Connect with us

Boston, MA

Bruins vs. Blues RECAP: Boston comes back in 3rd to win 3-2!

Published

on

Bruins vs. Blues RECAP: Boston comes back in 3rd to win 3-2!


Oh my god.

1st Period, where nothing happened

While the B’s controlled the shot count, this game started kind of slow, with the. The Power Play couldn’t take advantage of the Blues’ penalties, and both sides headed to the break tied 0-0.

2nd Period, where all the bad things happened.

The Bruins took some penalties.

On those Penalty Kills, the Boston Bruins got absolutely rinsed in nearly identical ways; the defenseman in front was moved away from the net-front in a battle, Swayman committed to a shot coming from his right, and then the Blues batted home an unusual rebound.

Advertisement

The first Blues player to do this was Braden Schenn…

…and then, Oskar Sundqvist.

The Bruins head to the third period down 2-0 thanks to some gruesome penalty killing.

3rd Period OF THE GODS

ALRIGHT.

SO.

Advertisement

Things looked bad. Really bad. Coming into this period, there looked like there was going to be yet another long discussion about how the final frame was becoming a slow-burning problem for the team.

And then something funny happened.

David Pastrnak stripped the puck from Colton Parayko in the neutral zone, charged into the Blues’ end, and got Morgan Geekie an absolute rocket to fire off past Binnington to get the Bruins their first goal of the night! 2-1 Blues.

Next, Charlie McAvoy got a strong pass out of the defensive end to Justin Brazeau, where he and Brad Marchand victimized Mathieu Joseph for a few seconds, then passed the puck back off to McAvoy, who put a bunker buster of a shot straight past Binnington to tie the game off a screen! 2-2 Everybody!

Good positioning on Brazeau’s part to get in front of Binnington, too. Boston’s had their issues with that kind of thing and it’s great to see a plan come together.

Advertisement

Finally, the Bruins smelled blood in the water, and harangued the Blues until finally, off of a chaotic sequence where the puck bounced out into the slot to Charlie McAvoy, who let David Pastrnak rip one off on Binnington again. Binnington couldn’t keep it in his body, and it trickled into the net with less than 2 minutes to go.

Comeback complete. BOSTON WINS 3-2.

Game Notes

  • Your TOI leader tonight was Charlie Mcavoy, who played 25:08 tonight. Right behind him however was David Pastrnak, who played 24:29.
  • The B’s were well on their way towards making another extremely exhausting night of people venting their spleen on how the team is built for all of us here on SCoC, but man if they didn’t figure themselves out after Morgan Geekie got his goal. The 5v5 game had always been on their side tonight, it just took a distressing amount of time and a strong shift to finally get it going.
  • It also doesn’t escape my notice that they hammered the net-front tonight in what was almost assuredly more of what Coach Monty wants for this team. If Boston wants to win, getting to those dangerous areas of the ice will always be a wonderful equalizer; even if they still struggle with other things. Namely…well…special teams.
  • David Pastrnak had a statement game tonight; A goal, an assist on Geekie’s goal that got this whole thing rolling in the first place, accounted for a third of all shots on net from a Bruins skater, and a staggering 97.02% in xGF%. Only one giveaway too, for all those people who care about that sort of thing! Absolutely exceptional stuff from Pasta.
  • Charlie McAvoy finished tonight’s game with a huge goal from distance, and one of the better nights he’s had possession-wise so far this season. Morgan Geekie probably got a goal tonight that kept him in the lineup going into the next week or so, but Charlie McAvoy needed a game like this badly, and I gotta imagine he’s gotta feel like he just stepped out of the shower with how refreshed his game was tonight. Gonna need that to continue, but this is an all important step-forward.
  • Thank god the Blues’ defense is such trash that Pastrnak was able to get that puck through to Morgan Geekie. Could you imagine what this game would be like if that poke check actually worked instead of just slow it down for Geekie? I sure don’t want to.
  • The Penalty Kill is still pretty bad; St. Louis got their lead from two nearly identical shots on the power play that were born of the Blues being able to find space in front of the netminder. That’s gotta be cleaned up when they head to Dallas, because they’ll make you pay for that.
  • Oh yeah and the power play is still rough too. Not much I can say there except maybe get weird with it. Let’s stack five forwards. Let’s stack five defenseman. It’s already cratering towards league worst right down by St. Louis, might as well get wacky and make the other team tilt their head.
  • Jeremy Swayman’s night was defined, much like Boston, by the penalty kill. He seemed completely out of sorts when he didn’t have a 5th skater in front of him, but after that? He settled down and his SV% settled at .909. If the B’s weren’t taking boneheaded penalties and leaving his left side as a yawning cage, he probably would’ve had a more impressive statline. Otherwise? I think we actually got a pretty standard Swayman performance. To me, a standard Swayman performance is that you can get two goals against him. They might even look terrible. But you will have to move heaven and earth to get goal three, and the Blues couldn’t do that.
  • The Bruins lost Hampus Lindholm very early on in the game thanks to blocking a shot with his leg. Hopefully it’s just some pain and swelling, because him being out for any length of time will be painful. Someone on the Providence Bruins should be getting to the airport to make it to Dallas by Thursday night.
  • STOP TAKING HIGH STICKING PENALTIES.

