#-1: Gopher volleyball (Last Week: -4). Swept at Northwestern, although who doesn't sweep Northwestern, and the team did drop the first Set in Saturday's Match, so they don't get a Positive Numbers or a 0.
Believe it or not, in this season that was shifted from the fall, the Gopher volleyballers are playing their last Games of the regular season. They host Iowa for two tonight/Friday night and tomorrow/Saturday afternoon.
#-2: Gopher soccer (Last Week: -2). A second straight 1-0 victory at home, this time to Maryland back on Sunday afternoon, this time courtesy of a Goal by McKenna Buisman 132 Seconds into the Match. They have five Wins, two Draws and three Losses, and have now scored a half-dozen Goals. Saturday afternoon marks the end of the regular season, when they will host Wisconsin. And after that ... ?
#-3: Gopher softball (Re-Entry!). Won three-of-four in Illinois, which is really nice. The only thing I don't like: The loss was the getaway tilt, and they got Mercy-Ruled in five Innings, 8-0. I don't remember the last time the Gophers were Mercy-Ruled. Moreover, Amber Fiser took the loss on this one, and the club's star Pitcher is now 5-3.
After starting their season in Florida and then in Urbana-Champaign, Ill., they finally come home and open up play in Jane Sage Cowles Stadium for the season with a four-Game series vs. Purdue. (Note to self: The two middle Games, as they will be for all the four-Game series for at least this Year, are Doubleheaders, but they're going to both be full Games, in other words going the full seven Innings. So no truncating like with baseball.)
#-4: Timberwolves (Last Week: -5). On Friday they came back from an all-time deepest hole to beat Houston. The next night (also at home) they dug themselves a similarly-deep hole and this time they did not come back to beat the Rockets. Those two Games, mirror images though they may be, prompted Jon Krawczynski, Timberwolves beat writer for The Athletic, to absolutely rip the team a new asshole. I like it when a media member stands up to the team they're covering and tells it like it is when that team plays like shit.
With all that being said, I kind of think they're playing better now than they were before the All-Star break. It is a small sample size, but they were competitive in losing in Brooklyn Monday, 112-107 -- aka the Moral Victory -- and then gutted out a 102-101 win back at Target Center Wednesday over New York and former T-Wolves Head Coach Tom Thibodeau. Malik Beasley's return from his suspension has helped the team.
This Week: Back-to-back road Games in Memphis and Philadelphia, home to Sacramento, then in Indiana.
#-5: Wild (Last Week: -1). Conversely to the Woofs, observers have, uh, observed that the Mild have not been playing well over the past several contests. The Power Play, a borderline-historic worst, has not changed since the beginning of the season. But they haven't played with pop ... uh, whatever that means.
What's more disconcerting for me is the team's home-vs.-road Jekyll-and-Hyde routine has hardened -- well, sort-of. They were on the road all Week, and they got swept in San Jose, but came back from a pair of one-Goal deficits last/Thursday night to beat Las Vegas in a Shootout. They schedule gets appreciably tougher for next Week -- another versus the Golden Knights, then Monday and Wednesday tilts against The Bastard Quebec Nordiques at Xcel -- but the their recent stretch of success, buoyed by their impeccable home record, has glided them into a playoff spot that seems to also be hardening.
#-6: Twins (Re-Entry!). So this team begins the 2021 season with mostly the same roster (at least when it comes to the main guys, minus Eddie Rosario) they had at the end of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. And why not: They won the American League Central Division -- even though they extended their postseason losing streak to an American record 19 Games -- their roster is still on the young-ish side, and their farm system is pretty good. Their window of contending may no longer be opening up, but I don't really see it closing, either. Yes, the White Sox now appear to be the main contenders for the division crown, and with the way they spent, they might be a problem (although the injury to budding superstar Eloy Jimenez, for which he'll be gone up to six Months, is a pretty big blow). But steady as she goes is a plausible outlook for this organization. If anything, people loved what is considered to be the squad's big acquisition, former Angels Infielder (and winner of multiple Gold Gloves) Andrelton Simmons. A team that was one of the worst in Infield Defense appears to have instantly solved it with one guy -- assuming his injury issues don't come back to hobble him and the Twins.
So it is a head-shaking irony that the Twinks started the season yesterday/Thursday afternoon versus The Bastard Seattle Pilots with a 5-2 lead going into the bottom of the Ninth Inning and surrendered three Runs with the help of two really bad Errors, first by Alex Colome, one of the Reliever pickups (who eventually was given the Blown Save), the second by ... Simmons. And Randy Dobnak, the Uber driver who just signed a new five-Year contract for a total of almost ten million dollars, gave up the Game-winning hit to Oswaldo Arcia in the Tenth. Yeah, it's just one Game. But for a franchise that has not won a playoff Game in more than 16 Years, one fears the worst. And by the by, they shouldn't have fuckin' blown that fuckin' Game.
Oh yeah -- big-ticket Free-Agent signing Josh Donaldson had one Game, this Game, before he had to leave the Game because he got hurt. One At-Bat, actually -- he hit one to the Outfield, and while he was turning from First Base he felt a twinge in his leg. But of course.
They have today/Friday off, then finish the three-Game set Saturday and Sunday. They then play in Detroit for three before opening up Target Field Thursday against Seattle.
