In the midst of the Rangers’ seven-game winning streak, coach John Tortorella stated, “We’re teetering on going the wrong way here.” And man was he right. The Rangers did more than teeter against San Jose – they plummeted, crashed and burned. Their poor play finally caught up with them. They can come out on the winning side against a team like Toronto while being outplayed, but not against an upper-echelon team like the Sharks. As the third period went on, I thought I was reliving the Giants-Saints game. How did Drew Brees end up with a hat trick?
The Rangers are taking way too many penalties. In the first nine games of the year, they’ve been shorthanded a whopping 49 times, which is third worst in the league. The good news is that their penalty killing is again one of the best in the league. But it’s hard to control the game and score goals when player after player is marching off to the penalty box. …
Sometimes great teams and great people have bad days. Not everything goes as intended. Evel Knievel didn’t make it to the other side of the Snake River Canyon. The Summer of George didn’t go off as planned. You launch your balloon-like contraption in your backyard, forcing your six-year-old son to hide in the crawl space of your garage while alerting the authorities that he’s trapped inside your homemade UFO as it soars across Colorado and the next thing you know you’re being arrested. Even the division-winning 2008 Giants lost to the Cleveland Browns, and the Super Bowl-winning 2007 Giants gave up 80 points in their first two games of the season. The 2009 Giants probably aren’t as good as they looked beating Oakland, 44-7, and they’re most likely not as bad as they looked yesterday, losing to New Orleans, 48-27. Should we just chalk it all up to a bad day and move on?
In honor of his homecoming and as a tribute to his father’s …
Now that the Great Balloon Hoax of Aught-Nine is over, we can concentrate on sports again (CC Sabathia’s uniform is so big and baggy, it could probably be filled with helium and flown across the country, too). This past week in New York sports, the Yankees swept the Twins and now have to take on those pesky, team-of-destiny Angels, the Giants killed the Raiders to stay undefeated, the Jets suffered their second consecutive loss, the Rangers kept on winning, the Devils heated up, but the poor Islanders still couldn’t manage to notch their first victory of the year. The most bizarre moment of the week, though, was the Mickey Rourke sighting on the Giants sideline. And Kevin Bacon showed up at the Garden for the Knicks preseason home opener. Is the cast of Diner making the rounds of the local sports teams to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the movie?
Besides being at the Knicks game, Bacon could also be seen hiding in the Yankees dugout on Friday because, unbeknownst to A. J. Burnett, that was Shrevie’s wife, donned in curly …
The season is still very early, but it looks like the Rangers have found themselves a legitimate first line. Marian Gaborik, Brandon Dubinsky and Vinny Prospal fit together like other great trios of the past – the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, the Mod Squad, Richie, Ralph and Potsie, Cream and, of course, Charlie’s Angels (well, maybe not them – or any of the others come to think of it).
Gaborik is the first top-talent game-changer the Rangers have had since the days of Jaromir Jagr (seems like a long time ago now, doesn’t it?). But Jagr was finicky and quirky, and had trouble fitting with other linemates (except Michael Nylander). Gaborik, Dubinsky and Prospal have clicked since game one. And they’re producing on a nightly basis. Gaborik is all he was cracked up to be (I’m crossing my fingers that he doesn’t get injured as I write this), netting five goals to go along with four assists in six games. He has a point in every game, …
Yesterday’s Giants game can easily be summed up in four words: Giants good, Raiders bad. Things went exactly as the Giants hoped for. They ran out to a 28-0 lead, with Eli Manning showing no signs of an injured foot. With garbage time starting in the second quarter, the Giants were able to give Manning the rest of the day off, and have David Carr take over from there. Big Blue dominated every aspect of the game, putting up 483 total yards to Oakland’s 124, six sacks to zero and 36:04 to 23:56 in time of possession.
Let’s not waste our time analyzing a blowout, though. Instead, let’s concentrate on the most interesting event of yesterday afternoon: The fact that Mickey Rourke was watching the game from the Giants sideline. What the heck was he doing there? How did he slip by security? I’m just spitballing here, but here are a few reasons I came up with for his appearance mingling with Big Blue:
He came by to personally …
The Giants kept on rolling this week, the Jets lost to a good Saints team (but traded for troublemaker Braylon Edwards), hockey season has started, with mixed results for the three local teams, the Mets held a day-long press conference on Monday to announce the firing of two coaches, and the $200-million juggernaut that is the Yankees steamrolled over the Twins in the opening game of their playoff series. Here are some fun facts about the Yanks and Twins:
CC Sabathia eats more food in one year than the farmers of Minnesota produce combined.
Brett Favre was warming up in the Twins bullpen in the seventh inning of Wednesday’s game.
George Steinbrenner gave an inspired speech to the team down in Tampa after the Yankees’ final regular season game. It was short, yet fiery: “Where the hell is my damn calzone!”
