He’s highly effective sufficient to show a sneaky tank candidate again right into a Cup contender. Ah, Patrice Bergeron, we’ll miss you once you’re gone … however not as a lot because the Bruins will.
What number of extra offseason strikes had been extra consequential than Bergeron’s resolution to return to Boston? David Krejci adopted. All these David Pastrnak commerce rumors had been extinguished in a rush. The Bruins’ ahead group, abruptly, made sense once more.
And, most of all, Boston acquired itself an opportunity to climate early absences from Brad Marchand, Charlie McAvoy and Matt Grzelcyk. With out one of many few greatest facilities within the NHL, that might’ve been a troublesome promote. It nonetheless could also be — the domino impact of these three accidents stays to be seen — however by midseason, this roster has an opportunity at being one of the balanced within the league.
If Bergeron and Krejci returned as a result of they nonetheless noticed actual championship potential? They simply may be proper.
The Denver Nuggets have made a final determination on their sick MVP.
Sources inform Bennett Durando of The Denver Post that six-time All-NBA superstar center Nikola Jokic has been ruled out for Denver’s home game against the Boston Celtics on Tuesday night with a worsening illness.
Jokic was a late addition to the Nugget’s injury report. Head coach Michael Malone told reporters this afternoon that the 6-foot-11 big man had first presented symptoms of an illness on Monday, and that his condition had declined Tuesday.
Advertisement
Read More: Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic Downgraded Ahead of Boston Battle
It had previously been announced that starting Denver power forward Aaron Gordon would also miss out on Tuesday’s action while he continues to recuperate from a calf strain.
Vinny Bennetto of The Denver Gazette reveals that, sans Jokic and Gordon, the Nuggets will start guards Jamal Murray and Russell Westbrook, swingman Christian Braun, forward Michael Porter Jr. and reserve center Dario Saric.
Boston, meanwhile, will be without starting All-Defensive Team guard Derrick White, who himself is sidelined with what has been listed as a non-COVID-19 illness. That same undisclosed ailment is also hounding backup guard Jaden Springer.
Read More: Is Derrick White Playing vs Nuggets? Final Celtics Injury Report Revealed
Advertisement
Those aren’t the only absences for either squad, but those are the most impactful ones short-term.
Per the NBA’s most recent injury report, rookie wing Baylor Scheierman and all three of the Celtics’ two-way players — point guard JD Davison, plus forwards Anton Watson and Drew Peterson — are putting in reps with the club’s G League affiliate, the Maine Celtics.
Two Nuggets, meanwhile, continue to recuperate from major procedures. Guard Vlatko Cancar is on the mend from a left knee surgery, and center DaRon Holmes is working his way back from a right Achilles tendon repair. Elsewhere on Denver’s roster, small forward Spencer Jones remains shelves with a right adductor strain. Two-way player PJ Hall is on assignment to Denver’s G League squad, the Grand Rapids Gold.
The 26-10 Celtics are looking to improve from what — to them — has been something of a rut. The reigning champions have gone 5-5 across their past 10 contests, a fairly mediocre run for a club hoping to become the first repeat title winner since 2018. The 20-14 Nuggets, meanwhile, are hoping to do the improbable and win a game without their best player. They’ve gone 1-2 in such contests so far this season.
More Celtics: Boston Proving to be Historically Great on Road This Season
As the Boston tech scene closes the book on 2024, let’s take a moment to mourn the local startups, apps, and products that we lost last year.
The year started with rounds of layoffs at local tech employers including Wayfair, iRobot, and Toast. But the biggest blow hit when Uber decided it didn’t need to maintain Drizly, the Boston-based alcohol delivery startup it acquired in 2021 for $1.1 billion.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the boom in online orders put Drizly on course perhaps to join Wayfair and DraftKings as Boston’s next Internet consumer brand success story. But Uber had other plans and shifted customers to its Uber Eats app.