#-7: Gopher baseball (Last Week: -3). Oof. These Golden Goofers got swept over four-Games (even though the two middle Games comprised a Doubleheader of seven Innings each). It got really bad in the back half, with the Saturday capper a 17-5 rout and Sunday's getaway contest a 10-2 laugher. The nine is now 3-12 for the Year. Yeah, I don't know if these guys are any good. Wincing with wounded pride, they open play at Siebert Field this weekend with a three-Game set versus Michigan St.
#-Infinity (tie): Whitecaps and Gopher men's hockey (Last Week: Re-Entry! and Re-Entry!, respectively). Wow, what a shit-ass Week for hockey in The State Of Hockey. Well, maybe in the Twin Cities.
Anyway, let's start with the Whitecaps. First of all, I need to clear something up ... by admitted I didn't make things clear. They had won the NWHL's Isobel Cup in 2019, and so by my rules, I wouldn't have had to talk about them until the Week they finish a season short of a championship. Yet I did include the 'Caps starting in the WMNSS for January 29 as the league began their star-crossed semi-bubble in Lake Placid. I don't remember my thought process of re-including them. Maybe the pandemic was a force majeure clause that compelled me to talk about them again. Or maybe since the Whitecaps didn't technically win the 2020 Isobel (they were set to play Boston in the final, but that got postponed due to the pandemic and then cancelled outright), I had to put them back in. But I think I did so because I flat-out forgot.
At any rate, I'll be talking about them a lot next season with no technicalities or mistakes, because they lost in the 2021 Isobel Cup Final -- brought about when the NWHL hastily went back on their word that the season was done after COVID-19 ripped through a couple teams and brought four teams into Boston to play three Games over last Friday and Saturday -- to the Boston Pride, 4-3. I was not able to watch the Game, although I think it's really good for "woho" that it turns out NBCSN was able to carry that league's playoff Games after all. I am, however, very disappointed. Don't exactly know what happened, and the mini-bubble set up standings based on only several Games, so maybe the higher-seeded team (in this Game it was Minnesota; they were second, the Pride were fourth) really wasn't the better one. But a Minnesota team fell short of a title, and so that constitutes failure. Do better.
I will say one mildly uncouth (at least I think) thing going for the Whitecraps. So few people actually care about women's hockey that, even though the sport and the league are fighting for survival, at least they aren't getting hammered by fans like teams in more popular sports. Sports like men's college hockey. Did I say last week that this club and program are "on the upswing," and that their appearance back in the NCAA Tournament is "reason to celebrate what can be brighter days ahead?" Yeah, well, fuck all I said about them last week, because I'm sorely ashamed. Sure, they annihilated Nebraska-Omaha in the First Round Saturday, 7-2. But they were in turn emasculated by ... ugh, fuckin' Minnesota State-Mankato Sunday, 4-0.
I should step back and at least indulge in the, uh, fecundity of the state teams in the tourney. There are five top-flight men's college hockey schools in Minnesota: Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth, St. Cloud St., MSU-Mankato, and Bemidji St. This is the first Year all five programs reached the tournament. (By the way, there will be a sixth Minnesota top-flight school when St. Thomas comes in next Year.) Moreover, all five squads won at least one Game. And three of the schools comprise three-quarters of the Frozen Four -- the Bulldogs (after that epic quintuple-Overtime ultramarathon over North Dakota), the Huskies (who upset Boston College), and the Mavericks. It does not include the Gophers ... they who celebrated their 100th Year of existence, the flagship school of the University of Minnesota college system, the supposedly vaunted "Pride On Ice." They lost to a school of inferior academic caliber which began top-flight play in 1996 and had not won a single tournament Game until Sunday.
I know I should expand my provincialism enough to be proud that three Minnesota schools have reached the Final Four (is it the first time?). But let's be real here: I have lived my entire life in the Twin Cities. I've been to Duluth once. I've been to Mankato never. I have only gone up to St. Cloud to attend a yearly math competition when I was in high school. I believe in The State Of Hockey, but when it comes right down to it, I'm a Gopher fan. And I am utterly humiliated that, even in a crazy Year where all four #1 seeds fail to get to Pittsburgh, the Gophers were upset.
And credit the Mavs, but they upset the Goofs in dominating fashion, blocking shots, controlling the puck and, by all accounts, giving the Goofers little-to-no opportunity to wrest back control of the Game, let alone get shots off. It was a master class of hockey ... done on purportedly the fourth-best team in top-flight men's college hockey this season. And what really pisses me off is that the most high-flying, offensive-minded Gophers team I have seen in Years got fucking shut out. How in the fuck does a Bob Motzko team go out like bitches like that?
No, this is unacceptable. This is underachieving. And the thinking in Duluth and St. Cloud, where Gophers used to go and heckle the Bulldogs and Huskies by chanting "Gopher rejects (clap-clap-clap-clap-clap)!" and now they do the same to the U.? Well, those drunk fuckers down in Mankato can now say "Mavericks rejects (clap-clap-clap-clap-clap)!" next time the U. travels down there for a Game or a series. Because they're right. Gophers recruits might not be able to get onto any of those teams in outstate Minnesota. The University of Minnesota has, once again, shown that it is a lazy, indulgent dilettante of a program.
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