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
For a hockey fan, there really isn’t anything better than a playoff Game 7. Even fans who have no real rooting interest in either of the teams bubble with anticipation and inevitably begin rooting for one or the other, or in many cases against one or the other. Yes, there are Game 7s in baseball and basketball, but except for rare instances, they never seem to have the vibe that a hockey series finale reaches.
There were two last weekend in the NHL, where the Boston Bruins faced off against the Toronto Maple Leafs Saturday night and the Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars tangled on Sunday. Each contained their own great stories in the lead-up to the games, but of course here in New England most were focused on the Bruins/Leafs Original Six match-up.
The Bruins were looking to avoid being the first team in NHL, MLB, or NBA history to lose 3-1 series leads in consecutive years. The Maple Leafs needed a win to break a Game 7 losing streak that had reached five straight.
Toronto fans went nuts when William Nylander gave the Leafs a 1-0 lead at 9:01 of the third period. Eighty-one seconds late TD Garden erupted when Hampus Lindholm tied it. And then it was overtime.
Very little that is more stressful as a fan than your team being in a Game 7 in overtime. Every time your team attacks is an opportunity to win and move on, and every time it defends there’s a chance for a loss and a long summer ahead. It’s an emotional roller coaster even for fans who are able to turn the game off when it’s over and sleep easily no matter who wins, and it’s thousands of times better (or worse) when your team is involved.
Lindholm and David Pastrnak made sure the Bruins didn’t make some unfortunate history Saturday night.
Toronto has now lost six straight Game 7s, with now four of those losses coming at the hands of the Boston Bruins (2013, 2018, 2019, and 2024).
As I drink my morning coffee from the skulls of the defeated Maple Leafs players one of my Bruins Tervis tumblers, I’m reminded that Worcester hockey’s record in Game 7s isn’t that great. OK, really that’s being beyond polite because their record out and out stinks.
The IceCats lost the city’s first pro hockey Game 7 over 26 years ago, on May 13, 1998, in an 8-2 loss to the Hartford Wolf Pack. Their second Game 7 loss is the single most heartbreaking moment in Worcester pro hockey history as Dan Trebil accidentally kicked the puck into his own net on May 1, 2000, in a 3-2 overtime loss to the Providence Bruins.
There’s another “win or go home” game in Worcester’s hockey history when the IceCats and Manitoba Moose played a three-game play-in series at the then-named Worcester’s Centrum Centre, where in double overtime Worcester lost game three on a Jimmy Roy goal when he beat Reinhard Divis on a three on one break.
Oh, yeah, that other NHL game 7 I mentioned? Joe Pavelski’s Stars beat Tomas Hertl’s Golden Knights 2-1.
TWO
OK, a quick show of hands: how many of you stumbled into a sport you’d never seen before, decided to watch it because of who the announcer was, and because you watched that one time and fell in love with the sport?
Obviously, I can’t see if you’ve raised your hand or not, but odds are I’m one of the very few people with his arm up. For me the sport I stumbled into was handball, not the game played here in the US where you smack a ball against a wall with your hand, but a team game that combines parts of soccer, hockey, and basketball. The first time I saw it was on TV during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, and I watched every game that was on afterward because of who was doing the play-by-play:
Mike Gorman.
I’m not a huge basketball fan, but during times when there’s no hockey game I’m interested in watching or just want some sound in the background I’ll often tune in to watch the Celtics, and by that I mean listen to Gorman do his play-by-play. As much of a homer that Tommy Heinsohn was going the color, Gorman was the consummate professional game in and game out, knowing that the show wasn’t about him but was instead about the game going on in front of him. That’s knowledge some of the “modern” play-by-play announcers don’t seem to know.
Prior to retiring last week, Gorman did the TV broadcast for 43 years. That’s so long that I had to look up who was doing the broadcasts before he started because I couldn’t remember who it was. It was Roger Twibell and Bob Cousy working games for WBZ-TV in 1980-81. Gorman’s tenure was longer than Celtics legendary radioman Johnny Most’s 36 seasons on the radio.
Based on recent interviews it will be hard to tell who will miss what the most; Gorman doing Celtics games or the fans not getting to listen to him call games.
On those boring winter nights, I know what my answer will be.
THREE
My wife and I won free tickets last week to the Worcester Red Sox last week for Thursday’s game, and so off we went to Polar Park for the match-up against the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. While it was our first game this season, we’ve gone to more than a handful over the last few years, with the vast majority taking place on Thursdays.
So when the ballpark was all but empty at the first pitch, we were a bit surprised. Usually Thursdays aren’t that bad. Obviously, it’s different on a weeknight than it is on the weekend, and crowds will be a lot less. But there was under 1,500 people there at 6:06 when Nick Pivetta threw the first.
And while there were more people at the ballpark as time went on, it was never more than a third full. The rain delay in the bottom of the fourth emptied the park even more, to the point when we left in the sixth it was back to under 1,500 again.
You can imagine my surprise when I saw the final box score listed the attendance for the game at 6,974.
It’s common knowledge that the vast majority of teams in sports don’t list the turnstile count. Ask most teams and, if they’ll even answer you, will doublespeak you to make it sound like they use the turnstile count but then qualify it with phrases like “tickets out” and “no shows”.
But there’s no doublespeak in the world that can explain that attendance number compared to the number that were actually in Polar Park.
I asked the Railers how they come up with their numbers, and it’s pretty much the same exact answer the WorSharks gave me when I asked years ago. The Railers use “tickets sold” as their guideline, but on those Wednesday games where the DCU Center is all but empty, the number you see is almost always right near the turnstile count.
When asked a few years ago Dave “Peterman” Peterson indicated the Bravehearts pretty much follow exactly when the Railers and WorSharks did.
The professional thing to do probably would have been to email the WooSox to ask them about it, but as they’ve never replied to any of my questions either via email or social media I just didn’t think it was worth the effort.
Plus now they won’t have to come up with 6,974 excuses for that attendance number.
FOUR
And speaking of my wife, Saturday will mark 28 years since we said, “I do”. When people ask how long we’ve been married I always jokingly say, “Five happy years, but not in a row.” But honestly, all in all, they’ve been pretty good years.
I’ve got some stuff planned for out anniversary, and that took a bit of time away from this week’s post, so it appears you’ll only get something like 3.25 things I’m thinking about this week.
But it’s for a good reason.
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