DK's 21 Takes: Dubas' 'boring-brick' plan a perfect fit ... Cherington's excuses ... Telling our own tale
Stability doesn't sell. Certainly not in any marketing sense.
Imagine, for instance, someone in the Penguins' sales department attempting to do something with this scintillating quote from Kyle Dubas over the weekend at the team's Downtown headquarters for the NHL Draft, explaining his lack of external activity so far this offseason: “We’ll stay after it, for sure, but it might not be the one gigantic-type transaction. We’ll try to stay active on those, but it might be more of a brick-by-boring-brick style.”
Oh, you betcha. And by the way, has everyone met Hendrix Lapierre, a winger who just authored four whole goals over 74 games in Washington this past winter?
Where's the line form for autographs? Or, for that matter, season tickets?
Whatever. Doesn't matter, I say.
Look, I get it: Sexy sells. Auston Matthews, Dylan Larkin, Zach Werenski, even an overpaid/underachieving Elias Pettersson, those sell. They're fun. They flood the fan base with hope, not just for the future but for the right freaking now.
But I also know that the boneheads who bury the Blackhawks on an annual basis just forfeited the Nos. 4 and 45 overall picks in that draft for Bowen Byram, an OK offensive defenseman who just turned 25 and can still become a free agent next summer.
That's a brutal mismanagement of assets, even if Byram eventually signs an extension.
I also know, of course, that some aggressive moves can be smart. I cringed as much as I'm sure most hockey followers in our city did to see the Rangers, of all teams, come away with Pavel Dorofeyev, who's the precise prototype of the high-skilled, younger forward that Dubas and the Penguins are coveting, while the Golden Knights got New York's Nos. 26 and 92 overall picks, plus a lottery-protected first-rounder in 2028. After which the Rangers signed Dorofeyev to a seven-year, $77 million extension.
I'd have done all of that in a heartbeat. And I'm betting Dubas would've, as well.
But these sign-and-trade kind of transactions, which this was, requires the player to agree, to an extent. The acquiring team needs to know in advance the player won't stiff them. And in Dorofeyev's case, he trains with a few of the Rangers each offseason in Connecticut and, like seemingly all hockey-playing Russians, prefers to be in New York (lots of fellow Russians) or Florida (sand, beaches, etc.).
Not much Dubas could've done there. And not much, from the sound of it, that he would've done related to Byram even if he'd wanted.
“In some of them, we just really haven’t had the assets to get there,” he'd say, specifically citing the Blackhawks' part of that exchange.
The same applied for moving up in this draft, which the Penguins “worked our butt off” to do, Dubas added, only to be so exasperated by their efforts that, on the actual draft day, they flat-out stopped and focused on the event itself.
So, what to do now?
I see it as simple: Eyes open. Ears open. Ringers on.
If a Matthews or Larkin or Werenski happens to have Pittsburgh as a preferred destination, it'll be up to them to express that to their respective GMs. If they don't, they don't. Those players' rights are held by those teams. Dubas can't exactly send them brochures.
When Erik Karlsson wanted out of San Jose, he told the Sharks he wanted to come to Pittsburgh. That's when the work between Dubas and Mike Grier began, not a minute before.
It takes patience.
Same goes in the other direction, by the way: Just because some teams are spending at obscene rates -- imagine Alex Tuch at age 38 finishing up that eight-year, $84 million contract with the Capitals -- and just because the hottest commodity appears to be top-six wingers, that doesn't necessarily mean trading one or both of Bryan Rust and Rickard Rakell would be prudent. If both are grossly outperforming their current average pay -- roughly $5 million each -- then they can keep doing so right here for the Penguins as easily as they could cull ... I don't know, more picks and prospects, I guess.
Stick with what's working, I say. Each year under Dubas, the Penguins have become stronger at all levels and, within that, all facets, while at the same time getting younger. The team this coming season could -- I'd argue should -- continue that trend on all counts, particularly if the expected 4-5 youngsters do, in fact, graduate from Wilkes-Barre.
So hey, for example, here's Lapierre. He's like Noel Acciari, only a decade younger. Yay.
Bear in mind that the biggest difference between the Penguins and the boneheads like the Blackhawks is that the GM here isn't under any time-based pressure. Dubas doesn't fear for his job, nor should he, even now under new ownership. He can take his time and do this right.
Ensure this coming season's an upgrade on the most recent one. See where it flies from there.
• I found this compelling from Dubas, too: “We would've aspired to be involved in every one of those conversations. It’s just that we didn’t have a top-10 pick because of the season that the team had."
Meaning finishing second in the Metro to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Hurricanes and making the playoffs for the first time in forever. Which maybe some wish hadn't happened.
Not Dubas.
“I don’t think we'd change that whatsoever because of the way that it was really fueled by the development of guys that are going to be part of it for a long time with us, whether it was Ben Kindel or Blake Lizotte or Connor Dewar or Parker Wotherspoon or Arty Silovs in net, or Sergei Murashov and Joel Blomqvist pushing."
Yep. I'm on perpetual repeat with this, but winning accelerates individual development and progress, too. I had a talk with Kindel late in the season on this subject, and he heartily agreed. He spoke of the lessons he learned, good and bad, of the night-after-night urgency, of the camaraderie. And even some of the negative lessons, like, say, Egor Chinakov's inability to score in the playoffs, those'll serve as necessary steps.
There's never, ever harm in winning.
• Dear God, get Chinakhov signed already. He's a restricted free agent, but so was Dorofeyev.
• In the face of all else I've written here already, there's no mountain I wouldn't move for Werenski.
• Speaking of fun storylines, it's always tough to top twins in team sports. At any level, really. But to have it happen at the highest level ... well, let's similarly take it slow on Liam and Markus Ruck, as both are bound for college and, as such, probably 2-3 years away from poking onto the Pittsburgh roster.
And cooler still that, although both have legitimately similar skill and are deserving of their relative draft spots -- No. 22 for Liam, No. 39 for Markus -- they're universally viewed as being better together than apart.
• Both will be part of the weeklong development camp that opens today in Cranberry, Pa. Not much happens at these sessions until the final day, when there's a team scrimmage, but the latter can -- and has -- shown a lot over the years.
Not always for the best, either. I vividly recall declaring Derrick Pouliot a dud and a half after his very first scrimmage, never to be proven remotely wrong on that count.
• I came away richly impressed by Geoff Hoffmann, and it's heartening to see and hear, in particular, his passion for wanting to make the Penguins a long-term thing. That's not quite how private-equity firms tend to operate, so any hope that this isn't another Fenway Sports Group one-and-done would be welcome.
• Is David Hoffmann still struggling to find hotels in the Downtown area?
If so, can someone please share that all he needs to do is walk a maximum 50 feet in literally any direction from where he's presently standing. Including one that actually abuts PPG Paints Arena and was built by the Penguins themselves, plus a Marriott across the street, plus a recently refurbished Doubletree next to the U.S. Steel Tower.
I'll let it go, I swear, but don't waltz into a new city and suggest something that insulting without -- obviously -- having done enough homework to at least know we just hosted an NFL Draft.
JUSTIN BERL / GETTY
Esmerlyn Valdez one-hands a book-rule double to left field Sunday at PNC Park.
• Are we not appreciating Esmerlyn Valdez enough?
Six hits over the weekend series with the Reds, a home run in each of the three games, and a 461-foot monster yesterday -- among the longest in PNC Park's history -- has the kid slashing .346/.370/.808 since his June 11 recall, with six of his nine hits going for extra bases.
He's 22. And brings other tools. And he arrived here after spending only 51 games in Altoona, only 56 more in Indianapolis.
This probably ought to be a really big deal.
• It's undoubtedly a really big deal for Junior Vizcaino, the Pirates' international scouting director responsible for signing Valdez out of the Dominican Republic for $130,000. He's also seen from afar this year -- he's now a crosschecker with the Angels -- that Brandan Bidois and Wilber Dotel also made it to Pittsburgh this summer.
Vizcaino was fired two Augusts ago by Ben Cherington, in the GM's words at the time, "to get better in this space and to produce more." And if anything, given that the pipeline to Latin America, in particular, had been bone-dry from the time Vizcaino took the job in 2017, it looked like Cherington had waited too long. That was my own criticism, as well, when it happened.
But signing children -- and that's what they are -- at age 16 in the Dominican, that's long, hard path for almost all of them. As Vizcaino himself acknowledged in an interview two weeks ago with Francys Romero, “When scouting Esmerlyn, we had to project his ability and tools. Because the finished player you are seeing now is far from the young man we scouted."
• Cherington, speaking on his team-produced radio program yesterday with a team employee rather than being interviewed by the actual reporters at PNC Park, partly blamed "bad luck" for the Pirates' epic bullpen failures.
For real.
And of the team's broader .500 output to date, he'd say, "We need to be better, and we all have a job to do to make it better. What we want to make sure we do is separate out the things that are probably rotten luck that maybe smooth out over time, from things that we can actually improve from an execution standpoint, and then that's putting aside, 'Can we add guys to the team?' At some point, we can, and we're working on that. It's still pretty early. Not a lot of trades happen this early."
He's right about the timing of trades. The rest is hooey. Every syllable of it.
Pro tip: When someone who's immersed in advanced analytics talks about luck, almost invariably, they're expressing exasperation that their various "more excellent" calculations aren't computing properly. It's an attempt to explain what they see as inexplicable.
In other words ... hooey.
This bullpen's blown 17 of 35 save opportunities, for a 48.5% success rate. The lowest such rate in franchise history, since the save became a stat in 1969, was 48.3% in 1985.
Referring to that as luck, in any context, is an utter abdication of accountability.
Act surprised.
• I'm not in denial about Paul Skenes. It couldn't be clearer that something's amiss. His velocity's slightly off, even if it's by design. He's had to cut down his arsenal. He's throwing fewer strikes. He's outright flailing on occasion. Anyone can see any of this.
I'm just not worried about him. Big difference there.
He's just so well put together that, with or without help, he'll be right back at it before long.
• Jared Jones and Carmen Mlodzinski behave, in various ways and at various times, as if either of them's accomplished as much as half of what Braxton Ashcraft has ... while Ashcraft comes with the healthiest vibe of all.
Just saying.
• Here come four in Philadelphia, where their Phillies are 12-6 in June and just planted 21 runs on the Mets in the past two games. Next, it's three over in Washington, where the Nationals' baby boomers rank fourth in the majors with a .741 OPS. Then, back here, it'll be the Braves and the Brewers, the majors' two best overall teams in my eyes, leading into the All-Star break.
Not to overstate things, but that, my friends, will be the season. One way or the other.
• There are now Jaylen Warren days until the Steelers report to Saint Vincent College and, to remind yet again, this is the blandest few weeks of the entire NFL calendar, with almost everyone involved at every level of the league hitting some beach or other.
That'll contribute, on occasion, to stories arising from little to nothing. Or, at the least, stories getting far more notice than they might at another time of year. Like, for example, Brendan Sorsby suddenly becoming a household name.
Here's what I have on Joey Porter: The most recent information I received, this being at minicamp earlier this month, was that an extension's expected between the team and the player "sooner rather than later."
I have no reason to doubt that. Just as I have no reason to believe for a split-second that Porter will be missing so much as a single snap of training camp.
• Feels like it took me forever to find a way to phrase how the Steelers are approaching their quarterback situation this summer: It's Will Howard vs. Will Howard.
As I reported exclusively five weeks ago, management's internal intention focuses on Mason Rudolph being Aaron Rodgers' backup, for the glaringly obvious reason that neither Howard nor Drew Allar's ever taken a snap in the NFL, not even in preseason. And along that same line, Allar's not about to be put at risk, being a fresh third-rounder.
So Howard's competition in this camp will be Howard. Meaning Howard has to out-produce whatever concept of his potential management might have. He has to show he can handle ... not being better than Rudolph or Allar or anything like that, but, rather, that he can beat the Falcons in the season opener if Rodgers rolls out of bed that Sunday morning with back spasms. He has to be able to do the job in 2026.
Feel free to pass along.
