Sports Redux: Win-Win Situation

We like to imagine that a secret room exists within the TD Banknorth Garden. It is a room where Claude Julien and Doc Rivers met before their respective seasons began. In this room, they established some form of friendly wager over this season. Whichever Garden team proves to wind up with a better winning percentage by season's end wins some form of a prize. And sometime right about now, Julien and Rivers will take to this secret lair to settle into leather armchairs by a fireplace and congratulate each other on their general awesomeness.

What more can you say? The Bruins won on Friday. Again. The Celtics won on Friday. Again. It was tricky to figure out which game to lead with in this Redux. But we're going with the Celts, if only because of the Bruins video we'll be including as our anchor (see below).

It was a sloppy Celtics game as they faced down the Hornets, but a 94-82 win nonetheless. And we'll take a little sloppiness for a night if the team can still improve their record to 22-2. Paul Pierce led all scoring with 28, while KG chipped in 19 and Rajon Rondo managed to notch 10 points. With the win, the Green has won 14 straight, is improving upon its best start in team history and proved again that they have diverse talent enough to get the job done when someone (read: Rondo) is struggling. Big win against a pesky team.

While the Celts were struggling to get things going early in their game at home, the Bruins were off to an early and devastating start to their Atlanta showdown against the Thrashers. When you convert four of your first five shots into goals, you know things are working right. The Bs went on to take the game,7-3. And while we're the first to congratulate the scorers for the night (Mark Stuart, Stephane Yelle, Zdeno Chara, Mike Ryder, Phil Kessel and Milan Lucic), Atlanta goalie Ondrej Pavelec said postgame that he might have helped out the Boston team a bit. The quote, seen in the Herald writeup: “It was one of those games when I wouldn’t have stopped a beach ball."

Now, if you want to start to panic about Hot Stove, Friday might have offered good reason to do so. The Yankees have reached a five-year, $82.5 million deal with A.J. Burnett. Which means that Burnett will now join CC Sabathia as Pinstripe Pitchers. Say what you will. Panic if you will. As far as we're concerned, we're reminding ourselves that stories suggest there are four Horsemen of the Apoacalypse. So until we see Mark Teixeira and Jason Varitek heading onto planes to New York, we're not worried. Yet.

But we want to end on a positive note, given the way the in-season teams played Friday night. So let's give a shoutout to Kessel, the man enjoying a 14-game points streak: