NHL playoffs: It just doesn’t get any better
It just doesn’t get any better than this. Any sports fan who hasn’t been caught up in what the Penguins have been doing is to be pitied. It’s hard to believe but there are lots of people in western Pennsylvania who call themselves sports fans and say they just don’t get hockey. That means that there are lots of people around here who like sports but haven’t been paying attention to what the Penguins have been doing for the last five weeks. ( Although, the TV ratings do show that more and more people are catching on.)
If this were the Steelers on a Super Bowl run, this would have been the weekend for the AFC Championship game. Remember 2005? They beat Denver to advance to the Super Bowl and you had to wait two more weeks for the next game.
The Penguins could play six games over the next week and a half and every one of them has the potential to be as exciting and as compelling as any NFL playoff game.
If this were a Super Bowl run, the Steelers would be interviewed 600 times over the next week and a half and they would still have two more days to talk.
Let’s recap:
Football championship = 13 weeks of talking followed by a game.
Hockey championship = seven games in 13 days, followed by as many as seven more games in 14 days.
Call me crazy but, given the choice, I’ll take a Stanley Cup run every time.
– Bill Belichick is such a great coach that he doesn’t need to cheat.
That’s what I’ve heard and read several times since the Patriots’ videogate scandal reared its ugly head again.
Maybe he’s not.
Maybe Bill found out in Cleveland with the Browns that he couldn’t quite keep up with the better coaches around the league and when he took the job in New England in 2000 he decided that he needed an edge. And could we please stop with the argument that the tapings didn’t help that much? If you know anything about successful NFL head coaches, you know that they don’t waste their time doing things that don’t increase their chances of winning. We’re talking about guys who develop a schedule that plots every minute of every day in training camp. In February.
Does anybody really think that a guy as focused and obsessed as Belichick appears to be, would take the time and the effort to devise a plan for taping his opponent’s signals if he didn’t think that it was helping him win games?
Does anybody really think that he would do it for eight years?
If he had done it for a season or two and stopped, you might be able to make a case for the tapings being inconsequential, but football coaches, especially NFL coaches, don’t do anything for eight years unless they believe that it’s helping them win games.
– Filip Bondy, a sports columnist for the New York Daily News was duly impressed by the Penguins. Here’s what he wrote: “The Rangers have no chance to capture more than perhaps one game against Pittsburgh, which, has, under cover of mid-Pennsylvania darkness, somehow become the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980’s.”
– I don’t know about you, but I was shocked, shocked I tell you, when I read reports that claimed Roger Clemens was involved with several women for whom he bought jewelry and flew around the country on his private jet. Roger has said many times -including in front of the United States congress – that he is a devoted family man.
– Ryan Malone, who grew up in Upper St. Clair, might have been playing in the Stanley Cup semifinals even if Mario Lemieux had not shown up to play for the Penguins in 1984 because he’s the son of a former NHL player, but you can be pretty sure R.J. Umberger of the Flyers and Plum Borough would not. Umberger was two years old in 1984. By the time he was 10 the Penguins had won two Stanley Cups and they were the most popular team in town. If the Penguins had drafted second that year, Umberger may have never seen a hockey game, much less played in one, by the time he was 10.
– Do you suppose that Filip Bondy of the New York Daily News really believes that Pittsburgh is in mid-Pennsylvania? If so, it’s more proof that more hicks live in New York City than in any other city in the USA.
– Rashard Mendenhall may not be as fast as Willie Parker but he’s a better runner.
– The New York Giants drafted Michigan wide receiver Mario Manningham in the third round and he may turn out to be the steal of the draft. He was considered by many to be the best receiver in the country. His stock dropped because he was arrested on drug charges that were eventually dismissed and he wrote letters to every NFL team to assure them that he no longer smokes marijuana, but Mario’s biggest problem may not be drugs. Finding the stadium on game day may be a bigger problem. He scored six out of 50 on the NFL’s Wonderlic intelligence test. I’m pretty sure you get seven for spelling your name correctly. Most second graders would be able to score at least a six on the Wonderlic. How do you suppose Mario stayed eligible for four years at the University of Michigan a.k.a. “The Harvard of the Midwest”?
I’m guessing really good tutoring.