Mornings with Mr. Canoehead

Well I woke up Sunday morning, with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt. And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert ... here what's not bothering you now, raisins off an Oldsmobile.

... The new Yankee Stadium after Roy Halladay was done out of a win Saturday. It's understood that the Yankees honour their history, but turning Johnny Damon into Lou Gehrig is going too far. Between its ridiculous hitter-friendliness — Damon has already hit 12 home runs there, hey, lots of 35-year-olds just suddenly become power hitters — and the super-extendo seventh-inning stretch, it's borderline cheating. The latter actually comes from Mike Wilner:

" Speaking of the 7th inning, and I hate to bring this up since the idea of signing God Bless America in the 7th inning stretch, especially on the 4th of July, is a lovely thing, but seriously. Does it have to be the extended dance mix of the song, a Yankee Stadium tradition? I would love to go back over the last nine years and see how many runs the Yanks have scored at home in the 7th inning after freezing the opposing pitcher for an extra five minutes while Dr. Ronan Tynan dragged out every last syllable of GBA.

"And maybe it’s me, but I just find it to be the overwhelming Yankee arrogance that carries over into Tynan’s rendition, since he’s the only one on the planet who actually sings the whole thing. It's as though the thinking is 'this is New York City, we’re going to be the only ones who do it right.' It would be like the Blue Jays stopping home games in the 7th inning stretch to sing O Canada and making sure to include the mysterious second verse about great prairies spreading and mighty rivers flowing."

The new Yankee Stadium calls to mind the late, great Dan Quisenberry's line about another stadium, "I don't know if there are good uses for nuclear weapons, but this might be one."

... two players on a Double-A team driving in more runs last night than Vernon Wells has since the first of June. No, they were not playing a doubleheader.

... Dany Heatley thinking it's despicable Sarah Palin won't honour her commitment to the Alaska electorate. Incidentally, if Heatley is coming to Ottawa for teammate Jason Spezza's wedding, they might need to hold the reception at the U.S. embassy, for the extra security.

... the irony of minor-league hockey player Robin Gomez being acquitted of assault on the same day that his team, the Oklahoma City Blazers, went out of business.

(Former Ottawa Gee-Gees goalie Jordan Watt was one of Gomez's defence lawyer.

... the Toronto Argonauts running radio spots calling themselves an "accessible team." The B.C. Lions deserve that appellation after the way their offensive line blocked on Friday (nine sacks allowed vs. Saskatchewan).

... Team-hopping football coach Nick Saban playing himself in the film version of The Blind Side. Apparently he wandered off the set in the middle of the shoot to take a role in another movie.

... knowing why it is not socially acceptable to say Formula One's Bernie Ecclestone got roasted for praising Hitler. You would be almost as bad as he is.

... not knowing Tyler Arnason was still in the NHL.

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Steve McNair: Slain NFL MVP bridged a generation of black quarterbacks

The media tends to overemphasize the importance of someone being the first or last of his kind.

Steve McNair, the former NFL MVP who was murdered Saturday in Nashville, would fill the middle chapters of a book about the progress of the black quarterback in pro football. He was important, as someone who was taken in the first 10 picks of the draft. McNair, who "won’t get inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, but was one of the league’s toughest players," (Biloxi Sun-Herald, June 28), spanned a generation when black quarterbacks went from novelty to normative to being at risk of becoming a novelty once again. That is important.

(P.S. Interesting comments from the ex-boyfriend of the slain young woman, Sahel Kazemi.)

McNair came up the hard way, playing at Alcorn State in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, which Sports Illustrated described in 1994 as "small, underfunded and unable to lure recruits with big-time television, yet it has sent a steady stream of players, from Buck Buchanan to (Walter) Payton to Charlie Joiner to (Jerry) Rice, to the NFL."

In that sense, he was the last of his kind, reaching back to a bygone era when the big-time football schools were not open to blacks. One macabre irony of his death is that McNair had just opened a restaurant on Jefferson Street near Tennessee State University. That is the alma mater of one of his predecessors in the NFL, Joe Gilliam, who also died young. Gilliam's nickname was Jefferson Street Joe.

McNair was a few years ahead of the trend in major-college football toward the spread offence, which has spawned a new breed of star, the dual threat quarterback. (He was more of a drop-back, pro-style passer, but since people think in images, he probably would have got a shot in the spread.) Here one thinks of several exemplars who are both black and white, such as Tim Tebow at Florida, Vince Young when he played at Texas, Alex Smith at Utah, current Pittsburgh Steelers backup Dennis Dixon, who if not for a knee injury would have led the Oregon Ducks to the BCS title game in 2007 and, of course, Michael Vick. Scouting and recruiting networks even in the early 1990s were nothing compared to today. Someone would have discovered him in this day and age, when in 30 seconds you can find YouTube footage of a quarterback from the University of Montana who might be signing with the Saskatchewan Roughriders (Cole Bergquist, remember the name).

Less than 20 years ago, people still noticed when you turned on a NFL game on Sunday and saw a quarterback who was black. In January, when the NFL playoffs were on, a writer named David D. at The Smoking Section mused that it might seem passé to dwell on this issue with Barack Obama now in the White House. However, it still draws a lot of water, especially with how Young, Vick and Daunte Culpepper have struggled:

"Aside from perhaps the hockey goalie, the Black quarterback is one of the last frontiers of major sports. The fact that the quarterback is responsible for the cerebral field has historically made general managers and coaches hesitant to put the keys in the hands of an African-American who is characterized as merely a instinctual athlete good for running out of the pocket, with questionable accuracy and limited ability to think on his feet."

If you read the S.I. cover story from the fall of 1994, you can understand the banner McNair carried into the NFL.

"It also makes him, one hopes, the standard-bearer for a new generation of black NFL quarterbacks, the first who will enter the league without needing to break some shabby stereotype about their capacity to lead. Williams's triumph in the 1988 Super Bowl and Warren Moon's stellar consistency over the past decade forced this change, but there's one final step to go: There have to be "so many black quarterbacks that it no longer seems like a novelty," says Minnesota Viking defensive coordinator Tony Dungy, 'or a charismatic type, a Joe Montana who wins so many Super Bowls that the issue just fades away.'

" ... College football has spawned many winning black quarterbacks over the past three years — Colorado's Kordell Stewart, Nebraska's Tommie Frazier, Virginia Tech's Maurice De Shazo; even Ole Miss, of all places, started Lawrence Adams last year. And now here's McNair, out of the same conference that quietly produced Jerry Rice and Walter Payton, carrying superstar intangibles like leadership and grace under fire.

"Of course, people said Florida State's Charlie Ward possessed those characteristics. But once the 1993 Heisman Trophy winner refused to commit to the NFL over the NBA, his supposed deficiencies — too short and lack of a cannon arm — made him anathema. He wasn't drafted, and that created an intriguing divide: It was easy to conclude that Ward must not be good enough for the NFL, but a significant number of blacks felt, as Dungy put it, 'slapped.' Ward was taller than McMahon, with a stronger arm than Montana's, in a two-sport quandary similar to that faced by John Elway as a college senior. His snub confirmed the suspicion that the NFL still takes fewer chances on black quarterbacks than on white ones. 'If you're black,' Williams once said, 'you have to walk on water or be gone.'

"Ward never even got the chance to try for that miracle. 'I remember the day it happened,' says Los Angeles Raider tight end Jamie Williams, who is black and who last year wrote and produced a documentary film on the media's treatment of black quarterbacks. 'My wife looked at me, and her eyes were watering. I almost cried. The guy did it all in college, and he didn't get drafted. I was training with Jerry Rice and Ricky Watters, and they were like, "I can't believe that happened." It hit an emotional chord with black Americans. It gave everybody a sour taste.' "

The record should show McNair carried the standard pretty well, guiding the wild-card Tennessee Titans to within one yard of forcing overtime in the Super Bowl in 2000 and sharing MVP honours with Tom Brady Peyton Manning in 2003. Brady Manning deserved it hands-down, but the voters made a huge deal of McNair's toughness and leadership, which shows how attitudes have improved.

Meantime, talk about an awful, unnecessary death. No one deserves to leave this mortal coil at such a young age, 36 years old. Ultimately, in the short time he had, McNair made a lot of progress, for that he should be remembered no matter what.

Update: Mocking The Draft wrote a very nice tribute:

"Still today, McNair remains one of the greatest quarterback prospects of all time. He was not wasted potential like Ryan Leaf, Todd Marinovich or Vince Young. He was like John Elway and Steve Young – incredible athletes who went on to NFL glory. Much like Jerry Rice and Walter Payton, he was the rare star from the Southwesten Athletic Conference.

"It took 13 years for an NFL team to take a Division I-AA quarterback in the first round when Baltimore took Joe Flacco. It's only fitting that McNair's roster spot in Baltimore to be theoretically used by Flacco after his retirement in April 2008.

" ... What was even greater about McNair was that he seemingly broke that last quarterback color barrier. Doug Williams won the Super Bowl. Warren Moon sustained greatness for a whole career. McNair was the first to be a top draft pick. It's impossible not to think, then, McNair's success played a factor in Philadelphia's decision to take Donovan McNabb second overall in 1999."

Update II:Jeff Pearlman has some good stuff:

"McNair was genuine. Teammates loved him. I mean, really loved him. He was gritty and tough and hard-nosed. He played through pain and thrived at overcoming odds."

Related:
McNair defined the magic of the NFL Draft (Mocking The Draft)
Air McNair; Steve McNair is the best quarterback — black or white, big school or small — in college football (S.L. Price, Sports Illustrated, Sept. 26, 1994)

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Raptors: There is no D in 'Türkoğlu,' but we can get past that

It's good when the Raptors sign a player whom MLSE executives might have heard of.

Adding Hedo Türkoğlu and spending right to the NBA's salary cap is a huge dice-throw by Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo. It is also an easy sell. Türkoğlu comes wearing the mantle of having been a NBA all-star and having just helped the Orlando Magic throw a wrench into David Stern's vision of a LeBron James-Kobe Bryant NBA Finals. Plus he has a cool-sounding name. You can just hear Matt Devlin or Paul Jones, the Raps' radio and TV announcers, yelling, "Hedo-nism Three!" after Türkoğlu swishes a three-pointer. (That's trademarked, by the way.)

It's probably a necessary risk. It gets the Raptors closer to a return to the playoffs. It is easier to implement a grand design when you still have a job or confidence of the highers-up. It will not make them a top-four team in the East.

By the same token, the Raptors' Achilles heel during the Colangelo era has been defence, rebounding and athleticism. Adding Türkoğlu, a 30-year-old perimeter player, does not necessarily address those areas.

They can probably sign a two-guard on the cheap and they have added Reggie Evans, who can get plenty of rebounds (as any fantasy leaguer knows). Meantime, as they showed in 2006-07 and much of '07-08, sometimes you can just outshoot and outscore teams in the NBA, which can be damn entertaining if hard on a fan's blood pressure.

As the Toronto Star's Doug Smith noted, Türkoğlu gives Jay Triano and the Raptors coaching staff more options when they are either late in the shot clock or in an endgame situation. It also somewhat addresses the Chris Bosh Question.

"Another good ball-handler and initiator on the court.

"A guy you can give the ball to at the end of the game and say, 'make a play' while you stretch the floor with José Calderón (a very good three-point shooter) in the corner.

Let's just say – as Jeff Blair first pointed out on a radio show last night – that (Chris) Bosh leaves (and no, I don’t have any idea if he will). Do you feel more comfortable going forward with Calderon, (Andrea) Bargnani and Turkoglu or Calderon, Bargnani and (Shawn) Marion? A no-brainer over here.

You can put Hedo and Bargnani in the pick and roll; you could never do that with Marion."

Needless to say, it was crazy how this came together late on a Friday night. Michael Grange from globesports.com described it thusly:

"Five hours later Turkoglu has a tentative deal in Toronto and I’m standing outside a bar trying to confirm and write a news story on my Blackberry while under the influence. Given that Turkoglu was in Portland and all indications were that he had agreed to a five-year, $50-million offer from the Trail Blazers, that’s a pretty major reversal."

Meantime, the defence, rebounding and athleticism parts will be works-in-progress. Ultimately, when you miss the playoffs and you're overshadowed by the hockey team, you have to take some chances. A lot of the armchair GMs might have done the same thing.

Related:
The dawn of a new era? Or something like that (Doug Smith's Toronto Raptors Blog)
Colangelo works fast and hard to get Turkoglu (Michael Grange, From Deep, globesports.com)

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CFL: B.C. - Saskatchewan live blog

I'll be live-blogging the B.C. Lions - Saskatchewan Roughriders game tonight. It's the first one of the year for both teams, so it should be a good one. There are also several strong CIS connections, which I explore in my game preview over at The CIS Blog. Kickoff is at 9 p.m. Eastern, and the game will be televised on TSN. Come join me then for the live blog!