• Looking ahead and just for fun, the actual best battle in camp might be -- arguably should be -- Dylan Cook trying to ward off Max Iheanachor at right tackle. And when I say best, I also mean that it'd bring the best result for the team either way: Cook continuing his starter-level play from 2025 brings a bountiful asset to Omar Khan. Iheanachor being better puts an already young offensive line into all-out launch mode.
Me, I'm taking Cook. For now, anyway. I believe what my eyes showed me.
• Anyone who ever wonders why the National Baseball Hall of Fame requires voters -- I'm one of them -- to consider character in making our choices, know that the Bills just announced this week that they won't be honoringO.J. Simpson at their new home in Orchard Park, N.Y., on Buffalo's Wall of Fame, unlike what they'd done at their previous home for decades.
Close call there, huh?
• I'm born and raised in Pittsburgh, as American as it gets.
I've also got 100% Serbian very-next-generation lineage.
But my birth father, also Serbian in heritage, was born and raised in Sarajevo, the historic capital of what's now the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And my mother, every time she wanted to chastise me for being stubborn about something would call me 'Bosanac,' which simply means Bosnian in a literal translation but implies unto itself a special level of stubbornness.
I share this partly because the U.S. faces Bosnia in the knockout round Wednesday night but, more than anything, so I can embed the World Cup's most awesome rev-up video:
Yeah, good luck rooting against those dudes.
• Thanks so much for reading the reborn 21 Takes. For anyone who might not know, I once wrote an all-bullets column called Tuesday Takes, which then briefly morphed into 21 Takes before fading into the ether for reasons I can't even recall.
This feature will run Monday mornings, by far our busiest reading period of the week, and it'll usually, not always, offer material on all three of our coverage teams.
• It's a slow time on the sports calendar, and I'm investing some of that time in upgrading our app experience, and other time on documenting -- for the first time -- a detailed written accounting of how our company was formed. It'll run as a five-part series some time soon, in advance of our 12th anniversary July 22.
We're proud of what's been built here by all of us, our readers very much included, and the pioneering role it's played across the scope of North American sports journalism. Time to tell that tale.
THE ASYLUM
DK's 21 Takes: Dubas' 'boring-brick' plan a perfect fit ... Cherington's excuses ... Telling our own tale
Stability doesn't sell. Certainly not in any marketing sense.
Imagine, for instance, someone in the Penguins' sales department attempting to do something with this scintillating quote from Kyle Dubas over the weekend at the team's Downtown headquarters for the NHL Draft, explaining his lack of external activity so far this offseason: “We’ll stay after it, for sure, but it might not be the one gigantic-type transaction. We’ll try to stay active on those, but it might be more of a brick-by-boring-brick style.”
Oh, you betcha. And by the way, has everyone met Hendrix Lapierre, a winger who just authored four whole goals over 74 games in Washington this past winter?
Where's the line form for autographs? Or, for that matter, season tickets?
Whatever. Doesn't matter, I say.
Look, I get it: Sexy sells. Auston Matthews, Dylan Larkin, Zach Werenski, even an overpaid/underachieving Elias Pettersson, those sell. They're fun. They flood the fan base with hope, not just for the future but for the right freaking now.
But I also know that the boneheads who bury the Blackhawks on an annual basis just forfeited the Nos. 4 and 45 overall picks in that draft for Bowen Byram, an OK offensive defenseman who just turned 25 and can still become a free agent next summer.
That's a brutal mismanagement of assets, even if Byram eventually signs an extension.
I also know, of course, that some aggressive moves can be smart. I cringed as much as I'm sure most hockey followers in our city did to see the Rangers, of all teams, come away with Pavel Dorofeyev, who's the precise prototype of the high-skilled, younger forward that Dubas and the Penguins are coveting, while the Golden Knights got New York's Nos. 26 and 92 overall picks, plus a lottery-protected first-rounder in 2028. After which the Rangers signed Dorofeyev to a seven-year, $77 million extension.
I'd have done all of that in a heartbeat. And I'm betting Dubas would've, as well.
