Fear the Deer & Vive Les Habitents!

Since the Orlando Magic swept the Bobcats in round 1, I had time to focus on the other matchups in the NBA playoffs. I haven’t spent as much time watching the NBA as I would have liked recently, so it was fun to have this time to see the players I used to watch either in the NBA or college again.

For somewhat selfish reasons, I’ve been rooting for the Milwaukee Bucks in the series v Atlanta. While Al Horford is my favorite Gator in the NBA, I wanted the Bucks to break the 2-2 tie, but still hoped he would have a good game. Luckily, that is exactly what happened. The Bucks were keeping it close the entire time I watched through the first half. While I refused to switch the channel to the Habs v Caps game going on at the same time (more on that later), I did lose focus for a bit in the final minutes of that crucial game 7. Apparently since I wasn’t giving them all my attention, the Bucks decided to slack a bit, resulting in a 10 point deficit when I went back to watching their game. Oops. Once I realized my mistake and focused on them again, the Bucks scored 14 unanswered points to take the lead and go on to win.  Al did have an amazing game, though, and ended with 25 points and 11 rebounds, many of which came at crucial times ie: ending ATL’s scoreless nearly 4 minutes.

Watching the NHL playoffs hasn’t been quite as fun since my Canes aren’t playing. (Is it bad I miss my boys already?) I’ve decided to be pro-Habs for playoffs, partly because they had the power to knock evil Alex Ovechkin out of the running, but mostly because I have several friends who are fans & their fan base seems the least pretentious of those I am familiar with (namely NJ, Sabres, Boston, Caps, Penguins). Similar to the powers I discovered I have for the NBA playoffs, I was watching the Magic game during the Caps v Habs game 6, only switching for a moment at halftime to see how things were going. Immediately upon putting the game on, the Caps scored their first (and only) goal, so I switched back to NBA as quickly as possible to minimize the damage. Convinced that was my doing, I refused to watch game 7 and followed on espn.com instead, watching gamecast in the final minutes (when I messed up the juju for the Bucks, apparently). I knew Halak had held the Caps scoreless again to this point, making it 1-0 in the 3^rd period, and checked in just in time to see both teams score once and the Habs pull off the win to advance to round 2. I was way excited to see the Habs go on, and possibly even more excited to see that the dirty-playing Ovechkin (or “OvenChicken” as he is affectionately known on the Canes message boards) would be going home. I’m pro-Flyers, too, for the same reasons I chose to follow the Habs, so should the two meet in the Finals, I’m not sure what I’ll do…

As for the Sox, they were doing better since I left my Ellsbury shirt behind in Gainesville. Mind you, “better” is still not great, but if it ends in a W, I’ll take it. With all the playoff games going on in the NBA and NHL, and the lack of televised Sox games anyway, I haven’t been focused on them yet. Though maybe that’s the problem… :)

Read more »

...In With the New

I’ve been MIA lately blog-wise with my Canes getting held out of the playoffs, baseball just starting up, brackets ending, and 2 friends of mine getting married, the latter of which involved a road trip. Rest assured I am back to updating now, following one of my favorite days in the spring turning into a 3 day long event.

The NFL draft is almost like Christmas (or now mini-Chanukah?) when you get to see who your team gets, hoping it’s something useful you will like, and give away your college guys, hoping their new teams will appreciate them as much as you have. Or maybe that’s just how it is for my friends and I. Either way, it’s exciting. I haven’t gotten to complete my analysis quite yet, and probably won’t till the season starts again in all its insanity, but here are my thoughts so far…

-- My Skins finally woke up and realized we need serious o-line help, picking up 4 guys with potential to make things functional. Hoping Shanahan has this under control after getting rid of a bunch of our guys shortly after his arrival… And speaking of getting rid of guys, poor Jason Campbell got traded to the Raiders (sad thing #1) for a 4^th round draft pick in 2012 (sad thing #2). This guy never had a shot when we threw him into the game with a shoddy o-line that couldn’t hold off a defense long enough for guys to run their routes, then got mad at him when he couldn’t scramble enough to make that work. Though Raiders fans scare the crap out of me, I hope JC works well with Louis Murphy and that together they can turn Oakland around some if they’re gonna have to be out there anyway.

