(Note: This is the last Weekly Minnesota Sports Survey for 2018. With the impending death of the year, I adhere to tradition and will readjust the day of the week the WMNSS is published for 2019. That day of the week readjusts to whatever day January 8 is [to reflect the results of the first full week of 2019, as well any ones for December 31], and for 2019, that day is -- ugh -- Tuesday.)
#0: Gopher wrestling (Re-Entry!). I suspect that the opposition was, uh, less than forthright. But they are coming back from the South Beach Duals in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., sweeping all four matches Saturday and yesterday/Sunday. They followed up victories over Lehigh and North Carolina (possibly the most notable win of the four Duals) on Day 1 with even better results on Day 2. They completely wiped out Kent St., 51-0. It is the first time the U. grapplers pitched a shutout since beating up on a community college six years ago, and it's the first time they rolled up at least 50 Points in a decade. They finished their time in Florida sextupling a ranked Utah Valley club, 36-6.
So, uh, that's real good, right? For sheer tonnage I didn't think it was fair to give them a -1, but it's not as if that team beat Penn St. or Oklahoma St. either, so 0 it is. And they begin Big Ten play Sunday afternoon vs. Rutgers at Maturi.
#-1: Gopher women's basketball (Last Week: -1). Well, Whalen & Co. have not slipped yet. The team opened conference play Friday with a convincing 74-56 win at Williams Arena over Wisconsin. Kenisha Bell continues to beast, scoring 17 and hauling down ten boards.
The 12th- or 15th-ranked Gophers remain undefeated at 12-0. However, Mechelle Voepel of espnW.com cautions against the anointing oil. With evidence (namely that the U. has only beating one ranked team, Syracuse, and boast a Strength Of Schedule on the good side of 200), she proves that this isn't really a stellar 12-0 record. This club does not face another ranked foe until the 14th, when they host Iowa, who has, as of press time, an SOS in the twenties. (It's also a game I'm hoping to work.) So maybe the games this week, when they travel to Michigan this/Monday/New Year's Eve afternoon and then host Illinois Sunday afternoon, won't tell much about how good they are. But, of course, it's better to win these games than to lose them.
#-2: Gopher men's basketball (Last Week: -2). Finish their non-con with a pair of hardwood beatings: Over North Carolina A&T Friday by 19 and Mount St. Mary's yesterday/Sunday afternoon by 18. These guys are 11-2, but like their female analogues, maybe that record isn't all that. They are the 63rd-best team according to Ken Pomeroy as of press time. Their Adjusted Offense is ranked 70th, and its Adjusted Defense is 66th. Thank goodness that is tournament-worthy advanced numbers for a BcS school, because it's nowhere near the real of very good. And now we will get to see what these Gophers are made of in conference play. They begin Thursday, when they visit Wisconsin.
#-3: Whitecaps (Re-Entry!). Almost forgot to check on this team; the National Women's Hockey League is so fledgling, these women go weeks without playing. But after a long hiatus, they played two in Buffalo. They were blitzed in yesterday's/Sunday's capper, 4-0, but the 'Caps defeated the Beauts, 2-1, Saturday afternoon in the first half of a unique NWHL/NHL doubleheader. Saturday's match was played at the Key Bank Center, which is where the Buffalo Sabres also play. The Sabres played (and lost in Overtime to) the Boston Bruins that evening; Sabres ticketholders were able to come in early to watch the Beauts/Whitecaps game. See, Terry Pagula, the mogul who seeded both Penn St. hockey programs, not only owns the Sabres but also the Beauts.
Despite the split, the Whitecaps lead the league with a 7-3 record. They resume play in two weeks (as opposed to their four-week furlough before this series) to play their first non-series games: At Boston the 12th, at Connecticut the 13th.
#-4: Timberwolves (Last Week: -3). Sandwiched a home loss to Atlanta with wins on the road versus Chicago and Miami. The rout over the Bulls can be glossed over. But the defeat to the Hawks and the victory over the Heat is a small sample size of the rapidly diverging career trajectories of the supposed twin foundations of this organization.
On Friday, the Woofie Dogs were getting blown out, only to come back in the Second Half and be up by as many as nine Points in the Fourth, only for the Hawks to storm back and, with a wild sequence, get the game sent to Overtime. There, Andrew Wiggins had a chance to tie the game late, but missed both Free Throws, contributing to a 123-120 loss. Big Wig was 3-of-8 from the stripe in the Fourth Quarter and in OT. Furthermore, for some goddamn reason, he forgot to put on his jersey at the beginning of the game. And after it, he called some Wolves fans "shitty" for booing him. Wiggins' future as a star, here or elsewhere, is just about over. Jesus fuck.
