Sports: December 2008 Archives

The Penguins are a good team. Eastern Conference champs last year, home team of the young superstar of the NHL...it's not a bad gig. But in the 2008-09 version of the league, they're nothing but a road bump for the red-hot Bruins, who exploded again for a 5-2 win and their ninth straight win. One of these days, it might be easier to list the Bruins who didn't score, but today we'll still salute those who lit the lamps in Pittsburgh: Zdeno Chara and Marc Savard on power plays, Phil Kessel (assisted by Savard), Martin St. Pierre......

As Boston continues to grapple with the realization that the Pats are not playoff bound, there are several different ways of coping. There's the act of creating Chad Pennington voodoo dolls (not mature, but certainly helps in the here and now), the approach of sending Eric Mangini links to CareerBuilder or Monster, or creating a NFL Suggestions Box (wherein you could write "8-8 teams making playoffs over 11-win teams? SERIOUSLY, ROBERT?"). There's laughing over headlines (this one from Deadspin remains our favorite thus far). Or there's......

You didn't wish hard enough. The Dolphins have vanquished the Jets. The Jaguars lost to the Ravens. The Patriots' season is over. On the other hand, the Bruins have won 8 straight. ...

The Patriots just won today's game against the Bills. According to the flowchart, that means that the AFC East is New England's... if the Jets beat the Dolphins today. Grab some markers and a green shirt, design a makeshift Brett Favre jersey, and stay tuned....

Golden State's record (9-22 as of today) might not be much to look at, but those Warriors have, for whatever reason, figured out how to make the Celtics tick. Leading into Friday night's game in Oakland, the Warriors had beaten the Celts four times in a row at Oracle Arena. So while Friday night's (late) showdown on the West Coast might have seemed like a foregone conclusion, even up and into the first half, the Celtics were required to bring a full game of solid play to the table. Which is precisely what they......

View image With the final day of the NFL's regular season fast approaching, Bostonist has been having trouble keeping the AFC East straight. We know that the playoff possibilities are as gnarly as a Gordian knot, but, thanks to Flickr user Plutor, we now have a handy flowchart to clear things up. Print it out and keep it with you Sunday, if you can manage the stress of watching the games in the first place....

We hope you still love Mike Lowell and David Ortiz. Because the slow tango between the Red Sox and Mark Teixiera came to a sudden crash yesterday, as the Yankees showed up on the dance floor with a briefcase full of $1000 bills and took the slugger back to New York. So Tex (and we'll have to come up with a derogatory nickname soon, something like "A-Fraud"...we're open to ideas) got his payday - 180 million clams over eight years. And now the Yankees have the four largest contracts in baseball history. The......

The Bruins and Celtics took a much-deserved day off yesterday, which allowed Boston sports fans and athletes alike an opportunity to make sure their holiday preparations (for those celebrating Christmas) or celebrations (for our Hanukkah-celebrating readers) were well underway. An inadvertent side effect of this day off? We got to know a little more about a man named Todd. Todd Kobus, the 31-year-old Attleboro man who managed to land a tackle on Junior Seau during Sunday's game at Gillette, appeared in Wrentham District Court on Monday to be arraigned on charges of assault and......

Well, the Patriots did their part. On a snowy nasty day in Foxboro, the Pats did all they could to help the Cardinals get back to the airport and back to sunny Phoenix in record time, pasting Arizona 47-7 and allowing them to have the buses warming up at halftime. Matt Cassel threw for 345 yards, Lamont Jordan ran in two scores, and the Pats pulled everything shy of the Flutie drop kick to embarrass the NFC West "champs". As far as the help the Pats needed, well...they got some. Baltimore and Miami......

Well, the Bruins won. That shouldn't be a surprise - after all, they've won 18 of their last 21, and 13 in a row at home. Phil Kessel had an assist - another non-surprise, as he's notched a point in 17 straight games (he also had a goal waved off because of a high stick). That's the good part. The bad part is that Patrice Bergeron, who'd finally gotten back into rhythm after missing almost all......

So Bostonist was chatting up Gordon Edes, Tony Maz and Peter Gammons* on Friday and, as such, want to give you the straight scoop on this Mark Teixeira business: at some point, the highly hyped player is expected to play some sport (most likely baseball, those close to the negotiations have suggested) for an organization of professional status. It can be safely assumed that Teixeira will announce his team signing before Spring Training 2009, but that is still questionable. The single absolute certainty, however, is that agent Scott Boras is going to be able......