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The Danys of our lives: In which we go broke appealing to the highest common denominator

Ottawa Senators fans are right to fume over DanyDebacle '09. The point remains, as noted yesterday, that the "endless flame-fanning and rip-jobs in the Ottawa media ... got really old really fast."

Call it naive, whatever, there was a time this cowboy would have been one of the 450 get-a-lifers on the Fuck Dany Heatley Facebook group. It is just hard to see the gain in slamming Heatley day after day for not just surrendering his "negotiated right through the no-movement clause to have a strong say in where he gets traded." (Pierre LeBrun, ESPN.com.) It's negotiated. Contrary to what some bar patron quoted in the Ottawa Sun, the Senators cannot actually "stick him in the minors and let him rot." This came to mind before Jason Spezza stood by his wingman in an article posted on the website, by the way.

Being a fan is not expressed by venting the kind of rage typically seen on cable news (please don't take that last part literally, it's just a good article). There is no desire to side with Heatley (AKA Joseph Stallin) side for the sake thereof. It would just be nice if the city's rank-and-file looked a bit better informed about sports. There is an exemption if you write half-funny, like Scott Feschuk at Macleans ("A small number of Ottawa residents are still keen to give him the key to the city, though only if he agrees to accept it rectally.")

Anyway, it's not a defence, but Alanah McGinley at Kukla's Korner has an all-things-considered post on the whole mess that reasonable-minded Senators fans ought to read.

"... most of the rhetoric floating around seems to go off the charts.

"And why? Well, the justification for this is clear, we're told. First, Heatley went public with his desire to leave Ottawa. Next, he turned down a possible escape trade to Edmonton, making the situation infinitely worse.

"However, being that I’m willing to give Heatley the benefit of the doubt, I’m also willing to believe in at least the possibility that there were other factors at play in the choices he’s made in the last few weeks. After all, it wasn't so long ago that a goalie named Ray Emery was in the hot seat, getting blamed for all the destruction around him as his once-mighty Senators took an abrupt and unexplainable plummet into the crapper. And back then, everyone whispered all sorts of unsubstantiated and shocking gossip blaming Emery for the team’s fortunes.

"But then Emery left and seems to have done reasonably well since then. And yet Ottawa is still... Ottawa.

"So isn’t it remotely possible — just an tiny bit possible — that the problems in Ottawa might have more to do with the Senators organization itself than any one player? If so, then maybe Dany Heatley's comments to Darren Dreger last night, implying he felt he was getting deliberately screwed around by the team, are at least reasonable from his point of view. (Not that I have any reason to believe he was, simply that I'm no more likely to let the Senators off the hook than I am to let Heatley off for this mess.)

"On the other hand, Heatley is the one that made this public and that wanted out of a contract that HE willingly signed in the first place, so he has plenty of fault in this no matter what. And I’m not saying the Senators are the 'bad guys' in this drama, either. Only that we don’t necessarily know the whole story. And since Heatley strikes me as a reasonably smart guy able to anticipate he'd look pretty bad in all this, I can only assume he felt he had good reasons to take this path.

"Whatever the truth, it seems likely there's far more back-story to this than simply 'Dany Heatley is an evil psycho,' and everyone's sanctimonious moaning about how terribly Heatley has treated the 'poor Ottawa Senators' strikes me as an infantile over-reaction. At the end of the day, it's just business, and conflicts aren't unheard of in business, especially given the amounts of money at stake.

"... until some clever and gutsy Ottawa hockey journalist writes a tell-all book about Heatley and/or the Senators, I'm reserving judgment."

Point being, it's a little much to hear people making statements such as, "He's hurting the city's reputation." Hurting the city's reputation is supposed to be Larry O'Brien's job ... at least for the next couple weeks.

Meantime, LeBrun's column is a pretty balanced take on the ramifications of Heatley killing a trade. Freudian slip fans will note he refers to the Ottawa media as "the Senators' media," which is odd. Self-serving though it might be, agent J.P. Barry told LeBrun the Senators kind of screwed themselves:

"I specifically told (Bryan Murray) two days ago, long before the trade happened, 'Do not trade him to Edmonton until you have other options.' And he turned around and consummated the trade despite my request. The result of which is that I get a phone call from a guy that I really respect in Steve Tambellini, who was excited, and I had to inform him what happened.

"I think it was completely mishandled by (Murray). It was a pressure tactic. He loaded up the gun and put the gun against our heads."

"We advised Bryan continually that Dany requires more than one option (team) to make a decision and, as of last night, we still only had one option, so he still wasn't able to make a decision, given that there still was only one option in front of him."

Meantime, fans have a right to be livid. They also have an option to play it smart and unlike the option Heatley had, it doesn't involve having to pack for Edmonton. Bonus! Oh, sorry, shouldn't use that word.

Remember, we're all in this together.

As a post-script, Down Goes Brown imagined how a conversation between Heatley and Oilers president Kevin Lowe might have unfolded:

"Lowe: Now, just so I'm clear on your side of things, you're demanding a trade because...

Heatley: ... because I can't spend another day in Ottawa. I'm miserable beyond any measure of human understanding. Every day I spend in Ottawa is the worst of my life, and the only joy I find is in the knowledge that every day wasted in that god forsaken town brings me one day closer to the icy relief of death.

Lowe: I see. And you're not waiving your no-trade clause because...

Heatley: ... all that still sounds better than spending the winter in Edmonton."

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Blog blast past: Requiem for the released, Russ Adams

The Blue Jays have given former first-round draft choice Russ Adams the dreaded DFA, designated ... for ... assignment. It might sound bad, but Quad-A ballplayers take it in stride. From Aug. 7, 2008, here's a tribute to a human footnote.

Russ Adams is best known for not being something.

Let's think about what that says about us, rather than what it says about the first-round pick who was once the answer to the Jays' shortstop situation. Being a sports fan and cheering for a bunch of jocks employed by a multinational corporation, because it's your team, is an ultimate act of naive sentiment. It's odd how it's rare that any of that is saved for a bright hope who fell flat on his face.

Maybe it's an offshoot of the self-loathing that builds up from having spent your waking hours worrying about the outcome of games you cannot control. To think I believed in Russ Adams?! He's dead to me.

There's names for the exemplars of this phenomenon -- bust, flop, fizzle, dud, Ryan Leaf. It might be the worst ignominy to own in sports, on par with being a cheater. People will let an athlete off the hook for being an out-and-out rat bastard, but not for failing like Russ Adams has as a major-leaguer.

"I don't see playing baseball professionally, playing over two years in the majors, if someone thinks that's failing, I don't know what planet they live on. I'm not going to be sitting at home at 40 and think I'm a failure in life because I didn't play 20 years in the big leagues. That won't dictate my happiness." -- Syracuse Post-Standard

Hands up, everyone whose knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines, "Oh, go cry me a river." It might create the mental picture of Adams, barring some near-miraculous turnaround, spending the next 20 years dreaming of a parallel universe where he was the American League's answer to Chase Utley.

A lot of sports fans probably look it that way. It's not clear that the ballplayers actually do.

It's undeniable what springs to mind after seeing that quote from Adams, whose Triple-A rate stats in Syracuse this summer (.232/.322/.378) scream, "quintessential Quadruple-A player." This, of course, is from someone who as every Jays fan must know by now, was drafted ahead of Scott Kazmir, Nick Swisher and Joey Votto (not just a Toronto boy, but a paisano of J.P. Ricciardi).

It's actually straight of out of the novel North Dallas Forty. There's a scene where the antihero Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte played him in the movie) recalls commiserating with a player who had been traded, dumped by a team that had publicly proclaimed he would be brilliant:

"He seemed like the only survivor of a ten-car collison who was trying to explain how it happened. Several times during the course of our conversation he had stopped to stare off into his disastrous past, thinking of all those glories he had only tasted slightly."

There's a double-edge to that analogy. It could seem empathetic or just downright cruel. But it's c'est la vie for a human footnote.

For anyone who needs a refresher, the Jays advanced Adams quickly through the minors after he was drafted in 2002 (Matt Cain and Cole Hamels, both now top-flight starters in the NL, were also available when Ricciardi made the 14th overall selection).

In 2005, he put up a decent enough first season as a rookie shortstop. According to his Baseball-Reference.com page, his age-24 season compared pretty favourably with that of Orlando Cabrera, who's been an adequate, sometimes all-star shortstop for a decade.

He had the throwing yips in '06. You can't presume to know what's in a player's mind, but the stats make it look like he was taking his defensive problems up to bat with him. The Jays eventually had to send him to Syracuse to learn how to play second base, which was a give-up play.

Inside of two years, the Shortstop of the Future has become one of among the couple hundred Triple-A veterans -- roster flotsam who move about the minors, their names known only to the most hardcore baseball fans. They're valued by MLB organizations for what might be called their overdeveloped flexibility. Most of them, almost as a survival skill, have learned to play several positions (good for when the big club is shuffling players around). They've been around long enough that they don't need to be babysat by their manager. They're also fully comfortable with the hard reality that they can traded, demoted, promoted, or released at any time.

Who knows why it didn't work out for Adams. One historical note is that left-handed hitting shortstops are a rarity. (Stephen Drew of the Arizona Diamondbacks is the only everyday SS in the majors who bats lefty.)

The thing is, though, is that most fans don't fully appreciate that it does take exceptional skill, the kind not found in 99% of the population, to even be a career minor leaguer. People also don't get, or don't care, that's it debatable whether failing as an everyday shortstop actually hurt Russ Adams as a person. He got far enough to get all his illusions about playing baseball shattered, but a lot of men never will.

Some day in the not too distant future, the Jays will probably waive him. Drunk Jays Fans and the like will write a blog post for shits and giggles. Maybe someone will do up a Top 10 list of Toronto sports busts, slotting Adams in with Rafael Araujo and Ricky Williams, but Russ Adams will just go on living his life. The wicked burn won't be on him.

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Slotback slog: Jesse Lumsden is Eric Lindros

Jesse Lumsden deserves credit for trying to make it as a Canadian playing an American position in a Canadian league, with a playing style which owed more to American football.

This is not meant to kick a guy when he's down. Given a choice between the two, you'd rather have the CFL with Lumsden than without him. However, the former Hec Crighton Trophy winner failing to last one quarter in the Edmonton Eskimos' season opener before injuring his shoulder played into a personal theory: Jesse Lumsden is a CFL analog to Eric Lindros.

Lumsden went down last night after injuring his surgically repaired shoulder on a hit from Winnipeg's Siddeeq Shabazz, who is lighter than him by 20 pounds. On TSN's panel, Matt Dunigan seemed kind of shaken, talking about how tough it was to see such a fate befall a player who has worked to come back from surgery and prove he can take the pounding in the CFL. Jock Climie also showed sympathy while evoking the games-goes-on ethos of football, pointing out if you can't withstand a regular football play, you should not be playing.

The Lindros comparison is a hell of a tag to stick on someone. It is cheerfully acknowledged that many sports fans hold Lindros, the oft-concussed former NHLer, in very low esteem.

This has nothing to do with personalities. It's just that there are similarities between the two beyond alliterative surnames (both with seven letters, too). Each athlete had that golden boy vibe about him, that whole jocky, ruggedly handsome thing going on (you can admit it). Both had a parent who was a prominent part of their backstory, albeit for vastly different reasons (Lindros' parents, you know about, whereas Lumsden's legacy started with his dad, Neil Lumsden, the Ottawa Gee-Gees and Edmonton Eskimos fullback of yore).

Last but not least, each benefited from a false idea about their sports. Both was built up as a next big thing by people who did not fully acknowledge that having a huge physical and skill advantage over your peers in small junior hockey or Canadian university football ponds is not a guarantee of sustained success in the pros.

The false idea with Lindros, back in the early 1990s, was that he was a prototype for what hockey would be all about in 2010. The sport was going to be full of 6-foot-4, 225-lb. power forwards who were as mean as Mark Messier while possessing the flair of Mario Lemieux. Now, with 2010 around the corner, we can see that was wrong. Hockey is back to being about normal-sized humans like 6-foot-1 Alex Ovechkin, 5-foot-11 Sidney Crosby and 5-10 Patrick Kane, like it always had been prior to the '90s. Lindros, meantime, had all his concussion and various other injury problems.

A lot of people still believe this stemmed from how he played in junior with the Oshawa Generals. He got hit hard then, but often players just bounced off him because he was so damn big. Lindros did not have to adjust.

One does not profess to know why Lumsden has had difficulty staying healthy since debuting in the CFL in 2005 with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats after setting Canadian university records at McMaster. David Naylor, globesports.com's football writer, was clear that this setback could short-circuit his career, as much as we hope otherwise.

"Lumsden has legions of supporters who will insist he's merely the victim of bad luck (including his former coach at both McMaster and Hamilton, Greg Marshall). But the evidence suggests otherwise.

