Just like that, Jerod Mayo is out and Mike Vrabel is in, one era ends and another begins. The times … they are … a changin’ – or so it seems – and so we bring you our first overview as Boston sports enter 2025, a rather sizable fork in the road.
We’ll start with the Patriots, who have already made their choice in Vrabel, whose name fittingly rhymes with stable. Does that mean all the Patriots’ problems are gone? Hell no, especially after bungling mismanagement that bordered on insanity. Think about it. In the span of three years years, Bill Belichick empowered Matt Patricia and Joe Judge to run his offense while Robert Kraft empowered Mayo to take over his football operation. When Belichick made that first error prior to the 2022 season, he promoted confidants who lacked credentials for the job. Owner Robert Kraft ultimately ordered him to fix the mistake, then made precisely the same blunder – perhaps bigger – by promoting Mayo to replace Belichick.
As the saying goes, power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In this case, the power came from all that winning.
By all accounts, Vrabel now has control of the Patriots’ football operation, which feels like a good thing. But it is only the first step. The Patriots still have one of the worst rosters in the NFL – if not the worst – and no one should forget the recent years of organizational negligence. Belichick drafted poorly. He and Kraft hired poorly. Add in the departure of Tom Brady – who left the Patriots and kept right on winning – the demise of the organization sounds like a fable penned by the Brothers Grimm. (Or maybe just grim.) You get the drift. The boy who cried wolf meets the team that claimed victory.
So what happens now? As usual, time will tell. The Brady-Belichick era isn’t likely to be replicated by anyone anywhere, so keep your expectations in check. Between free agency and the draft, the next few months for Vrabel will be huge. The Patriots need legitimate, bona fide building blocks around Drake Maye on offense and Christian Gonzalez on defense, and they’re going to need some luck along the way, too. But at a minimum, the firing-and-hiring from Mayo to Vrabel suggests the Patriots have bounced, which is to say that they are now officially on the rebound.
Precisely how high they get, of course, is unknown.
The Bruins
Nov 16, 2024; Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Boston Bruins right wing David Pastrnak (88) during the third period against the St. Louis Blues at TD Garden. Mandatory Credit: Winslow Townson-Imagn Images
Serious question: right now, which of the four major Boston teams feels most hopeless? The answer is the Bruins, despite rather surprising victories in the last few days over both the Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning by a combined score of 10-5.
If you’ve been following the Bruins at all this season, you know exactly what we’re talking about. The last two games certainly have been entertaining, but the Bruins have otherwise been painful to watch – and they know it. Though the Bruins currently have possession of a the first wildcard spot in the Eastern Conference, they have a goal differential of minus-22 while ranking 30th in the NHL on the power play and 25th on the penalty kill. Overall, they rank 26th in scoring and 21st in goals allowed. (Historically, the latter has always been as big a part of their identity as the spoked-B.) Meanwhile, various rankings still place the Bruins’ player development operation near the bottom of those in the NHL, some placing them downright last.
The point? The Bruins are on a collision course with a rather sizable iceberg. Some sort of cataclysm seems unavoidable. The team may very well be headed for a blockbuster trade – David Pastrnak? Charlie McAvoy? – or some type of front office upheaval akin to what the Patriots just went through. Somewhere in the next several weeks, Bruins ownership might need to decide whether they want Cam Neely and Don Sweeney to be the ones making any moves at all as we approach the March 7 trade deadline, though Charlie Jacobs recently expressed a vote of confidence for the leadership.
The Celtics
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – JANUARY 10: Head coach Joe Mazzulla of the Boston Celtics reacts during the first half of a game against the Sacramento Kings at TD Garden on January 10, 2025 in Boston, Massachusetts. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Billie Weiss/Getty Images)
Worried yet? You should be – at least with a small `w.’ In their last two games, the Celtics have played the New Orleans Pelicans and the Toronto Raptors, who have combined for 20 victories and possess the second- and fourth-worst records in the NBA. The results? A one-point win over New Orleans that required a miss from C.J. McCollum at the buzzer and a rather decisive, 110-97 defeat at the hands of the dreadful Raptors. The Celtics are now 2-3 in their last five games, 6-5 in their last 11, 12-9 in their last 21.