In a way, it's hard to believe that only one Bruins scored a hat trick last night. But in a game of shaky defense, multiple goalie changes, and an insane amount of offense, it was David Krejci who sent headgear flying, notching his first career hat trick as the Bruins outlasted Toronto 8-5. It was a wild game. The Bruins scored twice early - Marco Sturm (welcome back, and sorry you got hurt again) and Krejci - chasing Toronto goalie Vesa Toskala from the game (he'd get chased back in later, when Curtis Joseph......

The boy is counseling the man. Except that Rajon Rondo's now The Man. It's confusing. Anyway, Rondo told Kevin Garnett late in last night's game to "relax a little bit" (yeah, good luck with that), and an inspired KG helped carry the C's down the stretch to another nailbiting win versus the Hawks. The finish was as wild as this much-hyped regular season contest deserved. The spunky Hawks had the lead well into the 4th quarter, but a Perk block led to a Rondo layup for a 74-72 lead. Mike Bibby hit. KG hit. Joe Johnson hit.......

There are some games the Celtics need to read the papers to get motivated for. Tonight is not one of them. The Atlanta Hawks, as you well know, improbably stretched the C's to the limit in the first round of the playoffs last year, taking every game in Atlanta, where they meet tonight. And it took some last minute heroics to dispatch them at the Garden last month. And the Hawks' website is calling this a rivalry, and bringing in Ludacris for halftime entertainment. And yet tickets are still available. Atlanta needs work on this......

Let's talk about Rajon Rondo. Everyone else is. Our plucky point guard is the lead story on ESPN, Bob Ryan goes into full gush mode, and the Herald mines quotes from his Celtics teammates. In other news, Rondo is HOT right now. "He's like a little Speedy Gonzalez," says Paul Pierce. "Paul told me never to play that man in HORSE and I had to learn the hard way," adds Kevin Garnett. When Bob Ryan asked Brian Scalabrine what point guard Rondo reminds him of, Scal said, "I'm going to have to give you an......

Let's throw out the necessary splash of cold water first. The Patriots aren't going to the playoffs unless Mia/NYJ or the Ravens flop. Which isn't impossible. But it's out of their hands, and even if they keep doing like they did yesterday and steamrolling collections of stiffs like the Oakland Raiders, it may not come to anything in the end. And if that's the case, we'll toast Bill and Matt for getting this team as far as they did, and congratulate the rest of America on their dream of a collection of crippling......

"Did you see the Slovak on Slovak battle?" Single best remark we heard after the Bruins skated to another win at the Garden (their eleventh straight - the longest such Bruins home streak since any of us can remember) on Saturday night. In this corner, Boston's Zdeno Chara. In that corner, Atlanta's Boris Valabik. Somewhere off to the side, Phil Kessel, whose stick-turned-lightsaber duel with Valabik in the second period got the Slovak Showdown underway. Chara, in his wisdom, didn't like Valabik messing with his teammate; the leader landed himself 17 minutes of penalty......

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......

Cousy, Russell, Auerbach, Havlicek, JoJo, Cowens, Bird, Parish, Kevin Gamble. In all the Celtics' many many championship seasons, no Green team has ever started 21-2. Until now. The 2008-09 Celtics reached that lofty plateau last night by toying with and flamebroiling an overmatched Wizards team. Ray Allen got the ball rolling with a bunch of early threes, and the C's never looked back, as they got seven guys in double figures, got the starters out of there early, and made a national TV audience change the channel with the 122-88 rout. How do the......

The blog Fan Foodie recently asked Bostonist to provide a guide to eating before seeing a game at the TD Banknorth Garden. We were suitably amused by the blog's guide to tailgating in Foxborough, that we were happy to oblige. Here it is, our guide to eating before seeing a game at the Garden. Did we leave anything out? Do you have a secret strategy for gathering calories before Celtics and Bruins games?...

Well, it was nice while it lasted. The Bruins and Celtics were on a combined 157-game winning streak (or did it just seem that way?), but it all came to an end at the hands of Washington goalie Brent Johnson, whose 33 saves stifled the B's attack and sent the locals away with only their second regulation loss since November started, 3-1. "If you're Washington, you're going to talk about the unbelievable saves your goaltender made, and we're going to call it missed opportunities," said coach Claude Julien. We're willing to concede that a hot goalie can......

Sure, it's 60 degrees outside. But it's beginning to look a lot like winter - well, maybe spring - in Las Vegas, where it's going to be in the 60s today, but more importantly, where baseball's winter meetings are taking place. And like this wintry scene, the Red Sox have come up empty so far. "I actually think I have less to tell you than yesterday," said Theo Epstein, upon emerging for his daily press briefing. What little buzz there has been, has centered around A.J. Burnett, but there's just as much evidence......