"Which is why when Lumsden became a free agent this off-season, there wasn't exactly a stampede to his door, despite his significant talent. CFL general managers and coaches simply didn't feel comfortable building their offence around a player they thought could not be counted upon to handle even 10-15 carries a game. And the fact that Lumsden doesn't play special teams made it even tougher to justify a large investment in him."

That speaks to the false idea. Running backs in the CFL cannot be one-trick ponies. Having one less down to play with than the NFL means a running back must be a factor in the passing game. For a Canadian running back, you have to be able to play special teams.

The Toronto Argonauts' Bryan Crawford, who was the tailback for the Queen's Golden Gaels when they went 0-5 vs. McMaster during the Lumsden years, is pretty typical of the breed. Crawford, in new Argos coach Bart Andrus' offence, gets the occasional touch when he lines up in two-back sets with Jamal Robertson. In Toronto's season-opening 30-17 win over Hamilton on Wednesday, Crawford had four carries for 20 yards and one catch for 25, setting up an early touchdown. He threw a block to spring Robertson for a 46-yard gain (which ended up being a 61-yard play thanks to a Tiger-Cats penalty) and contributed on special teams. As Apu Naheesapeemapetilon once said, it might not be glamourous, but it's good honest work.

Point being, one irony with Lumsden is that he was a Canadian boy next door whose style was a better fit for four-down American football. The teams he played on under Marshall at McMaster were perfectly suited to his style. The Marauders, typical of most OUA teams in the '90s and early 2000s, played straightforward power football, using a tight end and a fullback on most plays.

They just bludgeoned teams until they ran into someone their own size, which in the OUA, was not often. Mac won games on the recruiting trail and in the weight room, not by coming up with fancy pants plays. Running backs did not participate much in the passing game. As for special teams, Lumsden was limited to the odd kickoff return, as Queen's fans remember painfully well. (In a 2003 game, Queen's went ahead with 30 seconds left on a 99-yard Tom Denison-to-Craig Spear touchdown pass, only to have Lumsden returning the ensuing kickoff 88 yards to the end zone to lead McMaster to an eventual overtime win. It's hard to see where people in the rest of Canada ever got the idea the OUA was the no-defence league.) In Lumsden's senior year, 2004, Mac tried to shift to a more pass-first focus to give itself a better shot at reaching the Vanier Cup. Greg Marshall adapted, too. Last season, Western reached the Vanier Cup with a 180-lb. scatback-type, Nathan Riva, playing tailback.

It is important to go back and understand what contributed to the hype five years ago. It was a trip to watch him try to defy the long odds of a Canadian becoming a feature back in the CFL. He was fun to watch.

There will be a great Canadian 1,500-yard rusher yet who will owe a debt to those who came before, such as Lumsden and Éric Lapointe. After Thursday night, though, it's tough to banish that Lindros comparison.

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Rany Jazayerli provides the ultimate 'It's not you, it's them'

At least we know what it means when a sports franchise comes down hard on the media.

Baseball Prospectus co-founder Rany Jazayerli does a radio show about his beloved Kansas City Royals. Long story short, he wrote a post saying the Royals should fire their long-time head athletic trainer. The Royals retaliated by banning team personnel from going on his show (they also tried to ban team personnel from all stations which carry it, but backed off once word spread virally).

(Update: There is a relatively happy resolution. Yay!)

Out of that, ShysterBaller Craig Calcaterra proffered an explanation of what it says about a team who rides herd on someone who speaks critically of the team:

"There's no escaping that they're focused on the wrong things. There's also no escaping that, if this how they respond to external dissent, there's no reason to believe that they're making the right decisions internally either, because all good decisions are made in a setting where people can feel free to say anything without fear of reprisal."

In other words, this is not on Rany, this is on the Royals. Seeing how a team treats the media as an off-shoot of how they go about their business is pretty ingenious. The ones who are hyper-sensitive about honest criticism or insist that coverage of the team be "positive" are typically the bad organizations.

The principle is pretty simple. Teams which worry about media coverage probably should be spending more time worrying about themselves and less time worrying about what's said on a blog, news website, message board, radio or television. Outsiders have always had opinions about how well the coach, general manager and owner are doing their jobs. There are just so many ways to now journal them. Dealing with it is a sign of character.

This is inside baseball, but it is germane when you think of stories like the Edmonton Oilers turfing a reporter for blogging from the press box. More recently, a media friend who wouldn't her/his name used, lost a media gig because a team did not like what was said about it on the air. Thankfully, this friend is in a much better place, with bigger and brighter things in the offing.

No one can say for sure how every semi-halfway significant sports franchise in Canada and the U.S. deals with the media. It is not clear if there are thinner skins than compared to 20 or 30 years ago. Back then, teams did not have to worry about what was said about them floating around on the Internet in perpetuity. People threw away newspapers, they could not record what was said over the air so easily.

The situation with Rany was a pretty clear case of shoot-the-messenger. Jazayerli, a co-founder of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to FiveThirtyEight.com (the political analysis website) who at is a diehard Royals fan, was only saying what was borne out by his research. He noted the one constant in the Royals' surpassing suckiness over the past two decades has been its head athletic trainer, a guy named Nick Swartz, and that time and again, the team has mishandled player injuries.

For those who don't pay the Royals much mind (present company included), their closer, Joakim Soria, ended up having a stint on the 15-day disabled list extend to six weeks. Centrefielder Coco Crisp is done for the year due to shoulder surgery. It was announced the other day that shortstop Mike Aviles is going to need Tommy John ligament replacement surgery. Injuries are part of the game, but in this case there was a pattern:

"The handling of Coco Crisp’s shoulder injury is by itself a fireable offense. Crisp was playing – terribly, mind you – with a bum shoulder FOR FIVE WEEKS, and even after his shoulder pain became severe enough that he could no longer play, the Royals kept shuffling him in and out of the lineup for three weeks, putting him back out there as soon as the pain became tolerable again.

"But the pain didn’t go away. It only got worse, and presumably his shoulder only got worse. The question that no one can answer is whether, five weeks ago, Crisp already had a torn labrum, or whether the injury occurred while trying to play through the inflammation. We can’t answer it, but we sure as hell can speculate. As far as I’m concerned, the Royals’ ham-fisted approach to Coco Crisp’s shoulder turned an injury which might have healed with a few weeks of rest into a season-ender.

"The ham-fisted approach to Soria’s shoulder turned a quick 15-day DL stint into a six-week drama . We don't know the nature of Aviles' prognosis yet, but the fact that the Royals commandeered him into playing again even after he came clean with the injury certainly could not have helped.

" .... This is a trend, people. When the Royals downplay the extent of an injury, then give the player a few days off before sticking him back out there, and only later realize the injury was worse than expected THREE TIMES in the span of less than three months, this is not bad luck. This is incompetence, plain and simple. And while (manager Trey) Hillman and (GM Dayton) Moore are the ones quoted above, they’re making those decisions based on the medical information they’ve been given. And the point man for all that information is Nick Swartz."

"... it seems like every year some Royals player has an injury that lingers beyond any reasonable timeframe, or an injury that we’re told for weeks is minor turns out to be season-ending."

The point is the obvious. Jazayerli was being even-handed. He wasn't making anything up. He simply said there probably is a cause-and-effect between who's minding the store and the results. It's like, random example, pointing out that the Kingston Frontenacs have gone longer than any other Ontario Hockey League team without winning a playoff series, so maybe it's time to replace the general manager they have had over that entire 11-year run. Perhaps the Kansas City Star would not call for a trainer most people have never heard of to get fired, just as calling Larry Mavety "The Royal Mavesty (Rhymes With...)" is going to be restricted to a couple blogs. For anyone who has an issue with that, well, welcome to the web. The standard of decorum is a bit different, plus you can't pull punches if you want to differentiate oneself from traditional media.

Meantime, point being, what does it say about a team which has a problem with what people say about them?

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The game was not much of a thriller, though.

Toronto Argonauts receiver Arland Bruce III's Michael Jackson tribute in the end zone last night ... might land him a fine. Never mind it was entertaining (and if it wasn't, it was pretty benign). Never mind that it was entertaining and the 20 yards in penalties the Argos were assessed on the ensuing kickoff was worth it. Besides, teams should kick off from the 15-yard line against Hamilton, just to give the Tiger-Cats a chance.



(Seriously, it was like a Ricky Bobby moment watching it live: How did he get down to his UnderArmour that quickly? Did you hear about Calgary Stampeders running back Demetris Summers is out 2-3 weeks "after pulling his hamstring running alongside" teammate during a kickoff return for a touchdown last night. What Bruce did not hurt anyone.)

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Spezza's not going camping with Team Canada

There is irony, on a base level.

Jason Spezza's apologists will often suggest there's a chance he can do the Steve Yzerman metamorphosis from all-out offence to two-way centre when he gets older. Well, they both wear No. 19 and they're both right-handed shots. Now the Ottawa Senators centre has been left off the Canadian Olympic hockey team's summer camp roster chosen by none other than Steve Yzerman.

Honestly, it was a joke to write back in May that Spezza was one of the No Way Guys for Team Canada. Granted, this only has to be awkward for Sens fans if they let it be awkward. They like to pile on Spezza as much as the next guy.

Their team will have Spezza's undivided attention and he won't be holding back to try to avoid an injury that would keep him out of the Vancouver Olympics. He won't get burnt out by the playoffs. Anyway, it is dollars-to-donuts that the Ottawa media will try to reassure the faithful by pointing out this does not mean Spezza playing in the Olympics is absolutely out of the question. As per CTV's report, "Players not invited to the orientation camp can still be considered for both the 2010 Olympic Winter Games and 2010 IIHF World Championship. Although the 2002 and 2006 Olympic teams were comprised entirely of players who had been invited to camp."

In other words, Transformers 2 can still be considered for Best Director and Best Picture.

If it is any consolation, three other Canadian NHL teams, the Edmonton Oilers, Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens, do not have a single player going to the summer camp. There is the Calgary contingent, Jarome Iginla, Dion Phaneuf, Jay Bouwmeester and Robyn Regehr, bingo-bango-bongo Roberto Luongo from the Vancouver Canucks. Otherwise, if you follow a Canadian NHL team and would like to see a player who you're not angry with skating for this country internationally in 2010, you're going to have to wait for the world championship.

And you know what that means. Remember, we're all in this together.

On a Kingston-related note, former Voyageurs (and Belleville Bulls star) Dan Cleary has been invited to the camp. Everyone should be rooting for him, since he's a Newfoundlander. The St. Louis Blues centre Andy McDonald wrangled an invitation, too.

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CFL 2009: On Canada Day, 111 reasons to follow Canadian university football

On a per-team basis, Canada West is best at providing a pipeline to the CFL.

Last year this time, Duane Rollins provided a complete list of Canadian-trained players on CFL rosters. It provides a thumbnail sketch about how Canadian Interuniversity Sport players are faring in the pros. It's timely, with alumni such as Andy Fantuz (Western, pictured near right) becoming an impact receiver for the Saskatchewan Roughriders and likes of UBC grad Shea Emry (right photo) getting a start at middle linebacker tonight for the Montréal Alouettes. By our count, there are 111 CIS players either on an active roster or the nine-game injured list.

However, this list also might suggest this country's universities could be doing a better job. It's not clear if there's a cause-and-effect, but the two teams with the least CIS representation were also in the Grey Cup last fall. The full breakdown is after the jump.

By team — Saskatchewan Roughriders 21, Winnipeg Blue Bombers 17, Toronto Argonauts 17, Hamilton Tiger-Cats 14, Edmonton Eskimos 13, Montréal Alouettes 11, Calgary Stampeders 9, B.C. Lions 9.

By CIS conference — Canada West 41 (5.9 per team), OUA 41 (4.1), Québec 18 (3), Atlantic 11 (2.8).

By CIS school —

10 — McMaster
8 — Regina
7 — Laval, Manitoba, Queen's, Saint Mary's, Saskatchewan
6 — Simon Fraser
5 — UBC, Calgary, Laurier, Ottawa, Western
4 — Concordia, Windsor
3 — Alberta, Bishop's, McGill, York
2 — Acadia, St. FX
1 — Guelph, Sherbrooke, Waterloo
0 — Montréal, Mount Allison, U of T

Here's the complete list:Saskatchewan Roughriders (21)

Offence — Jason Clermont, SB, Regina; Andy Fantuz, WR, Western; Chris Getzlaf, SB, Regina; Rob Bagg, WR, Queen's; Adam Nicolson, WR, Ottawa; Dave McKoy, WR, Guelph (injured); Neal Hughes, FB, Regina; Gene Makowsky, G, Saskatchewan; Chris Best, G, Waterloo, Nick Hutchins, OL, Regina; Jordan Rempel, OL, Saskatchewan.

Defence — Kevin Scott, DT, Queen's; Sasha Glavic, LB, Windsor; Mike McCullough, LB, St. FX; Tamon George, CB, Regina; Jeff Zelinski, DB, Saint Mary's; Sebastian Clovis, DB, Saint Mary's; Leron Mitchell, DB, Western (injured).