“We have to start playing better,” Kristaps Porzingis said after last night’s loss to Toronto. “We just can’t keep cruising and expect to just turn it up toward the end.”
OK, so he calls it cruising. I call it sleepwalking or, more specifically, complacency. This is what happens when the winning goes to your head. You start thinking you can win again without doing the things that were required the first time around, like the 2015 Patriots or the 2010 Celtics. You cut come corners, sacrifice home field or home court, get bitten in the ass. The Celtics don’t have a talent issue. They excelled during the absence of Porzingis. But they’ve bought in to some much of their own bullcrap that they think they can win whenever they want, against whoever they want, wherever they want.
Can they? Maybe. But they don’t look nearly as fearsome as they did at the beginning of the season and the whole league still questions their mental toughness. And now the Celtics have given everyone the right to.
All of that said, we’ve buried the lead. While the Bruins are at a form in the road facing buy or sell, the Celtics are, in another manner of speaking, selling. This week, the Boston Globe reported that the Celtics will begin taking bids in their sale process. In the short term, that shouldn’t affect the on-court product. But in the bigger picture? There is no bigger fork in the road in all of Boston sports.
The Red Sox
Jul 12, 2024; Boston, Massachusetts, USA; President and CEO of the Boston Red Sox Sam Kennedy applauds before a game against the Kansas City Royals at Fenway Park. Mandatory Credit: Paul Rutherford-USA TODAY Sports
Let’s start with this: are they better? Indisputably. But we just don’t know by how much. Garret Crochet and Walker Buehler are sizable additions, assuming the first isn’t some kind of fluke (which he doesn’t seem to be) and the second is on the rebound (which is entirely possible). Combined, Crochet and Buehler will make about $25 million in 2025, which is an excellent number for those who are cost-conscious. The bad news? The Red Sox haven’t exactly redistributed the savings elsewhere on the roster.
Fact: according to spotrac.com, the Red Sox right now have a projected opening day payroll of $206.3 million, which is roughly $35 million below the luxury tax threshold of $241 million. Pardon the expression, but … WTF? Back in November, team president Sam Kennedy certainly gave the impression that the Sox management was planning to be fiscally aggressive this offseason and chief baseball officer Craig Breslow echoed the sentiments. Now the Sox seem to be signing a much different tune.
Said Kennedy to reporters at last weekend’s Fenway Fest: “We don’t have really have a hope or a goal when it comes to spending. We have a hope or a goal about wins and win total. Winning enough games to win that American League East is the goal. That’ll take 90+ wins, we believe, this division, and we think we have the opportunity to do that this year.”
So, after all that, the Sox actually appear to have cut payroll from last season, when their season-ending total of $226 million finished $11 million below the luxury tax. They went 81-81. If the Sox win the World Series this year, nobody will care what they spent. But until then, whether the Sox like it or not, the problem for them is that fans rightly correlate their desire to win on hos much they are willing to invest into the product. Over the last number of years, that number has been, to put it kindly, questionable.
One final thing: while the Sox have been rebuilding their farm system, we’ve all made presumptions, me included. For example: a good farm system sustains your chances at winning a championship. What it also does is help you cut costs, which now appears to have been the Sox’ primary motive. In acquiring Crochet, the Sox traded away catching prospect Kyle Teel. Maybe that will be a good trade – or maybe it won’t. But a few months ago, the Sox were trotting out Teel with Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer as centerpieces of the future. Now it feels like he was just collateral to use instead of cash, of which they still have plenty as they look to fill needs at second and in the lineup (re: a right-handed bat).
So, in the end: who do the Red Sox want to be? Will they ever be the big, bad version that took over baseball from 2003-2007? Or are they now complacent to effectively be what they were for much of the previous century? Good, not great.
