2024 NHL Stanley Cup Finals (Game Seven)

Oilers 1-2 Panthers

The Panthers opened the scoring in the first few minutes of the game. I believe Game Two is the only game of this series where the winning team didn't score first. so it felt momentous that the Panthers got on the board first--especially so quickly. But the Oilers came right back and tied it up quicklike and it felt like this might be a goal fest. Both teams possessed well and defended well, too, both teams played well. But the Panthers were able to find the goal again in the 2nd period and though the Oilers had a few good looks, they just couldn't match it. In the final minutes of the game, the Oilers were just out of gas, even though the clock was running out, they just didn't have the energy or the legs to come up with a solid possession. 

Good win for the Panthers. Like the Heat last year, they came to the edge of blowing a 3-0 lead but managed to regroup and outlast their opponents. I watched all of the games against the Rangers and the Oilers and though the Panthers did occasionally have a dud game, when they tightened up their defense, the Panthers were basically impossible to score on and those were two good offenses that they overcame. 

Congrats, Panthers. I don't watch much hockey but I really do love it and I'm glad I got to catch so much of this year's Cup.

2024 NHL Stanley Cup (Game Six)

Panthers 1-5 Oilers

I thought the Panthers flat out sucked in the 1st period. They didn't get destroyed too bad, down just 1-0 going into the 2nd period, though the Oilers found the goal early in the 2nd period. The Oilers added to the lead again right at the end of the period, I wondered if the Panthers would ever show up. 

In the 3rd period, the Panthers finally found the goal on a weird play, where the goalie just sorta fell over, leaving the net wide open. It felt like the Panthers had at least picked up the tempo, trying to get into the game. But as the game wound down and the Panthers had to go to the empty net, they just couldn't maintain possession and the Oilers tacked on two empty netters to send the crowd into a frenzy and the Series back to Florida.

Been a wild ride, glad I stuck with it. The Edmonton Oilers are my new favorite team! But Game Seven is still anyone's ball game, though the dominant defense that got the Panthers up 3-0 in the Final has vanished and the counter attacking offense went with it. They've got 60 minutes left to get it back and if they can then they can still win it (worked for the Miami Heat last year who nearly squandered a 3-0 lead on the Celtics last year). The Oilers definitely have the momentum but they still gotta go finish it off.

2023-24 NHL Stanley Cup (after 4 games)

(ONE) Oilers 0-3 Panthers

Man, both of these defenses are drum-like in their tightness. I thought the Panthers had basically two good looks at the goal--finished them both--and picked up an empty netter on the way out. Meanwhile, the Oilers had zero good looks at the goal in 60 minutes and scored zero goals. This reminded me of Game One in the Eastern Conference finals where the Panthers beat the Rangers by the same score. That, too, felt like a harbinger of an all-defense series but maybe not, that series had a fair amount of scoring and the Oilers-Stars version in the West had a lot more offense. So, while this has gotten off to a full-on defensive start, that might not be the shape of it. 

The 1st goal was a nifty fast break where the third guy in the attack had just enough room to find the net because the forward defender couldn't recover in time, leaving a gap up the middle. The 2nd goal was a lovely searching pass that just happened to find the defender stretched out of position momentarily leaving an empty space in front of the net where luckily the forward was able to find the top shelf; don't want to discount its awesomeness, but the pass that led to the finish was just a piece of luck, really, a hopeful pass that was rewarded. In short, neither of those are examples of the cornerstone of the Panther attack.

I watched all of the Eastern conference Finals over the Rangers and most of the Western Finals over Dallas. My gut feeling is both of these teams have more offense and I expect this Series to loosen up, especially if Edmonton can keep it going. Not that I don't love some defensive hockey, just saying I think there's going to be goals scored. 

