A Lost Weekend

This is Chicago sports right now. Let's get through it together.

Sector 1901 - This Is The Best We Can Do, Folks

Boy, it's a good thing Kyle Davidson said at the end of last season that the total of 52 points the Hawks accumulated during the 2023-2024 campaign would not be acceptable going forward. Because this motley crew of muppets he's assembled are on pace for 48. We've got a lot of bullets to cover both losses this weekend, so let's dive right in.

• I would like to start with the ESPN national broadcast on Friday. My distaste for John Buccigross is probably well known at this point. But I hadn't actually bothered to listen to him in a while because of that, mostly reducing whatever game he's doing to my muted TV. There was no choice on Friday night, and quite frankly having to listen to Bucci should get its own amendments in the Bill Of Rights. As @Torqpenderloin put it, "He's just not a serious broadcaster."
  
  Nope, he sure isn't. Everything is a chance for him to cram in one of his god-awful catchphrases, and there is no pause that he can't fill with completely unnecessary words that only sometimes make sense. Not everything needs to be described and the occasional silence is ok to let the play develop. It's a visual medium for fuck's sake!
  
  When he's not doing that, because he never shuts up, he's speaking in his hushed tone as if something dramatic is JUSTABOUTTOHAPPEN, meaning there's no modulation or change. He constantly sounds like a teenage boy who's about to get laid for the first time. Just an abhorrent listen.
  
  If that's not bad enough, and it is, I don't know what Dave Jackson brings on any review. He had to have it pointed out to him that on the called-back goal for the Hawks that Teuvo Teravainen was offsides. And every bit of analysis he does ends with him saying it was a good call and that he doesn't know what the review will determine. Fuck, I can do that and I'm sitting on my couch, too. And I need the money!
• The loss on Friday is especially galling because the Predators are truly dog-ass. That's not a team going anywhere, and no team should be blowing a two-goal lead at home to them, and certainly not as easily as the Hawks did.
  
  It was even more horrific that Brady Skjei scored the winner, because he was awful most of the night, as if he was inserted into the game at the last minute never having played the sport before. But just about anyone can get right against the Hawks right now.
• Right, so Lukas Reichel was all over the map over both games. He set up the first goal on Friday beautifullly, not just with the rush up the ice and the pass to Craig Smith, but some nifty handling at his own line to break out with speed and possession. These are two things the Hawks play with so rarely.
  
  His work earned him a chance to play with Bedard on Saturday, and the two of them together produced...a 0.97% xG-percentage. Less than 1 percent. I didn't even know that was possible. You'd think they could simply fall down and run into an attempt or two accidentally. Pretty obvious what the limits are to Reichel's game, as when he sees anything like a real d-man he doesn't have anything other than his skating. He's not great along the boards, he's not all that shifty (Friday's work aside). His future isn't a fourth-liner, unless the Hawks completely reimagine what a fourth line could be (and they should!). More study needed, I guess.
• For some reason, on Friday night with the last change, Luke Richardson saw fit to send Connor Bedard out agianst Ryan O'Reilly a majority of the time. What was the reasoning there?
• The Hawks were simply too passive on both of the Preds' first two goals. It's a recurring theme. Whether they're not getting the right amount of back-pressure from the forwards or it's a philosophy now, the Hawks simply give up their blue line way too often. Gustav Nyquist was allowed to waltz in before setting up Filip Forsberg for the first.
  
  On the second goal, Seth Jones is playing it as a 2-on-1 even though Teravainen has gotten back and has (mostly) cut off the pass, Jones could have cut the angle for Nyquist more than he did, though Mrazek also doesn't have to be beat clean by whatever's left of Gustav Nyquist.
• But hey, Bedard did score on a one-timer! Sorta! And then his goal against Dallas was pure violence. More of that.
• This isn't my bag, but for a team that makes a pretty big deal about "culture" and "standards," I found it curious that after Jason Dickinson got his shit completely wrecked by Matthew Dumba (who remains an overhyped dipshit) that the only response was a mild questioning from Connor Murphy. Or is all that horseshit only for postgame scrums?
• Speaking of Murphy...he very well might be toast. It sucks, because he's been better than he'll ever get credit for because of who he was traded for, the fact that he's played on only dogshit teams, and he's obviously worked back from a pretty serious injury or two. But he's second to everything, he's not even that strong on the wall or in front of the net right now, and every time he has the puck on his stick it looks like a sneeze that'll throw out his back again.
• Nolan Allan and Wyatt Kaiser continue to be relentlessly attacked to the outside, and not in a "they're forcing wingers to go wide" way but in a "there's gold in them thar hills" way. This is the problem when you have a bunch of d-men who "skate well for their size." Because eventually they're going to run into wingers who just plain skate well, and Kaiser and Allan going to be in the Lemuel Stinson trail-technique.
• There's no point in having Tyler Bertuzzi and Nick Foligno together on the first power play unit. They ostensibly do the same thing, they both want to be in front of the net, they both offer little to nothing when shunted out to the wall. It's unclear if either can effectively play the bumper position. If Bedard has license to roam, as he should, give us Hall or Reichel (or y'know, Frank Nazar) so that someone other than Teuvo can make a pass or open up space.
• I get that Drew Commesso probably isn't ready for the NHL, but is it also necessary to back-to-back Mrazek? At home to one of the worst teams in the league is a pretty sweetheart spot to give a kid like Commesso a look. If it goes well you've filled him with confidence for his run in Rockford. If it doesn't, what have you lost?