The Bruins continue their road trip to Dallas, Texas to take on the Stars on Thursday at the American Airlines Center. That game drops the puck at 8pm EST.

We’ll see you there!



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Boston, MA

Q&A: Chad Finn on 'The Boston Globe Story of the Celtics'

Published

on

Q&A: Chad Finn on 'The Boston Globe Story of the Celtics'


Book Club

Columnist Chad Finn dives into the details of how his new book, “The Boston Globe Story of the Celtics,” came together.

Last month, “The Boston Globe Story of the Celtics,” a comprehensive book of nearly every recorded moment in Celtics history, was released. The book’s editor Chad Finn, a sports columnist for The Boston Globe and Boston.com, collected hundreds of Celtics stories written by renowned sports reporters, such as Bob Ryan and Jackie MacMullan, since the team’s inception in 1946.

For Boston.com’s Book Club, Finn joined Boston.com sports writer Hayden Bird to discuss his process and insights in editing his book. Watch the full video, or read highlights of the discussion below.

Advertisement

Below is an abbreviated version of the discussion, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Bill Russell, left, star of the Boston Celtics is congratulated by coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach after scoring his 10,000th point in the NBA game against the Baltimore Bullets in Boston Garden on Dec. 12, 1964. (AP Photo/Bill Chaplis, file)

How did you approach creating this book?

With something like this, where it’s a compilation of the Globe‘s coverage of the Celtics throughout their mutual histories, the one thing you’re really wondering about is: Was everything covered?

I think it was a little bit more complicated, a little bit more reason to worry about it, with the Celtics book because of the race element with Bill Russell. Did they cover some of the stuff that players endured back then? Not being able to eat with their teammates when they would go to North Carolina for an exhibition game or something like that. So it was very satisfying, and also a bit of a relief, to find out that the Globe … had covered every single step, every single significant story along the way with the Celtics, from their launch in 1946 until putting out banner No. 18 a couple of weeks ago.

How daunting was the research process?

The first thing you have to do is sit down and make a thorough list of every significant thing chronologically that happened in Celtics history. Once you have that list of 450 different things that happened in Celtics lore, then you go into the archives and you say, “Do we have this?”

A lot of it is also our researcher, Jerry Manion, who’s just an absolute expert at finding what you’re looking for. I can’t tell you how many times in putting this book together where I would message Jerry and say, “Can you find that?” and I’d have it five minutes later. To be able to have that kind of support when you’re putting together a project that could be overwhelming is incredible. I’m incredibly grateful for that.

How did a game recap from 70-80 years ago compare to today?

The game stories and the stories from the coverage tended to be play by play, whereas nowadays, it’s a little bit of a look ahead, or a little bit of context on what you just saw, because you know about Jayson Tatum’s dunk and Jaylen Brown’s three-pointer that tied the game. Back then, that was news to you in the morning. You didn’t see it yourself. 

Advertisement
Boston Celtics Larry Bird is defended by Detroit Pistons SF Mark Aguirre during Game 6 of the 1991 NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals. The Pistons beat the Celtics, 117-113. Bird had 12 points, 4 assists and 4 rebounds. (Barry Chin/Globe Staff)

What’s your favorite lead or passage?

