Thus far, my life as a sports fan has been nothing short of tragic. The only championship from a major pro sports team that I've witnessed was the Twins winning the World Series in 1991. I was three months old. Sure, just last year the Lynx won the WNBA title, but that just doesn't give me the same kind of excitement that I would expect from a championship. The major pro sports, I think, are football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. That means that, in order for me to witness a championship by one of my beloved Minnesota teams, either the Vikings, Twins, Timberwolves, or Wild would have to win one. The Vikings, Twins, and Wild are pretty awful, meaning the Timberwolves have the best shot at a title, though I think the Vikes will be a lot better this year (I'll get to that in a moment). You know Minnesota's sports outlook is pretty bleak when the Timberwolves have the best shot at a title. Their odds aren't good, either. They're not even decent. Sure, we've got Ricky Rubio and Kevin Love, arguably two of the best (if not the best in Kevin Love's case) at their respective positions of point guard and power forward, but outside of those two, we're not very good. Nikola Pekovic showed a lot of promise this year as the team's center, actually, so add him to the Love and Rubio group of "at-least-solid-starters. Derrick Williams showed flashes at times and, given that he was just a rookie, could end up being a very good player. The only problem is that he's more of a power forward than a small forward, and we've got the best power forward in basketball. The team desperately needs a shooting guard that can actually shoot (that seems like it should be easy to find, but apparently it's harder than it seems) and an athletic small forward. If we can get those this off-season, and if Rubio can fully recover from his knee injury, the Wolves will be a contender for a top-four spot in the west next year. Yeah, I said it.
*Sigh*... The Twins. This team is such a mess, I don't even know where to start. Yeah, we've won five of our last seven, which is good (it's actually really good. 1/3 of our wins have come in the last seven games), but frankly, we're a bad team. Without doing any research on this, I believe that Carl Pavano is the only current starter that was in the rotation at the start of the year. That's actually good because, even though all five of them were garbage, he was the best one. Consequently, I believe our starters had the highest ERA among starting rotations in baseball. Now we have three guys I've not heard of and Duensing in the rotation (I think), and I feel a lot more comfortable with that. It's not just the pitching though. Our hitting, though explosive at times, is inconsistent at best. It's unfortunate, too, because when the five guys on the team who can actually hit (Denard Span, Joe Mauer, Josh Willingham, Justin Morneau, and Ryan Doumit) are hitting well, we score a lot of runs. When they're not, though, that means it's up to guys like Alexi Casilla, Jamey Carroll, and Erik Komatsu to get hits. They can't get hits. Mauer and Morneau, though still good-very good, are shells of their former selves. If they were the Mauer and Morneau from five or six years ago, this team would be drastically better.
The definition of heartbreaker when it comes to sports has got to be the Minnesota Vikings. I mean, not last year. Last year they were pitiful. It's not like we've never been good, though. It's not even like we haven't been good recently, because we have. Remember 2009? Yeah, the 12-4, Brett-Favre-led Minnesota Vikings won the NFC North division, and should've at least made the Super Bowl. Yeah, I'm going to complain about that NFC Championship game a bit. First, though, I will reminisce. I remember week 3, Favre's last second, desperation heave to the endzone, miraculously caught by none other than Greg Lewis. I remember sprinting to my dorm room from my Monday night class to watch Favre beat the Packers on Monday Night Football. I remember all the "experts" saying the Cowboys would beat us in the Divisional round of the playoffs, their only reason being that the Cowboys won their Wild Card game. I remember saying, numerous times, "I hope we beat the Cowboys by 30, just so everyone will realize how dumb they are." I remember the Vikings winning 34-3, and the Cowboys complaining that we ran up the score. That game couldn't have been more perfect for me. Then, yes, I remember the NFC Championship game against my new-least-favorite team - the New Orleans Saints. The game in which Saints linebacker, Jonathan Vilma, offered $10,000 to whichever player knocked Favre out of the game. A sense of vindication came over me when the Saints' bounty system was discovered; I, along with many other Vikings fans, knew that the Saints players were playing dirty. Non-Vikings fans called us sore losers. What really bothers me, though, is that the referees just let that happen. They're just as pathetic as the Saints players.
That's not all with the heartbreak of the Vikings, though. Remember 1998? The '98 Vikings are the second best team to never win a Super Bowl, behind only the Patriots team that went 16-0 in the regular season. In '98, the Vikings went 15-1. Our kicker, Gary Andersen, didn't miss a single kick the whole year. That's unheard of! 100% accuracy on field goals for the whole year. Granted, we scored a ton of touchdowns, so Andersen didn't need to kick a lot of field goals. However, in the NFC Championship game that year, he not only kicked field goals, he missed field goals. We ended up losing in overtime, and seven-year-old Joe Russell cried.
Currently, the Vikings are not very good. We do, however, have the best running back in the league (Adrian Peterson) and the best defensive end in the league (Jared Allen). Christian Ponder, now that he has a decent left tackle in Matt Kalil, should improve drastically this year. An awful defensive secondary was improved (though only slightly) with the drafting of safety Harrison Smith and cornerback Josh Robinson. For some reason, no matter how bad the Vikings were the year before, I am always optimistic about the upcoming season at this time during the year. Knowing how horrible we were last year, looking at this year's schedule, I think six or seven wins is realistic. That's still not very good, but it's at least twice as good as last year.
(I know next to nothing about hockey, so I'm just going to assume the Wild will be bad again next year)
The thing about Minnesota sports teams is that we're not always bad, we're just never the best. I feel like if you want emotional balance in your life, you need to be a Minnesota sports fan. That sounds kind of crazy, given that it's pretty depressing here, sports-wise, but hear me out. You have to be optimistic to be a Minnesota sports fan. If you're pessimistic, the frustration, depression, and heart break will be too much, and you'll abandon ship. However, Minnesota sports turns anyone into a pessimist because Murphy's Law (what can go wrong will go wrong) is in full effect for every single sporting event. Actually, I guess it could go either way: you'll either find emotional balance, or you'll become a schizophrenic. Heh, well, good luck with that.
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