Contrast that, hopefully, to last (Sunday) night. Maybe he learned that the Vikings broke Minnesota fans' hearts (again) by choking the bit with a playoff spot on the line. But in leading the T-Wolves to a 113-104 win, Karl-Anthony Towns scored 34, hauled in 18 Rebounds, dished seven Assists, and blocked six shots. I think this needs to be researched more, but the only player in National Basketball Association history to notch more in each of those four categories in a single game was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who went 35-19-9-8 in a 114-107 win over Phoenix back in 1975. This huge night will no doubt be overshadowed in Twin Cities sports lore because 1) it happened on the road and 2) it happened on a day the Vikings screwed the pooch and underachieved for the fan base once again.
The Woofs are still near the bottom of the Western Conference, and Big Kat has yet to show he can bring a night as huge as his performance over the Heat on a regular basis. That's why these guys are rooted down here for the survey. But KAT is young enough, and he has shown enough, to earn patience. Time may be running out on Wiggins, however.
The team plays in New Orleans tonight/New Year's Eve Night. Man, there aren't a whole lot of places better to party in the New Year than the Big Easy. They then travel to Boston before coming home and hosting Orlando and The Team That Was Stolen From Us v.1.0.
#-5: Gopher men's hockey (Re-Entry!). Went to Saturday night's tilt against Ferris St. at 3M; it was the last of the three Golden Gophers tickets I bought at the Minnesota State Fair. And goddammit, just like versus St. Lawrence, I had to go to a contest where the U. lost to a vastly inferior opponent, by a score of 3-2. Look, again, I need to give Bob Motzko this first year to bottom out the program. But shit, man, it's so weird to see this team not able to impose their will against the likes of Ferris St. And meanwhile, defensive breakdowns have made this club so leaky that it oftentimes feels like this isn't a program from a BcS conference. And from what I heard from the crowd Saturday night, a lot of people feel that same way. But at least they won the first game Friday, 5-3.
They resume B1G play with a pair vs. Penn St., also at Mariucci.
#-6: Wild (Last Week: -5). A losing streak that grew to five with Thursday's 5-2 loss at Chicago (where Devan Dubnyk was pulled for the third time in his last ten Games, what?!) was broken Saturday when they beat The Bastard Atlanta Thrashers 3-1 at division-leading Winnipeg. But the big, and probably season-destroying, news for the screening week came late last week. Offensive Defenseman Matt Dumba, the Wild player probably punching above his weight the most this year, had surgery to repair his ruptured right pectoral muscle and will miss the next three months. That'll mean he could be able to return to the team in time for a playoff push. But these guys have had trouble scoring -- they scored a total of five Goals during that five-game losing streak; he suffered the injury vs. Calgary, the second of the five defeats, on the 15th -- and without Dumba providing Goals for them, there might not be a playoff push by the time he's fully healed.
I cannot believe that not too long ago, this team had the third-best record in the National Hockey League. Now, they are four Points off of the final playoff spot in the Western Conference.
This week: They host Pittsburgh in the squad's annual New Year's Eve game. Say, is the Mild hosting a game every NYE a tradition? I never noticed that. They then do an Eastern Canada three-step -- Toronto Thursday afternoon, Ottawa Saturday afternoon, Montreal Monday evening.
#-Infinity: Vikings (Last Week: -4). Man, I have to lol at the fucking Vikings season so I don't cry. Just because I predicted they would lose last week mean that I wanted them to lose. Of course I want them to win! But I knew they wouldn't. And they didn't, they fuckin' didn't.
I was wrong about the logic through the game. I thought San Francisco would push the Rams in their game playing concurrently. The Rams would lose the 2-seed and a first-round bye if they lost and the Bears won. So any news that the Rams were losing would give Chicago much more incentive to beat the ViQueens in order to overtake them for that 2-seed. And for this year at least, if the Bears were motivated to win, they have more talent and they would beat Minnesota.
Well, even though The Bastard Cleveland-By-Way-Of-St. Louis Rams were in Santa Clara, they blew out the 49ers, so the Rams were doing to get that first-round bye no matter what the Bears did. So, did Chicago let up and rest their starters and maybe let Minnesota win, setting up a probable rematch between these two teams in Chicago next week, where they would inevitably beat the shit out of the Vikes? No! To the Bears' credit, they played, straight-up and honestly, even though there was no tangible reason for them. And they went into Us-Bank and whipped the Vikes' asses, no joke.