The Boston Red Sox announced that they will unveil a new team logo and new alternate uniforms during a press conference Thursday, the Herald reports. The current logo has been the unchallenged symbol of the team since the seventies. And now that there's a new contender, who's going to break the news? Jerry Remy, Jim Rice, and, um, Manny Delcarmen. Sending Manny Delcarmen to break the news about a new Sox logo is like sending a nurse with epilepsy to remove the bandages on a head wound. But we are pretty psyched about Jim Rice, whose appearance at the......

The good news out of the TD Banknorth Garden on Monday night is that the Bruins managed to pull out a win. The new It Team on the Boston sports scene (confirmed by a Sunday Globe front page story and Improper Bostonian cover) managed to rely on an early crushing of lead over Tampa to skate to a 5-3 victory in front of an eager Boston crowd. But there is the reality that the team's later-game play left much to be desired. Tampa, showing some moxie that reminds us an awful lot of typical......

Well, so much for that. BC's hopes of the ACC Championship and ending up in the Orange Bowl came crashing to earth yesterday, as the Eagles were pummeled by Virginia Tech 30-12 in the title game in Tampa. Hope the Music City Bowl is an acceptable substitute. Freshman quarterback Dominique Davis will rue this day, as he was sacked five times, threw two interceptions and fumbled. At least he'll get more chances. Things in Florida were going a lot better for another local team, as the Bruins Train kept rolling, powered by the Phil Kessel Train.......

Even with all the awesomeness that was the Celtics' 2007-08 season - the championship, the 66 wins, the beating every team in the league, the blowout of the Lakers - they never managed to win eleven in a row. This season, however, is barely a month old and the C's have already done that. They earned #11 by beating Portland, 93-78, in a game that featured more drama than the final score would indicate. First, let's look at the numbers: all five starters and Leon Powe were in double figures. Rajon Rondo returned partway down......

Well, maybe not laugh, exactly. (Except that Claude Julien, asked to describe the pain that kept Dennis Wideman out of last night's game, said, "Does it have to be upper body or lower body? Let's go with middle body.") Bruins get hurt, new Bruins take the ice, and the Bruins win. It's been happening rather a lot lately. The B's ran to 15-2-1 in their last 18 games with a 3-1 win at the Tampa Bay Lightning. Phil Kessel tied it at 1-1 in the second, then David Krejci scored shorthanded to take the lead. Kessel dumped......

"It's like there were three Rondos out there," marveled Kevin Garnett. "He was everywhere tonight." The ever-improving Rajon Rondo had his best game ever last night, notching his first-ever triple-double as the Celts avenged their first loss of the season with a 114-96 thumping of the Pacers. Rondo was in triple-double territory in the first half (10/8/9), and got his 10th rebound early in the third to be the first Celtic since Ryan Gomes to notch a 3-D. Asked if a quadruple-double was a possibility in the future, Doc Rivers said, "Yeah, with turnovers,......

We wouldn't normally start off our Redux action with a look at high school football, but we've joined the masses following the drama surrounding the Mansfield-Bishop Feenan football semifinal scheduled to kick off tonight at Bridgewater-Raynham High School. The quick take: Mansfield had an ineligible player appear in a couple of games this season. He hardly played, but Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association forbids such conduct. As such, the MIAA wanted to cancel the game and advance Bishop Feenan to the championship. Taunton Superior Court granted an injunction, and the MIAA considered fighting it......

After destroying the Magic on Monday night, 107-88, Paul Pierce described the Celtics effort to the Globe as "like a statement game for us." But what kind of statement are they trying to make? We're still trying to figure it out. On one hand, there's the obvious statement: give us an inch and we will roll all over you and leave you wishing you were back playing pickup ball like you used to back in the good ol' days. There's the clear commitment to notching back-to-back championship titles. And there's the "every single one......

Curt Schilling, Boston's favorite riddle wrapped in an enigma, has done it again! We're still scratching our heads over the way Schill managed to work it so that he could walk out to the Fenway mound during the 2008 postseason (a season to which he told us - and the Sox brass - that he would be able to contribute), throw out a bouncer of a commemorative first pitch and still get a standing ovation from the Faithful on hand. That was some crazy mindwarping, for sure. But the latest news from all things......

You might have trouble getting tickets at Fenway, like most of us do. But it's comforting to know that when all those and myriad other troubles have gone away, you can still proclaim your allegiance to the boys even as you while away the centuries. The Globe today introduces us to Eternal Image, a Michigan company that's correctly deduced that people don't want to spend the hereafter in a boring old coffin when they can cheerfully decay surrounded by the logo of their favorite team. So we now have the option of......