One is Bob Ryan’s lead when they drafted Larry Bird. Red Auerbach took him while he still had a year left of college in Indiana State because back then there was a loophole … where you could draft a player if his college class had graduated. 

Bob Ryan had seen Larry Bird play in person. He knew what Red had just pulled off, and his lead basically said Red didn’t just look like he swallowed the canary, it looked like he swallowed the whole aviary — perfect lead for Larry Bird. The whole column turned out to be prescient about how Larry’s career would go. I have some favorite stories in the book, but that one would be right up there in the top five just because of how he started it, how he wrote it, and how right he was.

What’s something you learned about the Celtics or the Globe’s coverage that stuck out to you?

I learned that the quality of writing really elevated in the late ‘60s. People took more chances with their writing.

In 1969, Leigh Montville got hired at the Globe, and I think if you asked every Globe columnist that has worked here the last 50 years, they would tell you Leigh Montville was the best columnist of all in terms of pure writing ability. He was lyrical, and he joined the beat covering the Celtics in Bill Russell’s last year. 

There was another writer at the same time named Bob Sales. His style was very easy to read and thoughtful, and did not shy away from opinions that probably were considered pretty progressive at the time. He was very supportive of the Black players on the Celtics. I thought Bob Sales, even more than Leigh Montville because he came before him, was somebody who really changed the style of writing about the Celtics and the approach that people took to it. 

Then a whole different topic, but Bob Ryan came around. He started the Globe the same day as [Peter] Gammons in 1968 as interns. When he took over the NBA beat in the early ‘70s, it changed everything. 

Advertisement

Celtics history is so intertwined with integration in basketball. How did the Globe cover that at the time?

If there was an incident, or if they were not treated as equals — which happened a lot — to their white teammates, the Globe wrote about it. And I wasn’t sure going into the book if that was going to be the case, and it was. 

There are still misconceptions about how the Celtics handled race, and a big part of that is because their team — that a certain generation remembers so well — is Bird, McHale, Danny Ainge. There was a perception: Oh yeah, Celtics, Boston, White. I mean they had the best white players, but it had nothing to do with race why they were here, and Celtics history tells you that.

Look at Celtics history, and Red just wanted to win. He didn’t care about the race or color of his players. He just wanted the best players, and that was well ahead of its time back then.

Bob Ryan sitting in the same seat as he did for the first Celtics game he attended in 1964. (Barry Chin/Globe Staff)

You lived through much of this history as a fan. How was looking at it different from the standpoint as editor of this book?

You get into the eighties, and Magic and Bird change the game in a bunch of different ways — saying they save the league really isn’t an exaggeration. To have grown up watching that, it was really cool to be able to get into that phase of the book where we are doing things that I remember and that I witnessed. 

But it was the hardest chapter in the book to edit, and it’s by far the biggest chapter in the book, for two reasons. Obviously they accomplished a lot, and they won the three titles in that era, and there were so many memorable games, the Lakers and the rivalry, the Sixers, and later on the Pistons. And with a book like this, you can’t just put the championships in it. There were so many games that resonated with people along the way. 

The other thing was the quality of the writing was mind-blowing. It was Bob Ryan at the peak of his powers; it was Dan Shaughnessy, Montville; Jackie MacMullan came along in the late ‘80s. So the hardest thing I had to do with this book was pick which story to use without being redundant when two or three of them wrote about the same subject. Which one do I use?

Advertisement

What does this book mean to you and your connection to the team?

I dedicated the book to my daughter who’s the biggest Celtics fan I know. I also dedicated to Bob Ryan, who is my writing hero.

I also think just writing about the family aspect of it — that’s become a really big thing with the Celtics themselves. I’ve never seen a team that was as connected and as willing to allow people around the players, their kids, their wives, to be as big a part of things as the 2024 Celtics were. 

I think it bonded them together even more where they’ve developed this culture, where it’s just greater than what they have on the court.


What is your favorite memory of being a Celtics fan?

Kelly Chan

Content Producer


Kelly Chan is a content producer at Boston.com. She designs multimedia content on-site and across social media platforms, and experiments with new ways to engage readers.

