Author: Dave Long

After three long months sports fans got good news last week when the NHL and NBA ok’d plans to open camps in July and begin playing in early August. Meanwhile the league that should be closest to returning put its season at risk by doing what baseball usually does with tone-deaf bickering over money between the owners and players at a time when 40 million just lost their jobs. The NFL meanwhile remains on track for the usual September start, though college football is still mostly up in the air.

It won’t be business as usual, however, as normal league schedules will be way out of whack and the return will require concessions to playing with effects of Covid-19. Not the least of these will be playing games with no fans, at least until football season, where social distancing plans are underway to have about 25,000 paying customers on hand at least. There’s also the threat of infections rising for people playing in such close proximity as they sweat, regularly bang into each other and are laying on top of each other after almost every play in football.

And most amazingly, the pandemic is just one of three national calamities that will impact sports in 2020. Depending on how long it lasts, immediate economic difficulties and a possible deep recession likely will restrict spending power for tickets, sponsorships and merchandise. That in turn should affect 2021 free agency, a big thing for the Patriots, who have many players on expiring contracts and up to an expected $100 million to spend next spring. Then there’s the civil unrest following the death of George Floyd while in custody of the police in Minneapolis. The Black Lives Matter protests it sparked throughout the country will likely impact the NFL in a most divisive way that puts fans, players and the less than shy president in constant conflict.

Finally, it’ll be interesting to see if any pandemic-related changes become permanent. Like a new NBA calendar with an early December start to be closer to its real opening day when all those big games are played on Christmas Day with the playoffs ending in August. That would not be great news for baseball, which already has declining attendance and perhaps now a missed season. If you were the NBA who would you rather go head to head with MLB or the NFL?

That’s the big picture. Now here are some more thoughts on the restart and stories related to it:

Interested to see if teams like the Bruins and Bucks who were rolling to their league’s best records restart in similar fashion or will that momentum be gone and it be more like starting a new season.

I’m all in on the Bruins, but “ice” hockey games in the heat of summer doesn’t seem like a good fit.

If baseball does get its act together, will the growing rage gathering steam during spring training stay focused on the cheating Astros? Or, since that seems like 50 years ago and with no fans in the stands did they luck out? Here’s my suggestion: have a special soundtrack for the Astros when crowd noise is piped into their TV/radio broadcasts that has boos, catcalls and hisses mixed in.

Quickly apologizing was a good move by Drew Brees after starting a major hoo-ha with his original thoughts on kneeling during the anthem. Beyond getting killed in the court of public opinion, I’m still wondering if defenders will line him up for a little extra shot if they don’t buy the apology. Hope not.

Buckle up on the kneeling protests, though. Because with his presidential campaign in peril (at the moment) expect DJT to inflame tensions to fire up his base as a likely nasty campaign rages through the NFL’s first 10 weeks. And with Adrian Peterson already saying “without a doubt” he’ll kneel I don’t see the players backing down. So the brass had better have a better plan than the last time.

I couldn’t be more sick of the unending series of stories on Jarrett Stidham and everything you-know-who does in Tampa Bay. I’d rather wait to see what happens on the field. But for the record, Stidham will be better than expectations, at 43 TB won’t meet his and thanks to a year off to get healthy and recharged Gronk has the best year of the three.

It’s just one guy’s opinion, but I like Jalen Rose’s reasoning for why he thinks the Celtics will beat Milwaukee if they meet in the playoffs. He said with the Bucks’ huge home court advantage lost, the games will be more like playing a pick-up game in the park. And if they were, Giannis is picked first for sure, but the next five guys taken would be all Celtics. Meaning the C’s have the overall talent edge and that could be deadly for the Bucks in a neutral site.

Vegas doesn’t buy that, however, as the C’s odds to make the finals have gone up from what they were in February.

Heard this from a caller on talk radio: to reward teams like Milwaukee losing their earned home court advantages, let the highest seed choose who they face in each playoff round from the lower seeds. That would add major bulletin board “I’ll show you” material into the mix, which I love.

I wonder if the NBA doing all play-by-play announcing remotely from home base studios with noise from Orlando mixed is the beginning of the end of road announcers being on site in the future.

No baseball season makes the Mookie Betts trade look even better, as the Sox keep the three prospects while L.A. gets no games from Mookie and still has to swallow David Price’s contract.