Chicago's drive spanning the Third and Fourth Quarters, that 18-play monster that was capped off with a Touchdown ... well, that was the dagger. But everything about that damn squad was off, as it has been all year. The Offense bogged down when they could least afford it. Kirk Cousins burnished his reputation as a Quarterback who shrinks when the stakes are highest, and Wide Receivers Adam Thielen and Stefon Diggs got so frustrated by the neutered passing (which, to be fair, was largely a by-product of the Bears Defense) that they outright started venting at Cousins on the sidelines. But let's not forget the ViQueens D, either. Advanced metrics continue to say that they had one hell of a season. That may be the case, but I sure as fuck didn't see any third-down stoppages yesterday/Sunday, where the Bears made close to two-thirds of their Third Downs, including three in that long, season-killing drive. It felt as though this supposedly vaunted Defense could not stop the best teams when they needed to, especially when Minnesota's Offense went buggy.
In fact, this club's 8-7-1 record is a complete reflection of their season. (By the way, I predicted these guys would go 8-8 and miss the playoffs.) They beat bad teams (Detroit, Arizona, the Jets), but they did not beat good teams, nor even ones supposedly equal to them (New England, New Orleans, Seattle). Furthermore, in a last-week, win-and-in situation, at home, against a Bears team that may have decided to cut their losses if the Vikings showed even a fucking smidgen of fight in them, they not only lost, they were handled like a joke to the tune of a 24-10 meep of a defeat.
How is that nothing but failure? Every other single team that controlled its own destiny yesterday/Sunday won (well, maybe not The Bastard Houston Oilers, who lost at home to The Bastard Baltimore Colts). If you cannot handle your own shit, if you lay a turd of this magnitude -- how fucking good can you possible be?
Right now I feel the need to fire everybody -- Head Coach Mike Zimmer, General Manager Rick Spielman, the entire Offensive Line, everyone. But frankly, heads may very roll after next year. I am guessing that ownership feels staying the course is best, especially since they are paying Cousins a total of, what, $84 million for this season and the next two? The O-Line will go begging because Zimmer will draft another goddamn Cornerback in the first round of the draft, and not only will this team be in the same situation as they are this year, they conceivably will be worse. Because this is Minnesota, and improvement is something none of the local sports teams are able to do.
Fuck these guys.
#0: Gopher wrestling (Re-Entry!). I suspect that the opposition was, uh, less than forthright. But they are coming back from the South Beach Duals in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., sweeping all four matches Saturday and yesterday/Sunday. They followed up victories over Lehigh and North Carolina (possibly the most notable win of the four Duals) on Day 1 with even better results on Day 2. They completely wiped out Kent St., 51-0. It is the first time the U. grapplers pitched a shutout since beating up on a community college six years ago, and it's the first time they rolled up at least 50 Points in a decade. They finished their time in Florida sextupling a ranked Utah Valley club, 36-6.
So, uh, that's real good, right? For sheer tonnage I didn't think it was fair to give them a -1, but it's not as if that team beat Penn St. or Oklahoma St. either, so 0 it is. And they begin Big Ten play Sunday afternoon vs. Rutgers at Maturi.
#-1: Gopher women's basketball (Last Week: -1). Well, Whalen & Co. have not slipped yet. The team opened conference play Friday with a convincing 74-56 win at Williams Arena over Wisconsin. Kenisha Bell continues to beast, scoring 17 and hauling down ten boards.
The 12th- or 15th-ranked Gophers remain undefeated at 12-0. However, Mechelle Voepel of espnW.com cautions against the anointing oil. With evidence (namely that the U. has only beating one ranked team, Syracuse, and boast a Strength Of Schedule on the good side of 200), she proves that this isn't really a stellar 12-0 record. This club does not face another ranked foe until the 14th, when they host Iowa, who has, as of press time, an SOS in the twenties. (It's also a game I'm hoping to work.) So maybe the games this week, when they travel to Michigan this/Monday/New Year's Eve afternoon and then host Illinois Sunday afternoon, won't tell much about how good they are. But, of course, it's better to win these games than to lose them.
