Welcome to another edition of “Friday 4”, where I talk about the four things I’ve been thinking about the last week and the upcoming weekend in sports and the world.
ONE
Yes, it has indeed been 13 months since the last one of these made it up on the site, but since last March I’ve been asked many times if I was ever going to bring “Friday 4” back, and with me still deciding if I’ll continue with “WooSox Rewind” this seems like it might be a good time to get this rolling again, if only to have something to post each week.
I stopped in the first place because I didn’t have much time to write these due to other projects, plus I hadn’t really worked out how my new work schedule would impact everything else I was doing. I’m not claiming that I have any of that figured out at all, but unless I restart these I won’t spend even a second trying to work out how to fit in the time to write these posts.
So, will they be every week again? Well, I hope so, but as German Field Marshal Moltke the Elder once said, “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” Right now the enemy’s main strength is time, with a tiny portion of indifference occasionally thrown in.
As an aside, Helmuth von Moltke is an interesting character in military history and is one of the few people born in the 18th century to have had his voice recorded. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any modern biographies of him in print. Perhaps I’ll check online to see if anything biographical about him is streaming somewhere.
If I can find the time, that is.
TWO
There is little more I find humorous than sites putting up clickbait articles grading drafts that just happened, and last week’s NFL draft is no exception. I’ve never understood how anyone can say a team had a good or bad draft literally hours after the picks were made.
Sure, we can all guess that a particular team needs a quarterback or pass rusher or whatever, and then point a finger at that team’s stupidity at not addressing those positions with the player we think they should have taken, but unless you’re in their draft room you have no idea why they decided to pick player A over player B.
I would like to see these sites dredge up some of their older clickbait posts and see how well they did in their grades versus what happened years later. I used to ask the same thing about a national hockey site I occasionally contributed to years ago and their prospect rankings. I haven’t looked at their rankings in over a decade because they were almost always crap, but they used to delete older posts that contained prospect grades so you couldn’t look back and see how bad they were at predicting how well (or badly) a player would do.
One of the reasons I left there was I had to write their opinions about prospects as opposed to what I thought a player’s upside was. And I’ll tell you this, I was far from perfect but my thoughts ended up closer to the truth than that site’s opinions a lot more often.
At any rate, this section is supposed to be about the Patriots’ draft, so I may as well begin to write about it. No, I have no idea if who they picked was the best option at the time their pick came around. But I can say even the most uninformed knew the Patriots needed a quarterback after the Pats traded away Mac Jones, and they seemed to have gotten a good one in Drake Maye. Will Maye turn into a stud NFL quarterback? No one can tell you that right now, and anyone saying anything otherwise is talking out of their rear ends.
Just look at the NFL’s official scouting report on Jones. Did anybody see many of those positives in his three seasons in New England? It’s all just guesswork, and the object of the draft is to make your guesses as good as they can be. Everything else is just minutia.
The Patriots drafted five more offensive players with their seven remaining picks. Despite not getting to watch many games last season I managed to win a college football pick ’em contest last season, and that’s the sum total of my knowledge of any of the players the Patriots took, except their second sixth-round pick, quarterback Joe Milton III.
I have friends who are really into Tennessee football, and they all talk about what a great, smart athlete Milton is. Not in a “he plays for my school so he must be great” kind of way, they are all legitimately high on Milton and his prospects in the NFL, either as a quarterback or as a Julian Edelman-style player. And in an important connection, the pick the Patriots got for Jones was the one they used to draft Milton.
So maybe Jones might help deliver another championship to New England after all.
THREE
I think some people would be a bit disappointed if I didn’t at least mention the Worcester Railers and Jordan Smotherman parting ways. In no way should anyone consider this a victory lap. Despite me being very vocal saying that Smotherman had to go people shouldn’t celebrate when a good guy loses his job, and make no mistake, Smo is a great guy.
I was glad to read he already has another opportunity, and even though in his radio interview he slightly exaggerates how good that league is–it’s generally considered the 7th best league in Europe–he still landed on his feet and gets to keep coaching. So good luck to him over there.
What would have been the best-case scenario in 2023-24 was Smotherman learning lessons from his first year as general manager and head coach and using what he learned to improve himself and the team. Unfortunately, he struggled with the “general manager” part of his job, and based on public comments and social media postings it seems part of the issue in that department for him was it wasn’t something he was really interested in doing. He said his primary goal was coaching and developing players, and that’s what he’ll get to do in Innsbruck.