I think that's all of it. Is that enough?

Monday Pregame

Colorado Avalanche Lineup

Colton - MacKinnon - Rantanen

Kovalenko - Mittelstadt - O'Connor

Wood - Kelly - Kiviranta

Wagner - Ivan - Stienburg

Toews - Makar

Girard - Manson

deHaan - Malinski

Georgiev

What You Need To Know: We'll abbreviate our game preview just a touch because this newsletter will get Joyce-ian anyway.

The Avs spent the first two weeks of the season mistaking the reverse pedal for the gas, and then have spent the most recent two weeks doing the opposite, as they lost their first four contests and now have won their last five. That includes beating the Sens last night at home 5-3. So at least the Hawks will catch them on the back end of a back-to-back? Hey, we're tryin'...

The only story with the Avs so far is that Alex Georgiev has played like he got into the mushroom chocolates before every game. He has an .810 save-percentage, which has helped the Avs to have the second-worst even-strength SV% in the league at .873.

Other than that, everything looks mostly like it always does for the Avs. They've actually been pretty defensively solid, giving up 2.21 xGA at 5-on-5. Casey Mittelstadt is scoring on the second line (12 points in nine games), which has been a problem area, though the metrics are pretty rough. Cale Makar is averaging nearly two points per game from the blue line. MacKinnon and Rantanen are always a bounce away from a five-point game and will carry the Avs to 100 points on their own.

The Avs are pretty hamstrung right now cap-wise, if they want to bolster the second line or below at all. They have to carry Valeri Nichushkin's hit until he's reinstated. He's eligible next month to come back from the Player Assistance Program, but that's not automatic. Right now the whole season basically works as a runway to see if Mittelstadt can become a #2 center on a true Cup contender and what they'll do about the third line.

For tonight, well you probably know the drill. The Avs will play at a pace the Hawks will struggle to match, but maybe they'll get loose defensively and leave Bedard and Hall too much space at times and there's a very good chance Georgiev can't stop anything and might even chuck one or two into his own net. Strap in.

Sons Of Lemuel - The Bad Place

If only I were a talented enough writer to somehow capture the feeling of whatever Bears fans are going through right now. I'd probably have a real job! What I do know is that we're all in the same fucking place we've been in with other Chicago teams that show any sort of promise lately, at least most of them.

It is clear now that the Matt Eberflus and his staff is too stupid to live, much less run a football team. There's the obvious: the pre-snap and post-whistle penalties, the non-sensical playcalling and inability to compensate for a patched offensive line on the fly, the situational unawareness, and a refusal to take any responsibility for that from the coach. Eberflus is always too happy to back up any asinine call he or his staff made during a game that add up to an infuriating loss.So either he's backdoor bus-tossing his players or he doesn't understand the problem, both of which should see him deposited in the nearest green bin on the way home. And all this was out of a bye week where a team gets an extra practice or two to nail down the details.

If the Bears ever play games that really mean something again, it won't be with Eberflus at the helm. So what's the point of the rest of this season? Are he and his staff that good at developing talent? Maybe on defense, though one can't help but wonder if any average defensive coordinator couldn't produce a good defense with these players.

So, there will be a faction of Bears fans rooting for a collapse here. Which is totally possible. Because when NFC Central play starts, the Bears will be required to play grownup football to even win a game of the six. They can't play grownup football under Eberflus. 1-5 in the division seems a stretch.

But who wants to watch the Bears collapse? No one in their right mind. And if they don't outright collapse, if football footballs enough for them to goof a win or two they probably shouldn't get, and end with 8-10 wins, will that be enough for Ryan Poles to jettison these dopes to the moon? If not, it means another year gets wasted on a coaching staff that isn't B to C, and it's debatable if it's even A to B. He may be hated in this town because this town can me moronic to the 12th degree but it should be forever indebted to Jerry Krause for knowing the difference and doing something about it.

I don't want to watch the Bears lose. I want them to rebound in Arizona immediately, and then beat the hanging curve that is New England at home to be 6-3 and then I will delude myself into thinking the rest of the season could really be something. And then they'll spin their wheels some more, and neither you or I will be any happier. But this is the path we chose.

Even after that game I and most others feel the Bears really do have something special with Caleb Williams. But not only is it hard to feel like it'll fully flower with Eberflus here, but the knowledge that it's going to be so hard to get rid of Flus now colors everything. And I can't actually sit around and hope the Bears lose to rid us of that last feeling. We're stuck. It's the conveyor belt to the middle we can't ever get off of.

I hate it here.

I couldn't help but get flashbacks on Friday to another playoff game in LA where a manager brought in a starter who hadn't ever pitched out of the pen was brought in the middle of the inning with runners on and immediately gave up a homer to lose the game. It was kind of funny when Joe Maddon did it to John Lackey, because fuck John Lackey. I guess it's still funny that Aaron Boone did it to Nestor Cortes, because it's the Yankees. But that will go down as one of the worst World Series decisions in recent memory. It's the kind of thing Dave Roberts would do, honestly.

Anyway, that's plenty for today. If I have soccer stuff we'll push it to tomorrow.

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