Specialists — Jamie Boreham, P, Manitoba; Luca Congi, K, SFU; Jocelyn Frenette, LS, Ottawa

Winnipeg Blue Bombers (17)

Offence — Daryl Stephenson, RB, Windsor; Arjei Franklin, SB, Windsor; Aaron Hargreaves, WR, SFU; Ibrahim Khan, OL, SFU; Kelly Bates, G, Saskatchewan; Ryan Donnelly, OL, McMaster; Brendon LaBatte, OL, Regina; Steve Morley, OL, Saint Mary's; Lorne Plante, C, Manitoba.

Defence — Doug Brown, DT, SFU; Don Oramasionwu, DT, Manitoba; Pierre-Luc Labbé, LB, Sherbrooke; Brady Browne, DB, Manitoba; Steven Holness, DB, Ottawa; Ian Logan, S, Laurier.

Specialist — Chris Cvetkovic, LS, Concordia; Mike Renaud, P, Concordia.

Toronto Argonauts (17)

Offence — Bryan Crawford, RB, Queen's; André Durie, RB, York; Jeff Johnson, FB-RB, York (injured); Mike Bradwell, SB, McMaster; Tyler Scott, WR, Western; Brad Smith, WR, Queen's; Andre Talbot, WR, Laurier (injured); Dominic Picard, C, Laval; Jeff Keeping, G, Western; Mark Dewit, G, Calgary.

Defence — Adrian Davis, tackle, Concordia; Étienne Légaré, tackle, Laval;
Randy Srochenski, LB, Regina; Jason Pottinger, LB, McMaster; Jean-Nicolas Carrière, LB, McGill (injured); Delroy Clarke, CB, Ottawa (injured); James Green, S, Calgary.

Hamilton Tiger-Cats (14)

Offence — Simeon Rottier, OL, Alberta; Alexandre Gauthier, OL, Laval; Chris Bauman, WR, Regina; Dave Stala, WR-K, Saint Mary's; Darcy Brown, FB, Saint Mary's; Andre Sadeghian, RB, McMaster.

Defence — Matt Kirk, DT, Queen's; Agustin Barrenchea, LB, Calgary; Ray Mariuz, LB, McMaster; Yannick Carter, LB, Laurier; Dylan Barker, DB, Saskatchewan; Marc Beswick, DB, Saint Mary's; Sandy Beveridge, DB, UBC.

Specialist — Matt Robichaud, LS, Bishop's.

Edmonton Eskimos (13)

Offence — Jesse Lumsden, RB, McMaster; Chris Ciezki, RB, UBC; Mathieu Bertrand, FB, Laval; Graeme Bell, FB, Saskatchewan; John Comiskey, C, Windsor; Kyle Koch, OL, McMaster; Gordon Hinse, OL, Alberta.

Defence — Dee Sterling, tackle, Queen's; Justin Cooper, DE, Manitoba; Tim St. Pierre, LB, Saint Mary's, Elliott Richardson, DB, Acadia; Scott Gordon, DB, Ottawa.
Specialist — Derek Schiavone, K-P, Western (injured).

Montréal Alouettes (11)

Offence — Luc Brodeur-Jourdain, C, Laval; Scott Flory, G, Saskatchewan; Mike Giffin, FB, Queen's; Dylan Steenbergen, T, Calgary (injured).

Defence — Jeff Robertshaw, DE, McMaster; Shea Emry, LB, UBC; Joel Wright, LB, Laurier; Cory Huclack, LB, Manitoba (injured); Mathieu Proulx, S, Laval; Doug Goldsby, S, UBC; Paul Woldu, CB, Saskatchewan.

B.C. Lions (9)

Offence — Greg Hetherington, SB, McGill; Angus Reid, C, SFU; Dean Valli, G, SFU; Andrew Jones, OL, McMaster.

Defence — Ricky Foley, DE, York; Javy Glatt, LB, UBC; James Yurichuk, LB, Bishop's; Jason Arakgi, S, McMaster.

Specialist — Dan McCullough, LS, Bishop's.

Calgary Stampeders (9)

Offence — Brett Ralph, WR, Alberta; Godfrey Ellis, G, Acadia; Tim O'Neill, C, Calgary; Derek Armstrong, G, St. FX (injured).
Defence — Miguel Robede, DT, Laval; Justin Phillips, DE, Laurier; Wes Lysack, DB, Manitoba
Specialist — Burke Dales, P, Concordia; Randy Chevrier, LS, McGill.

For point of comparison, there are numbers available which count practice-squad players. This list counts players on the active roster and nine-game injured list.

(Cross-posted to cisblog.ca.)

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Mornings with Mr. Canoehead

It's all raisins off an Oldsmobile. None of this should have kept you up at night.

... Knowing today is not the day when you will finally go a full 24 hours without feeling embarrassed by Canada. The NHL Free Agent Special starts on TSN2 at noon.

... Sarah Palin telling Runner's World she could beat Barack Obama in a footrace. It didn't work out so well the last eight years when the U.S. had a president who was tryin' to be the best at exercisin', instead of governin'.

(About Canada Day. Fair is fair, though, and you're dead inside if you don't love the clip of Chandra Crawford singing O Canada at the Olympics three years ago.)



... those nonsense stories you see every year around Canada Day about how a shockingly high percentage of Canadians can't identify "famous faces." Do you think any other country measures patriotism by the ability to ID someone from a 125-year-old photo?

... wondering how long it will take the Toronto Blue Jays to get the scent out Paul Godfrey out of the good linen (see Vernon Wells' contract and nostalgia hire Cito Gaston burning out his best hitters).

... realizing one of the Toronto Argonauts and Hamilton Tiger-Cats will be 1-0 tomorrow. Great, now they'll probably tie.

... the CFL not making the Montréal Alouettes appear at the stadium in Calgary yesterday to promote the second half of tonight's CFL season-opening doubleheader, "forcing the media hordes to battle downtown traffic" to get interviews (Calgary Herald). Think about it. The CFL is such a slick, professional operation that it induces feelings of nostalgia when it does drop the ball. Where is Murray Pezim when you need him?

... Vibe magazine folding. What happened to the money from Peter Gibbons buying 40 subscriptions? (Wait, that was in Office Space.)

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DanyWatch Day 23: Heater left holding the bag, which might not contain $4 million

None of the principals in the Dany Heatley debacle had time to pick up face paint for Canada Day, but boy are their faces red.

This is not about trying to figure out how this ends. Maybe it gets worked out within a day, or maybe a team who strikes out in free agency will look at "Dany Nicks" as a nice silver medal.

This is more about about being a fan and feeling inadequate trying to figure out what's going on in a league where two front offices do not even seem to understand the rules. The Ottawa Senators and Edmonton Oilers, and possibly Heatley's agents, seemed to work on the assumption a trade had to be wrapped up by 12 a.m. July 1, since hey, that was what they'd heard on TSN and read in the newspaper like all us Al Capp schmos. There was that $4-million matzo ball, the bonus Heatley was due, hanging out there, as you know. It turns out, as mc79hockey explained, they had another 24 hours, possibly longer. Cue Tyler Dellow, who knows this stuff cold (he has a law degree, which makes him the Canadian version of Craig Calcaterra):

"The really interesting thing though is that I don’t think Ottawa necessarily has to pay Heatley the $4MM at some point (Wednesday). The CBA specifically deals with what happens when a team defaults on a contract.

"... There is, I think, some room here for the Senators to simply agree with Heatley that they will default on payment of his bonus and that he'll hold off on grieving that default. Then, once he’s traded, he can file his grievance and his new team can cure the default."

This is the pertinent section of the CBA Tyler dug out:

"11.15 Default. If a Club defaults in the payment of any compensation to the Player provided for in his SPC (standard player's contract — Ed.) or fails to perform any other obligation under his SPC, the Player may, by notice in writing to the Club and to the League and the NHLPA, specify the nature of any and all defaults and thereafter:

(a) If the Club fails to remedy the default within fourteen (14) days from receipt of such notice, except as hereinafter provided in subsections (b), (c) and (d) of this Section 11.15, the SPC shall be terminated, and, upon the date of such termination, all obligations of both parties shall cease, except the obligation of the Club to pay the Player’s compensation to that date."

Cripes, where was that piece of understanding three weeks ago? No doubt there are some CBA experts who were aware, but we are talking about the normals.

It sure looks like everyone believed they had a deadline. Hindsight is 20/15 when someone is standing to the side of it all. However, it stands to reason that if Heatley and his agents were aware of the rules, they could have said to the Senators, "Dany is going to sleep on it," before talking to the New York Rangers, who cleared cap space by trading Scott Gomez to the Montreal Canadiens in the afternoon. The Senators probably could have sat tight and remained in control of the situation. Instead, they were sitting there getting tense because of a deadline that was not only arbitrary, but apparently wrong. No wonder beat writers in other NHL cities are calling Eugene Melnyk's franchise "one of the most dysfunctional clubs in the NHL."

The point, hopefully, is how much one's eyes can get opened to the realities of the salary-capped NHL within a span of 24 hours. This stems from a comment one of this site's users, Alex, left Tuesday morning which turned to be prescient, at least for now-now:

"The reason Heatley is not going to be dealt (at least possibly until the trade deadline) is the lack of understanding of value in the cap environment by Ottawa fans. Every Ottawa fan seems to be expecting a huge return for him. But his value is not high. He is an excellent player and maybe he will get 50 goals again, but his contract is bad enough to cut his value way down. They would get spare parts and other people's salary problems in return. Near the trade deadline when contenders are looking to add salary is when his value will be at its peak, but still with the length of the contact it won't be what fans are expecting.

"Since Murray (who above all wants to avoid looking bad or disappointing fans) can't get what fans expect for him, he won't be dealt."

From the get-go, it seemed like a lot of the Heatley coverage in Ottawa has not reflected that the days are gone when one team could just pick up the phone and hammer out a blockbuster trade.

The other big ball-and-stick sports have gone through this evolution. In the NFL, you rarely see star players traded in their prime. (The deal the Chicago Bears made with the Denver Broncos for quarterback Jake Cutler does not count since Denver's coach is a wingnut and Cutler is not actually a star).

The informational revolution in baseball over the past 10 years has made it harder for teams to flip a veteran for a package of prospects at the trade deadline. Meantime, in pro basketball, only the truly deranged really understand the ins and outs and why it's good to add a player with an expiring contract, like the Raptors did last winter with veteran forward Shawn Marion.

Try telling that to anyone today. After all, the Hockey Reflex dictates that consumers should be led to believe something big is going to go down before the next commercial break. Of course, it does not always go that way, as TSN's insider, Darren Dreger, said on his Twitter after the first round of the NHL draft last Friday ...

"The perfect storm didn't materialize. Tons of talk, but the cap complications killed deals. Saturday should be fun."*

... but it will, probably in the next few minutes, honest.

Ultimately, it seems better to try to understand how this is possible. The endless flame-fanning and rip-jobs in the Ottawa media (and Edmonton too, shame on you, Terry Jones) got really old really fast. Heatley should not rate a single iota of sympathy. He asked for a trade, got one, and shot it down. The situation is akin to Trish Piedmont telling Andy Stitzer in The 40-Year-Old Virgin: "You asked for this, Andy. You asked for all of it." Puck Daddy's headline is "Oilers, Senators had deal in place; Heatley nixed it."

The media might point the cannon at Heatley (fist bump: John Fogerty), but the onus is misplaced. James Mirtle noted the CBA is a culprit:

• "There has to be some way to force players to either (a) honour their contractual commitment to a team or (b) not be able to veto deals when they're the ones requesting a trade. Heatley put the Sens in a terrible position by asking (publicly, no less) to be moved with his July 1 bonus date approaching, and if he now is going to turn down deals, it's going to become increasingly difficult for GM Bryan Murray to get anything resembling fair value for his top player.


• "How bad would it be if the Sens had to pay Heatley's $4-million bonus before making a trade? Well, his contract was heavily front-loaded, with Ottawa paying out $10-million in Year 1 of a six-year, $45-million extension he signed in 2007. If Murray pays the bonus, it'll mean Ottawa forked out $14-million — 31 per cent of the contract — for only one season under those terms, and the acquiring team will get Heatley for just $31-million over five years (about $6-million a season instead of $7.5-million)."

See how far you get with that down on Parliament Hill today, though. Heatley is the bad guy, but a NHL GM not knowing the rules might be worse.

Many metabeers should be consumed in Tyler Dellow's honour on this Canada Day. (That is a new word for beers you say you're going to drink in gratitude to someone, except you're now a semi-responsible adult and have to be sober enough to drive, or get on the right bus, subway and/or streetcar).

UPDATE: Alanah McGinley has all-things-considered take defence of Heatley posted at Kukla's Korner that reasonable-minded Senators fans ought to read.

"... most of the rhetoric floating around seems to go off the charts.

