An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports
What happened on Tuesday, November 18?
Sloppy end for the U.S. in Dublin: The United States Men’s National Soccer team played its last game of the season yesterday vs. Ireland in Dublin. It did not go well. The team looked sloppy and disorganized and lost 4-1 to an Ireland team that wasn’t even playing its best players. In the American team’s defense, not only were we missing a bunch of our best players but even among the 23 players we had, we decided to not play four or five of the best because they have Major League Soccer playoff games this weekend. Still, losing to Colombia and then Ireland is not a happy way of ending a good year for U.S. Soccer. Line: U.S. soccer still has a long way to go.
Uh… Crisis time in Toronto: The story of the night in the National Hockey League was the 9-2 loss of the Toronto Maple Leafs at the hands and skates and sticks of the Nashville Predators. Toronto is perhaps the hockey craziest city in the world and they do not react well to embarrassing defeats from their hockey team, especially not to teams like Nashville, which, while good, does not exalt have a long hockey history like Toronto does. Line: [If you live in Toronto] The sky is falling!! [If you live basically anywhere else] Did you see Toronto last night… oh boy, someone’s gonna get fired. [evil chuckle]
The new rich in the National Basketball Association: The classically great franchises of the NBA are almost all having down years. The Celtics and Lakers are a combined 5-14 (five wins, fourteen losses) and that’s not a surprise. The Knicks are 3-9 themselves and only newsworthy because some crazy person lost his job and is following them around. The flip side of this is that there are some really exciting new teams rising to the top of the league. Two of those played last night: the New Orleans Pelicans and Sacramento Kings. The Pelicans beat the Kings 106-100. Line: Whoever thought we’d be excited about the Pelicans and the Kings? But we are!
Well that was easy: The two big match-ups in college basketball last night both turned out to be easier for the higher ranked team than expected. The Duke Blue Devils coasted past the Michigan State Spartans 81 – 71 and the Kentucky Wildcats routed the Kansas Jayhawks 72 to 40. It’s a long season, so things could easily turn around, but for now it looks like Duke and Kentucky are head and shoulders above almost everyone else. Line: Tons of exciting games in college basketball yesterday, just not the biggest ones.