(TWO) Oilers 1-4 Panthers

More of the same. The Oilers took the lead early when a rather innocuous breakaway chance dribbled through Bobrovsky's legs into the goal. Bobrovsky has been getting all the love, and that's great, but it seems to me that it is the full Panther defense that is parrying away the Oiler attack. Bobrovsky has certainly been good but he's mostly getting hit in the chest by desperate shot attempts. Thought it was weird that he gave up this piece of fluff, though.

But Rodridues was able to finish two tight rips in the 3rd to seal it. And they tacked on another empty netter. 

The Panthers defense is so good that it creates patience opportunities at the other end. If the attack just maintains possession, they'll eventually find the lane. Not over yet but unless the Oilers find some kind of scoring acumen and do something to upset the Panther defense, then this one is over. 

(THREE) Panthers 4-3 Oilers

Man, this series is looking exactly like the Mavs-Celtics series: in Game Three over there, the Mavs trying to avoid a sweep, got a nice lead early, couldn't hold it, got way down to the Celtics, who fell asleep and let the Mavs back into the game late, but held on to win anyway. (Replace Mavs with Oilers and Celtics with Panthers) I'm still so amazed that Edmonton just can't get a sniff of the goal. Everyone is praising Bobrovsky, and he's playing well, but his defense in front of him is leaving him very little to do. And the Panther attack is methodical, takes its time, but is punching holes more than the Oilers can hang with. Dude, the 2nd period of this match was like target practice for the Panthers, the Oiler D was getting stretched and the keeper got peppered. 

3-0 is pretty much over--even in hockey--and, uh, yeah, this feels over to me. Maybe getting 3 goals (even in a losing effort) will ignite the attack...maybe....that could happen. But the Panthers are playing really well, I think they'll finish it in 4.

(FOUR) Panthers 1-8 Oilers

Well, now, wait a second....After 4 games the NHL Final looks an awful lot (right?) like the NBA finals. The better team is up 3-0, the drowning home team in Game Four steps and gets a big win. But the Celtics rolling over to the Mavs' last-gasp onslaught is not the same as the dominant Panthers defense getting steadily dismantled. In the first 8 periods the Oilers scored 2 goals; in the last 4 periods the Oilers scored 10 goals. The Oilers have dug a pretty deep hole, I'm not yet ready to say that they turned a corner at the end of Game Three, but I am more curious for Game Five than I thought I would be (whereas I fully expect the Celtics to rail the Mavs in Game Five and finish that series). 

The Panthers looked untouchable til the 3rd period of GameThree, were they just taking the night off in Game Four? We'll see.

(FIVE) Oilers - Panthers

Yeah, I'm getting pretty excited for tonight's match! Whereas the Celtics easily finished off the Mavs in Game Five even after a shaky performance in Game Four, it feels different over here in the hockey world. I don't think you can just mail in a game in hockey like the Celtics do from time to time in basketball. Though the Celtics fans certainly felt shaky going into Game Five, you knew and I knew that the game was going to be a triumphant Celtic stomping (and it was) because Game Four was just a fluke.

But in this series, the sheer dominance the Oilers turned on in the last 1.3 games looks like they figured something out on the Panther defense--that wasn't simply a hamfisted performance by the Panthers or a lucky night for the Oilers. That was two teams and going at it and for the first time in the series, the Oilers looked like the dominant ones. Can they keep it going? I look forward to finding out tonight.

Recent Sports Watching

NHL
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.

Stanley Cup Finals

I didn't grow up watching hockey, I've never lived in a hockey part of the country, I don't know the history of the game, I don't know the numbers (shit man I don't even get how the regular season standings work anymore!), I'm not conversant in the strategies or personalities. But I love hockey. Playoff hockey is good good stuff but unfortunately it coincides with NBA so hockey has gotten lost in the shuffle for me. Good luck, then, that the Cup Finals and NBA Finals dovetailed perfectly.

