Game Seven. Two words that tell you pretty much all you need to know. Whether it's baseball, basketball, or hockey if it's playoff season and you hear that there's a Game Seven, you know that both teams will be giving it their all as they are in a win or go home situation. The whole thing comes down to a single game.
A Championship game seven in any of these sports represents one percent or less of the season for both teams, but it will forever serve as the divider between Champions and Also-Rans. Tomorrow night will see Game Seven of the Stanley Cup finals in the NHL and the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins will each end up with one of those labels.
Championship game sevens don't come around every year. The most recent one was in June, 2006 when Carolina beat Edmonton to win the Stanley Cup. The year before, the Spurs topped the Pistons in an NBA Finals Game Seven. Baseball's last all-or-nothing World Series game saw the Anaheim Angels beat Barry Bonds's Giants.
So I know what I'll be doing this Friday night. But don't ask who I'm rooting for. It's hard to say whether I want to see the Wings lose as revenge for them beating (up) the Blue Jackets in the first round of the playoffs or if I want to see them win so I can say "Hey, we lost to the eventual Cup winners." I gave up trying to decide which was better and just want to see a close, hard-fought game where both teams are still in it at the end of the game and the season's still on the line when the third period clock starts counting down the tenths of seconds.
Showing posts with label Hockey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hockey. Show all posts
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Columbus Blue Jackets Arena Info and L'Affaire Glavine
A couple of sports items of interest today.
Light The Lamp has an excellent writeup of a blogger get-together with Blue Jackets big-wigs about the recent Arena issue. There's a lot of information there about the background of the whole issue and some insights into where things may go from here. There's obviously a lot of spinning going on here -- who'da thunk it with a confluence of Sports, Big Business, and Politics? Worth the time to read over the writeup if you're interested in learning more about what happened and might still happen with that situation.
Yesterday, the Atlanta Braves released pitcher Tom Glavine. Today, bloggers and a notable former teammate of Glavine's (bet you can't guess which one!) are claiming that this amounted to mistreatment of Glavine by the Braves. I certainly won't deny that it had to be a frustrating end to the situation for Glavine, but it sure looks like the Braves ended up in a lose-lose situation and chose what they deemed to be the less "lose"-y option.
Sure, the Braves could have brought Glavine up but it's been a couple years since he was more than a #4 starter. (Even his 2006 stats show a real drop-off in the 2nd half, from 11-2, 3.48 in the 1st half to 4-5, 4.33 after the break.) Between Kawakami, Medlen, Hanson, Campillo, Reyes, and Morton (now traded) the last thing the Braves needed was another 4th or 5th starter option.
So, their choices were to bring him up, let him block the kids while probably not being any better than them AND pay him millions for the privilege or deal with the sunk cost of the money they'd spent on his rehab and let him try to catch on with another team who might have more use for a veteran at the back end of their rotation. From the position of a baseball team trying to compete with a fairly fixed budget, I can't see how this is anything but a no-brainer.
While Smoltz and others might try to claim that "it's just not how you treat people," it's hard to get too worked up about the plight of someone who was just paid $1,000,000 for 3 1/2 months of work even accounting for the fact that injury rehab in pro sports certainly isn't a cushy job. Finally, if someone says "He came this close to making it back and he just wanted to pitch in the bigs one more time" -- Well, there's 29 other teams out there. If none of them think he can be a valuable component, why should the Braves have felt any differently?
Light The Lamp has an excellent writeup of a blogger get-together with Blue Jackets big-wigs about the recent Arena issue. There's a lot of information there about the background of the whole issue and some insights into where things may go from here. There's obviously a lot of spinning going on here -- who'da thunk it with a confluence of Sports, Big Business, and Politics? Worth the time to read over the writeup if you're interested in learning more about what happened and might still happen with that situation.
Yesterday, the Atlanta Braves released pitcher Tom Glavine. Today, bloggers and a notable former teammate of Glavine's (bet you can't guess which one!) are claiming that this amounted to mistreatment of Glavine by the Braves. I certainly won't deny that it had to be a frustrating end to the situation for Glavine, but it sure looks like the Braves ended up in a lose-lose situation and chose what they deemed to be the less "lose"-y option.
Sure, the Braves could have brought Glavine up but it's been a couple years since he was more than a #4 starter. (Even his 2006 stats show a real drop-off in the 2nd half, from 11-2, 3.48 in the 1st half to 4-5, 4.33 after the break.) Between Kawakami, Medlen, Hanson, Campillo, Reyes, and Morton (now traded) the last thing the Braves needed was another 4th or 5th starter option.
So, their choices were to bring him up, let him block the kids while probably not being any better than them AND pay him millions for the privilege or deal with the sunk cost of the money they'd spent on his rehab and let him try to catch on with another team who might have more use for a veteran at the back end of their rotation. From the position of a baseball team trying to compete with a fairly fixed budget, I can't see how this is anything but a no-brainer.
While Smoltz and others might try to claim that "it's just not how you treat people," it's hard to get too worked up about the plight of someone who was just paid $1,000,000 for 3 1/2 months of work even accounting for the fact that injury rehab in pro sports certainly isn't a cushy job. Finally, if someone says "He came this close to making it back and he just wanted to pitch in the bigs one more time" -- Well, there's 29 other teams out there. If none of them think he can be a valuable component, why should the Braves have felt any differently?
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