anyone could score a goal like that the narrative becomes “Claude just got out coached better the superior Babcock, the B’s were out hustled, their system broke down”.

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    1. Yeah. I mean. That take just seems ludicrous to me, stretching even. I usually expect fans of the losing team to pull the infallible “they didn’t win, we lost” card, not local talk show hosts. Maybe I’m just naive. (Yeah, I’m just naive.)

      If you weren’t looking to raise the ire of fans dying to be happy about two straight playoff game wins, you could absolutely champion the hustle of Caron, and his ability to read a play.

      But that ain’t going to fill four-hours.

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  7. Also, can we all agree to stop using the term TOMATO CAN when referring to a perceived unworthy sporting opponent? It makes me cringe.

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    1. Uhhhh, then how are we supposed to cut and paste 70% of our articles from prior “efforts”, dude? Can’t just be running around creating new phrases! What would be next? Insight? Good god, the slope is slippery!

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  8. What I want to know is when did sports stop valuing honor. With the exception of Golf where players penalize themselves for the slightest ball movement (unless they are Tiger Woods who cheats either with alleged PEDs or on the course) players, coaches and organization have accepted the philosophy that if you are not cheating you are not trying. Michael Pineda should be suspended for 50 games. He brazenly cheated last week. Was exposed on TV. He comes back and does it again less than 10 days later. Toss him for 50 games because he has no respect for the game. What he did is actually worse than PEDs…because he was mocking the game. Here is a novel thought…lets go back to playing games honorably. Yes I know guys like Ty Cobb cheated if they could…but there should be a nobility within sports that is more important to the players than winning. Respect the rules.

    This is not localized to MLB…suspend floppers or cheap shot takers in hockey or the NBA. Shut down cycling. Point shavers in Euro Soccer…shoot them. The thing is athletes because of the money no longer respect the games they play. Winning long ago became more important than sportsmanship. We as fans have stopped demanding that games be played as gentlemen, by gentlemen. 4000 years ago a blind poet wrote about the Greek concepts of Diké and Timé in relation to battles fought on the plains of Troy and in funeral games played as a war alternative after the death of Patroklos…meaning it was customary when playing sports or fighting battles to behave within accepted codes of honor. This idea that you should play the game right is not new. In my mind it would be refreshing if the players, coaches and game officials could remember this and maybe readopt codes of honor.

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        1. David Stern’s family tree must be bigger than some of those 1,000 year-old redwoods in California.

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        2. Long before that, actually. Achilles’ (the great runner) mother dipped him in a vat of performance enhancer just after he’d been born. Eat your heart out, Lance!

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    2. I find it more infuriating about how the “code” (MLB) allows for cheating but only in certain ways. Oddly enough, Deadspin did a good job on this:

      http://deadspin.com/pine-tar-should-be-fully-legal-and-baseball-is-still-f-1567100538

      Make it illegal or don’t. Since everyone seems to use this and virtually every MLB insider says its widely used just in not such a blatant (stupid) way.

      Since the game was on 3 networks last night, the coverage differences were insane. NESN went all “CNN’S HUNT FOR MISSING PLANE”. YES was in its usual al Jazerra mode (NESN is when its their guy) and ESPN at least picked it up.

      Raissman in NY covered it well (Chad Finn of NY media, if you don’t know):

      http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/raissman-yes-voices-stuck-tar-pit-article-1.1767145

      Also, does anyone get the impression Farrell did NOT want to call him out? Now, he has to worry about his guys at every single park. I think he had to call him out because he didn’t want heat from upstairs or the media.

      —

      It reminds me of the differences between cheating in the NFL and MLB. I recall a Chargers guy got caught with Stickum a few years back but there was nothing like the reaction nationally. I know its Yankees/Red Sox but every single national outlet was leading with this story today.

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      1. My criticism is beyond this one event and one game. I am tired of trying to draw a line and deciphering unwritten or in this case written rules. I want the athletes, coaches and game officials to value the rules and be disgraced when they cheat…not when they are caught cheating but when they actually cheat. The final straw to me was the Steroid scandal in the 90’s and how no player stood up and said this is wrong…doing PEDs goes against the integrity of the game.

        Cheating is so prevalent that the players attitude is “well everyone is doing it”. Well they would not be if you all had any honor and objected to it. But it should not all be on the players. MLB had video of the Pineda incident from 2 weeks ago. They should have suspended him then. They should have said…”doctoring the baseball is against the rules regardless of the game time temperature.” They should have instructed the umpires to look for pine tar on Pitchers starting the next day, rather than leaving up to managers, who admit they all allow their guys to do it if it is subtle, to challenge it. Enforce the god damn rules. Make the games pure. Stop worrying about ratings points, and start worrying about making the games watchable again…in all sports. 4 hour baseball games, 3.5 hour football games, any basketball game, and all but a very few playoff hockey games are unwatchable. Fans do not know the rules and the players don’t care about them. Enough!

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      2. Well, it is illegal. The rule is unambiguous, and the ump was pretty clear in tossing Pineda. What’s ambiguous is managers’ willingness to call out pitchers and players on it. For one thing, if a player is pretty clever at hiding something foreign, it seems to me that it’s possible an ump might miss it and cause general embarrassment to the manager who called for the inspection, and for the game. When establishing guilt for breaking a rule can be so iffy (in my mind), I can understand that managers might hesitate to call for many inspections, and certainly not unless there’s good reason to suspect it. Perhaps there could be a rule change, a’ la automatic replay review, where if a player, ump, or replay official observes something suspicious on a pitcher or other player, the game is paused and the suspicious substance is investigated, without onus on the manager. I think a change like that would be simpler to implement than baseball’s clusterbleep involving plate collisions.

