An advice column for people who live with people who live for sports
What happened on Monday, January 19, 2015
Finland wins border conflict: Finland beat Sweden 1-0 in their international friendly in Abu Dhabi. Their one goal was scored by a player with a typically awesome Finnish name, Roope Riski in the 63rd minute. Line: Playing Finland is Riski business. HAHAHAHAHA
Sometimes it is easy being the Blues: The St. Louis Blues are making hockey look easy. They beat the Colorado Avalanche 3-1 for their seventh win in the last eight game. Avalanche goalie, Semyon Varlamov valiantly saved 27 of the 30 shots that came at him, but it wasn’t enough. Line: The Blues are playing great hockey. Maybe this will be their year.
Is the NBA coming back to normality? The two NBA basketball games I featured yesterday were the Detroit Pistons at Atlanta Hawks and the Chicago Bulls at Cleveland Cavaliers. Before the season, NBA observers would have said that the Hawks and Cavaliers would win those games. The way things have been going though, it was fair to think about the opposite results. Turns our, things might be turning back to normality in the NBA, at least a little. The Hawks won 93-82 and the Cavaliers won 108-94. Then again, the Knicks actually won a game, beating the the Pelicans 99-92, so maybe normality is just an allusion. Line: The NBA season is long. Let’s not get too carried away by unlikely things like the Cavaliers terrible play and the Pistons brilliance.
An upset blowout: There’s college basketball upsets and then there’s the unranked Georgetown Hoyas beating 4th ranked Villanova 78-58. Georgetown scored 42 points in the first half while playing a smothering defense that allowed only 20 points in return. Line: Nice win by Georgetown, they’ll probably be ranked in the top 25 after this one.
The first tennis upset of the new year: The first of the four major tennis tournaments of 2015 has begun and with it comes the first upset. Fifth seeded Ana Ivanovic lost her first round match to a relatively unknown Czech player, Lucie Hradecka. After winning the first of three sets 6-1, things fell apart for Ivanovic and she lost the second two sets 6-4 and then 6-0. Line: It’s not unexpected to get some early upsets, especially on the women’s side of a big tournament, but it is surprising how bad things got in the third set for Ivanovic.