Sean Comerford's Kick Arse Blog

So my Islanders haven’t had a decent scoring threat since the days of the mighty mini Ziggy Palffy. They’ve been last and 2nd to last in goals scored the last two years. Their scoring leader in ’09 netted a whopping 18. Now they own the #1 overall pick in a draft that features, among others, a guy who has been a phenom pretty much his whole life, broke Wayne Gretzky’s OHL scoring record as a 16 year old and continues to impress both in juniors and international play – John Tavares.

What am I missing? Don’t be dumb or overthink things… just take Tavares for the love of all things holy.

While I’m on the subject of potential dumb moves by the Isles, I took a few minutes to put together a list of their “all time hits”. At various points during the fire sale days, the Islanders swapped: Zdeno Chara, Jason Spezza, Olli Jokinen, Roberto Luongo, Brian McCabe, Todd Bertuzzi and Dany Heatley for Alexei Yashin, Mark Parrish, Oleg Kvasha, Trevor Lindor and Rick DiPietro. Think about that…  a still in its prime starting forward line of Spezza-Jokinen-Heatley with Chara+McCabe on D and Luongo in net for a can’t stay healthy DiPietro and a bunch of bums.

If they don’t take Tavares, it just might be the last straw for me.

Here’s how it’s going to go down:

First Round:

Bruins over Habs in 5

Caps over Rag$ in 6

Canes over Devils in 6

Pens over Flyers in 6

Sharks over Ducks in 7

Wings sweep Jackets

Canucks over Blues in 5

Hawks over Flames in 7

Second Round:

Bruins over Canes in 6

Caps over Pens in 7 game classic

Sharks over Hawks in 6

Wings over Canucks in 5

Semi-finals:

Caps over Bruins in 5

Wings over Sharks in 6

Finals:

For the 2nd straight year, the Wings school a wet behind the ears young team, beating the Caps in 5

Between making for of the mentally retarded on Jay Leno(wtf?!?!?) to kissing the royal rear of the king of Saudi Arabia, it’s been a fun 100 days for BO.

Now at this point I don’t anyone is going to argue dearly departed GWB did a bang up job the entire time he was in office.

But c’mon now, can you imagine how he would have been crucified if HE had said “I bowled like a retard” or bowed to the king of some arab nation the only thing we get from is oil and terrorists? It’s weird… it’s almost like the media is giving BO a free pass for some reason… hmmm.

The weather here in lovely central CT is finally starting to brighten and I’ve completed no less than six different fantasy baseball drafts… so spring and MLB games must be here!

And while I’m not as big of a fan of the Mets as I was back when Mookie dribbled that one through Buckner’s legs (man was that a great series), I still love the game…. I just root mostly for the guys on my roster in the $100 a team fantasy league I’m in.

Anyway, here are my 2009 predicted standings record for posterity:

AL East: Yanks finally get their money’s worth in ’09… Sox finish a half dozen back for the wild card in the curtain call for the aging heroes Varitek, Lowell, Ortiz (who is off the juice as of last year BTW). Rays show ’08 was a fluke and struggle to stay above .500 while the Jays and Orioles are mired in rebuilding seasons.

AL Central : This is a tough one to call…. all of the teams look to me like 80-85 win teams. But I’m picking the Tigers to rebound from a disastrous 2008 and that the Royals will surprise everyone by contending for the central division crown much of the year. The Indians, Twins and White Sox will all be competitive but fade down the stretch.

AL West: The Angels… by a mile. Oakland will most likely finish second but only because Texas still has no pitching and Seattle is fielding a glorified AAA team.

AL Playoffs: Yankees over Tigers, Angels over Red Sux… Yankees beat Angles in 6

NL East: Sports Illustrated is picking the Amazins to win it all and while I don’t agree they will at least manage to avoid choking away the NL East crown this year. The Marlins – that’s right, the Marlins – will finish second AND take the wild card as Cameron Maybin wins NL Rookie of the Year. Braves finish distant third while Phillies pitching goes back to being its old implosive self and they only avoid last by virtue of the less than stellar Nats.

NL Central: 2009 is the year the Pirates… once again finish last. Ok, the biggest lock in baseball out of the way, this will be a two team race between the Cubbies and Cards. And I think the Cards will win in a central division that is actually pretty weak. The Brew crew window closed this off season but their next wave of prospects will get a year to improve and maybe compete in 2010. Houston isn’t a factor as they finish 4^th. The Reds actually might have a chance to compete for last with the Pirates if they have injuries to their pitching.

NL West: Much like the AL West, this is a one horse race as the Dodgers should breeze to a double digit margin in the standings here. The Dbacks finish a distant second while the other 3 all have a legit shot to lose 90+.

NL Playoffs: Mets sweep the Cards while Dodgers are forced to 5 against the scrappy Marlins. The Mets then flame out against Manny and the Dodgers.

World Series: Bud Selig throws millions on his bed and rolls around naked on it as the two biggest markets face off in the series. A truly classic October classic ends with Arod (lock it up!) hitting a walk off homer, the monkey finally off his back now that’s he’s fessed up to being a rod freak like all the rest of MLB. Bonus prediction: The Yanks win one for the George who passes away a few weeks before the series and watches the games with Billy Martin… in hell.

Rumors have been circulating for weeks that IBM is close to buying Sun Micro. This one hits home for me as a software geek who worked at both Big Blue as an intern / new college grad for 5 years an then at Sun for 5+ years.

Let’s just say I left IBM underwhelmed. Now granted I was just one guy with a very limited and short sample set but I’ve also subsequently been exposed to some of their “flagship” software products like MQ , Websphere, etc. And let me assure you that for high price products, they are lousy. Also, my impression working there was the company was largely a model of in-efficiency… most of us were 100% sure the guy who wrote Dilbert worked at IBM.

Sun on the other hand, always had really hard working people cranking out really cool tech but was absolutely CLUELESS as to how to sell and market…. it’s like they forgot the point of being in business is to actually make money. Once the dot com bubble burst and people realized buying expensive servers wasn’t enough to make you an “internet millionaire”, a gaping whole in Sun’s business model was exposed. So while I really did like working at Sun, I decided to leave on my own terms back in ’06. Things had been bad for awhile even back then but I never really thought they’d be struggling just as much 3 years later and apparently be on the verge of ceasing to exist.

So as a fan of Sun and believer in their software (Java, Glassfish, etc), I will be bummed if the Sun does set…. but especially if IBM is the buyer. If that happens you’ll have one giant pitching the .NYET stack and another pitching their craptastic Java stack – and it’ll probably be time for me to start learning Ruby or Scala or whatever all the cool kids on the software block are doing these days.

Who knows what will happen… multiple places reported Friday it was a done deal but now the NY Slimes has an article saying the deal is off.

But here’s to hoping it is and Sun can shine again on its own… or at least partner with someone a lot less likely to gut the company after a merger