"And why? Well, the justification for this is clear, we're told. First, Heatley went public with his desire to leave Ottawa. Next, he turned down a possible escape trade to Edmonton, making the situation infinitely worse.

"However, being that I’m willing to give Heatley the benefit of the doubt, I’m also willing to believe in at least the possibility that there were other factors at play in the choices he’s made in the last few weeks. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that a goalie named Ray Emery was in the hot seat, getting blamed for all the destruction around him as his once-mighty Senators took an abrupt and unexplainable plummet into the crapper. And back then, everyone whispered all sorts of unsubstantiated and shocking gossip blaming Emery for the team’s fortunes.

"But then Emery left and seems to have done reasonably well since then. And yet Ottawa is still... Ottawa.

"So isn’t it remotely possible — just an tiny bit possible — that the problems in Ottawa might have more to do with the Senators organization itself than any one player? If so, then maybe Dany Heatley's comments to Darren Dreger last night, implying he felt he was getting deliberately screwed around by the team, are at least reasonable from his point of view. (Not that I have any reason to believe he was, simply that I'm no more likely to let the Senators off the hook than I am to let Heatley off for this mess.)

"On the other hand, Heatley is the one that made this public and that wanted out of a contract that HE willingly signed in the first place, so he has plenty of fault in this no matter what. And I’m not saying the Senators are the 'bad guys' in this drama, either. Only that we don’t necessarily know the whole story. And since Heatley strikes me as a reasonably smart guy able to anticipate he’d look pretty bad in all this, I can only assume he felt he had good reasons to take this path.

"Whatever the truth, it seems likely there's far more back-story to this than simply 'Dany Heatley is an evil psycho,' and everyone's sanctimonious moaning about how terribly Heatley has treated the 'poor Ottawa Senators' strikes me as an infantile over-reaction. At the end of the day, it's just business, and conflicts aren't unheard of in business, especially given the amounts of money at stake.

"... until some clever and gutsy Ottawa hockey journalist writes a tell-all book about Heatley and/or the Senators, I'm reserving judgment."

(*It wasn't.)

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Kinger now officially another country's problem

Out of Left Field contributor Tyler King,is beginning his master's program at Syracuse University today. From March 24, here's a post heralding Kinger's acceptance to SU.

They are on red alert down in Orange country.

Our own Tyler King, scourge of Kingston Frontenacs management, The Queen's Journal, the National Council of Churches (probably) and those who misuse the semi-colon, is taking the next step in his broadcasting career. Kinger, who's graduating from Queen's in a couple months, will be taking his master's degree in broadcast journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. It's got a long name, so you know it's gotta be good.

In his dreams, Fronts owner Doug Springer sees himself having all border crossings between Kingston and Syracuse sealed.

The noble King has graced this site with his presence for about a year. Having a full-time course load and his 2,795 odd jobs with CFRC 101.9 (cfrc.ca), Kingston's TVCogeco and the city's local radio stations takes priority, as well it should. It's been a real enjoying-the-enjoyment experience, seeing Kinger avail himself of the broadcasting opportunities available to a student in Eastern Ontario, hosting his own shows the radio and TV, calling Queen's Golden Gaels hockey games ("over the line, holds it ... holds it") and broadcasting baseball in Ottawa with Howard Bloom.

He's also helped this site carve out its small, goofy niche, even if you don't always see his name here. Whether it's coming up with analogies between Canadian university football teams and Simpsons characters or pointing out the latest idiocies committed by Springer and GM-for-life Larry Mavety, Kinger can always be counted upon.

Going into broadcasting is a tough road in any era. Here is hoping Syracuse will open some doors for Kinger. Meantime, Kingston still has him for a few more months. Kinger will have the call of a Kingston Voyageurs playoff game on Thursday night.

The Vees won tonight, taking a 2-1 series lead over Huntsville in the Ontario Junior Hockey League semi-final series. It's a junior hockey playoff tilt in Kingston in late March, so it might appear in the TV listings under "science fiction."

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Fronts: Tired and true — Mavety between a K-Rock and a Harnden place

If one did not know better, you'd swear everyone was in cahoots to make sure the Kingston Frontenacs do not three-peat as playoff watchers.

The trade today for 20-year-old forward Zach Harnden along with Monday's move for fellow overage forward Kaine Geldart makes it pretty obvious how the season will set up for the Frontenacs. Getting Geldart and Harnden, two forwards with only a year left in the league, is right off page 125 of Larry Mavety's Big Book of Bad Hockey.

The subtext is that OHL would really like to see a turnaround in Kingston. It will be embarrassing for owner Doug "Whatever It Takes" Springer if the Frontenacs do not improve in Year 13 of Mav's five-year plan. The novelty of Doug Gilmour coaching in the OHL will soon wear off. The issue of a sweetheart arena deal for a subpar team could become hot-button during the municipal election in 2010, so it would help if they get in the playoffs.

The hope is they will. I am nothing if not a diehard fan. However, please try to see what goes along with Mavety falling back on what he knows, a reflex often peculiar to none-too-bright people. Mavety trades for "players we know," as The Royal Mavesty his ownself put it to the Kingston Whig-Standard. That means you get anyone whom another team believed had promise at age 16, since it's well-known how Mavety ranks as a talent evaluator (not very good) and how much he can impart to Gilmour (not very much). True to form, Mavety, who leads the world in trading for former first-rounders (and trading his own) is adding a player who as Loose Pucks noted, "was was Peterborough's first-round pick in the 2005 OHL Priority Selection. But his OHL numbers have topped out at 40 points during the 2007-08 season."

This is not aimed at Harnden and Geldart. They just work there, presumably (the Loose Pucks post, by the way, noted only that Harnden "could be back in the OHL for an overage year." Each could help the Frontenacs get back to the playoffs, probably more so the gritty Geldart. That is always, repeat always the hope.

However, you can see where this is headed, since it was predicted here 30 days ago:

"One can hear the spin-doctoring from nine months away. It will be framed as a great triumph if Kingston merely makes the playoffs next season. This means ignoring that 80% of the teams in the OHL get in and owner Doug Springer said at the start of last season their goal was "top four" in the Eastern Conference." — May 30, 2009

And as stated even earlier, this goes back to ...

"... a previous point that the Frontenacs are, in Andrew Bucholtz's phrasing, 'Unimaginative talent evaluators (who) tend to go with guys who are generally thought to be good by the scouting community.' They're slave to orthodoxy when it comes who to take and don't do enough to help them get better once they're there."

Nothing against the two players the Frontenacs have added, but people have seen this movie before from Mavety and it's about as fresh as a Michael Bay summer blockbuster. There is no rebuilding, just the same ol' same ol': Trade for veterans, trade for forwards, ignore that you win by drafting smart and building out from the back end, goalies and defence (it did not take that much smarts to draft Erik Gudbranson).

One can reconcile the Frontenacs being unwilling to utilize the CHL Import Draft. It is understandable that Springer does not want to spend and Mavety will not go outside of his "players we know" comfort zone. (One would point out that no OHL team has turned up its nose at drafting high-end Europeans since Don Cherry's Mississauga IceDogs when it won like 16 games across three seasons about a decade ago, but it's not a requirement for OHL success.) The organization also has other fish to fry, like trying to shut up any local media who dare to cast a critical eye toward the team instead of towing the party line.

Anyway, there is a feeling people want to get behind the Frontenacs in Gilmour's first full season behind the bench. The point in writing this is in hope people do not get the wool pulled over their eyes during the season ahead. Setting a goal of simply making the playoffs is the absolute nadir of low-bar setting. Knowing that hockey tends to be a chummy old boys club, it would not come as a shock if a few teams were open to helping Mavety patch together a playoff team, quote-unquote. They owe him after him taking advantage of him so many teams over the years by fleecing him (get it?) in trades. (By the way, who gets the other overage spot now that two of the three are presumably accounted for by the new guys? Defencemen Corbin Crawford and/or Zack Fenwick must not be coming back.

It is certainly in OHL commissioner's David Branch's interest to have Gilmour be a success in Kingston instead of being part of a long-running gong show. Meantime, Kingston's city council and Mayor Harvey Rosen, probably needs the team to start showing real progress to keep the sweetheart arena deal with Springer from becoming an election issue.

In other words, there is a lot more to this than the Frontenacs picking up a little veteran experience. Welcome aboard, Zack Harnden. It has been 616 days since Doug Springer promised to do "whatever it takes" to bring a winner to Kingston.

(Here are Harnden's stats juxtaposed against Luke Pither, the first-rounder from that same 2005 draft whom Mavety gave up on way too soon. It is apples to pears, but Pither had twice as many points last season as the great player Mavety just acquired, 72-34. A Petes fan on the New OHL Open Forum described him as a, "Slow, under-achieving guy with average hands. Thanks for the 3rd!)

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Pre-emptive bag of shhhhhhhh on specious steroid list

No doubt it is only a matter of time until traditional media seize on the supposed list of 103 ballplayers who tested positive for steroids in 2004. It's ready-make opportunity to bash all because of the actions of one.


It's a fake. The general consensus seems to be that someone did a huge cherry-pick of big names in baseball from 2003. It's actually kind of brilliant, as one of TBL's commenters noted:

"We know somebody has the list, and that they’re willing to leak names, especially in the face of vehement denials by guilty parties.

"So make up 103 names, write them down, and just wait for the fireworks.

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Blog Blast Past: The Drunken Idiot's Guide To Blue Jays Baseball

At the Blue Jays game last night, two women were ejected for throwing cups of beer at Tampa Bay Rays centrefielder B.J. Upton while he was catching a fly ball in the eighth inning. Fan decorum, or lack thereof, has been a recurring problem at Rogers Centre, as Hughsy wrote about back on April 7.

Hey Jays fans? How'd you enjoy the game last night? Good? Yeah, 12-5 win over the Tigers and everybody in the line-up got at least a hit. Too bad we once again proved why many Toronto sports fans know no better than to display idiotic, embarrassing behaviour. Yes, I'm being self-righteous, but I don't care anymore. For every one smart, reasonable and measured Jays fan, there now seems to be 10 drunken morons at a Jays game. It's time to stand up against them.

It's all over the blogosphere and some of the MSM today -- last night, there was a delay of game when Jays fans threw debris at the Tigers' Josh Anderson in-game.

While it's easy and entirely justified to call out Toronto sports fans for a lot of reasons -- Leaf Nation's zombie-like adherence to sub-par Leaf teams, the small minority of upper-middle-class frat boys that ruin things for Toronto FC's fan base, the strange, affected attitude Toronto has towards the Raptors to name a few -- there's no other place where the collective lunacy of Toronto sports fans gets noxious than at a Jays game.

I can deal with the stupidity of the "wave" that seems to be part and parcel of every single Jays game. I can even deal with the occasional fight (although they seem to be happening more and more at the Rogers Centre) in the 500-level. But throwing crap onto the field and interrupting the game is going too far.

While I live in Toronto and appreciate aspects of this city, there's a lot about Toronto that's lame and bad -- our sports culture in particular. While we collectively suck the teat of MLSE and the crappy product put on the ice, forking millions of dollars over to a corporation that cares little to nothing about the product's quality, we're the most fair-weather fans in the world when it comes to our other sports. Only when it's cool and trendy to show up to a Big Event like last night do Torontonians show their civic and sports pride, but it's just gone too far.

This is the last straw.

Must the Rogers Centre post uniformed Toronto police officers at every section entrance now? Must the Rogers Centre resort to what the Tigers (talk about irony) had to do post-World Series win in 1984 and ban regular beer? Must we put up barriers across the 100 and 200 sections at the Rogers Centre to block people from throwing debris?

I'm only one man, I know. I can't inspire any movement just by myself. But it's time to show your frustration with the way things are at the Rogers Centre. The drunken idiot quotient is too high and it's time to let the Rogers Centre, Blue Jays and anyone else involved that we're angry and fed up with not being able to enjoy a Jays game in peace.

Down With The Douchebags.

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Mornings with Mr. Canoehead

It's all raisins off an Oldsmobile. None of this should have kept you up at night ...

... Any gut feeling that the Senators will end up stuck with Dany Heatley and have to pay him his $4-million bonus.

... People treating the story about Wimbledon putting better-looking female players on centre court as ribald. Sorry, but when the two Grand Slam events held in old Europe often schedule Serena Williams to play on a side court, it's not amusing. It's something else which rhymes with acism.

... wondering how long until it is OK to riff on Vernon Wells changing his at-bat music to Michael Jackson songs. It's a classy move, but it's as if Wells is trying to point out someone else has actually gone even longer without producing a big hit.

... feeling like you have taken the Hamilton Tiger-Cats' futility for granted for the past 10 years. (That's a great column by Stephen Brunt.)

... Whether to take the inaugural football Junior World Championship seriously. The joy of football is the journey, yet New Zealand, Sweden and France travelled all the way to Canton, Ohio to lose by a combined 184-7 to Canada, Mexico and the U.S. Did the French run the original Statue of Liberty play against the Americans, or did their quarterback's play wristband read, "Prenez un genou."*

(BT to the dub, proof the Creator does not throw dice. The Hockey Hall of Fame is in the heart of Canada's largest city. The Baseball Hall of Fame is nestled in the postcard-worthy Finger Lakes. The Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio is right next to interstate highway.)