Advertisement
Drizly wasn’t the only tech company that bit the dust. Ginkgo Bioworks spinoff Motif FoodWorks, developing plant-based meat substitutes, closed in September. Quantum software firm Zapata AI shut down in October, only six months after merging with a blank check company to go public. And government data startup Civin, founded by Boston’s former chief data officer, Andrew Therriault, four years ago, shut down in December.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Thrasio, which raised billions of dollars to buy hundreds of small Amazon sellers, filed for bankruptcy in February but stayed out of the 2024 dustbin by completing a restructuring and emerging with new leadership and less debt in June.
There were some startup highlights last year, including Liquid AI debuting its groundbreaking software in October, the creation of an “AI hub” backed by $100 million of state money in December, and the continued growth of local battery developers Ascend Elements and Form Energy. And local venture capital investors said they are looking forward to a better year in 2025.
Advertisement
Bostonians also lost a few apps last year. Foursquare pivoted away from running city-oriented apps cataloging local restaurants, leading to the demise of its Boston specific app. And grocery delivery service Getir, which opened some of its mini-warehouse locations around Boston over the past few years, pulled out of the market in April.
A more serious loss hit low income families in Massachusetts and around the country in June. The Federal Communications Commission’s Affordable Connectivity Program ended after Republicans in Congress refused to support new funding. That left about 368,000 in Massachusetts without the free Internet service subsidy.
At DraftKings, a venture into cryptocurrency related collectibles ran out of steam. Back in 2021, at the height of the crypto bubble, the online betting company opened a store called Reignmakers to sell digital game pieces related to fantasy sports bets. But the effort to sell the pieces, known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, was hit with a class action lawsuit alleging the store violated securities laws and DraftKings shuttered it in July.
But hope springs eternal for new lines of business at DraftKings’ Back Bay headquarters. In November, chief executive Jason Robins said the company was looking at adding betting on election results.
Hopefully, the effort will avoid 2025′s tech dust bin.
Advertisement
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
The aspect of the city’s zoning plan that perhaps most strongly signals a break with the past would strike the rules that gave birth to the Combat Zone in the neighborhood. It would largely be a symbolic move, as the heyday of the notorious den of sleaze — once home to strip clubs, X-rated theaters, peep shows, and adult bookstores in the downtown core of Boston — is decades in the past.
Still, for those who advocate for Chinatown, removing a slice of the zoning that for years allowed for Boston’s only adult entertainment districtin their neighborhood matters. It’s a modicum of recompense for a time when city authorities largely ignored the wants and needs of a place that has for generations offered a beachhead for immigrants.
“Chinatown suffered decades of increased crime and negative impacts on the community,” said Lydia Lowe, executive director of Chinatown Community Land Trust. “That issue is very important.”
Advertisement
The rezoning discussion — a comment period for the city’s proposed changes ends in mid-January — comes amid a time of transition for Chinatown, one of Boston’s smallest neighborhoods, an ethnic enclave with a rich history in the city’s urban core. Talk to seemingly anyone in Chinatown and they’ll say that displacement is their largest concern. And demographic data back up the notion that the effects of years-long gentrification continue to alter the fabric of the neighborhood.
The city’s planning department this fall released a draft of new zoning regulations and design guidelines that “seek to promote affordable housing, emphasize the significance of small businesses and cultural spaces, and highlight Chinatown’s unique character,” Brittany Comak, a department spokesperson, said in an email.
The next public meeting, focused on property owners,will be held in January, with final recommendations to come later, Comak said.
The proposal looks to better protect the neighborhood’s historic row houses — symbols of Chinatown’s working class, which now faces displacement — by capping how tall developments can be in part of the district. Residents have fought to preserve the affordability and character of those structures, saying they are integral to the area’s cultural fabric, one of the last untouched pockets of a neighborhood roiled by development.
Under the plan, the maximum height of projects would be 45 feet, down from the current 80 feet. (Chinatown’s row houses tend to be three to four stories in height.) Other restrictions, according to the city, would help ensure new buildings “would be of similar size and scale to the existing row houses” in a certain subdistrict of Chinatown.