#-2: Gopher men's basketball (Last Week: -2). Finish their non-con with a pair of hardwood beatings: Over North Carolina A&T Friday by 19 and Mount St. Mary's yesterday/Sunday afternoon by 18. These guys are 11-2, but like their female analogues, maybe that record isn't all that. They are the 63rd-best team according to Ken Pomeroy as of press time. Their Adjusted Offense is ranked 70th, and its Adjusted Defense is 66th. Thank goodness that is tournament-worthy advanced numbers for a BcS school, because it's nowhere near the real of very good. And now we will get to see what these Gophers are made of in conference play. They begin Thursday, when they visit Wisconsin.
#-3: Whitecaps (Re-Entry!). Almost forgot to check on this team; the National Women's Hockey League is so fledgling, these women go weeks without playing. But after a long hiatus, they played two in Buffalo. They were blitzed in yesterday's/Sunday's capper, 4-0, but the 'Caps defeated the Beauts, 2-1, Saturday afternoon in the first half of a unique NWHL/NHL doubleheader. Saturday's match was played at the Key Bank Center, which is where the Buffalo Sabres also play. The Sabres played (and lost in Overtime to) the Boston Bruins that evening; Sabres ticketholders were able to come in early to watch the Beauts/Whitecaps game. See, Terry Pagula, the mogul who seeded both Penn St. hockey programs, not only owns the Sabres but also the Beauts.
Despite the split, the Whitecaps lead the league with a 7-3 record. They resume play in two weeks (as opposed to their four-week furlough before this series) to play their first non-series games: At Boston the 12th, at Connecticut the 13th.
#-4: Timberwolves (Last Week: -3). Sandwiched a home loss to Atlanta with wins on the road versus Chicago and Miami. The rout over the Bulls can be glossed over. But the defeat to the Hawks and the victory over the Heat is a small sample size of the rapidly diverging career trajectories of the supposed twin foundations of this organization.
On Friday, the Woofie Dogs were getting blown out, only to come back in the Second Half and be up by as many as nine Points in the Fourth, only for the Hawks to storm back and, with a wild sequence, get the game sent to Overtime. There, Andrew Wiggins had a chance to tie the game late, but missed both Free Throws, contributing to a 123-120 loss. Big Wig was 3-of-8 from the stripe in the Fourth Quarter and in OT. Furthermore, for some goddamn reason, he forgot to put on his jersey at the beginning of the game. And after it, he called some Wolves fans "shitty" for booing him. Wiggins' future as a star, here or elsewhere, is just about over. Jesus fuck.
Contrast that, hopefully, to last (Sunday) night. Maybe he learned that the Vikings broke Minnesota fans' hearts (again) by choking the bit with a playoff spot on the line. But in leading the T-Wolves to a 113-104 win, Karl-Anthony Towns scored 34, hauled in 18 Rebounds, dished seven Assists, and blocked six shots. I think this needs to be researched more, but the only player in National Basketball Association history to notch more in each of those four categories in a single game was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who went 35-19-9-8 in a 114-107 win over Phoenix back in 1975. This huge night will no doubt be overshadowed in Twin Cities sports lore because 1) it happened on the road and 2) it happened on a day the Vikings screwed the pooch and underachieved for the fan base once again.
The Woofs are still near the bottom of the Western Conference, and Big Kat has yet to show he can bring a night as huge as his performance over the Heat on a regular basis. That's why these guys are rooted down here for the survey. But KAT is young enough, and he has shown enough, to earn patience. Time may be running out on Wiggins, however.
The team plays in New Orleans tonight/New Year's Eve Night. Man, there aren't a whole lot of places better to party in the New Year than the Big Easy. They then travel to Boston before coming home and hosting Orlando and The Team That Was Stolen From Us v.1.0.
#-5: Gopher men's hockey (Re-Entry!). Went to Saturday night's tilt against Ferris St. at 3M; it was the last of the three Golden Gophers tickets I bought at the Minnesota State Fair. And goddammit, just like versus St. Lawrence, I had to go to a contest where the U. lost to a vastly inferior opponent, by a score of 3-2. Look, again, I need to give Bob Motzko this first year to bottom out the program. But shit, man, it's so weird to see this team not able to impose their will against the likes of Ferris St. And meanwhile, defensive breakdowns have made this club so leaky that it oftentimes feels like this isn't a program from a BcS conference. And from what I heard from the crowd Saturday night, a lot of people feel that same way. But at least they won the first game Friday, 5-3.
They resume B1G play with a pair vs. Penn St., also at Mariucci.