Columnists bellyaching about how bored they were by watching the NHL draft. There seriously has to be a better topic and whining about you doing journalism, isn't that what a blog is for? (Besides, Jack Todd wrote the definitive takedown of the NHL draft on Monday.)

(*That's French for, "Take a knee.")

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CIS Corner: Losses hit Gaels hard; mulling the Ravens revival

Being on vacation last week precluded weighing in on a couple pertinent university football stories, the emerging details about a Carleton Ravens revival and Queen's losses to the CFL.

Ravens/Gee-Gees: Ottawa's WCE — whose turn is it to wear the mayor's chain of office this week? — could still screw this up. After last week, it is easier to picture a double launch in 2012, with the Ravens joining the Reconstituted.

CFL commissioner Mark Cohon said recently that Ottawa will come back into the pro league in 2012. Three years is enough lead time for Carleton to prepare the proper exploitation for a football revival.

Carleton would basically run on the Laval model, with the football team almost separate from the university save for academics and admissions. Quoth John Ruddy, one of the Lansdowne Live leaders (and a former Ravens defensive back):

"The Ravens would utilize our professional training facilities, they’d play in a new, fan-friendly stadium and they’d leverage our marking and operations staff ... At the end of the day, I think those elements would benefit recruiting and player development and fast-track success on the field."

David Naylor, the excellent Globe & Mail football reporter, noted this gives Jeff Hunt, Roger Greenberg, John Shenkman and Ruddy an important card to play in their negotiations with the city:

"... The revitalization of Lansdowne starts to look less like the building of a home for a CFL team and more like the construction of a community asset that will be used for two sports at both the amateur and professional levels.

That is surely the message the (Jeff) Hunt group wants to get out in advance of city council vote scheduled for Aug. 26."

Two questions pop immediately to mind:

1. How does this affect the Ottawa Gee-Gees, who play at Lansdowne? As an ottawasun.com user noted, the Gee-Gees would not want to play at a stadium run by a group which is putting its fundraising and marketing expertise toward their cross-town rivals. It would be similar to the situation where Waterloo used Laurier's stadium for many years, the irony here being the Gee-Gees have been a powerhouse while Carleton was an also-ran more often than not.
   
   
2. Carleton coming back likely means another OUA school is exploring starting a football team to bring the conference to even 12. Not to play coy, but feel free to speculate away about who might be that school. The one these ears heard would be a stunner.

Golden Gaels: Losing Dee Sterling to the Edmonton Eskimos probably leaves more of a hole in Pat Sheahan's two-deep than Mike Giffin making the Montréal Alouettes.

That is not a knock on Giffin, who made the Als as a fullback and special-teamer. Sterling going up to the CFL probably was less anticipated.

Meantime, Thaine Carter, the middle linebacker, ripped up his shoulder at Winnipeg Blue Bombers camp and Osie Ukwuoma might remain on the Calgary Stampeders practice roster, so that is three players lost off the front seven if Sterling stays in Edmonton and Carter does not comeback from his surgery. In order, that means Queen's is without a linebacker who could play sideline to sideline, its best rusher coming off the edge and a disruptor in the middle of the defensive line.

The Whig's article from last Friday noted cornerback-kick returner Jimmy Allin is a maybe to return for a fifth season. Centre Dan Bederman is "expected to return."

Meantime, good on Giffin for making the Alouettes. He was in tough after converting from tailback, since one of the other fullback spots was being used for Martin Bédard, a tight end from UConn who can also long snap. Giffin is not the first Queen's rushing star to earn his keep in the CFL as a fill-in back and special teamer. Bryan Crawford is going into his fifth season with the Toronto Argonauts, while Brad Elberg did it for the better part of a decade.

It just took Giff a little time to commit to the switch:

"I didn't go in with a good attitude last year (with Hamilton) ... My head just wasn't in it with my wife (Heidi) being eight months pregnant. I didn't think I had to perform. I was naive."
— Kingston Whig-Standard

Related:
Carleton aims for return of football (Terri Saunders, Sun Media, June 25)

(Cross-posted to cisblog.ca.)

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Nazem Kadri and the Hockey Reflex

It might be a stretch, but whatthehell.

The way some media portrayed the Leafs drafting Nazem Kadri, a young man who is Muslim, might be a symptom of what a friend calls the Hockey Reflex. It's an umbrella term for a much larger identity crisis which envelops the national obsession. Canada is evolving faster than ever as a nation, albeit not in ways that can be 100% anticipated. That has stoked angst hockey will one day concede some of centre stage to other sports. If that happens (stress, if), it will be because it is cost-prohibitive and a sport of the middle class, which has been shrinking for more than 20 years.

Please bear in mind this is not directed at any individual. It's more of an attempt, as someone on the outside, to try to figure out what is at the heart of the Saturday Star describing Kadri as a "symbol of change" (beat writer Kevin McGran's story) and a sign "the cultural tectonic plates of the GTA just shifted a little bit." (Damien Cox's accompanying column.) The Globe & Mail also got in on the act ("The new face of the good ol' hockey game"). Here you thought the Leafs drafted Kadri because they thought he might be a potential 35-goal scorer whom you can already see skating on a line someday with Taylor Hall. Suspend your disbelief and presume that Leafs GM Brian Burke is waiting for next year to make a big move to snag a phenom from the OHL, instead of just talking about it so much).

Kazem being Muslim is part of the story, certainly. One could not get away with not noting it when only one other Muslim, early-2000s journeyman Ramzi Abid, has played semi-regularly in the NHL (68 games). There are certainly fans who are going to identify with a player who's of a similar background to them, or commit it to memory like his height, weight and junior team (case in point: On Newsday's blog item about Kington Frontenacs forward Ethan Werek being drafted by the New York Rangers, the first comment makes reference to Werek being a "dual Canadian-Israeli citizen").

This comes back to the Jason Whitlock saying that social agenda does not trump truth. One way to get away from a loaded word such as "agenda" is to say that labelling and packaging — Leafs draft Muslim player! — should not stand in for honest dialogue.

Think about it. It as if there is a nettle tugging at the heart that mandates reassuring people that newer Canadians are taking up the game en masse, even when they are not. It comes off as a Hail Mary, hoping there something will just magically happen to off-set trends which are working against sustaining the elitist youth hockey model in Canada.

That would include, off the top of one's head, urbanization, an aging population, the decline of the manufacturing sector in smaller Ontario centres (if the family breadwinner now works at a big-box instead of on an assembly line, it will be tougher to afford new skates for little Logan) and last but not least, the fact the cost of youth hockey is divorced from sanity. You can only count on families being willing to make a sacrifice for so long.

However, The Globe's Jeff Blair had a point when called BS on the Kadri coverage in his Monday column, writing, "Look, I like to sing Kumbaya as much as anybody but it's a stretch to see anything remotely altruistic behind the Maple Leafs drafting a Muslim player of Lebanese descent. Really." The Star, once it had time to flesh out a sober second thought, moved from "symbol of change" stuff to following up with a story headlined, "Immigrants won't flock to hockey for Nazem Kadri." The money quote probably came from minor hockey organizer named Paul Maich:

"We are still not seeing the numbers from the visible minorities that represent the percentages in the local population. I really don't think the short term effect will be that great but I'd like to be proven wrong."

Not to presume anything of some random minor hockey guy, but I'd like to be proven wrong is not far off from, It'd be nice, but I'm not gonna actually make an effort.

Point being, citing Kadri as a "symbol of change" is unfair. This is not out of concern for Kadri. It's presumed he has the head on his shoulders to handle being a hyped-up high draft pick and a Leafs prospect from Southern Ontario, plus being the team's first Muslim. That's for the Leafs and sports psychologists to handle.

The unfair part with some of the Kadri coverage is that it wrongly assumes a person who is a visible minority needs that role model. It's a little too close to the old liberal canard, add-minorities-and-stir. It is pandering. Just because your parents were born in another country does not you need a role model to get into a sport.

We can all find it on our own. Many already do this in Canada. The demographics of a Leafs crowd are distinctly different from Toronto's other teams, but it's a far cry from what it looked like at Maple Leaf Gardens in the 1970s and '80s. People from all walks of life are discovering hockey in Canada since it is the No. 1 sport, although it's overcovered. (There is even a side point that having the world junior here almost every year might be a good entry point, since it's the most publicized hockey event whose format is similar to the World Cup, with group play followed by knockout rounds. That is just a personal observation.)

The Kadri-to-the-Leafs love-in glosses over a larger truth. No matter what your cultural makeup is, you play a sport because there is an opportunity. It's like the riff Chris Rock did on blacks dominating U.S. sports — "and as soon as we get a heated hockey rink, we'll have that too!" (Oddly enough, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's story about the Thrashers drafting Evander Kane did not mention that Kane is black.)

Opportunity hinges on the values of one's family, community and society's ability to pay. On a macro level in Canada, that means there is a push to keep men's hockey on the front burner, even to neglect of other sports, which has passed the point of satire. Meantime, the way it works in this country is that if you want to be great at a sport, your family is expected to go out-of-pocket (unless said sport has a very thin field at the Winter Olympics).

That puts hockey beyond the means and interests of many families, pure and simple. That dictates a day is coming when the drop-off between No. 1 and whatever is the No. 2 sport will shrink. Exercising the Hockey Reflex only prolongs the inevitable.

(As a footnote, some recent examples of the Hockey Reflex. It is a gross generalization, to be fair, but you can see it in the sports section every day.

You can see at play with Canada Basketball having to scrap its successful beyond belief National Elite Development Agency or the fact our national women's basketball team's summer schedule is being subsidized by China and Cuba. Dave Feschuk, writing in the Toronto Star, noted sarcastically, "Thank goodness for Communists."

It's even prevalent within hockey. Earlier this month, ctvolympics.ca posted a story headlined, "Hockey schmoozers to gather at Olympic centre" which outlined how there will be a 80,000-square-foot entertainment and hospitality complex for rich folks and hockey players to hobknob during the Olympics.

On the same day, no less, the Calgary Olympic Oval scrapped its women's hockey program where national team mainstays such as Cherie Piper, Gina Kingsbury, Carla MacLeod, Colleen Sostorics, Delaney Collins, Tessa Bonhomme and Gillian Ferrari train. At least the schmoozers' needs are being addressed, eh!

As a second post-draft footnote, for any Sennies fans — love the choice of Jared Cowen — did you see this from the Columbus Dispatch:

"It's hard to believe how far the Ottawa Senators have fallen, and how fast they went from Stanley Cup runner-ups to one of the most dysfunctional clubs in the NHL.")

Related:
Newest Leaf's hockey-mad home; Kadri's father made sure son could play the sport his own parents couldn't afford for him (Kevin McGran, Toronto Star)
Immigrants won't flock to hockey for Nazem Kadri; New face of Leafs might help introduce the sport, but cost still a big factor (Lois Kalchman, Toronto Star)

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Fronts: Geldart supplies the jam

It looks like our beloveds, the Kingston Frontenacs, have turned a weakness into a strength,

The talk on the NOOF and Fronts Talk is that grinder Kaine Geldart is coming home for his overage season. The Fronts have flipped the sixth overall choice in the CHL import draft to the Plymouth Whalers, and will get two draft choices in return. If it looks like a desperate attempt to squeak into the playoffs to convince people they're really trying (even though owner Doug Springer said last season the goal was "top four"), well, it is.

The Fronts typically make little use of the import draft since it requires Springer to do more than the bare minimum. Based on that alone, getting Geldart is a decent move. The Fronts sometimes don't value rounds 2-15 in the OHL Priority Selection, either, so it is just as well that GM-for-life Larry Mavety traded three draft choices for someone with only one year left in the league. Hey, a Frontenacs fan is nothing if not practical.

Geldart was a fan favourite with the Whalers and he should give the Fronts some badly needed jam up front. The trade might also answer questions about the status of the three potential overagers who were left at the end of the season.

(Update: Plymouth has put out a release.)

Geldart is 5-foot-9, 175 lbs, about the same size David Ling was in the early 1990s when he was perhaps the most popular player to ever lace 'em up forthe Fronts. He isn't a scorer like Linger was, but he's had glowing notices for intangibles:

"Silent off the ice, Geldart constantly chirps the opposition and receives the same treatment back. In spite of his size (he's listed at 5'9), Geldart will fight any opposing player. He forechecks as well as anyone in the league and adds his share of offense to the Whalers attack. Geldart is also a responsible defensive forward.

"Pound-for-pound, nobody is tougher in the OHL. Older Whalers fans might remember Mark Cadotte, who played in Plymouth from 1995-97 and is now working as a part-time assistant coach with the Windsor Spitfires. Geldart plays a similar style.

