Do football teams have a responsibility to their fans? I think they probably do, but I had never thought about this much until I watched the New York Jets voluntarily start Zach Wilson at quarterback — someone who is incapable of winning NFL football games — for a second consecutive week. Should they be required by law to replace him?
Until last week, I would have had a different opinion. Tennis has all the hallmarks of a sport: competition, athleticism, clearly defined rules and even uses a ball. Surely that’s a sport, right?Wrong.
I thought I’d pop some champagne over the third consecutive year of Sports and Society with a quote from “John Wick” (2014), a film about being so mad someone killed your dog that you kill 77 people and topple the Russian mafia. If that’s not in our wheelhouse, I don’t know what is.
Watching a close NBA playoff game is awesome. It is also a form of psychological warfare. I present to thee: The five stages of playoff-watching, currently waiting on peer review.
Throughout the season — and to the surprise of very few — Rudy Gobert punched his ticket as the centerpiece of one of the worst trades in NBA history. And then he punched Kyle Anderson.
I’m going to level with you. Among the “Big Four” American sports, baseball is my least favorite. It’s both the slowest and least athletic, yet also the most confusing and time intensive. But I still went to the Red Sox-Pirates game on Monday night and remembered why I still love it.
The NBA MVP Award has always been completely ridiculous. It is the most confusing award ever conceived with zero agreed-upon criteria with which voters can even begin to formulate an opinion. Surely this hasn’t caused any problems over the past few weeks.
I have a friend who goes to Georgetown, a still-great school with a once-great basketball program. Aside from weekly Celtics mental health check-ins, an ever-increasing proportion of our conversations consist of three words, unmatched in history in their titanic importance:
Sports are about money. Nobody understands that better than owners, whose money is the principal currency of competitiveness. Two of them, Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry, recently gave interviews to The Athletic about funding their respective enterprises, the former approaching dynastic status and the second in panic mode. Let’s see what they had to say.