I got to see Games 1,2,5,6.  All tense, tight games, great hockey. I did not care who won until Game 6 when I was openly rooting for Game 7 (and thus the Lightning). I always marvel at how fast the game is: 20 minutes of hockey takes about a half hour whereas in basketball the last 2 minutes of game time can last longer than that! The Lightning goalie (Bishop) kinda drove me nuts: constantly diving into players, getting behind the net, quite nerve wracking behavior from a goalkeeper. I wish I had more to say, I enjoyed every second of it.

Sports Watching

I had a good sports watching day the other day.

FA Cup Final (Arsenal 3-0 Aston Villa).  Yeah, never felt like Aston was gonna score. Arsenal didn't exactly dominate the game but they were more dangerous team from beginning to end. (Man, that second goal, yowza!)

French Open Tennis. Azarenka (against Serena) choked away a break in the 2nd and another in the 3rd, can't say anything other than she blew it. Matches like those (when you're on the verge of winning and then Serena effortlessly surges back into the lead), must hurt worse than other losses: Azarenka not only has to live with choking away a winnable match in a Slam but the way Serena let Azarenka feel like she had a chance of winning, just to snap it back, is just cold-hearted and hurtful. Serena Williams is probably my all-time least favorite athlete: I think she's an obnoxious snob on the court and her rudeness to her opponents is all the more egregious because she's clearly better than anyone else that has played in the last 15 years! When she wants to be the best she is clearly the best and has been pretty much since day one. And for her to be such a selfish, angry, demented little brat makes her the quintessential ugly American in my book. (Very rare for me to dis an athlete, the hero/villain dynamic in our entertainment culture rather bores me, that's not what I watch sports for, so I rarely pay attention enough to really dislike anyone; AJ Pierzynski and Bill Romanowski are the only other athletes I can think of that really struck me as awful people)

Rugby 7's. I used to cover rugby back in the day, so I have actually watched and paid attention to rugby in my lifetime, though not for long and not recently. Always liked the game, bummed Americans don't dig it a little more. Dude, we have minor league indoor football, can't we just get into rugby?  Its a really cool game.  And the way the NCAA plays it is much more fluid than 'real' rugby, much more like backyard football.  'Real' rugby is slower, chippier, more intense, the scrums are Road Warrior-like affairs, and pro rugby players are badass dudes, they've been beat up and stuff, they are not 'studio tough'.  So watching these clean cut college kids with spiffy clean jerseys was fun, a bite-sized morsel of sugary rugby rather than a hearty meal of the real thing. I really do like rugby and I'd like to see USA get more competitive in it (its a college sport here, surely we're producing plenty of rugby players) and I'd like to see Americans embrace it more fully. The Rugby 7's is not great stuff but its pretty good stuff and that ain't bad.

Alvin Gentry to the Pelicans. I think Gentry is (or was until Saturday) the best coach in the world not coaching in the NBA. Steve Nash had his best years under Gentry, I think he can be a great coach with the right talent. Personally, I thought he was the best candidate for the Cavs job (if David Blatt should happen to get shivved during the post-game shower), but I guess Gentry wanted to lock up the gig as Anthony Davis's mentor rather than wait for the courtly intrigue to play itself out.  Good move for the Pelicans, I think it'll be a good move for Gentry, too. (*sigh* Now Calipari is the only guy that can replace Blatt)

NHL Western Conference Finals (Blackhawks 5-2 Ducks).  The Ducks didn't have a single slice of luck in the whole match.  Reminded me of watching the Clippers game 7 against the Rockets: no lucky breaks, nothing to build on, felt like they'd lost before they even walked in the arena. The Blackhawks scored early and kept it on the Ducks all the way. Very tight game, thought the Ducks goalie played about as well as he could have (he got no help from that defense in front of him). The Ducks controlled the puck well enough but they're scoring chances (til the 3rd period) were never so scary. The Blackhawks pressed their chances and were able to keep the Ducks backpedaling the whole way.

Way to go, NBC Sports! I know where to go for my Tour de France fix.