"The pot is always stirred up when Geldart is on the ice. Watch him away from the puck and you'll see." Pete Krupsky, Michigan Live, Oct. 30, 2008

The Frontenacs are lacking in scrappy grit quotient up front, save for one of the newest members of the New York Rangers organization, Ethan Werek. The Fronts generally have a smallish group of forwards, save for the Ethanator, whose wont is to outthink opposing d-men, although he is not averse to banging them up along the boards.

Ultimately, Geldart is probably Doug Gilmour's kind of player. Meantime, he's an overager (a player born in 1989). Forward George Lovatsis and d-men Corbin Crawford and Zack Fenwick are the other 89s who were still in the Fronts' employ at the end of the season, so if Geldart is coming, one of them is not. Fenwick previously played NCAA Division 1 and he finished last season in the ECHL, if anyone is looking for smoke.

Granted, the Fronts could have also traded for Geldart just so they can release him and let him earn a championship ring with the Kingston Kimco Voyageurs. (Just kidding, not really.)

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NBA Draft Day: No. 1 overall not the most interesting topic right now

Draft Day's are always exciting, thankfully this week ends with 2 big drafts back-to-back. And my favourite of them all, the NBA draft, is the first one up! (tonight at 7pm).

As Riz already mentioned beyoned Blake Griffin going to the Clippers (a move yes even the Clippers can't mess up!) the board is wide open! It'll be interesting to see what a number of teams end up doing tonight!

But before the night has come there's already been some big moves, and they just keep on coming as well!

Shaquille O'Neal was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Ben Wallace, Sasha Papolovic and a draft pick. The Suns are entering full rebuild mode and the Cavs, likely upset this move fizzled earlier in the season, are hopeful this will keep LeBron James in town (I'd say put them over the edge but let's be honest here, win or lose if they still have LeBron after next season they'll be happy!)

Vince Carter and Ryan Anderson have just been traded from the New Jersey Nets to the Orlando Magic for Rafer Alston, Courtney Lee and Tony Battie. While this solves the point guard issue it also brings about a new, "I'll play when I feel like it" issue that has dogged Carter his entire career. The Nets certainly benefit but adding some size in Battie, potential and defence in Lee, and...street ball moves and turnovers with Alston...at least they have some insurance for Devon Harris.

The San Antonio Spurs picked up Richard Jefferson in return for aging defensive specilaist Bruce Bowen, and aging rebounder Kurt Thomas to the Milwaukee Bucks. The Detroit Pistons were in there too acquiring The Spurs needed an injection after it was evident they couldn't do it in the postseason sans Manu Ginobli, in Jefferson they definitely helped out their offence. The Bucks are clearly posturing for signings in the coming future

The Minnesota Timberwolves stockpiled the draft picks, now claiming the fourth overall pick to accompany their fifth overall pick. The trade sends Randy Foye and Mike Miller to the Washington Wizards who, with all star Gilbert Arenas returning next season, should be very much improved. The players the T-Wolves got in return with the fifth overall pick were relatively minor players (Etan Thomas, Darius Songaila and Oleksiy Pecherov), now what they do with their stockpile of high ranking lottery picks will be interesting. Many believe there will be a move made here with someone and not to expect Minnesota to draft twice.

It's never generally this active around draft day, some moves happen but not that many. However this season, with the 2010 free agent bonanza looming, these moves may not even be the last ones we see today! With talks of Detroit making a power move, Rajan Rondo getting into a verbal battle with Celtics GM Danny Ainge after being mentioned in trade talks, and Tracy McGrady being mentioned while the Rockets hope to move into the top 10, there's still plenty of time to go in the next few hours!

Generally who is taken number 1 overall is the talk of the day - this year, it's anything but the first overall selection.

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A big victory for the U.S.

Yesterday was quite the day [Jason Davis, Match Fit USA] for the American national team, as they pulled off a 2-0 defeat of Spain [Chris Nee, twofootedtackle] to advance to the Confederations Cup final. Soccer clashes between the U.S. and Spain are always expected to be lopsided, but this result was even more bizarre considering that Spain were the top-ranked team in the world and the defending European champions, had a international-record 15-straight victories entering the match and were about to break an international record for the longest unbeaten streak (36 games). It's certainly one of the greatest victories ever [George Vecsey, The New York Times] for the American national team, and up there with some of the most unanticipated victories in other sports.

Normally, the Confederations Cup isn't all that important of a tournament. Generally, it's just a test run for the World Cup and an excuse to see a final between the European and South American champions, with maybe a few interesting games against the lesser sides along the way. Even on the rare occasions when other sides have won it (Mexico in 1999) or made the final (Australia in 1997, Japan in 2001, Cameroon in 2003), it hasn't meant a lot, as the sides they beat generally weren't taking it all that seriously. However, the gap between the top sides and the rest seems to have been closing a bit of late, as shown by recent strong performances at the World Cup and the European Championships by the likes of Turkey, Ghana and Australia. Moreover, in this case, Spain were pulling out all the stops in an attempt to extend their streak and advance to the final. They gave it their all, and they came up short.

That doesn't mean that the U.S. is suddenly a better team, though. Anything can happen on any given Wednesday, and in this one, Spain had the majority of the chances. The Americans defended well, throwing themselves in front of shots whenever possible, and goalkeeper Tim Howard was outstanding, but the Spanish could have had two or three goals if their finishing had been a bit more clinical. The U.S. did very well to capitalize on their only chances of the match, but that doesn't all of a sudden put them among the best teams in the world. They're a very good team that, at their best, can compete with the elites, and that's plenty to be proud of right there.

From a Canadian perspective, it's nice to see the U.S. doing well. They're quite a ways ahead of the Canadian team at the moment, but the difference is about as wide as from the American team to the Spanish one: Canada can give them a good game at any time despite the superior talent on the U.S. side. Thus, seeing them do well against top-drawer sides provides hope that Canada can one day do the same. The Canadians have come close at times, most recently in last summer's friendly against Brazil, but there's still a long ways to go.

One other thing to consider is how much popular and media interest there is in the American national team. Almost every general sports newspaper and website in the States was doing something on the game, and even guys who primarily cover other sports were talking excitedly about the game on Twitter. You never see an explosion of interest of that magnitude in the States around any other soccer event, be it MLS, the English Premier League or the UEFA Champions League. For MLS, the quality may be an issue, but that's not the case with the EPL or the Champions League. In my mind, part of it's due to patriotism, but another part of it's due to being able to identify with the team; many Americans don't feel a real connection to a MLS side or a Premiership one, but that isn't an issue with the national team.

It's interesting that there never seems to be anywhere close to this level of popular support around the Canadian national team (see the Gold Cup later this summer for a perfect example; it's been barely mentioned outside of the soccer blogs so far). The soccer writers will cover the team, and a few of the big papers will run recaps from time to time (often just wire service ones), but the Canadian team never manages to transcend their sport the way the American one seems to. Maybe part of that's due to their relative lack of success lately, but that's not entirely the case; there was very little mainstream interest in the team that won the 2000 Gold Cup against all odds and played in the 2001 Confederations Cup. It seems, at least for the moment, the U.S. is well ahead of Canada in this dimension of soccer as well.

It's hard to predict definitively what this win will mean in the long run. A lot of that depends on what happens in Sunday's final (against the winner of today's semi-final, which will be either Brazil or South Africa). If the U.S. goes on to lose that game, this one will still be big, but not as important. If they win, this victory becomes even more important. It's not just about winning the Confederations Cup; this gives them a good shot at the number-one CONCACAF (North American) seed in the World Cup and a higher seed in general. As the Americans found out previously, seeds can be everything; last time around, their second seed from CONCACAF (behind Mexico) placed them in the Group of Death with eventual champions Italy, the second-ranked Czech Republic and African powerhouse Ghana, and they didn't make it out. Meanwhile, Mexico wound up with Portugal, Angola and Iran, and sneaked through in second place. That seeding difference could be big in the long run.

Beyond that, I'm not going to predict any sudden explosions of interest in soccer in the States for the long run. That's been tried before, and it hasn't panned out as well as people had hoped. However, the interest in today's game showcases that there already are a significant number of people following at least the national team, and that may translate to other levels in time. It's not a rocket to the top of the mountain, but it's another step along the way. Fortunately, the slow, step-by-step approach does result in less of a tendency to dramatically fall to earth. Moreover, Canada and the U.S. are considerably intertwined in soccer, as Toronto F.C., the Vancouver Whitecaps and the Montreal Impact demonstrate; all three have found success playing in primarily-American leagues. Thus, anything that helps the game in the States is likely to help it in Canada as well, and that's a good thing in my books.

Related:
- I have a more detailed take on the match over at The Phoenix Pub
- Another good piece on the subject from Avoiding The Drop
- Andy Hutchins puts it in historical perspective at The Arena

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Zen Dayley: Mauer could be another Ted Williams, but .400? No ... no

In the box marked It's Not For Nothing, please note that Joe Mauer had his first 0-for-5 all season on Tuesday, dropping his average down to .395.

Mauer is a wicked player, but the idea of him hitting .400, really? One should stay on the stathead side with respect to the Sports Illustrated cover story about Mauer being the literary device in Tom Verducci's argument that, post-Steroid Era baseball's "most iconic, captivating pursuits are of hitting streaks and a .400 batting average." The snark has already been covered off Tommy Craggs ("Tom Verducci has found his latest anti-drug mascot: Joe Mauer").

The Mauer meme was probably started by Joe Posnanski. Poz wrote a column a month ago where he noted most of the highest batting averages recorded in recent times where by players who almost never struck out, like 4% of the time. Using that 4% strikeout rate, he figured that Manny Ramírez might have hit .416 one season and that Canadian Larry Walker might have hit .400 a couple times for the Colorado Rockies (and .398 in another season).

This is not an attack on two writers who have put out/will put out a book this year every baseball fan will likely want to read (Verducci's The Yankee Years and Poz's The Machine, which is about the 1975 Reds). The problem is that one guy is ignoring math and the other was ignoring intent.

The question about whether we will ever see another .400 hitter was answered by the late, great Stephen Jay Gould. Chris Lynch at A Large Regular dug out a great quote from Full House:

1. Complex systems improve when the best performers play by the same rules over an extended period of time. As systems improve, they equilibriate and variation decreases.
   
2. As play improves and bell curves march toward the right wall, variation must shrink at the right tail. (Emphasis mine.)

Like Lynch says, "The disappearance of the .400 hitter is seen as basically a measure of an overall improvement in play."

League batting averages, give or take a few percentage points, have been relatively stable over time. In 1941, when Ted Williams hit .406, the entire American League hit .266. You know what the league average was in 1977, when Rod Carew hit .388? The exact same, .266.

Three years later, when George Brett took his run at Williams and wound up at .390, the AL hit a collective .269. Last season, it hit .268, with the highest average in the league being Mauer's .328.

You can pretty much go back to any season from the wayback era when the .400 hitter was commonplace (when black athletes were barred from playing and scouting and player development was next to nonexistent) and find similar support of Gould's theory that the best players don't lap the field by as much because there are more good players.

Take 1911, when Ty Cobb hit .420 and Shoeless Joe Jackson was runner-up at .408. Twenty-one players (i.e., those who batted enough to qualify for the batting title) hit at least .300 that season, almost three per team in an eight-team league. In the first post-Dead Ball season, 1920, when George Sisler hit .407, there were 26 .300 hitters in the AL. There were similar totals throughout the heavy-hitting '20s, the last decade where .400 hitters appeared with any regularity.

By '41, though, when Williams turned the trick, 15 players hit .300 in the AL, less than two per team (the eight-team NL had only 11). Fast-forward ahead to 2008 and only 17 everyday players in the 14-team AL hit .300, just one per team on average.

Those are only randomly gathered examples, but you should see the trend. The more competitive the game gets, the less likely you are

There also (sorry, Poz) does not seem to be any correlation between batting averages and strikeout rates. His aforementioned column certainly did stimulate thought, but it ignored intent. Players do not intend to strike out. Even a world-renowned space cadet such as Manny Ramírez does not say, "Okay, this will be one of my 100 strikeouts for the year, it's just a cost of doing business." He is trying to make solid contact and sometimes he misses because the pitcher he is facing is better than him that day.

Pitchers generally go for strikeouts more than their decades-ago brethren, who were often expected to pace themselves to last the full nine innings and did not have to worry the threat of Dr. Longball. Besides, as I'm sure someone much smarter long ago pointed out, there is no relationship between strikeout rates and overall batting averages.

Last season, when the entire AL hit .268, Jack Cust led the league with 197 strikeouts. Sixty years earlier, when only one player in the AL (Pat Seerey, remember him?) struck out 100 times, the entire league hit .266. The year after that, the entire league hit .263 without a single player joining that dubious Century Club.