-- At the end of the draft, 9 Gators had been drafted, 3 of them (unfortunately) going to the Patriots. Some of my boys still available have the potential to do well in the NFL, but if they get taken at all, they’ll have to go as free agents.

-- Now that the draft is over, I’m going to miss the little song that plays when they announce a selection, but more so, the “we can have a draft while we watch the draft” commercial with Ditka. You gotta love Ditka. If he teamed up with Shaq in a commercial, I would buy/watch whatever they told me to.

-- I was as surprised as everyone else when Tebow got picked 25^th by the Broncos. It made more sense later when I learned that Denver just did it to QB-block the Bills, but regardless of when he went, I’m glad he went. I’m also glad he went to Josh’s team and not the Pats, cause I don’t think I would have handled that well.

-- Not that Rex Ryan is my favorite person or anything, but I was bummed to hear that Leon Washington got traded to work under Pete Carroll in Seattle. Leon was one of my favorite Noles to watch play, and has done well in the NFL (and on my fantasy teams) until he busted his leg. Stephania said on ESPN during the draft today that he expects to be good to go by the start of the season, but I’m curious to see if he can play as well as he used to.

PATs:

-- The Sox got off to a bumpy start, but ever since I left my Ellsbury shirt behind in Gainesville accidentally, they’ve been doing better. If that’s what it takes, I’m fine with going back to my old Sox shirt. Being 5 games back isn’t where I’d like them to be ideally, but less than 20 games into a 162 game season, I’m not too worried about it. Yet.

-- Stanley Cup playoff quarterfinals have actually been pretty interesting so far. Only the Flyers have gone on to the next level at this point (yay for beating Jersey!), and the rest of the matchups are pretty close. I’ve been keeping track of what’s going on, but watching games isn’t nearly as exciting with my boys out of the running.

-- The Magic just won their 3^rd game over the Bobcats in the first round of NBA playoff games. Sweep, perhaps? Eastern conference matchups seem to be more decisive so far than Western conference matchups, but it’s still early.

Read more »

Out with the Old...

Right when so much has been going down sports-wise, which is partially the reason, I’ve been slacking on the blog. Instead of trying to catch up completely, here’s the basics of what’s happened with the teams up to the transition between hockey/NCAA bball and baseball’s season opener.

NHL- The Canes were very up and down and kept some of us fans hoping for a miracle, but with an embarrassing loss to the Devils last night (I do not like them) , the Habs the previous game, and Boston not losing all their remaining games, we’ve officially been mathematically eliminated. On the bright side, the River Rats guys we’ve called up from the AHL to cover the injuries toward the end of the season have looked pretty good, especially Boychuk and McBain. If nothing else, we can be hopeful for next season with the depth it looks like we have in the system.

NCAA- Butler made an awesome run to make it into the championship game beating Izzo’s Spartans 52-50. They face Duke tomorrow night for the title. Wonder how many brackets had this matchup…

NFL- Random trading has been going down, but saw tonight on the bottom line that Donovan McNabb will officially be joining my Redskins next season. Don’t think it’s right to have done that to him the way the Eagles did, but hopefully he can get something going with the Skins and kinda mentor JC if he’s sticking around as our QB in waiting. Surprisingly, I don’t think I’ve heard much Favre-ing going on yet. Has he said he’s staying or going yet at all?

MLB- A new addition to the blog lineup: Red Sox! Not that the season opener with the Yankees is looking so hot, but I’m excited that my boys are back. Hopefully everybody will get adjusted to their new spots in the field and we’ll get things settled for a good run this season. *As I was writing this, Youk had an amazing triple that brought 2 guys in and made the score 5-4 with no outs in the bottom of the 6^th. There’s hope for this game yet!

So as we bid farewell tomorrow to college basketball and later this month to regular season hockey, we can usher in the new season of baseball with the Sox v Yankees first series and look forward to new lineups this fall. Here’s to potentially successful seasons for my completely unpredictable teams! Guess I just have a thing for potentially horribly disappointing teams that always do just enough when you least expect it to keep you hoping for a miracle…

Read more »