Mamma Mea Culpa

About a year ago, I wrote about the struggles of the Vancouver Canucks, and their ham-handed handling of a midseason coaching change. I complained that while hockey pundits were critical of the team, they didn't do enough to call out the team's institutional incompetence. I also insinuated that new coach Rick Tocchet was a downgrade who was only getting the job through connections with management.

Well, boy do I look stupid now; the Canucks have the second best record in the league. And now I see that Tocchet is far and away the favourite to win coach of the year.

So I decided to go back through my sports articles to see if there were any more embarrassing proclamations I should admit to.

Weep, The North

I talked about the Raptors predicament in 2017, in which they were a good team that didn't appear to have any chance of winning a championship. This was partly due to a lack of superstar talent on the team. And that discussion became a jumping-off point into the philosophy of sports fandom.

But it turned out that journey into sport existentialism was a little premature. Just over a year after that post, the Raptors took advantage of an awkward situation in San Antonio to trade Demar Derozan for Kawhi Leonard, then took advantage of a banged-up Warriors team in the final, and won an unexpected title. So although the deep discussion of the philosophical and psychological purpose of sports fandom is intriguing, it turns out the Raptors weren't as mired in hopelessness as it seemed.

Also bonus marks for my comment that the Leafs might be blocked from winning a Stanley Cup by, "a dynasty developing in Edmonton." For a start, the Leafs current problem is being blocked from getting out of their own division; running into a good team in the finals is a bridge they’ll cross if they ever come to it. And then Edmonton seems cursed by a similar inability to build into contender status.

Of Goats And Men

I mostly stand behind this discussion of the difficulty in naming the best players in various sports. Just keep in mind that it was written back when Brady could still wear all his Superbowl rings on one hand. But it does fall back on the idea that Bill Belichick made Tom Brady look better than he was. And now that we’ve seen each of them without the other, that sounds pretty stupid.

Mighty Vocal People 

In a discussion of how we determine who gets Most-Valuable-Player awards, I argued that the support for Mike Trout was based on the lazy notion that he was the overall best player, rather than best that season, and the award would really go to Mookie Betts. You guessed it, Trout was named MVP. But I will point out that Betts had a better batting average, home run, and RBI numbers than Trout.

Minor Obstacles

I talked about the controversy at the start of Kris Bryant's career, as the Chicago Cubs were waiting a couple of weeks to call him up to the majors, in order to take advantage of a loophole in the rules that would force Bryant to stay with the team an extra year. I then went over a humourous preview of the career ahead of him, in order to ridicule the odd path many major league careers go through.

But his career didn't really go that way. Obviously, I never considered the posibility that he and the Cubs would actually win the World Series. I think I can be forgiven for that. But the rest of the preview was based on him following the money to big market teams. Unfortunately, injuries have curtailed his effectiveness, and he instead signed with the Colorado Rockies, usually one of Major League Baseball's small spenders. That's unfortunate for him, and makes my prediction look silly. However I stand behind the point I was making: That the weird business of baseball makes for odd, circuitous careers, so complaining about a small loophole is a waste of time.