Advertisement





Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Boston, MA

Wu urges state lawmakers to approve revised Boston commercial tax plan

Published

on

Wu urges state lawmakers to approve revised Boston commercial tax plan


Boston Mayor Michelle Wu spoke to a joint committee on Beacon Hill Wednesday to advance her revised tax proposal.

The mayor urged lawmakers to approve it in time for Gov. Maura Healey’s signature. Wu called the revised plan, with more protections for small businesses, a compromise, balancing the needs of residents and the business community.

Boston’s commissioner of assessing used a paperclip as a visual aid during the presentation to lawmakers to illustrate a new balance: An effort to offset revenue losses caused by vacant business space by shifting and increasing the tax burden onto commercial properties.

“We need residents to have enough money in their pockets at the end of every month to go out and support our businesses,” Wu said.

Advertisement

She warned that homeowners could face steep property tax increases without the plan, which would likely be passed on to renters.

Lawmakers, however, pushed back, questioning the city’s financial needs.

“We all have to think about tightening our belts,” said Massachusetts State Sen. Susan Moran.

Wu countered, citing the need to address long-overdue salary adjustments for municipal workers.

“We had to sort of adjust the salaries after about four years of not having cost-of-living increases for municipal workers — the police contract, for example,” she explained.

Advertisement

Mayor Michelle Wu announced that she’s reached a deal to temporarily raise tax rates for local businesses amid a revenue shortfall. 

The revised proposal includes measures to protect small businesses, such as raising the personal property tax exemption threshold from $10,000 to $30,000.

Still, some critics remain unconvinced. Business owner Lou Murray argued the tax hike would ultimately trickle down to consumers.

“You tax somebody, they pass on the cost down the ladder,” Murray said.

Supporters like Boston resident Chaton Green said the tax proposal is critical for those already struggling on fixed incomes.

Advertisement

“I was sitting next to a 90-year-old woman, and she said, ‘I still have to work.’ And that broke me,” Green shared.

Because the proposal would temporarily raise Boston’s commercial property tax rate above the state limit, the mayor needs legislative approval to pass it on to the governor.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Boston, MA

Boston University Halts Admissions for Art History PhDs

Published

on

Boston University Halts Admissions for Art History PhDs


Boston University (BU) has suspended admissions for various Humanities and Social Sciences PhD tracks, including its art history program, for the 2025–2026 academic year. The news was first reported yesterday, November 19, by Inside Higher Ed.

BU did not make a public announcement, but an undated update to the PhD information page on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’s website indicates that admissions to its PhD programs in History of Art and Architecture, American and New England Studies, Anthropology, Classical Studies, English, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Romance Studies, and Sociology were temporarily suspended.

Inside Higher Ed’s report references emails between school administrators suggesting that the move was due in part to the financial implications of a recently ratified contract with the Boston University Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU). The contract, which ended a seven-month strike in October, ensured that the university’s PhD candidates are afforded a minimum yearly stipend of $45,000 with an annual 3% raise in addition to the school covering tuition throughout the agreement’s three-year lifespan. Additional contract points include expanded healthcare coverage, commuter benefits, and subsidized dental insurance among other benefits. Though the $45,ooo minimum was a significant raise, the university did not concede to BUGWU’s demands for a $17,000 increase in yearly stipends and 7% annual cost-of-living adjustments — a conflict that led to the longest strike in the university’s history.

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, emails between Stan Sclaroff, dean of BU’s College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), and Malika Jeffries-EL, associate dean of the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, implied that the financial requirements of the ratified contract were points of concern for meeting the needs of existing doctoral student cohorts.

Advertisement

However, Colin Riley, a spokesperson for the university, told Hyperallergic that the school “initiated [its] review of PhD programs through a task force in 2022 and began implementation of the recommendations this fall.”

BU also decided to reduce doctoral cohort sizes for the 2025–2026 academic year, Riley said, citing factors including “student success; job prospects and placements; the recommendations of the 2022 PhD Task Force on PhD Education; and ensuring we can honor the five-year funding commitments we have made to our currently enrolled doctoral students.”

A spokesperson for the Service Employees International Union Local 509 in Massachusetts, under which BUGWU organizes, did not immediately respond to Hyperallergic‘s inquiry.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending