While the Celtics are floundering out West, the Bruins have just finished an honest-to-goodness stampede through the South. And attention must be paid. Last night, the B's finished off a 4-0-1 Southern swing with a 5-3 win at Tampa Bay. Glen Murray scored twice, with Milan Lucic and Mark Stuart also scoring early. P.J. Axelsson took a Glen Metropolit pass and scored a shorthanded goal to put the Lightning away for good. Alex Auld wasn't......

Super Bowl Media Day is the professional football equivalent of the annual family reunion. A bunch of people get together, often traveling long distances, for the purpose of catching up. There's little that they have in common, but since they sort of fall under the same name, everyone has to make nice. The hijinks on display makes for a hilarious time for those not directly involved. People make nice and dumb down the stories of......

Amazing when you think about it: everyone who's played the Celtics this season has a losing streak against them right now. The C's' three losses have all been avenged; first Cleveland, then Orlando, and last night in Detroit, in a fantastic game that served as a serious test of how good this 28-3 team really was. Ray Allen continued his struggles, Kevin Garnett got in early foul trouble, so it was Paul Pierce and -......

The Red Sox won their last seven games. The Celtics have a six-game winning streak. The Patriots haven't lost in - well, we can barely remember. Even the Bruins stopped Atlanta yesterday. So every local team finished 2007 on an up note (yes, Revs, we know, and we're sorry). The B's were headed for another stinkeroo for a while, but they finally found their offense, and pelted the surprised Thrashers. Dennis Wideman and P.J. Axelsson......

Seen on ESPN yesterday: "The Bruins are 8-4-1 in their last 13 games. Just thought you should know the fourth horse of the apocalypse is saddling up." The Bruins insist that Tim Thomas is not being Wally Pipped; he'll be the starter again as soon as he recovers from his groin injury. But for finding a backup goalie in the clearance bin, it's hard to beat what the B's have seen from Alex Auld, who......

We're not the biggest Japanese-movie-monster buffs in the world, but we honestly can't remember an entry in the series when the monster got to go home early because Tokyo didn't even make a token effort to defend itself. But Ghidorah was sent to the bench early last night; the "Big Three" were no longer needed amid the Celtics' utter annihilation of the listless Knicks last night. It was a 23-point lead at halftime, and when......

As tempting as it would have been for the Bruins to come out swinging last night, playing back the Flyers for Patrice Bergeron's concussion, that's not how they roll. And they needed the two points even more than they needed the visceral satisfaction of seeing the Flyers laid out like the wounded soldiers in Gone With the Wind. The 6-3 shellacking wasn't exactly a tea party, though. Defenseman Andrew Alberts left the game after a......

Does the venue make the team or does the team make the venue? And what happens if the venue has two teams, two games, and one day to pull it all off? The two host teams win, venue staff deserve medals, and a lot of people walk out of the place happy. There wasn't much of a battle on the boards of the TD Banknorth Garden on Friday night. The Celtics, doing what has become......