Larry or Stanley?

[Slacker]

Helen would have taken them both.

You probably meant this for the "I Had a Chubbie for Mrs. Roper at 13" board. But thanks for sharing anyway!

 

[Twirling Time]

Depends on which year. Never been a year where the Mavericks and Stars both combined to go sufficiently deep. Closest to it was 2001 when Calvin Booth and zygotic Dirk willed the Mavs past the Jazz in Round 1 and the two-time West Division Stars faced the Blues.

 

[Hermes]

Picture-in-picture is not a thing anymore. It should be.

DirectTV still has it. Most of the streaming apps allow for multiple screens, too.

 

[DanOregon]

I always feel really old when I realize I'm now older than TV characters or the actors who portrayed "really old people" (at least in my mind) when I was a kid. Thankfully, I'm still under the Roper line.

 

[Cosmo]

Depends on which year. Never been a year where the Mavericks and Stars both combined to go sufficiently deep. Closest to it was 2001 when Calvin Booth and zygotic Dirk willed the Mavs past the Jazz in Round 1 and the two-time West Division Stars faced the Blues.

This is interesting and made me go look up how often both of my teams (Caps and Suns) made deep-ish runs in the same year. I started following Phoenix in the 1987-88 season and really became a Caps fan about the same time, so when I was 11 or 12. The only season I can find where both even advanced to the conference finals was 1989-90 when the Caps got swept by the Bruins in the Wales finals and the Suns lost 4-2 to Portland in the Western Conference finals. So it's really been an either-or scenario for my rooting interests for much of my life.

 

[BitterYoungMatador2]

This is interesting and made me go look up how often both of my teams (Caps and Suns) made deep-ish runs in the same year. I started following Phoenix in the 1987-88 season and really became a Caps fan about the same time, so when I was 11 or 12. The only season I can find where both even advanced to the conference finals was 1989-90 when the Caps got swept by the Bruins in the Wales finals and the Suns lost 4-2 to Portland in the Western Conference finals. So it's really been an either-or scenario for my rooting interests for much of my life.

Yeah, but the Suns were kind enough to dump the Lakers in five in the semifinals.

I remember game six of the Western Conference finals being on a Thursday night in Phoenix. The next day was the last day of school for us. I was already beaming walking into eighth grade and then Ryan Malady comes up to my desk and gives me $10 in quarters.

"The heck is this?" I asked.

"Don't you remember?" he said. "You were shooting your mouth off (totally believable) about how good Portland was going to be and I bet you ten bucks they wouldn't make the NBA Finals. Well, there's 10 bucks."

 

[Liut]

Stan.

But enjoy reading about the break-in of Larry's office.

 

[qtlaw]

Stanley was fun when Sharks were competitive but then the Ws exploded.

 

[UPChip]

I've always said that I wish that the NBA and NHL could somehow not run concurrently because I just don't have the bandwidth to follow both.

The Stanley Cup Playoffs are probably better on the whole, but they get almost as much hype from middle-aged white dudes as the Masters, and the whole warrior mentality has become almost cliched at this point. The NHL has stinkers too, as evidenced by the way Winnipeg rolled over and died in Vegas last night.

The other thing is that the NHL has developed a gift over the years for being so random that there are many examples of matchups involving one or both teams that are not really a part of the conversation, but just got hotter or healthier or luckier than their opponents. If I did the math correctly, this is the 18th season since the lockout (God, I am so old). In that span, at least one of the Stanley Cup Finalists did not have home-ice advantage in its first round series more than half the time, and one of the ones that wasn't was the infamous 2007 Ducks-Senators matchup, that I think got negative ratings on NBC (Sorry, ChrisLong).

On the other side, the early rounds of the NBA playoffs tend to be fairly predictable (Bucks and Cavaliers notwithstanding), but more often than not, the final matches the two best teams. Meanwhile, the Stanley Cup Final has only featured two division winners three times since the lockout and only once (Caps-Golden Knights) since they went to four divisions.

 

[Songbird]

Such a surreal moment for Kings diehards who never EVER expected them hoist the Cup, then it happened again 2 years later.

 

[DanOregon]

Don't know how many times I'd go to the gym - flip on a Stanley Cup game - whatever round, and people who never watch hockey near me would suddenly be really into it. They'd be surprised by the intensity from the puck drop to the final horn. They don't do "load management" in hockey.

 

[BTExpress]

When are they going to rename the NBA trophy David so it at least reflects a commissioner who ruled for a generation and in an era where the league exploded?