East of Boston

Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, the whole nine yards...

All sorts of good stuff happening in the local Sports scene,
..and I have piles and piles of video to prove it.

 The Patriots left Draft Weekend with a bevy of players. For reasons that Only The Coach Need Know, he dropped out of the first round to gather second and third round picks. If he's trading a dollar for five quarters, all should be well. Dumping third rounders for second rounders next year is pure Belly Check Brilliance.

We ended up with several interesting prospects. Patrick Chung (who isn't Chinese, or at least Chinese-lookin') will attempt to fill a Rodney Harrison-sized hole at safety. Rookie cornerback Darius Butler will hopefully look as good in New England as he did at Connecticut... a statement which actually makes sense if you watch enough football.

Boston College's own Ron Brace is 330 pounds of Vin Wilfork Free Agency insurance, I have no idea who the second round Right Tackle guy is, and Brandon Tate was (good news) averaging 24 yards a catch in the ACC before he (bad news) tore what I believe was every ligament in his knee.

The Celtics/Bulls series (currently Boston, 3-2) has been four heart attacks and a laugher. Last night was no exception.

Chicago has a good young team. Gordon is an assassin. Rose is the Goodness. Noah plays like a man possessed. If they keep that team together and maybe fine-tune it a bit in the offseason, they should be a good team for a decade. Someone less optimistic might view them as "Ben Gordon has hit 10 circus shots in the last minute of like four games in this series, and they still lose more than they win," but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

As for this series... well, we outlasted them last night, and now they have to win two straight on us. I'm betting some fairly large currency against them being able to do so.

Looking beyond Chicago (a big mistake if you're playing, but I can do it all damned day to no ill effect), we're going to have an uphill battle. We have very limited Big Man capabilities with Kevin Garnett gone, and Orlando (should they get by Philly) has an absolute beast inside in that Dwight Howard kid.

That's also the good news, because the bad news is that the road to the title most certainly will go through Cleveland. This generally isn't the case, but you can almost smell a LeBron James/Kobe Bryant showdown in the Finals. LBJ seems to be having the sort of season where we may be seeing him ascend into Heaven afterwards, and that generally bodes poorly for teams that have to face such a guy in the playoffs. Like us.

That's all Then. As for Now, we're still the defending champs. We expect to be treated as such.

Here's one you don't see every day, kids....

Usually, we leave the baseball stuff to the baseball blogger, but I just had to post some video of Jacoby Ellsbury performing a straight steal of home plate. The Sox had won 11 in a row before last night, including a sweep of dose Damned Yankees.

Stealing home is very difficult to do, as the pitcher is throwing at 90 mph to an expert catcher/tagger-outer who happens to be right where you have to go. You can only do it if you're as quick as a hiccup, like ol' Mr. Ellsbury seems to be.

 Speaking of quick....

The Bruins swept the Canadiens, 4-0. While there were some good games (including a heart-stopping sequence where Les Habs hit the crossbar in a tie game, only to have us put the winning goal in on them like 30 seconds later), we generally spent most of the series Sonning them.

 I could speak at length on the matter, as I was a hockey cheerleader in high school (our principal activity was to Keep Warm), but we subscribe to the theory that the Action speaks louder than does the Word.... so the series was basically the equivalent of this fight:

 That's how we roll at Cape Cod Today. Good day, and Godspeed.