Sports Forecast for Friday, November 7, 2014

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

In today’s segment, I covered:

  • NCAA Football – Memphis Tigers at Temple Owls, 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPNU.
  • NCAA Football – Utah State at Wyoming, 8:00 p.m. ET on ESPN2.
  • NHL Hockey – Washington Capitals at Chicago Blackhawks, 8:30 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NBA Basketball – Cleveland Cavaliers at Denver Nuggets, 10:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

What Happened on Thursday, November 6?

  1. An Orange Brown-out in Cincinnati: The Cleveland Browns beat the Cincinnati Bengals 24-3 in an NFL game that was difficult to watch, partially because strong winds kept the offenses grounded and partially because the fact that both teams have the same color palette made it difficult to tell them apart. In any event, the Browns are now tied for first place in their division but with seven games remaining, anything could still happen, the teams are so tightly bunched.
    Line: Brown beat Orange but to tell you the truth, I had trouble figuring out which team was which. Why don’t they have required secondary colors like in Soccer?
  2. Spurs rest and lose: The San Antonio Spurs are a team that wisely rests their older players in the second game of stretches when they have two games in two nights. It’s smart because it keeps them from getting injured in what is only a handful of the 82 games that make up the NBA season. It’s unfortunate that sometimes this falls during what would otherwise have been an exciting, nationally televised game. Last night, the Spurs rested some of their best players and the Houston Rockets zoomed by them, 98-81.
    Line: I know the Spurs do this just to be smart but sometimes it feels like they’re doing it just to annoy the league.
  3. Demon Deacons fight hard: The Clemson Tigers were supposed to crush the Wake Forest Demon Deacons but the Demon Deacons determinedly decided to defy expectations. Oh, they still lost, but 34-20 is a thoroughly respectable score.
    Line: Clemson won but not by as much as I expected them to.
  4. Lightning extinguish Flames: Team nicknames are fun, especially when they lead to unlikely events like lightning extinguishing a fire. The Calgary Flames have been one of the most surprising teams so far in the hockey season. After five straight years missing the playoffs, they’ve looked every bit a playoff team this year. They went into Tampa Bay having won their last three games but lost last night to the Lightning, 5-2.
    Line: I’m surprised at how well both teams are playing but especially the Flames.

Checking back in on Michael Sam

It’s halfway through the National Football League schedule, so it’s a good time to check back in on some of the big stories from the start of the NFL season. One of those stories was Michael Sam, who this past spring became the first openly gay male athlete to be drafted by a team in one of the big four professional sports leagues (football, baseball, basketball, hockey) in the United States. Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams but was cut towards the end of the pre-season. Soon after, he was signed by the Dallas Cowboys to be on their practice squad of ten players who help simulate the opponents during practice and who also would be the next men up in the case of injury to someone on the regular season roster. A few weeks ago, the Cowboys dropped him from the practice squad and Sam has not been signed since.

This past spring, when Sam was first drafted, I wrote that he made me feel “Proud, Ashamed, and Old.” When he was drafted, I was willing to believe that he had slid down teams’ draft boards because of his mediocre combine workout numbers and the stature that made him fit neither the linebacker or defensive end position in the pros. When his first team cut him, I pointed out that they had one of the best and deepest rosters at Sam’s position. I thought he would be signed quickly by another team, at least for their practice squad, and that he would break through onto an NFL roster soon. Now, I’m not so sure. It’s hard to imagine Sam playing this year, and if he doesn’t play this year, he could easily be drowned by the next wave of young players from college, and never become what we thought he would be: the first openly gay man in the NFL.

Other people are thinking the same thing. Three authors wrote about Sam recently: Phil Taylor nominated Sam for 2014 Sportsman of the Year in Sports Illustrated, Michelangelo Signorile wrote an essay for the Huffington Post questioning Sam’s treatment, and Cyd Ziegler of Outsports took a strong stance that Sam has been discriminated against.

To start with the positive, here’s Taylor writing about Sam’s admirable conduct and his impact:

Sam could have played it all so differently. He could have tried to tap into our sympathies, presented himself as a victim struggling against the homophobia of the league and of segments of the public. But he repeatedly said he wanted to be considered a football player first, and he backed that up by simply playing football. He never complained about things he had every right to complain about… By choosing not to do anything except play, Sam showed a toughness that can’t be measured by tackles or sacks. He left the social commentary to others, knowing that he would lend power to the LGBT struggle for equality just by putting on his pads.

Here is Signorile leading his readers to the conclusion that something is very fishy about the way Sam has been treated by the NFL:

Again, any of the individual actions can be explained away as a football decision. But when you add it all up and throw in the NFL’s past and current disregard for homophobia (in incidents and hiring), it’s impossible to escape the very real probability that Sam’s being gay was a factor that determined his fate.

