Sports Redux: Even Steven

One team's up, one team's down. One team is charging into the new year even with injuries, one has two stars out and is floundering. Our whole city is Even Steven today.

Let's start with the good news. The Bruins buried Atlanta 4-0 yesterday, rolling to a 3-0 first period lead and letting Tuukka Rask stifle the Thrashers the rest of the way. Not that Rask had a Herculean task in front of him: "If you can say any game is easy, this was in that category." Since Atlanta only got off 19 shots all night, Rask could have been sipping a daiquiri all night and still roused himself every time the puck came his way.

The goals came from Byron Bitz, Marco Sturm, Steve Begin and Patrice Bergeron, but it was Begin's heroic pose that got him featured with today's picture. Also, he doesn't score as often as the other guys.

The Bruins also got a bunch of good news in preparation for the Winter Olympics, as four of their number were selected to play for their respective home countries. Bergeron was picked for the Canadian squad, and Zdeno Chara, Marco Sturm and David Krejci will represent Slovakia, Germany, and the Czech Republic, respectively. Everyone's also pretty confident that Tim Thomas will be named a US Olympian after the Fenway game tomorrow. As long as none of them fight each other, it's a great honor.

So that was the good news. The bad news was, Kevin Garnett joined Paul Pierce on the injury list, and without them, the Celtics surrendered meekly to Phoenix 116-98. So the C's finished 0-3 on the Western portion of this road trip. Blecch. If there was a bright spot for the Green (and there really wasn't), it was that Eddie House found his shooting mojo again, hitting five of seven threes for a game-high 19. But without PP and KG, the defense was abysmal, as Phoenix's Channing Frye and Amare Stoudemire scored 26 each.

Even when the Patriots don't make any news, they're still hated around the league. The latest potshotter is Pittsburgh's LaMarr Woodley (no, we never heard of him before now either), who is pretty sure that both the Pats and Cincinnati will give less than 100% this weekend because it will deny his Steelers a chance at the playoffs. "Once we get into the playoffs, the Pittsburgh Steelers is a playoff team," says Woodley, who didn't explain why the Steelers is 8-7 and needs other teams to help them get in in the first place. From our point of view, jockeying for position to get a shot at the Colts is as important as anything else right now.