The Railers have had three general manager/head coaches in their history, and none of them were competent at both facets of the job. (I’m excluding Toby O’Brien’s title as GM because he did literally nothing in that capacity while he was with the organization.) The first was Jamie Russell, who was probably the best in identifying talent to put on the ice. His problem was he wasn’t a great coach, and when players complained about his lack of coaching, they were often sent away. He was often one of the last to arrive for practice and the first to leave, and never looked at video.
Dave Cunniff was essentially the mirror opposite of Russell; he was one of the best pure coaches Worcester pro hockey ever had but couldn’t do the general manager portion of his job at all. It also led to him having too many “projects” on his team as opposed to players who could help win games right then and there. Unfortunately for Cunniff, he’ll always be remembered for trading away Ross Olsson for Nolan Valleau, who didn’t report and the Railers ended up with nothing for a fan favorite.
And then there was Smotherman, and for now, I’ll let others rank him where they want in terms of both coaching and general manager duties.
One thing is for certain of the three, none of them has an actual winning record with the Railers. Ignore points percentage, which is skewed by gaining points in games lost in overtime and the shootout, and just count actual wins and losses. Even counting shootout losses as ties, which is what they really are, doesn’t “improve” anyone’s record to the .500 mark. Russell was 73-78-8, Cunniff was 49-66-2, and Smotherman was 66-75-3.
Not counting the bonus goal teams are credited with for winning a shootout, no Railers team has ever scored more goals than they’ve allowed. Heck, counting the bonus goals they’ve only done it once, in their inaugural season. They’ve been outscored as a franchise 1,374 to 1,201. I’m too lazy to look it up, but that 1,374 number might include 13 “bonus” goals opponents got in shootout losses, but honestly, that doesn’t really change things one bit.
And change is what the Railers need to do, and they have a couple of months to figure it out.
FOUR
It stinks when a city loses one of its sports teams. It’s happened a few times in Worcester, most notably when the IceCats and WorSharks moved on to other cities when their NHL affiliates decided locations closer to the big club would be better for their prospects. Teams like the Tornadoes and the Surge went out of business due to the financial shenanigans of their ownership groups, and numerous basketball teams have called Worcester their home despite it being pretty clear the market isn’t interested in pro hoops in the city.
I guess I should add the Mass Pirates to this list somewhere, but if half as many people who complained about them moving to Lowell actually went to the games at the DCU Center, they’d maybe still be here.
The fans getting the short end of the stick this time are the fans of the Arizona Coyotes. It’s hard to find a professional sports team run more incompetently over the years than Arizona, and despite failure after failure on and off the ice their current owner, Alex Meruelo, gets to cash a check for a billion dollars. The fans who have been loyal to the team from the beginning get absolutely nothing but heartache.
It would take a post thousands of words long to even come close to explaining the idiocy of all the ownership groups they’ve had since Steven Gluckstern and Richard Burke bought the original Winnipeg Jets and tried to move them to Minneapolis because buying a pro sports team with the intent of moving it to a city you don’t have a lease in yet is a brilliant business move. It got worse when they decided to move to Phoenix instead because their best option there, America West Arena, wasn’t built for hockey to be played there.
In a nutshell, the inability of any ownership group to get an arena built near any metropolitan area in Arizona over the last dozen years or so is almost unbelievable short of someone knowing they’d make more money by selling the team versus continuing to operate it in that market and continuously creating a roadblock to prevent a building from being built.
But as bad as the fans in Arizona feel, those in Salt Lake City are ecstatic. Current numbers have the new Utah franchise, which the NHL considers an expansion franchise as Meruelo still owns the intellectual property of the Coyotes and can reactivate them if he gets a new building built, at more than 20,000 season-ticket deposits. The big problem is the Delta Center sits only 16,200 for hockey, and a quarter of those seats are considered “obstructed view”. There’s no plan for a new building for the team, with new owners Smith Entertainment Group saying they’ll do some major renovations to the building, which they also own.
There’s no word on what will happen to the ECHL’s Utah Grizzlies, who play at the Maverik Center in West Valley City, about a half hour away from the Delta Center in Salt Lake City. Odds are the two teams can’t co-exist so close together unless they’re affiliated with each other, so it will be interesting to see if the Smith Entertainment Group purchases the team to use as their AHL affiliate.
The problem there is the AHL and NHL still have the same number of teams, so the Smith Entertainment Group would need to buy one for a spot in the AHL. Arizona’s AHL affiliate was the Tucson Roadrunners, and in a local tie, the Roadrunners are the former Springfield Falcons. The Coyotes purchased the Falcons in 2016 and moved them to Tuscon a year after the AHL’s western migration took place. Meruelo retained ownership of the AHL team in the deal that suspended his NHL franchise.
So he’ll probably get an opportunity to give another team’s fans the shaft soon.
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