The Open Ice Hits Olympics: Boxing

Today I'm taking a look at other places in the league, and generating musings of no importantance whatsoever.

Was anybody else bemused as I was to see all the ex-Flames land assistant coaching positions this summer? Especially Gilmour and Berube, on the same day... remember they changed teams in the same trade.

Doug Gilmour as assistant coach for the Marlies.
Tim Hunter as assistant coach for the Leafs.
Craig Berube as assistant coach for the Flyers.

How weird is it that Gilmour and Hunter both ended up in the Leafs organization in the same summer?

Now, million dollar question to me is, if the Leafs and the Flyers should get into an extreme on-ice dispute in the forthcoming season? Which assistant coach wins this?

Ah, well, at least if Cliff Fletcher wants to gull Riseborough again, he'll have to phone the Wild instead of us now.

The Open Ice Hits Olympics: Baseball

If you happen to be stuck on a gorgeous August weekend with nothing to do, don't forget to check out the Vipers game... perhaps you'll get to see their newest signing...



Am I taking this seriously? Well, neither should you. Still, if it manages to fill seats, well, more power to them.

I have a soft spot for Theo Fleury - he was my absolute favourite player in my formative years as a hockey fan. I'm glad he seems to have got his shit together, and has time to do publicity stunts like these.

The Open Ice Hits Olympics: Opening Ceremonies

While the Olympics are on, I'm going to attempt to get our posting chops back into game shape by posting something marginally related to what this blog is about and which is also thematically related to the games. Most days this won't be deep, and probably won't even make much sense, but that's....not really what we do anyways, right?

Unfortunately, I can't blow up nearly quite that amount of fireworks as the real Olympics can. But! I would be amiss without pointing out all the good work that is going on in the blogosphere.

MG and Cynical Joe have been putting us to absolute shame this summer. They're pumping out a ridiculous amount of analysis, and it's good stuff. Go check it out.
WI had a fantastic series on the prospect camp.
Duncan is alive again! And he's kicking off his resurrection with a look at the depth of other teams, I presume in the NW. Go enjoy!

Now, back to waiting for like, sports to start playing over in Beijing.

Looking backwards

Fresh from the Herald's website: because he was teh awesome last time.

Honestly, as conflicted as I am about the Bertuzzi pickup (numbers make sense, hockey-wise, it's questionable, emotionally, NO, NO, NO!), this seems so much worse. Like we're gunning for death by mediocrity.

My summary of the last couple of weeks?

Sigh.

Looking Forward

I'm not even going to go into the whole Bertuzzi mess. Summary: Hate the guy; indifferent to the player; like the contract. Moving on...

While the team is not finalized, we've got a good idea what it will look like. We're currently over the cap a bit, so someone's gotta get traded or end up being the wealthiest bastard playing for the Quad City Flames. I'm quietly hoping Warrener and Primeau both disappear from the lineup somehow. Nilson? That guy gets no respect. His contract's light and he's not a bad 4th line player. Plus the ladies love him.

Looking at next year's roster, as of today, I can't help but think this team hasn't gotten worse, or better. Just different. We're a grittier team now, but perhaps a slower one. I'm not even going to pretend to know if that's good or bad, it seems like when the Ducks won the cup every team needed to be gritty...and now every team needs to be skilled thanks to Detroit. I think a good team will win the cup, regardless of the specific strategy behind how it's built. Sometimes it is just that simple.

As far as I'm concerned, this is Sutter's last year to see if he can get the Flames past the first round. Sutter earned a few years of good will with the '04 performance, but it's been all downhill since then. Iginla's years are dwindling and I'd hate to see them wasted on missing the playoffs or first round exists except for that one year... Unless we make it past the first round, I'd hope for a GM change at the end of the season. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let's think positive. We've got some fresh lines to concoct, so how should they be used? I've got all sorts of forward combinations in my head, but they basically boil down to the following possibilities, in order of my desirability:

Bertuzzi - Cammalleri - Iginla
Bourque - Langkow - Boyd
Glencross- Lombardi - Moss
Nystrom - Conroy - Prust

Cammalleri - Langkow - Iginla
Bertuzzi - Lombardi - Boyd
Bourque - Conroy - Moss
Nystrom - Prust - Glencross

Bertuzzi - Cammalleri - Iginla
Bourque - Langkow - Lombo
Boyd - Conroy - Glencross
Nystrom - Prust - Moss

The biggest problem is to figure out if Cammalleri and Bertuzzi are going to be top line guys -- or rather, if one or both are. The next problem, as I see it, is how to give Lombardi, Boyd, and Moss the proper opportunity with quality linemates to see if they can get the scoring going. I fear they languish too much in the grinding/energy line role and that's why they don't get the points to warrant a promotion.

Not even sure if it's worth going through the defensive pairings. Not yet, anyway.

"That's appetizer"

Well, one afternoon into the annual free-agent signing rush, and I am increasingly pleased the Flames have stayed out of it.

Sundin?
Rolston?
Brian Campbell?

Jeff Finger?
Mike Commodore?

Pure ridiculousness.

On the Calgary front, I'm not displeased to see Cujo and Godard go; that said, we do need a player not named "Iginla" or "Phaneuf" to fight fights next year. And while they haven't been out and out shooed out of town yet, can't disagree with what's happening with Warrener and Eriksson.

Nilson, on the other hand, that's a WHOLE 'nother matter.

On the whole Tanguay/Cammalleri draft day tangle, we've stayed fairly silent here; I'm still waiting to see what happens with the cap savings before I deliver a final verdict of any sort. It's unlikely the team this year will be as good as it was in previous recent years, but... I need to see how bad the damage is.