After defeating the Tigers in their dramatic one-game showdown on Tuesday, the Twins immediately called Darryl Strawberry, Lenny Dykstra and Keith Hernandez to find out the most effective way to destroy a plane on a flight to New …
The Mets baffled everybody by holding a nine-hour press conference on Monday to announce . . . the firing of two coaches (and reassignment of a few others). Yes, that was it. Did they really need to hold a press conference for that? Omar Minaya, Jerry Manuel and Jeff Wilpon took turns showing that there’s no accountability in the world of the Mets. Here’s what I heard Wilpon saying on Monday (keep in mind, I’m just paraphrasing here):
“What happened this season was unacceptable. But we decided to keep Omar Minaya around because when he came onboard after the 2004 season, he took a Mets franchise that was seemingly irrelevant and in five short years turned them into an embarrassing laughingstock. Not everybody has the talent to do that. Instead of creating a plan and vision for future stability, we’re going to continue to put our finger in the dike and keep on plugging holes.
“Today we’re announcing the firings of Luis Alicea and Sandy Alomar Sr., because, …
It’s only three games into the season, but we’re already seeing differences between last year’s Rangers team and this season’s version. A (relatively) new coach and an overhauled roster will do that. Here are seven contrasts between the Tom Renney 2008-09 Blushirts and John Tortorella’s 2009-10 edition.
1. Only one minute and 24 seconds into Monday’s game against the Devils, Tortorella called a timeout and ripped his team a new one. And the players actually responded, by going out, working hard and winning the game. Renney would have politely implored his players to at least act like they were trying, and then been just as politely ignored, resulting in a 6-1 shellacking.
2. The safe, boring, sit-back-and-wait-for-bad-things-to-happen style of Renney is gone. And when the aggressive, all-hands-on-deck attacking mode that Tortorella favors isn’t working that night, the team is showing it can adapt, like they did in New Jersey, settling into a blue-collar battling approach.
3. The defensemen are scoring. Last year the D couldn’t score …
Mike Vaccaro has been the lead sports columnist for the New York Post since 2002. A New York native, Vaccaro has also covered the local sports scene for the Newark Star-Ledger, as well as working for papers in Kansas City and Arkansas. He’s just written a book entitled The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants, and the Cast of Players, Pugs and Politicos Who Reinvented the World Series in 1912. He’s also the author of 1941: The Greatest Year in Sports and Emperors and Idiots. His latest book details the ninth World Series, and third one for the Giants (the only New York team to make it to the fall classic up to that point). And it had it all: Intrigue, drama, hatred, gambling, cheating, a tie game, an extra-inning deciding game, an all-time goat to rival Bill Buckner, day games, fans sitting on the field of play, no Joe Buck or Tim McCarver, the rebuilt Polo Grounds, brand-new Fenway Park, the Royal Rooters, Christy …
The Giants went into this game as heavy favorites, and won easily, 27-16, with most of Kansas City’s points coming in garbage time. The only way the Chiefs could have beaten the Giants was if they had Len Dawson, Otis Taylor, Ed Podolak, Curly Culp, Buck Buchanan and Jan Stenerud still playing.
The star of the game for New York was Steve Smith. He caught 11 passes for 134 yards and scored two touchdowns – and he barely played in the fourth quarter. And guess what? He now leads all NFL receivers in just about every major category. He’s #1 in receprions (34), #1 in yards (411), #1 in yards per game (102.8) and #1 in TD’s (4). He runs his routes with perfection and always seems to be open. He and Eli Manning have a great chemistry going. Best off all, he doesn’t suffer from the prima donna syndrome that most star receivers are afflicted with these days. I really don’t think Smith will be …
Sunday afternoon was a New York sports fan’s dream (or nightmare) as the Giants, Jets, Yankees and Mets all played at the same time – and they all won (even the Rangers played at noon on Sunday and lost, but we won’t count that because it was preseason). I’m jumping on the bandwagon and doing one of those running diary things that are so popular with the kids these days of that afternoon. Here we go:
12:30: Watch the last half of the first period of the Rangers game and eat a turkey, ham and cheese sandwich.
12:36: Yell at my daughter to quit jumping on the couch.
12:50: Bring plate into kitchen.
12:51: Sit back down in front of TV, and watch Terry Bradshaw, Michael Strahan, Jimmy Johnson and Howie Long laugh.
1:02: Giants game starts. They drive down field with ease and score their first red zone touchdown of the year. It was done so easily, I don’t think there was even another team on the field.
1:21: Switch to Channel 2 to check …
Glen Sather magically and miraculously got rid of Scott Gomez this summer and signed Marian Gaborik. But, much like going into last season, this year’s Rangers are ruled by “ifs” and question marks. Sather overhauled the team yet again – does he ever have a plan? (“This isn’t plans one through eight in outer space, this is plan nine! This is the one that worked!”) Maybe this is the team John Tortorella wants, though, with his faster, attacking style of play. Last season Sather tried to replace the offense of Jaromir Jagr, Brendan Shanahan and Martin Straka with Nikolai Zherdev, Markus Naslund and other assorted characters, and it didn’t quite work out. The 2009-10 Rangers are thin on defense and have a number of unproven forwards – the only constant is the goaltending, with Henrik Lundqvist and Steve Valiquette back again.
Gone But Not Forgotten: Gomez, Zherdev, Naslund, Lauri Korpikoski, Nik Antropov, Fredrik Sjostrom, Blair Betts, Colton Orr, Paul Mara, Derek Morris and Erik Reitz.
This …
