I love hockey but the Stanley Cup Finals is pretty much all I get to see. I caught Games One, Four, Five, Six and Seven and I think I found the Blues to be the better team in general. The Bruins were wild and up for anything, the Blues were more controlled and tended to want to dominate possession. But the game is all about energy and when the Bruins bring the active, they score more goals.
Blues 2-4 Bruins
Blues looked better, Bruins played better. Bruins had the energy and pretty much controlled throughout but the Blues showed flashes of an offense that could hold possession and attack.
Blues 3-2 Bruins
Bruins 7-2 Blues
Bruins 2-4 Blues
Opposite of Game One: I thought the Bruins played more compact and reliable but the Blues played wild, brought the energy and locked down this W early on.
Blues 2-1 Bruins
This series will be remembered for Game Five where the Blues committed an obvious penalty and finished the play with the goal that finished off the win. Okay: I don't watch a lot of hockey and I sometimes miss which interactions are illegal and which are just par for the course, but even I could tell right away that that was a foul--no idea how the refs missed it. Just to hammer home the point: the dude who committed the foul got the puck passed back to him after the dude he fouled turned it over--and he wasn't ready for the pass because he was already arguing with the ref who didn't even make a call! That makes him the guiltiest-looking human being I have ever seen. That kid with the chocolate icing smeared on his face who has no idea what happened to the cake has been moved to 2nd place. The Blues dude gave up on the play to start arguing--that's guilty! That alone should be 2 minutes in the box! And even though the Bruins dominated the final ten minutes or so of that match, they could not overcome the Blues' lead.
Bruins 5-1 Blues
Game Six was set up for the Blues to finish it off, but they didn't show up, man. I thought the Blues were the better team but they played tight and got frustrated by their inability to score. This game was still close deep into the 3rd, Blues sorta checked out by the end, Bruins piled it on, Blues got chippy late but never challenged the scoreboard. Again, I generally thought the Blues were the better team but once the Bruins started scoring, they just piled it on. (I think Binnington (Blues goalie) has been great and should be MVP if the Blues win; but he does have two games (Three and Six--both home games!) where he got beaten like a Bond villain and that is awkward)
Blues 4-1 Bruins
Game Seven: Whoever brings the energy will win the game. Bruins came out crazy but the Blues were able to snake two goals (one right before halftime--I love/hate those!) and seem pretty well in control after the 1st period. But I thought both teams were frisky and in it to win it, so I still expected more goals, maybe even a tie game going into the 3rd. But the 2nd period was pretty even, both teams played better defense than offense, which kinda surprised me: I thought we'd see more playmaking, more guys trying to be the hero, rather than tightening up on D. But the 2nd period was pretty conservative as neither team ever got their offense set up. Still close enough where anything can happen. But a beautiful counter attack goal by the Blues with around 9 minutes left sucked the life of the Bruins. Their defenders start slacking out there, Blues got another goal and this game was over. The Bruins scored a late on to give the fans something to cheer about (nice top shelf knuckleball).
Good win for the Blues! As I keep saying, I thought the Blues were the better team throughout and when they played their game, they were gonna win. Games One, Three and Six were the ones the Blues didn't show up for, those are the ones they lost. The Bruins had a wider range of play, at their best their offense was overpowering but at their worst they couldn't hold their zone against the Blues attack. I don't watch enough hockey to know how momentous this was, but it was the first Cup for the Blues and they were in dead last in the league on January 1, so they've come a long way in the last six months.
USA Friendlys
USA 0-1 Jamaica
USA 0-3 Venezuela
Well, the bad news is USA looked straight fucking horrible in both of these games: no creativity, no attack, no teamwork, sloppy in the backline, and no individual standouts. The good news is...the afternoons were sunny and breezy. This isn't USA's A-team, rather these were a coupla last look-over games before the Gold Cup, so I don't anticipate this is a preview of that (thank god!). That said, I doubt Jamaica or Venezuela brought their top squads, either, so this is a reminder that everyone else's depth is still greater than ours. (*sigh* Shouldn't USA be better by now?) Int'l soccer comes and goes so its hard to know what the Gold Cup will bring, I try to enjoy each tourney as the discrete event that it is. So I expect USA will be in, say, the final four, but we could just as easily get bounced by Martinique or somebody. I won't make a prediction because I have no idea what will happen.
Champions League
Liverpool 2-0 Tottenham
Ain't gonna lie: this was the dullest Champions League match of the whole season. I just happened to have seen that Liverpool won just as I was about to sit down and watch the replay (thank you Yahoo Baseball! (*)), which didn't surprise me, so I hoped at least for an exciting match. Not really. Liverpool got a PK on basically the first play of the game (dude, why was the defender waiving his arm like that? Wtf was that guy doing?), drilled it and that was pretty much it because Tottenham never could get any offense going. It stayed that way for 80 minutes or so, got a little more furious on the way out, but not much more because Liverpool was the better team throughout and sat on their one-goal lead to strangle this game. They stuck a late goal (nice finish) but that didn't do much to diminish the general lameness of this game.
That's too bad, I kinda loved this whole tournament. I watched as much this year as I've probably ever seen and I dug all of it. I was so into Ajax, really impressed by Barcelona, Juventus overachieved, Real Madrid underachieved, Bayern Munich got real old real fast and, holy shit, Man U was in the quarters (how on earth did that happen?). The big what-if is PSG, all they had to do was slip past a hapless Manchester and they might've done some damage. Liverpool was the best team of the whole tourney (they did beat Barca, too, so they earned the crown) and Tottenham just kept managing to survive all the way to the last game (if it was two games, I'd make it even odds for them to come back and take it).
French Open
I saw virtually none of this (I'm not an early morning sorta joe) except the very end of Thiem over Djokovic in the semifinals. The match was called the night before (for some reason), then suffered a long rain delay the next morning, then back and forth all the way. I expected Djokovic to take control but he never quite did, I expected Thiem to falter but he never quite did. Tennis is weird that way: the competition is so close at this level that the tiniest differences loom large. Either way, the winner was gonna get smoked by Nadal (hey, Thiem took a set off him, nice work).
(*) Angry old man rant: back in the day the sports ticker across the bottom of the screen during a ball game was the greatest invention since the flush toilet and I have actual memories of the ticker itself (1996 SEC Tourney B-ball final, I still don't believe UK lost that game). But now in a day and age when I get any score any time anywhere in the universe, I don't need the damn ticker. And putting in Bundesliga scores is supposed to make you look cool--but I watch my soccer on DVR, so now I have to start avoiding the damn ticker that I haven't needed in forever and just takes up space on the screen. Do you get it? The ticker actually interferes with my love of sports! Like the beeper and the VCR, it had its time and place and now it just takes up space.
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