Finally, here is Ziegler with hard-hitting facts and a definitive statement about wrongful treatment and discrimination:

To put it another way, of the 73 DPOYs (Defensive Player of the Year — an award which Michael Sam won in what is widely though of as the best defensive conference in the country, the SEC last year) in the big conferences since 2000, 95 percent were selected earlier than Michael Sam; all but two since 2000 (97 percent) – and 100 percent in the last eight years – made an active roster his rookie season … all except for Sam.

Sam is not being considered equally in that way. He is being held to a higher standard. Instead of potential to succeed, Sam must succeed now to make a roster. He must play like an All-Pro simply to crack a 53-man roster; he has to play like a starter just to make a practice squad. As he works out on his own, away from the league’s 32 teams, he’s not given that opportunity to show his stuff on the field. The bar for him has been set that much higher.

There’s still time to write a different ending to Michael Sam’s story. With each week that goes by, it seems more and more likely that for the story to end happily, a general manager of an NFL team is going to have to find one fifteenth the courage that Sam has shown. So far, we haven’t seen it.

What is pulling the goalie in hockey?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is pulling the goalie in hockey? When and why would a team pull their goalie? Pull him where?

Thanks,
Wayne

Dear Wayne,

A hockey team is said to be pulling their goalie when they substitute their goalie for a regular player. It’s the ultimate move of desperation. It’s a last gasp attempt to win a game. It’s a high-stakes maneuver that can end in disaster or triumph. It takes advantage of what feels like a loophole in the rules of hockey. Here’s what it means and how it works.

How does pulling a goalie work?

Here’s the thing about hockey. Teams aren’t ever actually required to have a goalie on the ice. They could, if they choose to do it, have six regular players on the ice and no goalie the whole time. They’d probably lose 600 to four but they wouldn’t be doing anything illegal. Tradition and sense suggest that teams should have five regular skaters on the ice and one extra player who specializes in preventing the opposing team’s shots from reaching the net. That player is called the goalie and he or she is allowed to wear specialized equipment including a face-mask and super-sized pads. In hockey, substitutions can and do happen any time during the game. Teams don’t have to wait for stoppages in the game to make substitutions like they do in other sports. When a hockey player is tired, he signals to his bench and skates over to it. He climbs onto the bench as another player leaps over the boards and onto the ice to replace him. When a team decides to substitute a regular player for a goalie, it works the same way. The goalie skates to the bench and a regular player replaces him. As with all substitutions, but even more so, the team making the substitution tries to do it at a safe time — when they have possession of the puck and are either in the other team’s end of the rink or headed that way.

Why do teams pull their goalies? And when?

Removing your goalie from the rink seems like a completely crazy thing to do. Good goalies save around 90% of shots on goal, so playing without a goalie makes the opposing team’s shots something like ten times more likely to go into your goal. Offsetting that advantage you’re giving to the other team voluntarily is the advantage you get from having one extra attacking player on the ice. How can we quantify that advantage? Well, playing six vs. five is not so different from playing five vs. four which happens a handful of times each game when a team has a power play. (A power play happens when a player on one team is assessed a penalty and has to sit out for two minutes while her team plays with only four players.) The very best power plays score around 20% of the time. Six vs. five is slightly less effective than five vs. four, so let’s say that teams that pull their goalies increase their likelihood of scoring by 15% per every two minutes they play that way.

Teams usually pull their goalie only if they are down by one or two goals. There’s no reason to pull a goalie if the game is tied or your team is winning and a deficit larger than two goals is too big to make it worthwhile. (One exception to this would be in the playoffs if a team is going to be eliminated by losing the game. In that case, they might pull their goalie down by more than two because… why the heck not?) The exact timing is dependent on where the puck is and who has it but is also up to the coach and may vary quite a bit depending on his or her strategy. Most frequently teams down one goal like to pull their goalies with about a minute and fifteen seconds left while teams down two goals might do it ten or fifteen seconds earlier. On rare occasions, a team might pull their goalie even when it’s not close to the end of the game. There’s an interesting but fairly unusual idea that if you have a five on three power play (the opponent had two players take penalties within a couple of minutes of each other,) pulling the goalie to make it a six on three power play increases the team’s chance of scoring without a significant risk of giving up a goal because the three defenders are so outnumbered.

Does it ever work?

Yes! It does! It’s hard to find statistics about these situations but a 2013 Boston Globe article by John Powers claims that 30% of the goals scored when a net is empty are scored by the team with the empty net. That may not seem like a lot but if the alternative is almost sure defeat, it’s worth a chance. If you scratch a hockey fan, you’ll probably find a triumphant goalie pulling memory not too far below the surface. Mine is Max Talbot scoring in game five of the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals. The Penguins were facing elimination and down a goal, so they pulled their goalie. I was alone, in my living room, fidgeting uncontrollably and quietly freaking out. Here’s what happened:

The Penguins went on to lose the cup that year but I’ll never forget the unlikely triumph of that moment.

Pulling the goalie in non-sports contexts

As with many sports terms, pulling the goalie has been appropriated in popular culture and used in non-sports contexts. In one non-sports context in particular. As confirmed by Urban Dictionary, people use the phrase “pulling the goalie” to refer to the decision to stop using contraception. This is a light-hearted, funny analogy to use when the decision is taken by a couple with consent on both sides, but it has a darker meaning too. Some people use the phrase to refer to one partner making the decision to stop using contraceptives without telling the other person involved, particularly if getting pregnant is part of a strategy to keep a relationship alive. This is obviously despicable in all ways but it is a remarkably well build analogy to hockey.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Thursday, November 6, 2014

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

In today’s segment, I covered:

  • NHL – An exciting and unexpected game between the Tampa Bay Lightening and Calgary Flames, 7:30 p.m. ET on regional cable.
  • NBA – San Antonio Spurs at Houston Rockets, 8:00 p.m. ET on TNT.
  • NCAA Football – Clemson Tigers at Wake Forest Demon Deacons, 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • NFL Football – Cleveland Browns at Cincinnati Bengals, 8:25 p.m. ET on NFL Network.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

What happened on Wednesday, November 5, 2014

  1. Barcelona strolls, Manchester City stumbles: The UEFA Champions league had six or seven games running simultaneously yesterday mid-afternoon. Of them, two were on national TV, Barcelona vs. Ajax and Manchester City vs. CSKA Moscow. I recommended (and followed my own suggestion) watching the Barcelona vs. Ajax game but the other game turned out to be more interesting. Ajax put up good fight throughout most of the first half but once Messi scored for Barcelona, Ajax’s eventual defeat was obvious. Meanwhile, over in Manchester, exciting things were happening. The scoring came early — by half-time it was 2-1 in favor of CSKA Moscow. The second half was characterized by Manchester City’s desperate and violent attempt to even the game at two, which was rewarded only with two red card ejections. The game ended 11-9 in terms of players and 2-1 in terms of scoring.
    Line: It’s hard to predict which game is going to be the most exciting to watch!
  2. Drama on Sixth Ave: The New York Rangers played host to the Detroit Red Wings last night and won in dramatic fashion more suitable to Broadway than Sixth Ave. I guess Madison Square Garden is only a block or so from Broadway. The Rangers were winning 3-2 in the last minute of the game when the Red Wings pulled their goalie and scored a goal with 7.7 seconds left to tie the game and force overtime. In overtime, the Rangers rallied back from the emotional upset of being less than ten seconds away from a win, and scored to end the game – 4 to 3.
    Line: The Rangers won dramatically last night, huh?
  3. Adjustment woes continue for Lebron and Co.: The big story of the night in the NBA wasn’t the Washington Wizards edging the Indiana Pacers by two points in overtime or the Golden State Warriors outscoring the Los Angeles Clippers 121-104, it was LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers losing to the Utah Jazz to fall to one win and three losses on the year. When LeBron chose to come back to Cleveland and moreover, when he finagled a trade to bring friend and fellow all-star Kevin Love to the team, the expectations for the team went sky high. I don’t think anyone expected them to start the season so poorly. Basketball talk today will be all about whether or not its too early to panic.
    Line: It is/isn’t too early to panic for the Cavs.

What is a trade in fantasy football?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a trade in fantasy football? And why do people who play fantasy football get so excited about trading?

Thanks,
Noah

Dear Noah,

We’ve written a few posts on how fantasy football, two of which are good preparatory reading in order to understand trades: How does fantasy football work? and What does it mean to start or sit someone in fantasy football? In those posts, you’ll learn how fantasy football teams are constructed (by selecting real world football players in a fantasy draft) and then evaluated each week (by the statistics that a select group of the starting players on each team accumulate.) After the initial selection of players onto teams, the only way improve your team’s fortunes is through swapping players with the “bank” of players that have not been selected by any team — this is called adding/dropping a player — or by swapping players with another team. This is called trading.

Every fantasy trade is the product of negotiation between players. Two fantasy owners get together in person or over the internet and go back and forth suggesting different ways of swapping players until they both agree. At this point, they can enter the trade into the website used to run the fantasy league. Every fantasy league is a little different, but there is often some kind of review period so that the rest of the fantasy league or the person who runs it can confirm that this was a “good” trade where both people think they’re getting the better deal. It’s important to avoid trades based on collusion (you trade me your good player for my bad one and I’ll buy you a pony) because it subverts the honesty of the competition.

