Hockey, soccer, baseball, hoops…let’s get it on!

The Stanley Cup. Congrats to the Hurricanes for winning a very exciting, 7-game Stanley Cup final. I’ve given hockey a ton of crap this season but it’s always been aimed at the suits that run the league. The bearded guys in the sweaters deserve all the credit, and if the game ever comes back to prominence it will be because of the players. When the NHL product is at its best, there are few sports that are better. For consistent, sustained crowd noise and craziness no other sport can match a hockey playoff game. Good, clean, aggressive, physical hockey is as exciting and physical as any game on earth and the Stanley Cup finals showcased all of the best that the NHL has to offer.  Let’s hope the league doesn’t screw it up and can use this great final series as a springboard to bring the game back into the public’s eye next season.

The NBA Finals. Why is anyone surprised at the putrid state of officiating during the Heat-Mavericks final? The NBA’s zebras have stunk all year, and have gotten worse in the playoffs. There’s nothing worse than an inconsistent sports official, and no officials in sport are as consistently inconsistent as NBA refs. There’s no conspiracy to rig games in the NBA, but there is a problem with finding refs that can get the job done. Both teams have been hurt by lousy officiating, so for these last two games it’s going to come down to a matter of which team is hurt the least by the men in stripes.

The World Cup. If conspiracy theorists want to dig their tendentious teeth into something, they should look into how the Italians just so happened to score a goal for the Americans, thus giving Team USA life in the World Cup. Think about it, there’s been a lot of money invested in Team USA soccer by ESPN, their family of networks and a lot of advertisers.

Going into the Cup, the Americans were ranked fifth in the world, and the ESPN sports machine invested in a lot of time and money into pushing this event on us despite the fact that soccer is a failure as a spectator sport in this country. Advertisers have spent tons of money in the lead up to the Cup with the expectations that the Americans would be around, attracting a lot of viewers.

It’s going to be hard to jam soccer down the throats of Americans without the American team around to promote. And it just so happens that the heavily favored Italian team scored a goal for Team USA and couldn’t score another goal for themselves, literally giving the Americans a 1-1 tie and life in the tourney. In a sport where 0-0 ties are commonplace – there were two of these exercises in futility in Monday’s play – is it so hard to make sure that your team doesn’t score a goal? Hmm?