Month: November 2024

Checking in on Philadelphia’s Boys of Winter

~ Tom ~ Leave a comment

WHILE THE EAGLES, midway through their season, appear to have righted the ship, their South Philly neighbors in the Wells Fargo Center are very much works in progress as their campaigns unfold.

What’s fascinating is how they’re trending.

The 76ers endured their time as basketball exiles, tanking for multiple seasons, drafting high-level first-rounders, and proceeding along what they smugly referred to as The Process. Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey developed into legitimate stars, but their supporting cast was a revolving door of studs who either didn’t fit in or were allowed to walk, and role players whom the front office prayed, futilely, could be more than their prior careers indicated. A string of early playoff exits brought us to this season, with Paul George the latest hoped-for complement. Injuries have taken their toll; Embiid, Maxey, and George have yet to be on the court at the same time, and the Sixers are a last-place 2-11. 

The news that Maxey called out Embiid in a team meeting for being late “for everything” is both encouraging and troubling. Encouraging because Maxey is likely to be in Philadelphia for longer than Embiid or George, and the team will need his leadership in the coming years. Troubling because Embiid has almost 200 million reasons to show up for work on time – to say nothing of showing up in shape to play.

No one expected anything much from the Flyers, and thus far they haven’t been disappointed. That said, while the Orange and Black are a mediocre 8-9-2, the vibe is thoroughly different. After years and years of signing aging, high-priced band-aids, the front office seems committed to a bottom-up rebuilding based on nurturing young talent and compiling a roster that can grow together into something sustainable. The team has been upfront about doing things the right way, a welcome transparency after decades of fruitless coasting on a pair of Stanley Cups fifty years ago. Whether they accomplish anything before the roster inevitably tunes out perpetually acerbic head coach John Tortorella remains to be seen.

At this point, the 76ers are struggling to make a whole out of their parts. The Flyers look to be on their way to a future whole that is more than the sum of theirs. | DL

Shy, Eagles, Shy: Don’t Look Now, But the Eagles Are an Understated First-Place Team

~ Tom ~ Leave a comment

WE’RE FAR ENOUGH into the Eagles’ season to draw some conclusions.

The Birds aren’t as bad as those wobbly first four games indicated. And they’re not as good as the recent demolitions of the Cowboys, Bengals, and Giants suggest.

Chalk up the unimpressive 2-2 start to new game plans on both offense and defense. The Eagles changed coordinators in the off-season, with Kellen Moore and Vic Fangio brought in to clear the rubble from last year’s collapse. But Nick Sirianni didn’t play any of his starters during the preseason, so there was no chance for either side of the ball to gain in-game experience with their overhauled schemes until Week 1 of the regular season. The rust was evident. 

Since then, things have looked a lot more cohesive. Saquon Barkley has been as good as advertised – and often better. A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert have, when healthy, shone. Jalen Hurts, like the team he quarterbacks, regained his equilibrium after those first four games and has performed reliably, if not at the elite level of a couple seasons ago. Both lines have been solid. The defensive secondary, boosted by impressive play from rookies Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean, looks better than it has in years, and DeJean has breathed new life into the punt-return game.

At the same time, even in the blowout wins, there have been signs of trouble. Hurts still has a tendency to hold onto the ball for too long, and he remains turnover-prone, though he has tightened that up. The D has gotten some lucky breaks, most notably at the end of the Jacksonville game, when a last-minute interception in the Eagles’ own end zone helped prevent an embarrassing upset at the hands of the Jaguars. And Sirianni and his coordinators can get too cute at times with their play-calling, as if seeking to demonstrate their own cleverness instead of taking the sure out.

The Chiefs are undefeated, the Bills, Steelers, and Ravens are acquitting themselves well, the Lions are the NFC’s darlings, and the Commanders are the surprise of the league. At 7-2, the Eagles feel like the NFL’s quietest first-place team. After that start, I’ll take it. | DL

Fact-Checking My Response to the Election

~ Tom ~ 1 Comment

He won. Fair and square.

Well, maybe not fair. Vladimir Putin and his red army of bots had a thumb on the scales. Elon Musk offered to pay people to vote for him. And the media ignored his obvious cognitive implosion while spending weeks eviscerating President Biden for far, far less.

Regardless, he won. And there will be no insurrection in January when Congress convenes to certify the election results, because Democrats believe in the rule of law. Unlike the other party.

I’m not a political scientist, and I don’t have the stomach for endless hot takes about Joe Sixpack’s heartland authenticity.

I want to stick to facts. And the facts are these:

He is a convicted felon.

He is an adjudicated rapist.

He is a self-admitted sexual abuser.

He incited a murderous mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

He admires dictators and autocrats.

He trivialized a catastrophically infectious illness that killed more than a million of the citizens whom he had sworn an oath to protect.

He mocks people with disabilities.

He insults soldiers, sailors, and marines who have died for their — for our — country. He insults their grieving families.

He is a tax cheat.

He stiffs contractors.

These are not opinions. These are facts.

If you voted for him, you decided that none of the above points — to say nothing of the sad, damning entirety of them — was a dealbreaker.

This, too, is a fact.

In voting for him, you made a transactional choice. You chose what you think will be a healthier paycheck over morality and decency.

Again, a fact.

So don’t you dare lecture me about character or values or virtue. With your vote, you told the world that those things don’t matter to you. 

I’ll leave it to the economists to sort out over the next several years whether your transaction has paid off. I get that lots of people are hurting economically. I get that it’s a hell of a lot easier to vote for the guy who tells you it’s not your fault. It’s those other people who are to blame, the ones “coming to steal your jobs,” as if you ever had any intention of doing those backbreaking, low-paying jobs in the first place, as if the inflation that drove up prices wasn’t the direct result of the guy’s utter and indifferent failure to deal with that illness I mentioned above with even a modicum of competence.

But the political is the personal, right? And here’s where it gets personal to me.

That guy, the one you’re putting back in the Oval Office, and the people aligned with him politically who will hold the majority in the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court justices in the ideological majority? 

The policies they intend to enact, uphold, and enforce will put the health, wellbeing, and safety of my daughters and nieces at risk. 

They will cause immense suffering to people whose only transgression is to look different, to speak different, to worship different, or to love different.

They will hasten the environmental decline of a planet whose rapid, human-caused climate changes are destroying lives and property with increasing, explosive, savage regularity.

They will widen what is already a morally corrupt gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Those are dealbreakers for me.

And that’s a fact. | DL

… Aaaaaaand We’re Back

~ Tom ~ Leave a comment

IN THE TWO YEARS, nine months, and twenty-one days since new pixels last appeared here, the Phillies lost a World Series, a League Championship Series, and a League Division Series, the Eagles lost two wild-card games and a Super Bowl, and the Flyers and 76ers just … lost. 

One of my daughters spent a semester in Ireland and returned to earn her bachelor’s degree; the other visited Paris for a couple of summer weeks and started her senior year of high school. 

The country readied itself, once again, for an election between an eminently qualified, mentally balanced, service-oriented candidate and a monstrously cruel, laughably uninterested, demonstrably fascist one.

I started a new job and began writing a new novel. 

And on and on and on.

Through all of it, a couple of constants: First, I’m at my best when I’m creating – whether here or in the notebook in which I’m writing longhand fiction or in the gorgeously papered journal where I process my shit. Second, I’ve neglected this most important part of myself of late – and I need to get it back.

So let’s get it back. | DL