Fantasy football is almost but not quite a closed system. In a true closed system, we’d be able to simply add up all the points from the players involved in a trade at the end of the season and whichever person ended up with the players with more cumulative points would have “won” the trade. In fantasy football though, there are positional requirements that make things more complicated. Each week, a team’s starting lineup has to consist of (for example) one quarterback, two running backs, and three wide receivers. If my team has two good quarterbacks but no good running backs, I will benefit from a trade that moves my good quarterback for your decent running back even if the quarterback will end the season having scored more points than your running back. There are a wide variety of reasons to make trades and looking for a trade partner, assessing their team, deciding which type of trade to approach them with, and then working back and forth with them to make it is great fun. All of this makes trading one of the most enjoyable parts of fantasy football. Here are some of the most common types of trades:

  • One position for another trade — this is the scenario we just talked about. If I’m rich at one position but poor at another, I’ll look for teams in the opposite position and talk to them about making a deal.
  • Two or three for one trade — this is a common trade made between one team at the top of the standings and another team towards the bottom or middle. If one team is so strong that they can give up two or three good players for another team’s great player, both teams can profit. The good team just got better by adding a great player to their roster and the not-so-good team improves in several different spots. The risk for the better team is that they’re putting more of their eggs in one basket and as we all know, an NFL player is an egg basket that frequently gets injured and breaks.
  • Dissatisfied like for like trade — the ultimate grass-is-greener logic. I’m annoyed at the performance of my tight end and you’re annoyed at the performance of yours, so we just swap them. This is relatively rare because in order to do it, both people need to think they’re winning the deal. This type of trade truly is zero sum.
  • Bye week trade — bye weeks (read the post on what a bye week is here) can hit fantasy football teams hard. On some weeks there can be up to six real NFL teams that don’t play. If you see that a team in your league is stuck with a lot of their players not playing that week, you may be able to induce them to trade you some of them for players who actually have games. Using this logic, you might be able to get slightly better players in the deal just because you’re willing to wait a week to use their statistics.
  • Keeper league trade — some fantasy leagues allow fantasy owners to retain players from year to year. By the time the middle of the season comes around, teams at the bottom of the league may be willing to give away good players this year for players that are more attractive candidates for next year. This type of trade may seem like collusion because it is intentionally imbalanced in terms of how good the players are but if you think of fantasy football as a multi-year instead of a single year competition, it makes sense.

Trading in fantasy football is an art and a skill. It involves analysis, negotiation, and risk taking. If you’re in a fantasy league, give it a shot. If you’re just around people who are in the midst of making fantasy trades, ask them what type of trade it was.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden —  international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

Sports Forecast for Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Sports is no fun if you don’t know what’s going on. Here’s what’s going on:

In today’s segment, I covered:

  • UEFA Champions League — a slew of games including Barcelona vs. Ajax Amsterdam on Fox Sports 1 and Manchester City vs. CSKA Moscow on Fox Sports 2, both at , 2:45 p.m. ET.
  • NHL – Detroit Red Wings at New York Rangers, 8:00 p.m. ET on NBC Sports Network.
  • NBA – Indiana Pacers vs. Washington Wizards, 8:00 p.m. ET on ESPN and Los Angeles Clippers vs. Golden State Warriors, 10:30 p.m. ET on ESPN.
  • And more!

For email subscribers, click here to get the audio.

You can subscribe to all Dear Sports Fan podcasts by following this link.

Music by Jesse Fischer.

What Happened on Tuesday, November 4

  1. Liverpool loses but only by a little: Liverpool was expected to be blown out by star-studded Real Madrid but managed to hold them to one goal in a 1-0 defeat. Liverpool’s coach made a controversial decision to actually not play some of his best (but older) players to rest them for an important game this weekend in the British Premiere League. This game vs. Real Madrid was part of the UEFA Champions League. All these different leagues make following European soccer bewildering at times but the British Premiere League is like a normal NBA/NFL/NHL league while the Champions League is different. Here’s how the Champions League works.
    Line: As losses go, it wasn’t a bad one for Liverpool.
  2. The rich keep winning: In the NHL, the two games were were keeping an eye on were the St. Louis Blues at New Jersey Devils and the Pittsburgh Penguins at Minnesota Wild. The Blues were on a five game winning streak and the Penguins on a four game streak. Both of them continued their streaks by winning last night. The Blues beat the Devils 1-0 and the Penguins beat the Wild 4-1.
  3. Line: It’s early still but the Blues and the Penguins look good.
  4. Matchup of unbeaten teams: The NBA lineup last night featured a matchup of two unbeaten teams, the Houston Rockets at the Miami Heat. These two teams were both pleasant early season surprises for their fans because they both kind of struck out during the off-season. The Heal lost LeBron James to free-agency and the Rockets lost Chandler Parsons and weren’t able to lure anyone else to play with them, not even the Heat’s Chris Bosh who they targeted aggressively. The game itself wasn’t that close — the Rockets won 108 – 91.
    Line: With all the noise about the Cavaliers, these two teams deserve some respect and attention as well.