Barstool Best of 2015 - Best Game
It’s officially 2016, and another year has come and went. By any standard, it was a weird, weird year in sports and pop culture. So we at Barstool decided to document the best moments of it for you, broken down into seven blogs by seven categories. Best can mean a lot of things: Our favorite, most memorable, most significant, and most important. This list isn’t meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive, just some of what we’ll think of when we look back on the year 2015.
Best Game
Brosh (@BarstoolBrosh) – Barstool Philly
Pick: Super Bowl, Patriots-Seahawks
Super Bowl 49 was a special one for me. Going to school up at Quinnipiac, I’m forced to be friends with Pats fan. So when my friend Justin is sitting on the couch, balling his eyes out after the Jermaine Kearse catch, I am holding back every bit of laughter. Why? Because it’s Pats fans, they deserve this.
Of course just 2 minutes later it’s Justin who now sadistically laughing while crying out of pure happiness, and while this is all going on my two other friends are covered in blood as my buddy Ned threw his beer up in the air after Butler’s interception and his finger caught in the inside of the can, slicing his finger wide open and spraying blood everywhere. He demanded he didn’t need to go the hospital as he bled all over our living room. I spent the next 3 hours in the Emergency Room. I hate being an Eagles fan.
RDT (@BarstoolRDT) – Barstool DMV
Pick: Blue Jays-Texas Rangers, Game 5
Easily the most memorable MLB game of the season was Game 5 of the ALDS between the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays. The Rangers, up 2-0 at one point, found themselves tied 2-2. Win or go home.
Flash forward to the top of 7th, when things start to get interesting. 2 outs, guy on third, the Rangers’ Shin Soo Choo at bat, Russell Martin tries to throw the ball back to the pitcher, when it hits off Choo’s bat and bounces out into the field, runner from third advances home. Umps originally call it a dead ball for no reason. The ball was live, and it was a great heads up play by Odor to read that play and sprint home. The call was protested and the Toronto crowd lets the umps hear it, they counted the run and the fans begin throwing their Molsons and tons of other trash onto the field. Blue Jays players pleading with the crowd to stop, such a bizarre scene and a play you likely will never see again.
Following that crazy half-inning, the Jays wasted no time getting back into the game. Three errors by the Rangers in the bottom of the 7th, including two by normally good fielder Elvin Andrus, got the Jays momentum right back. The Rangers got 2 outs and looked like they may get out of the inning when Jose Bautista stepped to the plate with guys on first and third. Bautista launched a mammoth shot into left center that turned out to be the game winner. I’m not sure what stayed in the air longer, the ball, or Bautista’s bat from his massive bat toss. Just an unbelievable turn of events and a crazy inning. Benches cleared a few times after that, but the damage was done. Jays won this crazy game, took the series and eventually lost to the Royals in the ALCS.
Reags (@BarstoolReags) – Barstool U
Pick: Spurs-Clippers , Game 7
When thinking of the best basketball game of the year, you automatically try to think of something that sticks out. Well, for me it’s an elimination game where the biggest of stars shine. There was nothing better than Game 7 of the Spurs vs. Clippers.
You had two of the biggest names in the game with Chris Paul and Tim Duncan doing wonders for their team only for the last play to come down between the former Wake Forest greats. Duncan made a couple of free throws to tie the game with 8.8 seconds to go.
That’s when the hobbled Chris Paul, suffering from a brutal hamstring injury hit a bank shot over Duncan at the buzzer to advance the Clips. Blake Griffin recorded a triple-double and the biggest lead at the end of a quarter was two. There were also 31 lead changes. This was absolutely the best hoops game of the year.
Charlie (@CharlieWisco) – Barstool New York
Pick: Anaheim Ducks-Winnipeg Jets, Game 3
When picking my favorite sports game of 2015, I went with one that was totally ignored by the majority of sports fans, and probably forgotten by most of the people who watched it. But fuck that, Ducks-Jets Game 3 was everything that made the Stanley Cup playoffs the greatest playoffs of the four major professional sports. The game, whose highlights you can watch on NHL.com still, featured bone-crushing hits (Ducks-Jets was statistically the most physical playoff series in recent Stanley Cup playoff history), lead changes, quick changes in momentum, and an intensity and passion from the players that is unmatched in pretty much any other sport.
Jordie from Barstool Philly once wrote that hockey is the perfect game, because it perfectly combines skill and grace with hard-nosed grit and toughness better than any other sport to make something greater than the sum of each of those elements. This game was the perfect representation of that balance that makes hockey, specifically playoff hockey, as (somehow) simultaneously electrifying and arresting as it is. You’re completely glued to your seat, but want to jump out of it every minute. You start feel physically ill because you don’t know what to do with yourself.
And none of this addresses the single most memorable element of the game: the Winnipeg crowd. A hockey-mad city, starved of playoff hockey since 1996, the fans were wearing all white and thirsty for blood. It was one of those rare moments the energy was so strong you could literally feel it through the television screen. Was it disappointing the Ducks ultimately won and let the air out of the home crowd? Yeah, but that disappointment was a small price to pay for the most memorable game of 2015.
Previously:
Upcoming:
January 2nd Afternoon: Comedy
January 3rd Morning: Sports moment
January 3rd Afternoon: Movies
January 4th: TV Show