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
Sports are full of silly superstitions. I could get weeks of content just by making fun of many of the silly things players or teams do that they claim to help them win or perform better that have absolutely no basis in reality. With it being the beginning of the Stanley Cup Final, we’re now dealing with one of the silliest superstitions in this great sport: touching the conference championship trophy.
Or, not touching it. Take your pick.
This season Florida didn’t touch the Prince of Wales Trophy, given to the Eastern Conference Champions. Likewise, Edmonton didn’t touch the Western Conference’s Clarence S. Campbell Bowl. I guess that means they’ll tie and share the Stanley Cup, right? Of course not.
The three Stanley Cup winners from 2016 to 2018, Pittsburgh twice and Washington, all touched the Prince of Wales Trophy. The Bruins didn’t in 2019 and ended up losing to St. Louis in the Final. The Blues didn’t touch the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl. The Golden Knights didn’t touch the bowl last season, but the Colorado Avalanche did when they won the Cup in 2022. The Tampa Bay Lightning touched the Prince of Wales Trophy in 2020 and 2021 and won. They didn’t in 2022 and lost.
In all, Pittsburgh has won the Cup five times after touching the Prince of Wales Trophy.
From 2012 to 2015 none of the four Western Conference champions touched the bowl, and they all won the Cup. It’s also important to mention that none of the Eastern Conference champions touched their trophy either in those years, and they all lost.
In terms of pro hockey, this superstition hasn’t even been around that long. It started in 1997 when Eric Lindros, then captain of the Philadelphia Flyers, refused to touch the Prince of Wales Trophy. Oh, and yeah, the Flyers got swept in the Final by the Detroit Red Wings. After watching a team not touch their conference championship trophy and getting swept, you’d think teams would be tripping over themselves to touch it the next season.
But hockey players are a different breed, I guess.
Listen, I get them not skating around the ice with it. It’s not the trophy they’re playing for, it’s just one you have to earn on your way to playing for the Stanley Cup. Even still, it’s OK to celebrate that you’ve made it to the Final. At that point, they’ve won 12 of the 16 games needed to hoist the Stanley Cup. Players should take it all in and enjoy the spectacle as they live it.
After all, it’s a touching moment.
TWO
Since I’ve given crap to teams for not touching their conference championship trophy, allow me to continue to give them crap over something else. While it’s not just hockey teams that do this, who thought it was a good idea to put their team’s logo on their locker room floor and then complain when people have the audacity to walk over it?
As an aside, yes, hockey uses dressing rooms and not locker rooms, but since we’re lumping all the sports together, we’ll give a nod to hockey teams for being different and just use locker room uniformly here.
A quick search of The Googles shows that there are articles going back ten or more years talking about players and media members and logos on locker room floors. What an incredible waste of bandwidth that is. It’s absolute silliness. Floors are made to walk on, it’s kind of the whole point of their existence.
There will be those out there who will talk about it being a team-building experience, and not walking over the logo shows respect to the team, and then they’ll add some mumbo jumbo that turns into phony outrage over someone stepping on the logo.
Years ago, Ray Ferraro tweeted, “If (the) logo is so sacred, put it on the roof. Putting it on the floor and expecting no one to step on it is ridiculous.” Now granted Ferraro has had some odd hot takes in his media career, but this one hits the nail right on the head. How do I know? Because two years later the Bruins were celebrated for, get this, taking the Spoked-B off the floor and putting it on the ceiling.
Now only Lionel Richie has a chance to step on that.
THREE
If you’ve followed along here on 210Sports for any length of time, you’ve likely noticed a sport that gets essentially no coverage from me: basketball.
I don’t pay much attention to the Boston Celtics, and while I admit to watching the Cs a lot more in the early 80s that was due exclusively to my dad watching and there only being one TV with cable in our house at the time.
Even not paying attention, if you use social media at all it’s hard to not run into references to Caitlin Clark.
Allow me to tell you what I know about Clark. She went to Iowa, who did not win the Women’s NCAA tourney, losing to South Carolina in the final. She was drafted #1 overall by the Indiana Fever, whose logo looks to me like it belongs to a minor-league baseball team as opposed to a top-level basketball team.
And she’s getting her ass kicked by opponents.
As a rookie, and arguably the new face of the WNBA, she has to expect that some players are going to try to knock her down a peg, both figuratively and literally. So far it seems she’s handling it with the kind of poise you’d want from a budding superstar, showing grace and dignity at every opportunity. But you know who’s not handling it well?
Her teammates. Where are they when Clark is being knocked down? Well, most of the time they’re standing right there and doing nothing.
Watch this video, which has been shown countless times
That’s Worcester Academy’s own Aliyah Boston standing right there preparing to inbound the ball. And while she does the good teammate thing and helps Clark up, the better teammate thing would have been taking her 6’5″ 220-pound frame and putting it right into the face of the much smaller Chennedy Carter.
Basketball is a physical game, and Clark plays that game well. But when someone cheap shots a player wearing your jersey it’s your job to step in and act like a teammate, and the Fever aren’t doing that.
Until they do, Clark is going to keep getting her ass kicked.
FOUR
I have become hopelessly addicted to streaming TV series.
Not that I would go anyway, but there’s no twelve-step program I’m aware of that could possibly intervene, mostly because if such a gathering exists, they’d likely end up talking about shows they love that I’d need to run home and add to my list of shows to look into.
In talking to my good friend Bill this week we’ve both gotten annoyed with the trend of streaming services not releasing the entirety of a season and instead acting like the broadcast networks and releasing episodes one week at a time. The whole idea of binge-watching a show is watching them all at once, and in order to do that now you have to wait for them to be all released.
I get that it’s better in the long run for services to put episodes out weekly as it increases the amount of time people are talking about the shows and might cause some to keep paying for a service they were close to dropping, but for fans who were spoiled when releasing whole seasons at a time became the norm going back to weekly episodes is a total downer.
Bill also noted that the next big thing being released, The Acolyte on Disney+, won’t finish its run until after the July 4th holiday. Seeing as we were both hoping to watch the show over that long holiday week, that puts a crimp in our plans.
Well, mostly in Bill’s plans, because while I said I’d watch I probably wouldn’t, and would instead think about finishing off one of the many series I started and then never got around to seeing the last episodes of. So maybe I’m really addicted to starting to stream TV series, and it doesn’t matter how often the episodes are released because in most cases I’m far behind anyway.
I’m still going to complain about it though.
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