Mismanagement ruining Boston sports

Ever since Tom Brady sold his house and left the New England area along with his six Super Bowl rings, Boston sports has returned to its pre-Brady doldrums and misfortunes. The first fifth or the 21st century has been the best era in Boston sports. Boston was renamed Titletown.

The Red Sox ended an 86-year old jinx by winning the World Series in 2004. They would go on to win championships again in 2007, 2013, and 2018. Bill Buckner was the happiest person in the country. Theo Epstein never has to pay for another beer whenever he is in Boston. David Ortiz became immortalized.

Prior to Brady coming to town, the Patriots had only made it to two Super Bowls, and they were utterly embarrassed in the first one, 46-10, by "The Fridge" and the rest of the Chicago Bears. Brady brought six championship banners to Foxboro for the 2001, 2002, 2004, 2014, 2016, and 2018 seasons. Bill Belichick was being talked about as the greatest head coach in NFL history. Brady was the greatest quarterback ever.

The Boston Celtics ended a 22-year drought when they won the NBA championship in 2008. Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen became the newest Big Three incarnation. Dancing Gino became a phenomenon.

Even the Bruins joined the party by winning their first Stanley Cup in nearly 30 years. Tim Thomas went on one of the greatest runs ever by a goalie in playoff history. The champagne was flowing at Foxwoods.

But now, it is like that classic Chris Farley Saturday Night Live skit in which he interviews Paul McCartney and asks him, “Remember when you were with the Beatles? That was awesome.”

Belichick, the greatest coach in NFL history, has struggled to reach .500 since Brady left and hasn’t had a playoff victory. The Red Sox haven’t won a divisional championship in the last four seasons, and finished last two of those years. They have seen cornerstone players like Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts leave town in the primes of their careers. The Bruins have had outstanding regular seasons, but haven’t made it past the second round of the playoffs since losing in the Stanley Cup in 2019. The Celtics seem to be on the brink of something special, but they blew a 2-1 lead in the NBA Finals last year and are close to choking this year in the Eastern Conference Finals.

So what has happened? Don’t blame the players or karma or Babe Ruth, all four franchises have been making huge executive blunders.

The Bruins fired head coach Bruce Cassidy prior to this season despite leading the team to a Stanley Cup and being named Coach of the Year in recent years. Mike Montgomery was brought in because he was considered more player-friendly. The Bruins would go on to only lose 12 games during the regular season, and set an NHL record for most wins and points in a season. But in one of the biggest choke jobs in sports history, the Bruins were sent home in the opening round of the playoffs. Cassidy’s new team, meanwhile, is one of four teams still playing.

Things have gone downhill for the Red Sox since they won the World Series in 2018. Their manager, Alex Cora, was suspended for the entire 2020 season due to sign-stealing with the Houston Astros. The Ron Roenicke season will be quickly forgotten as the Sox awaited Cora’s return in 2021. The bigger story, though, has been Chaim Bloom. Bloom took over for Dave Dombrowski as Chief Baseball Officer of the Red Sox after the 2019 season. Dombrowski was criticized, if you want to call it that, for spending too much money and fleecing the farm system in order to win a World Series in 2018. Bloom was brought in to revitalize the farm system and bring some financial prudence that his former team, Tampa Bay, was known for.

The results have seen Mookie Betts get traded to Los Angeles for, basically, Alex Verdugo. Xander Bogaerts was never offered a fair deal in free agency and was allowed to walk cross country to San Diego. The fact that Bogaerts even made it to free agency was a mistake. It was also a mistake not to trade him at the trade deadline if Bloom wasn’t serious about re-signing him in the offseason.

The Red Sox also didn’t make any big splashes in free agency, instead choosing to rely on past-their-prime, injury prone veterans like Corey Kluber, Kenley Jansen, James Paxton, Adam Duvall, and Justin Turner. The one big free agent signing they made a year ago was Trevor Story and he has been out all year with an injury which many people saw coming because of his loss of arm strength in recent years. There were other things like going into the 2022 season without a closer, not replacing Bogaerts this year with any of the top four shortstops available in free agency, trading away Christian Vazquez, and trading for Eric Hosmer. At least they extended Rafael Devers.

The Celtics looked like they were on the verge of starting a new dynasty behind their young stars, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Sure, they lost in the Finals last year to Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors, but they were certain to learn from that disappointment and come back stronger than ever. But then head coach, Ime Udoka, was suspended and ultimately fired because of an inappropriate relationship with a Celtics’ employee. The players supported the ascension of 34-year-old Rhode Island native Joe Mazzulla to head coach. The belief was that head coach in the NBA is overrated. It all comes down to the players on the court. These playoffs have proven those people wrong. This team lacks leadership and discipline. Players run past Mazzulla like he is not even there to substitute themselves into games. Players take over in timeouts screaming encouragement to each other. The two star players don’t seem to get along. Timeouts are not being called when opposing teams go on runs. Playing time has been unpredictable. While 2022 can be forgiven as a learning experience, the road has been wide open for the Celtics to cruise to the championship in 2023, and it will be inexcusable if this team crashes.

And then we have the Patriots. They have spearheaded the Boston dominance of sports for two decades. But then something happened on the way to Tom Brady’s enshrinement in both the Patriots and the NFL Hall of Fame. For either personal or professional reasons, Bill Belichick chose to let Brady walk to Tampa. Did Belichick want to prove he could win without Brady? That he could win with any quarterback? Or did he just believe Brady was washed up? Either way, Belichick was wrong.

But the decision that confounds everyone was his decision to go into the 2022 season with Matt Patricia and Joe Judge leading the offense. It is one thing to think you can win without a quarterback, it is a completely different, and foolhardy, belief in this modern day NFL that you can win without an offense. What was he thinking? Patriots’ fans had to suffer through a lost season. There is no other way to describe it. The 2022 season was just disregarded. It was a wasted year in our lives. The Patriots had the chance to build on a 10-7 Mac Jones’ rookie season. Instead, they made a mockery of Jones’ second season and may have permanently psychologically damaged their first round draft pick.

The Patricia and Brady decisions were the big ones, but there have been other things. The rift between Belichick and owner Robert Kraft has gone public with each, subtly, taking jabs at the other in the media. There have been questionable drafts (see N’Keal Harry) that have set the team back years, if not a decade. There have been questionable signings. Then, of course, there is that obsessional love that Belichick has for special team players. And the nepotism.

This is uncharted territory for an entire generation of Boston sports’ fans. Older fans have seen this kind of mismanagement before with the likes of Harry Sinden, Billy Sullivan, Grady Little, and Rick Pitino. As Pitino might say, "Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Paul Pierce, and Zdeno Chara are not walking through that door." If something doesn't change, it may be a while before we see another victory parade in Boston.