But these sign-and-trade kind of transactions, which this was, requires the player to agree, to an extent. The acquiring team needs to know in advance the player won't stiff them. And in Dorofeyev's case, he trains with a few of the Rangers each offseason in Connecticut and, like seemingly all hockey-playing Russians, prefers to be in New York (lots of fellow Russians) or Florida (sand, beaches, etc.).
Not much Dubas could've done there. And not much, from the sound of it, that he would've done related to Byram even if he'd wanted.
“In some of them, we just really haven’t had the assets to get there,” he'd say, specifically citing the Blackhawks' part of that exchange.
The same applied for moving up in this draft, which the Penguins “worked our butt off” to do, Dubas added, only to be so exasperated by their efforts that, on the actual draft day, they flat-out stopped and focused on the event itself.
So, what to do now?
I see it as simple: Eyes open. Ears open. Ringers on.
If a Matthews or Larkin or Werenski happens to have Pittsburgh as a preferred destination, it'll be up to them to express that to their respective GMs. If they don't, they don't. Those players' rights are held by those teams. Dubas can't exactly send them brochures.
When Erik Karlsson wanted out of San Jose, he told the Sharks he wanted to come to Pittsburgh. That's when the work between Dubas and Mike Grier began, not a minute before.
It takes patience.
Same goes in the other direction, by the way: Just because some teams are spending at obscene rates -- imagine Alex Tuch at age 38 finishing up that eight-year, $84 million contract with the Capitals -- and just because the hottest commodity appears to be top-six wingers, that doesn't necessarily mean trading one or both of Bryan Rust and Rickard Rakell would be prudent. If both are grossly outperforming their current average pay -- roughly $5 million each -- then they can keep doing so right here for the Penguins as easily as they could cull ... I don't know, more picks and prospects, I guess.
Stick with what's working, I say. Each year under Dubas, the Penguins have become stronger at all levels and, within that, all facets, while at the same time getting younger. The team this coming season could -- I'd argue should -- continue that trend on all counts, particularly if the expected 4-5 youngsters do, in fact, graduate from Wilkes-Barre.
So hey, for example, here's Lapierre. He's like Noel Acciari, only a decade younger. Yay.
Bear in mind that the biggest difference between the Penguins and the boneheads like the Blackhawks is that the GM here isn't under any time-based pressure. Dubas doesn't fear for his job, nor should he, even now under new ownership. He can take his time and do this right.
Ensure this coming season's an upgrade on the most recent one. See where it flies from there.
• I found this compelling from Dubas, too: “We would've aspired to be involved in every one of those conversations. It’s just that we didn’t have a top-10 pick because of the season that the team had."
Meaning finishing second in the Metro to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Hurricanes and making the playoffs for the first time in forever. Which maybe some wish hadn't happened.
Not Dubas.
“I don’t think we'd change that whatsoever because of the way that it was really fueled by the development of guys that are going to be part of it for a long time with us, whether it was Ben Kindel or Blake Lizotte or Connor Dewar or Parker Wotherspoon or Arty Silovs in net, or Sergei Murashov and Joel Blomqvist pushing."
Yep. I'm on perpetual repeat with this, but winning accelerates individual development and progress, too. I had a talk with Kindel late in the season on this subject, and he heartily agreed. He spoke of the lessons he learned, good and bad, of the night-after-night urgency, of the camaraderie. And even some of the negative lessons, like, say, Egor Chinakov's inability to score in the playoffs, those'll serve as necessary steps.
There's never, ever harm in winning.
• Dear God, get Chinakhov signed already. He's a restricted free agent, but so was Dorofeyev.
• In the face of all else I've written here already, there's no mountain I wouldn't move for Werenski.
• Speaking of fun storylines, it's always tough to top twins in team sports. At any level, really. But to have it happen at the highest level ... well, let's similarly take it slow on Liam and Markus Ruck, as both are bound for college and, as such, probably 2-3 years away from poking onto the Pittsburgh roster.
Still, come on:
That's cool.
And cooler still that, although both have legitimately similar skill and are deserving of their relative draft spots -- No. 22 for Liam, No. 39 for Markus -- they're universally viewed as being better together than apart.
• Both will be part of the weeklong development camp that opens today in Cranberry, Pa. Not much happens at these sessions until the final day, when there's a team scrimmage, but the latter can -- and has -- shown a lot over the years.
