The Boston Sports List #1 - Most Hated Teams

Welcome to a new column here on Dr. P’s, the Boston Sports List (name obviously pending), where we’ll examine a plethora of topics in list form from the eye of a Boston sports fan, myself! The column will start with the most hated sports teams from the viewpoint of a Boston fan. I figured some sports-related content might be a nice change of pace from writing about highfalutin movies and indie records.

Let’s take a look at some of the teams that inspire anger, frustration, annoyance and thoughts of suicide in the Boston fan, starting with the bottom half of the top ten.

10.) Cleveland Cavaliers

With the recent resurgence of the Boston Celtics, the Cleveland Cavaliers immediately became one of the biggest thorns in their side, and one of the biggest impediments between the Celtics and yearly NBA championships. The Cavaliers boast the NBA’s best player in LeBron James, they’re nearly impossible to beat at home, and they’ve surrounded LeBron with a group of ugly, mediocre clowns who look awful on paper but always play well against the Celtics.

Perhaps the biggest reason the Cavaliers even made this list is the 2008 Eastern Conference semifinal between the Cavs and Celts. In that tightly contested seven game series (ultimately won by Boston), the Cavaliers threw everything they could at the Celtics and proved themselves to be more than formidable opponents. Aforementioned ugly clowns Zydrunas Ilgauskas (tall Lithuanian mongoloid), Wally Sczerbiak (former Celtics cast-off who played terribly for us and turned into Robert Horry in this series), and Delonte West (another former Celtic stiff who has the most inexplicable and heinous tattoos known to man) played completely out of their minds and frustrated the Celtics and their fans to no end.

Cleveland superstar LeBron James became hated in Boston for constantly feigning injuries and flopping around on the floor at even the slightest bit of contact. In one instance, he was beaten on a rebound attempt by a Celtic (whose name escapes me), then dropped like a stone while holding his eye when the Celtic player swung his elbows after capturing the rebound. When it became apparent that James wasn’t going to get a whistle, he sprung right back into action with 20/20 vision. LeBron’s flops made him an immediate target of derision in Boston and provided Celtics fans with a clear villain on their biggest Eastern Conference rival.

9) New York Giants

Super Bowl XLII. Eli Manning, the league’s premier country bumpkin, threw a ball right in between Asante Samuel’s hands. Richard Seymour had that motherfucker by his jersey. And he managed to wobble a ball to an unknown, currently out of the league clown who succeeded to make one of the most miraculous catches in NFL history. Then he threw a go ahead touchdown pass to a man currently suspended for having shot himself in the leg with a gun tucked into his sweatpants waistband.

Oh yeah. The Giants win over the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII not only won the league championship, but it ruined what would have been the first 16 game regular season undefeated season in league history. That kinda sucked.

At the time, the game was played under the shadow of Spygate and the latest allegations about the Patriots “cheating” by videotaping other team’s defensive signals. Those allegations were spearheaded by Jon Tomase of the Boston Herald and were released on the morning of the Super Bowl. I am amazed that this man was not fired immediately (like the team needed a distraction of this magnitude on the day of the game; it couldn’t have waited?) and that any self-respecting sports fan in Boston would read the Herald in the first place.

After the game, some bozo on the Giants whose name I forget was spouting about how “cheaters never prosper”. Yeah? Well fuck you. This game turned a team that was not a rival of ours at all into one of our most hated.

8) Tampa Bay Rays

Tampa Bay used to be the best medicine for any ailing Red Sox team. We’ve lost 5 in a row? No worries, we have Tampa coming up. We’re six games behind the Yankees in mid-August? We still have 8 against Tampa. The stats were mindboggling. The Sox used to crush this team.

Then the Rays “got the devil out” and got much younger and much better. Last season involved a heated division race between Tampa and the Sox, and every time it seemed we were going to overtake them, they held us off. The ultimate victory between the teams was claimed by Tampa, who defeated the Red Sox in a seven game American League Championship Series last season to advance to the World Series (where they were summarily beaten badly by Philadelphia). Not only did the Red Sox lose out on the Series, but everything had turned on its head. Lowly Tampa had beaten Boston in a series of important games.

Tampa doesn’t have too many people I dislike. They have a good manager (Joe Maddon), one of the best players in the league (Carl Crawford), and a host of young talent that plays hard and never gives up. This group has proven to be a tremendous pain in the ass for the Red Sox and currently provide some of their toughest competition. They play in one of the worst stadiums in the league (Tropicana Field), one that was antiquated and inefficient before it was even completed. But they play very well there, and now hearing that the Sox are going down to Tampa doesn’t fill me with the joy it once did.

7) Detroit Pistons

This rivalry is slightly more historical than current, though the two teams did meet in the playoffs two years ago in the Eastern Conference finals, with the Celtics advancing in six games. In the late 80s, the Pistons and Celtics were like oil and water. The Celtics were advancing in age and stature in the league, but they still had Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and the other miracle makers of their earlier championship runs. The “bad boy” Pistons boasted Hall of Famer Isaiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, and shitheads extraordinaire Dennis Rodman and Bill Laimbeer. Trash talking was a given. Punches were often thrown.

The 1987 playoff series between the two teams gave us one of the most amazing endings of a game ever. In game five, with Boston trailing by 1, Isaiah Thomas’ inbound pass was stolen by Larry Bird, who immediately passed it to Dennis Johnson for a layup to win the game. The Celtics held off the Pistons in seven games; the last vestige of the great teams of the 1980s. In the 1988 playoffs, the Pistons won the Eastern Conference Finals matchup 4-2, and in 1989, the Pistons swept the Celtics out of the playoffs in the first round.

Though the teams were very competitive towards the end of that decade, it will be the antics of the Pistons that Boston fans will forever hate. Laimbeer was a constant nuisance to all Celtics (and pretty much the entire league), and Isaiah Thomas once said that Larry Bird was thought of as a great player only because he is white. Basically, the team was comprised of assholes that no one liked. The fact that they beat us in big games was icing on the cake.

6) Indianapolis Colts

You’d think they’d be higher, but the Colts are actually a tough team to hate. I truly don’t dislike Peyton Manning; I think all the ads he does are stupid and he plays up the “aw, shucks” routine a bit too much, but he’s more than a worthy adversary. Players that make me fearful are players like I have a hard time hating. I don’t think Alex Rodriguez is going to come through in a big game against the Red Sox, so it’s easier not to have any respect for him. But I always think Derek Jeter will, and it’s hard to really hate guys like that. Manning is in the same boat.

I don’t like the way the team used to pump crowd noise into the old RCA dome, and I don’t like Tony Dungy, their former coach. Dungy’s pontificating about Spygate and his “I would never do something like that” spiel after the allegations broke soured me on him forever.

Like the situation between the Red Sox and Tampa, the Patriots used to routinely handle the Colts in games big and small. That changed in the 2006 AFC Championship game, where the Patriots blew a 21-3 halftime advantage. The Colts went on to win the Super Bowl that year and Manning got the “can he win the big one?” monkey off his back. Now they’re simply one of the top teams in the AFC and a perennial threat to any Patriots season.

We'll be back soon with more teams from New York!

John Lacey