        I’m ambivalent about the omerta’ in professional sports leagues. It makes perfect sense that such a culture exists–there’s a camaraderie even among hard-bitten opponents, knowing that they’re among a group of elite performers–but at times it erodes the competitive integrity of the sports. There are no better or more obvious examples than steroids in baseball and juicing (of various types) in cycling. On the other hand, to borrow a well-worn phrase of Bill Belichick, you do business as business is being done.

        I don’t want to slide into some long essay on steroids and cheating in general. I’ll just close off here with two observations: (1) Bud Selig has proven that, outside of business deals, he’s incapable of showing leadership in any respect whatsoever. Expect no meaningful changes on baseball’s part on this topic; (2) Listening to whitewashing (YES) or hypocritical (NESN) commentators fall to pieces over this is difficult. Both Tom Caron and Eck–and I generally like Eck–ever-so-lightly glossed over Buchholz’ sweeaty forearm episode last year, and their comments at the time, with an almost inaudible, “We agreed that everyone does it,” before returning to the pigpile on Pineda. Eckersley wasn’t going near his contention last year that “Buchholz is too good. He doesn’t need to cheat.” It’d be easier to take him seriously if he were more honest in his criticism. (And I realize NESN likely has quite a bit of say in whether he does or not.)

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  9. So this is the reason why some of us suggest that Hockey on sportstalk is akin to dead air. Felger and Mazz argued at 5:40 on Wednesday that Bruins fans were made that they were not all puppies and unicorns over the Bruins win. They even opened the lines up for people to call them on it. The problem with hockey talk in general is that there is not really enough substance to it. You can’t have a technical discussion…so things like his skate angle is slowing him down, the plane of his shot is causing him to miss right etc are not going to make it on the air. Felger and Mazz (and Beattle) although congratulating the Bruins for their win had to fill 3 hours with Bruins talk. Had they opened with “did you see the snowing of the Detroit Bench when Z did a hockey stop right in front of it” and let it go from there…I can assure you there would have been nothing to discuss. So the hosts found a couple of points which were a little unsettling and attempted to engage fans for 3 hours (1 hour of obligatory Sox talk and Lester bashing was also needed). Its not easy and it is death on the radio. I suggest that Felger and Mazz did a better job of actually discussing the game than Dale and the Black Hole of Vapidness (as an aside…WEEI…team Steve Lyons with Dale Arnold permanently…you would have the best show in Boston…there I fixed your radio station for you). At least Felger and Mazz tried to find simple hockey concepts that could translate into engaging conversation.

    You can love or hate Eddie Andelman (I hate him personally), however for 30 years he made the point that hockey talk on sports radio should be avoided at all costs because it is not interesting. Hockeykrishna’s as he called them were so intent on defending the institution of hockey that they can’t look critically at a specific game. Having said that he went a step further and suggested that when they look at a specific game there is no good way to discuss it that will generate sports talk…not like there is with baseball or football. He was right.

    This is not an attack on my hockey…after all some of my best friends are hockeykrishnas… this is meant as a condemnation of Hockey as a discussable topic on the radio.

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    1. Could not disagree more. This is more of a case that you don’t understand the game vs. knowing match ups, game stratagy ect. This is no different that basketball in terms of defensive and offensive approaches. The Bruins win last night had a ton of factors to be discusssed. Yet D&C&M thought it was better to rehash the Jerry/Jared Remy story because the Sox got blown out. Over a come from behind exciting hockey game. That is a joke. I cant stand Eddie Andelman either so there is something for us to agree on.

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      1. Mick:

        I understand that you do not agree with me but 30 + years of Boston Sports Radio trends and ratings say I am right. If I did not make it clear…basketball is equally dead on the radio as hockey. There is no strategy in basketball to discuss.

        If D&C tried to do 4 hours of yesterday’s playoff win they would have dead air by hour 2. No one would be listening. They have been trying to discuss Bergeron’s role on the team and whether he is a legit MVP candidate (for the record I think he is in the same way I think Vince WIlfork has been in the past even though on the stat sheet you do not huge sack numbers). The problem they are having is in the technical part of the discussion. “What does he do great?” “Well he gets back on defense. He is the best 3 zone player in the game. He is the hardest forward to play against”. “But he does not score as many goals as Krejci”. There the argument ends.

        Discussing hockey in an interesting way on the radio with casual fans whether you want to accept it or not is difficult at best, impossible mostly. No one does it well. The sport does not translate well to TV and it is even worse to try and dissect and discuss. I am amazed that 98.5 has bullied WEEI into covering the Bruins as much as they are.

        Here I will throw it back on you for a minute. Be program director and you have to fill 4 hours of air time with hockey talk what would be your top three topics after last nights game. Remember your topics have to generate discussion on the air.

        Now that you have done that throw it out the window because no matter what you choose, the callers will want to discuss the Sox and their inability to field in last nights game.

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        1. I feel that one of the major reasons that 98.5 has taken over WEEI early in their existance is directly tied to the Bruins and giving fans an outlet to hear hockey being discussed. I am not saying that it was all this, but it is a major factor. And WEEI’s ignoring it AND dismissing its most knowlageable on air hockey tallent killed them. I don’t feel it needs to be hockey all the time but it is a major sport in this city. D&C ‘trying’ is a joke. They have no problem discussing who is guarding who for basketball. They have no interest. T&R have regular hockey guests, and I don’t think that it is any coincidence that their ratings are better than D&C.

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    1. I feel a little dirty sticking up for criminals here, but the Herald article is ridiculous. First off, it says in the article that Remy had someone write it for him. Why, I don’t know and honestly don’t care. But the point of the article seems to be to point out how stupid the author is. Well the writer isn’t Remy, so why bother going after him? Also do we really need to point out that criminals are dumb? If the man was smart he wouldn’t be in jail.

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