Finally, I’m fine with baseball not getting started because with all the problems going on around them, if they’re too clueless to work it out, so be it.

With the arrival of June a bit of normalcy is returning to everyday life. Not totally, of course; that’s still a long way off. But while the pandemic hasn’t abated, sports is talking about getting back to work sooner than later, though to start it will be in arenas that are more like TV studios with no fans in the stands. At least until football season, which is messing with plans for having crowds of 25,000 or so socially-distanced fans on hand. We’ll leave that for a future discussion as plans become clearer in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the good, bad and ugly things that happened in and to sports while most of us had our heads down.

So what’d you do during the pandemic? For Bob Kraft it was raising $1 million to help folks affected adversely by the Covid-19 via auctioning off his Super Bowl ring from the Atlanta comeback, along with sending his plane to China to deliver medical supplies to NYC. For Tom Brady it was his TB-12 company capitalizing on it by pushing 30-day supplies of “immunity supplements” for $45.

Ex-Patriot Chad Johnson also dropped a $1,000 tip for a $37 tab at a Cooper City, Florida, restaurant with this note written on the receipt: “Sorry about the pandemic, hope this helps.”

Loved the great Red Auerbach line Dan Shaughnessy mentioned in his column on her Celtics connections upon the passing of sportscasting pioneer Phyllis George. She was married to one-time Celtics owner John Y. Brown, whom Red hated, and when John Y. was running for governor of Kentucky not too long after selling his interest in the C’s he advised bluegrass voters, “you better watch out because he’ll probably try and trade the Kentucky Derby for the Indianapolis 500.”

Also dying during the siege, though not all from the coronavirus, were:

Tom Dempsey – the New Orleans kicker whose miraculous record-setting 63-yard FG to beat Detroit as the gun sounded in 1970 happened despite a birth defect that cost him half his kicking foot.

Bobby Mitchell – the Hall of Famer RB/WR was the first African American to play for the Redskins when the NFL’s most southern city became its last team to integrate in 1962. He was traded there by Cleveland for reigning Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis to form a spectacular all-Syracuse backfield with Jimmy Brown. Sadly the doomed Davis died of leukemia before ever playing a down for Cleveland.

Bob Watson – A solid .295 lifetime hitter who hit .334 for the Sox in 1979, four years after scoring baseball’s millionth run. He later hired the then-maligned Joe Torre to manage the Yanks during a short stint as GM.

Best local back-in-the-day Twitter line goes to political gadfly Grant Bosse, who wrote after the Pats got ripped off in the Rob Gronkowski trade, “if we can only get a fourth for Gronk, what can we get for John Hannah?”

The best pandemic Twitter video was the “you get what you deserve for not social distancing” moment of a guy drilling his just-two-feet-behind-him nitwit friend in the head with his backswing while hitting off a batting tee.

On the bright side the likely cancellation of the rest of the regular NBA season probably gives us an extra year of LeBron James, which based on his 25.7 scoring average cost him 514 points.That leaves him exactly 4,300 (34,087) behind Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s all-time high 38,387 points. That means instead of being in range to pass Jabbar near the end of 2021-2022, it’s now more likely he’ll have to play in 2022-2023 for the record to fall.

The Patriots unveiled new uniforms. While I do really like the new/old home blue on blue uniforms they’ve worn on Sunday and Monday night games, my only reaction is, would the Yankees go away from the pinstripes for the sake of merchandising? Classic, iconic teams like the Pats have to stick with tradition; otherwise they’re just like everyone else. So boooooo!

I can’t wait for the games, any games, to start just so talk radio, the newspapers and pundits will stop blathering on about everything Tom Brady, and I mean everything — Belichick, golf, TB-12 and the 97 “real” reasons various experts are saying for why he left. Ditto for exhausting and redundantly vapid chatter on Jarrett Stidham. Get over it. Brady’s now one of them and Stidham’s the guy.

Finally, to those who think Coach B can’t win with a fourth-round choice as his QB: Forget the “Brady was taken 199th” argument. In 2008 he won 11 games with a guy taken 230th overall who hadn’t started or played meaningful time in any game since high school. By year’s end Matt Cassel had put four 40-plus-point games on the board, including 49 and 47 in Weeks 15 and 16. They did miss the playoffs, but after tying Miami for best record in the AFC, it was on, like the 58th tie breaker, which made them the only 11-win team this century to not make the playoffs.

So relax, people.