Not always for the best, either. I vividly recall declaring Derrick Pouliot a dud and a half after his very first scrimmage, never to be proven remotely wrong on that count.
• I came away richly impressed by Geoff Hoffmann, and it's heartening to see and hear, in particular, his passion for wanting to make the Penguins a long-term thing. That's not quite how private-equity firms tend to operate, so any hope that this isn't another Fenway Sports Group one-and-done would be welcome.
• Is David Hoffmann still struggling to find hotels in the Downtown area?
If so, can someone please share that all he needs to do is walk a maximum 50 feet in literally any direction from where he's presently standing. Including one that actually abuts PPG Paints Arena and was built by the Penguins themselves, plus a Marriott across the street, plus a recently refurbished Doubletree next to the U.S. Steel Tower.
I'll let it go, I swear, but don't waltz into a new city and suggest something that insulting without -- obviously -- having done enough homework to at least know we just hosted an NFL Draft.
JUSTIN BERL / GETTY
Esmerlyn Valdez one-hands a book-rule double to left field Sunday at PNC Park.
• Are we not appreciating Esmerlyn Valdez enough?
Six hits over the weekend series with the Reds, a home run in each of the three games, and a 461-foot monster yesterday -- among the longest in PNC Park's history -- has the kid slashing .346/.370/.808 since his June 11 recall, with six of his nine hits going for extra bases.
He's 22. And brings other tools. And he arrived here after spending only 51 games in Altoona, only 56 more in Indianapolis.
This probably ought to be a really big deal.
• It's undoubtedly a really big deal for Junior Vizcaino, the Pirates' international scouting director responsible for signing Valdez out of the Dominican Republic for $130,000. He's also seen from afar this year -- he's now a crosschecker with the Angels -- that Brandan Bidois and Wilber Dotel also made it to Pittsburgh this summer.
Vizcaino was fired two Augusts ago by Ben Cherington, in the GM's words at the time, "to get better in this space and to produce more." And if anything, given that the pipeline to Latin America, in particular, had been bone-dry from the time Vizcaino took the job in 2017, it looked like Cherington had waited too long. That was my own criticism, as well, when it happened.
But signing children -- and that's what they are -- at age 16 in the Dominican, that's long, hard path for almost all of them. As Vizcaino himself acknowledged in an interview two weeks ago with Francys Romero, “When scouting Esmerlyn, we had to project his ability and tools. Because the finished player you are seeing now is far from the young man we scouted."
• Cherington, speaking on his team-produced radio program yesterday with a team employee rather than being interviewed by the actual reporters at PNC Park, partly blamed "bad luck" for the Pirates' epic bullpen failures.
For real.
And of the team's broader .500 output to date, he'd say, "We need to be better, and we all have a job to do to make it better. What we want to make sure we do is separate out the things that are probably rotten luck that maybe smooth out over time, from things that we can actually improve from an execution standpoint, and then that's putting aside, 'Can we add guys to the team?' At some point, we can, and we're working on that. It's still pretty early. Not a lot of trades happen this early."
He's right about the timing of trades. The rest is hooey. Every syllable of it.
Pro tip: When someone who's immersed in advanced analytics talks about luck, almost invariably, they're expressing exasperation that their various "more excellent" calculations aren't computing properly. It's an attempt to explain what they see as inexplicable.
In other words ... hooey.
This bullpen's blown 17 of 35 save opportunities, for a 48.5% success rate. The lowest such rate in franchise history, since the save became a stat in 1969, was 48.3% in 1985.
Referring to that as luck, in any context, is an utter abdication of accountability.
Act surprised.
• I'm not in denial about Paul Skenes. It couldn't be clearer that something's amiss. His velocity's slightly off, even if it's by design. He's had to cut down his arsenal. He's throwing fewer strikes. He's outright flailing on occasion. Anyone can see any of this.
I'm just not worried about him. Big difference there.
He's just so well put together that, with or without help, he'll be right back at it before long.