Advertisement
“We find that to be a positive change,” said Müge Ündemir, director of real estate for Asian Community Development Corporation, of the city’s zoning approach to the row houses.
Other parts of the rezoning initiative are being met with questions or outright skepticism.
For instance, an affordable housing overlay district would allow developers in parts of Chinatown to build structures up to 350 feet tall, if they meet two thresholds: 60 percent of the gross floor area must be devoted to residential uses, and 60 percent of the residential units must be income-restricted and meet an affordability standard. While advocates support the idea of more affordable housing in Chinatown, 35 stories, they argue, is way too high for the neighborhood.
Karen Chen, executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association, worries that such towering buildings could exacerbate quality-of-life issues in a neighborhood where some blocks are already cast in shadow and wind tunnels are a reality thanks to past development.
“Chinatown is so small and congested already,” said Chen. “Up to 35 stories is just ridiculous.”
Advertisement
Through a spokesperson, the city’s planning department said the overlay “reflects heights of recent projects in the area, how other areas of downtown are being rezoned to increase allowable building height, and acknowledges the clear community priority to deliver affordable housing in Chinatown in an area of limited sites for development.”
Others are critical of the income ceiling for who would qualify forthe affordable housing in such projects. Under the city’s plan, households making up to thearea median income would qualify. For a one-person household, the cap would be about $114,000.
Advocates want the cap to be much lower, say 60 percent of area median income, which would be about $68,000 for a one-person household. That would more directly help the neighborhood’s working class and working poor, they argue.
“The affordability standard, it needs to match where the neighborhood is at,” said Chen, who also worries that a proposed “transition zone” would contribute to the further encroachment into Chinatown of downtown’s luxury residential towers.
Angie Liou, executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation, concurs, saying the general idea of incentivizing more affordable housing in the neighborhood is a good one.
Advertisement
“The devil’s really in the details,” she said.
Officially, more than 4,200 residents live within about one-fifth of a square mile that makes up Chinatown.(Advocates have long challenged the population estimate there as severely undercounted.)
According to city figures, about 64 percent of the neighborhood’s population identifies as Asian or Pacific Islander. Half the population is foreign-born, with just under half of all Chinatown residents speaking Mandarin or Cantonese at home. There was a time when those numbers were much higher. An old master plan for the neighborhood estimated that in 1990, 91 percent of residents were Chinese.
Chinatown’s history is one of political marginalization. The Combat Zone, which is now occupied by luxury apartments and trendy restaurants, is a high–profile example of the city treating the neighborhood as an afterthought. Two strip clubs on LaGrange Street still stand in the city’s “adult entertainment district” as a reminder of what once was. They would remain part of an adult entertainment district under the proposed zoning changes, as they are located just outside of what the city considers to be Chinatown.
There is a history of development profoundly changing the neighborhood, which has never produced a Boston city councilor. Construction of the Central Artery and the Massachusetts Turnpike took sizable bites out of Chinatown decades ago, and the steady expansion of Tufts Medical Center also ate away at blocks.
Advertisement
Amid current gentrification and displacement challenges, many first-generation immigrants and working-class Chinese Americans still look to Chinatown for their day-to-day needs, as they have for more than a century. A plaque at Ping On Alley memorializes the city’s first Chinese immigrants, who pitched their tents there starting in 1875.
Advocates say new zoning alone won’t stop gentrification, but some hope it could have a “calming effect” on the neighborhood. Enforcement of the zoning rules also matters. Liou, of the Asian Community Development Corporation, said the city has historically given out variances to Chinatown projects on a regular basis, which has had a cumulative effect of largely rendering the existing zoning moot.
“If it’s on the books and no one follows it,” said Liou, “It’s pointless.”
Danny McDonald can be reached at daniel.mcdonald@globe.com. Follow him @Danny__McDonald.