#-6: Wild (Last Week: -5). A losing streak that grew to five with Thursday's 5-2 loss at Chicago (where Devan Dubnyk was pulled for the third time in his last ten Games, what?!) was broken Saturday when they beat The Bastard Atlanta Thrashers 3-1 at division-leading Winnipeg. But the big, and probably season-destroying, news for the screening week came late last week. Offensive Defenseman Matt Dumba, the Wild player probably punching above his weight the most this year, had surgery to repair his ruptured right pectoral muscle and will miss the next three months. That'll mean he could be able to return to the team in time for a playoff push. But these guys have had trouble scoring -- they scored a total of five Goals during that five-game losing streak; he suffered the injury vs. Calgary, the second of the five defeats, on the 15th -- and without Dumba providing Goals for them, there might not be a playoff push by the time he's fully healed.
I cannot believe that not too long ago, this team had the third-best record in the National Hockey League. Now, they are four Points off of the final playoff spot in the Western Conference.
This week: They host Pittsburgh in the squad's annual New Year's Eve game. Say, is the Mild hosting a game every NYE a tradition? I never noticed that. They then do an Eastern Canada three-step -- Toronto Thursday afternoon, Ottawa Saturday afternoon, Montreal Monday evening.
#-Infinity: Vikings (Last Week: -4). Man, I have to lol at the fucking Vikings season so I don't cry. Just because I predicted they would lose last week mean that I wanted them to lose. Of course I want them to win! But I knew they wouldn't. And they didn't, they fuckin' didn't.
I was wrong about the logic through the game. I thought San Francisco would push the Rams in their game playing concurrently. The Rams would lose the 2-seed and a first-round bye if they lost and the Bears won. So any news that the Rams were losing would give Chicago much more incentive to beat the ViQueens in order to overtake them for that 2-seed. And for this year at least, if the Bears were motivated to win, they have more talent and they would beat Minnesota.
Well, even though The Bastard Cleveland-By-Way-Of-St. Louis Rams were in Santa Clara, they blew out the 49ers, so the Rams were doing to get that first-round bye no matter what the Bears did. So, did Chicago let up and rest their starters and maybe let Minnesota win, setting up a probable rematch between these two teams in Chicago next week, where they would inevitably beat the shit out of the Vikes? No! To the Bears' credit, they played, straight-up and honestly, even though there was no tangible reason for them. And they went into Us-Bank and whipped the Vikes' asses, no joke.
Chicago's drive spanning the Third and Fourth Quarters, that 18-play monster that was capped off with a Touchdown ... well, that was the dagger. But everything about that damn squad was off, as it has been all year. The Offense bogged down when they could least afford it. Kirk Cousins burnished his reputation as a Quarterback who shrinks when the stakes are highest, and Wide Receivers Adam Thielen and Stefon Diggs got so frustrated by the neutered passing (which, to be fair, was largely a by-product of the Bears Defense) that they outright started venting at Cousins on the sidelines. But let's not forget the ViQueens D, either. Advanced metrics continue to say that they had one hell of a season. That may be the case, but I sure as fuck didn't see any third-down stoppages yesterday/Sunday, where the Bears made close to two-thirds of their Third Downs, including three in that long, season-killing drive. It felt as though this supposedly vaunted Defense could not stop the best teams when they needed to, especially when Minnesota's Offense went buggy.
In fact, this club's 8-7-1 record is a complete reflection of their season. (By the way, I predicted these guys would go 8-8 and miss the playoffs.) They beat bad teams (Detroit, Arizona, the Jets), but they did not beat good teams, nor even ones supposedly equal to them (New England, New Orleans, Seattle). Furthermore, in a last-week, win-and-in situation, at home, against a Bears team that may have decided to cut their losses if the Vikings showed even a fucking smidgen of fight in them, they not only lost, they were handled like a joke to the tune of a 24-10 meep of a defeat.
How is that nothing but failure? Every other single team that controlled its own destiny yesterday/Sunday won (well, maybe not The Bastard Houston Oilers, who lost at home to The Bastard Baltimore Colts). If you cannot handle your own shit, if you lay a turd of this magnitude -- how fucking good can you possible be?
Right now I feel the need to fire everybody -- Head Coach Mike Zimmer, General Manager Rick Spielman, the entire Offensive Line, everyone. But frankly, heads may very roll after next year. I am guessing that ownership feels staying the course is best, especially since they are paying Cousins a total of, what, $84 million for this season and the next two? The O-Line will go begging because Zimmer will draft another goddamn Cornerback in the first round of the draft, and not only will this team be in the same situation as they are this year, they conceivably will be worse. Because this is Minnesota, and improvement is something none of the local sports teams are able to do.
Fuck these guys.
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