THE HEAT AND THE PANTHERS The Miami Heat will be at the Garden tonight (May 17) to visit the Boston Celtics in Game 1 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. The Florida Panthers will travel to Raleigh, NC to face the Carolina Hurricanes, opening the NHL Eastern Conference Finals tomorrow…

MONTY AND BUTCH Jim Montgomery and Bruce Cassidy… Not quite a year ago, I wrote a scathing piece excoriating the Bruins brass for unceremoniously kicking then-head coach Bruce “Butch” Cassidy to the curb. [See “Bruce Cassidy, Claude Julien, Cam Neely and Don Sweeney,” June, 2022.] I was irate. It was…

BRUCE CASSIDY, CLAUDE JULIEN, CAM NEELY AND DON SWEENEY A .672 winning percentage over 399 career regular-season games. A 36–37 career playoff record with zero Stanley Cups, a game-7 loss to the St. Louis Blues in the 2019 Finals, as agonizingly close as it would come. A roster with not…

CHASE AND SYDNEY BROWN The Brown identical mirror twins were born two minutes apart, Chase at 5:33 and Sydney at 5:35 a.m., on March 21, 2000. This week, they will become just the sixth set of twins selected in the same NFL draft in 40 years. “Everything they’ve done, they’ve…

VIDA ROCHELLE BLUE JR. Of late, I’ve been writing about those whose time on our planet has run out. Expired. Sands of the hourglass, I suppose. Dick Groat. Bobby Caldwell. Joe Pepitone. Pete Carril. To name a recent few. It’s not that I’m obsessed with death. Hardly. Rather, sometimes it…

DICK GROAT Apart from Jim Thorpe, who possibly was the greatest athlete short of Tarzan, Dick Groat is so richly deserving of mention. In this context. Groat was one of the most accomplished two-sport athletes in American sports history, a college All-America in baseball and basketball as well as one…

THE TAMPA BAY RAYS The Tampa Bay Rays began play in the American League as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1998. Twenty-five years ago. They sport patches on their caps and uniform sleeves celebrating the franchise’s history. Until the recent past, there wasn’t a lot to celebrate. My, how…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR. Bobby Junior. Sixty-nine years old. A college classmate. Harvard ’76. Never really knew him. Saw him around occasionally, but never knew him. Which begs this question: Who did? Certainly, he enjoyed the company of a gaggle of his privileged private school friends, not to mention the…

BOBBY CALDWELL Bobby Caldwell… “What You Won’t Do For Love”… People of a certain age and musical taste or affinity remember that mega-hit. I know I do. This hit single became the signature song from his double platinum album, Bobby Caldwell, in 1978. “What You Won’t Do For Love” (WYWDFL)…