So what's next? Well... I guess we get to see what happens to Huselius etc etc. And, we could use something to shore up those first two lines.

Millions Loses the Handle

So, Millions is out as the play-by-play man on Sportsnet, and Peter Loubardias is in. I've no idea who this is, but it will be a tremendous improvement. Perhaps I'll actually watch the "local" feed on Centre Ice next season rather than the away feed. You know something's wrong with the play-by-play guy when I watch the Nashville feed instead, complete with their explanations about icing and why people are fighting.

What else is going on? Here are some drive-bys, De-troy-it style:

• Marc Crawford is out as well. Cry me a river, Marcy-marc, but I still hate your guts from Vancouver.
  
• The Leafs: Gongshow Edition. I'll never understand why MLSE has such a hard-on for Burke. He's a great GM, but he's not the only one. Hey, it says here he's also under contract for another year. Huh. Oh, I know, let's give Fletcher a whole year just so Burke can come join us then. Because he really wants to. Who wouldn't want to work as GM in one of the most critical cities with one of the most truly-fucked franchises in all of professional sports? Because we know how hard he has it in Anaheim, what with their meddling owners that let him do what he wants. His life would be so much better under the thumb of the Ontario teachers pension fund.
  
  Did you know that Ron Wilson once played a few games with Burke in prehistoric times? They're BFF now, apparently. So now that the Leafs have hired Ron Wilson, there's no way he can turn down coming to Toronto once his contract expires next year. I CAN'T WAIT (for Burke to shut them down). I'm so sick of the BURKE BURKE BURKE coverage in Toronto here.
  
• The Sharks' new coach is Todd McLellan. I don't know much about him, but his resume as assistant coach in Detroit plus his junior experience is quite impressive. I'll be keeping my eyes on him. I'm surprised the Sharks didn't try to lure Burke for the coaching job.
  
• Linden retires. M-e-h.
  
• I want some bigass trades. Not necessarily on the Flames (but maybe), but I need me some juicy hockey news. I so don't care about Toronto or San Jose.
  
• What's the over-under on Nickelback doing next year's HNIC theme? I need to make sure my MUTE button is in working order before the new season.

Sorry.

I knew if I turned on the TV tonight, the Pens would be doomed. And what a hell of a way to lose the game, as it turned out.

Well, good for Detroit for just dominating these playoffs. That said, in the grand pantheon of Flames gone by, Gary Roberts >>>>>> (Stuart + McCarty).

Think about that.

Brad Stuart has a Cup ring.

Vacation Reading

I was not-so-recently (sorry about that) given a review copy of Cold-Cocked: On Hockey, a recent book written by Lorna Jackson, a writer living on Vancouver Island, and yes, a Canucks fan.

I'm not interested in writing as an alien, a stunned onlooker, a girlie fan in a baggy jersey, or a robot guided by the television camera's morbid fixation on the puck.

The 2003-04 season was a watershed year for the Calgary Flames and their fans. In Vancouver, it was a watershed year for the Canucks, with names like Bertuzzi and Moore forever entangled in that season. And it was a watershed year for the author of this book as well. It would be a difficult year, with stresses in both her personal and professional lives that change her indelibly. She would commute from Vancouver Island to Vancouver regularly, to catch games and try to interview as many players and members of the Canucks organization as she could. Despite the many frustrations she would encounter, she would tough it out somehow, using what she observed on the ice and in the dressing room as inspiration.

Most hockey books I've encountered in the past have been bathed in fond nostalgia, or drowned in journalistic impersonality. Not so, this book. Ms. Jackson writes passionately, about her life, her past, her surroundings, as they all intersect with hockey. She's fearless and relentless in exposing every facet of her life as she spends the year asking questions about the game, and subjecting her answers to deep feminist analysis.

However, the same energy which so distinguishes this book from others also points out its greatest flaws. While there's no doubt that Ms. Jackson can write vividly, and likewise, there's no questioning the amount of sweat and tears that went into the writing, it's not at all clear to me why she wrote it.

It's obvious that this was a big year for her, full of changes and pain and joy, but it's unclear what drove her to begin chronicling it, what drove her to attend as many Canucks games as she did, what drove her to acquire dressing room credentials for the year. It's fortuitious that she got as much exposure to the Vancouver Canucks during this year that she could use as material to base her musings about her life.

Whatever Ms. Jackson's original intentions were, the book changes tone early on, to become a book about writing the book. However, the lack of explanation of what inspired this project in the first place makes the result come off as a vanity piece. It becomes more narcissistic than reflective. Which is unfortunate, for a writer who is so skilled and passionate about what she loves.

Maybe I'm being harsh. My impressions certainly weren't helped by encountering frequent and reoccuring typos of names I dearly love, names of players from my own team, like Nieuwendyk (OK, maybe we can let that one go), and McLennan. These only helped to reinforce my vague sense that Ms. Jackson's world was constrained that season, by the Canucks and nothing but, not even other teams nearby.

So my final verdict? Read this book if you want to dissect the life of a Canucks fan, if you want to see what makes this specific woman tick. Don't read it expecting to derive any new revelations of the game, to generalize her experience to what we all feel when the puck hits the ice.

Other HLOGgers chime in:
Sherry at Scarlett Ice
Cat at Untypical Girls

And maybe now everybody will spell it "Brenden"

Well played last night, Dallas Stars, well played. Well worth staying up for.

Thank you for avenging our golfers.