• Jared Jones and Carmen Mlodzinski behave, in various ways and at various times, as if either of them's accomplished as much as half of what Braxton Ashcraft has ... while Ashcraft comes with the healthiest vibe of all.
Just saying.
• Here come four in Philadelphia, where their Phillies are 12-6 in June and just planted 21 runs on the Mets in the past two games. Next, it's three over in Washington, where the Nationals' baby boomers rank fourth in the majors with a .741 OPS. Then, back here, it'll be the Braves and the Brewers, the majors' two best overall teams in my eyes, leading into the All-Star break.
Not to overstate things, but that, my friends, will be the season. One way or the other.
• There are now Jaylen Warren days until the Steelers report to Saint Vincent College and, to remind yet again, this is the blandest few weeks of the entire NFL calendar, with almost everyone involved at every level of the league hitting some beach or other.
That'll contribute, on occasion, to stories arising from little to nothing. Or, at the least, stories getting far more notice than they might at another time of year. Like, for example, Brendan Sorsby suddenly becoming a household name.
Here's what I have on Joey Porter: The most recent information I received, this being at minicamp earlier this month, was that an extension's expected between the team and the player "sooner rather than later."
I have no reason to doubt that. Just as I have no reason to believe for a split-second that Porter will be missing so much as a single snap of training camp.
• Feels like it took me forever to find a way to phrase how the Steelers are approaching their quarterback situation this summer: It's Will Howard vs. Will Howard.
As I reported exclusively five weeks ago, management's internal intention focuses on Mason Rudolph being Aaron Rodgers' backup, for the glaringly obvious reason that neither Howard nor Drew Allar's ever taken a snap in the NFL, not even in preseason. And along that same line, Allar's not about to be put at risk, being a fresh third-rounder.
So Howard's competition in this camp will be Howard. Meaning Howard has to out-produce whatever concept of his potential management might have. He has to show he can handle ... not being better than Rudolph or Allar or anything like that, but, rather, that he can beat the Falcons in the season opener if Rodgers rolls out of bed that Sunday morning with back spasms. He has to be able to do the job in 2026.
Feel free to pass along.
• Looking ahead and just for fun, the actual best battle in camp might be -- arguably should be -- Dylan Cook trying to ward off Max Iheanachor at right tackle. And when I say best, I also mean that it'd bring the best result for the team either way: Cook continuing his starter-level play from 2025 brings a bountiful asset to Omar Khan. Iheanachor being better puts an already young offensive line into all-out launch mode.
Me, I'm taking Cook. For now, anyway. I believe what my eyes showed me.
• Anyone who ever wonders why the National Baseball Hall of Fame requires voters -- I'm one of them -- to consider character in making our choices, know that the Bills just announced this week that they won't be honoring O.J. Simpson at their new home in Orchard Park, N.Y., on Buffalo's Wall of Fame, unlike what they'd done at their previous home for decades.
Close call there, huh?
• I'm born and raised in Pittsburgh, as American as it gets.
I've also got 100% Serbian very-next-generation lineage.
But my birth father, also Serbian in heritage, was born and raised in Sarajevo, the historic capital of what's now the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And my mother, every time she wanted to chastise me for being stubborn about something would call me 'Bosanac,' which simply means Bosnian in a literal translation but implies unto itself a special level of stubbornness.
I share this partly because the U.S. faces Bosnia in the knockout round Wednesday night but, more than anything, so I can embed the World Cup's most awesome rev-up video:
Yeah, good luck rooting against those dudes.
• Thanks so much for reading the reborn 21 Takes. For anyone who might not know, I once wrote an all-bullets column called Tuesday Takes, which then briefly morphed into 21 Takes before fading into the ether for reasons I can't even recall.
This feature will run Monday mornings, by far our busiest reading period of the week, and it'll usually, not always, offer material on all three of our coverage teams.
• It's a slow time on the sports calendar, and I'm investing some of that time in upgrading our app experience, and other time on documenting -- for the first time -- a detailed written accounting of how our company was formed. It'll run as a five-part series some time soon, in advance of our 12th anniversary July 22.
We're proud of what's been built here by all of us, our readers very much included, and the pioneering role it's played across the scope of North American sports journalism. Time to tell that tale.
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