This is not meant to be ad hominem. Verducci and Posnanski both write like a dream. Baseball fans are blessed to have them writing about the diamond game. They and their editors are smart to understanding it's all in how you package a story. Any baseball fan would be stirred if Joe Mauer was hitting .410 deep into August, even those who know batting average is a bunko stat. What Verducci says about Mauer is good writin', Dickie:

"Here is where Mauer comes in. With home runs having gone the way of junk bonds, derivatives and no-document mortgages, the most iconic, captivating pursuits are of hitting streaks and a .400 batting average, in part because of their daily drama and the stirring of the ghosts that come with them. Not since the Reds' Pete Rose hit in 44 straight games in 1978 has a hitter come within 15 games of Joe DiMaggio's single-season record of 56 straight. Not since the Rockies' Larry Walker and the Padres' Tony Gwynn, in 1997, has anyone hit .400 even as modestly deep into a season as June 22 — until Mauer."

A counter-point might be, who said Mauer has to hit .400 for the average casual sports fan to be regarded as an awesome ballplayer? FanGraphs has him down to finish this season with rate stats of .354/.433/.579 and he plays catcher, the most demanding fielding position. That hardly needs any high gloss.

Related:
Tom Verducci has found his latest anti-drug mascot: Joe Mauer (Tommy Craggs, Deadspin)
Joe Mauer Will Serenely, Politely Crush You (Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated)

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Bring back the Jets: Taking the high road!

One prevailing thought whenever Bring Back the Jets talk flares up is that Winnipeg is a "warehouse town."

No offence — that phrase was furnished by a Westerner who was born in the 'Peg, honest — but a piece from canadianbusiness.com hit upon that point. The high road to take is when/if the NHL faces up to economic reality, then Winnipeg becomes more than workable.

"(T)he league would have to dramatically contract, which is a possibility considering how many American teams are in financial trouble. 'The NHL has to shrink,' says (Rob) Warren (executive director of the Winnipeg-based Asper Centre for Entrepreneurship). "A source of mine in the league has said that anything south of New York you want to get out of because those aren't good hockey markets. You might find a pocket here or there, but places like Carolina and Florida, those are not traditional hockey markets."

"If the NHL becomes smaller, player salaries will come down, and then Winnipeg might be able to afford a team. Author Jim Silver explains that salaries 'aren't consistent with anything in the real world' and that while players should be well paid, they don't need $1 million a year.

"Warren adds that while contraction won't stop the superstars from getting the big bucks, everyone else's salaries will come down. Then it will be less expensive to purchase, and run, a franchise. 'And, when that happens, Winnipeg becomes a much better prospect for NHL hockey.' "

It is important to keep the horse and cart in the correct order, now that it is open season and on struggling Sun Belt hockey teams.

Most of you know, even if the media does not properly acknowledge it when they're covering those Make It Seven rallies, that raw attendance totals are not a good tell-all baseline. Average ticket price has to be factored in (which is part of why the Phoenix Coyotes with their $9 tickets are beyond saying). Secondary ticketing (which can get pretty greasy) also counts. Is there a resale demand when people or corporations who have tickets opt not to use them? Last, but by no means least, in the NHL you have to sell the luxury boxes, which brings it back to Winnipeg being a warehouse town. It is not a town of big spenders, not that there's anything wrong with that. As the writer from canadianbusiness.com put it:

"The only way the Winnipeg Jets will succeed is if they sell all 50 of their corporate boxes, and at a much higher price than they do now. Currently, a suite at the MTS Centre, for Manitoba Moose games, costs between $43,500 to $67,500. At Rexall Place, where the Oilers play, boxes run from $49,200 to $410,000 a year, while luxury suites at the Air Canada Centre cost $500,000. In order to make money, arena owner True North Entertainment would likely have to significantly increase its annual corporate box costs. The problem, however, is that it might not find any buyers.

"Warren says that so far, no one that he knows is willing to purchase a suite at NHL prices. 'I haven't seen the corporate community step up,' he says.

"Warren knows because he's already asked. 'I spoke to one senior executive with a Winnipeg-based insurance firm point blank whether his company would buy a luxury box. He said no. Another fellow in town, Doug Harvey from Maxim Truck & Trailer — he's a huge hockey fan — also said no. Unless you get a guy like Harvey on board it's tough in this market to make those revenue targets.

" 'It's the cost,' he adds. 'They just don't see the benefit. They don't run enough clients in from out of town to make it worthwhile.' "

It is something to keep in mind, since Winnipeg talk flared up two weeks ago in connection with the Atlanta Thrashers (Scott Burnside at ESPN.com said June 8 the Thrashers are unlikely to relocate, but that does not mean Winnipeg is not in the game). As much as we would all like to Make It Eight for chauvinistic and patriotic reasons, you got to keep your eyes peeled to the economics. That's not a business guy talking, that's a sports guy talking (sad but true, maybe).

Related:
Sports: The return of the Jets?; Winnipeggers would love to have NHL hockey back in their city, but it's going to take more than nostalgia to fuel a successful franchise (Bryan Borzykowski, canadianbusiness.com)

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Hoserdome 2009: Oh, that court thingy...

The stickiness of a sports business story is usually in inverse proportion to how sticky it is outside. People might have missed the story about a court finding the NHL has been underfunding pensions, especially in Ontario, where it's probably bigger news the LCBO strike has been averted.

"The decision by Ontario Superior Court means the league will have to top up its pension fund by as much as $30 million and may have to make retroactive payments to the widows of deceased players.

"The suit, brought forward last year by the NHL Players' Association, charged that errors in the calculation of pensions for players who died before 1986 meant their widows received as little as 10 per cent of the funds entitled to them."

This does not necessarily go all the way to Gary Bettman and Bill Daly, but it whets the thirst for reading about what depths of malevolence to which a league will sink. Point being, it will be really interesting to see what kind of reception Bettman and/or Daly get on Friday at the NHL draft in Montreal, since it would be his first appearance in Canada since a bankruptcy court dealt a setback to Jim Balsillie's plan to buy the Phoenix Coyotes (which is still very much a going concern).

Meantime (and there is a damned-if-you-do element to this space blogging on hockey on the 24th of June), there are a couple fish to toss out there.

• Have you heard the one about Dany Heatley being traded to Vancouver for the Daniel and Henrik Sedin? It would not come as a shock, after reading Bruce Garrioch's story, that the Senators might end up getting stuck with Heatley.
  
  
• Ex-Senator Martin Havlat Twittered that he is "only thinking about singing with Chicago."
  
  
• Actual words from an actual FAN 590 caller:

  "Any real Leafs fan knows the only way to get better is to suck."

  Believe it or not, people are already entertaining the idea of finishing dead last and earning the right to draft Taylor Hall No. 1 overall. That would certainly explain why the Leafs would have interest in bringing in ex-Senators Wade Redden and Peter Schaefer: They're planning to tank the season.
  
  
• Further to the point about the fault-finding mission with John Tavares, check out an interview that OHL coach Dave Cameron did with Islanders Point Blank:

  "As a head coach in the OHL, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes we over-play our best players. These young men play too much. It is impossible for them or for anyone to go full-out over a 100-game season as a teenager. We ask too much of them. So if anyone - the scouts, the experts, the fans - want to focus on gaps in a young player’s game, there will always be areas to pick apart."

  Meantime, someone actually said Tavares and Victor Hedman might be the same dyad as Alexandre Daigle and Chris Pronger in 1993. That's rough, man. The only common thread there is Daigle and Tavares were both left-handed shots.
  

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Lions back to Empire? Thankfully, it never rains in Vancouver

It's acknowledged the CFL loves playing to nostalgia, but the B.C. Lions temporarily returning to Empire Stadium takes it a little too far.

"(The B.C. Lions) are considering moving at least some games in the 2010 season to a temporary facility at the site of old Empire Stadium in east Vancouver during construction of the new roof (at B.C. Place)." — Vancouver Sun

Long story short, it's B.C. Place or no place when it comes to CFL-worthy stadia west of the Rocky Mountains. It's important to make too big a deal of this from a football point-of-view, since if worst came to worse, the Lions might end up with fewer than nine home games (then you get into the whole comprising-the-league's-integrity thing, but no more so than having people find out one owner was bankrolling another club, hey-oooooo!).

The subtext is this points out how in some ways, sport is almost foreign to Canada's culture. That is unless the sport is played on ice and only about 10 countries in the world happen to care (and if the athletes can be predominantly Caucasian, so much the better). Across Canada, you have major cities without a suitable stadium or trying to make do with an old one, even in Toronto, where Rogers Centre is exactly what we deserve, not necessarily in a good way. You know the refrain: "There's more important things to spend money on!"

Still, the hyper-pragmatism (GJH's term) wears thin after a while. Take a look around. It took forever and a day for the Montreal Alouettes to get the go-ahead on renovations for Molson Stadium (will that include actually having urinals in the men's washrooms?).

In Ottawa's case, it's ridiculous that intelligent people are nattering on about "process" because the city, to cop a phrase from the Citizen's awesome Randall Denley, has the temerity to "tak(e) the appropriate steps to review in detail an intriguing offer from a respectable group of city business people," with respect to Lansdowne Park. The same goes for people who summarize the situation with the baseball stadium on Coventry Rd. by saying, "Well, at least we got almost 20 years out of it."

Far be it people would get mad at the lack of leadership, as expressed by a couple Vancouver Sun users.

"We have lost Triple-A baseball because of facities that are antiquated and too old never to be upgraded to potential. We have an owner (Greg Kerfoot) who wants to pay out of his own pocket, a new soccer stadium but can't because of politics. They tore down Empire Stadium, one of the prettiest sites in North America, and made it into a park. This city and Province are spending millions of dollars on B.C. Place located in a very congested area. How come the city of Seattle has two beautiful facilities and we can't even have one. Luckily the Griffiths built GM Place otherwise we wouldn't have pro hockey here."

"Is Canada not the most pathetic country in the world ... How in heck a city the size of Vancouver ... only has one stadium is ridiculous... The fact that a city the size of Quebec City and Ottawa have no stadium at all proves how pathetic this country is... We have stadiums in Calgary, Winnipeg, Regina, Hamilton and Montreal that are laughable at best... All of those stadiums should of been torn down in the 1980s... In Montreal...they are sinking more money into Molson Stadium ... What a joke ... the stadium is 100 years old!!! Build a new one!!! .... This country is sooooo messed up...what is more important? Putting a bunch of taxi drivers in Vancouver out of work.... or building a foundation for the CFL in Canada that ,the last time I checked, was one of very few institutions that this pathetic country has to be proud of!!!"

Be that as it may. Arguments can be entertained that the NFL has gone way too far with building new stadiums and that the great college football powerhouses in the U.S., your USC Trojans and Alabama Crimson Tide and Ohio State Buckeyes all pretty much play in the same stadia that they did when The Bear and and Woody Hayes were coaching. Meantime, though, if you're a taxpayer who loves sitting out in the summer quaffing a libation and watching professional sport, it's a little tough to see the politicians always tossing blades of grass up in the air like a kicker trying to gauge the wind. They were elected to show some leadership and vision, eh.

Meantime, the Van Sun Mike Beamish noted people should curb their enthusiasm about the Lions playing outdoors temporarily:

"Football history happened there and may yet again. But re-creating the past on the former CFL site might be not as starry-eyed as the romantics envision. Call me unromantic if you want. But I see monstrous headaches ahead. And thousands of full bladders, doing the Mexican hat dance while queuing up for relief, is just one of many."

Related:
A return to old Empire? (Vancouver Sun)
B.C. Lions may return to original site of Empire Stadium; Team might play some 2010 CFL games at old Empire Stadium location while B.C. Place gets new roof (Vancouver Sun)

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The other 20 worst things to happen to the Vikings

Brett Favre's signing with the Minnesota Vikings is supposed to go down on Friday, July 3, according to the unimpeachable Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. Other oracles are chiming in. The production of No. 4 jerseys has already been green-lit (how unfortunate that phrase evokes the colours of a certain rival in Wisconsin). Some even wonder if this is the canary in the coal mine, that owner Zygi Wilf has resorted to a desperation play because he wants to unload the team since it has zero chance of getting a modern stadium.

The indispensable Daily Norseman has tried to counsel Minnesota Vikings fan through this. As it put it in a piece titled The Favre Stages Of Grief.

"As a group, we've been through way more than this, and we've been through way worse than this ... and we've managed to persevere for this long. To be honest, I'm not even sure if 'signing Brett Favre' would crack a list of the Top 20 most disappointing things to ever happen to the Minnesota Vikings."

Twenty most disappointing things to ever happen to the Vikings, eh? Consider that gauntlet picked up, even if the author is unaware it was even thrown down. If nothing else, it's way to build a a forcefield for Favregeddon, starting right after the jump.

First off, there need to be ground rules, to which the author reserves the right to make up off the top of his head.

Randy Moss' mock-mooning at Lambeau Field during the 2004 playoffs does not count. It came in a game where the Vikings beat the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. Moss came off better than FOX Sports' Joe Buck did. Scratch perennial running back Robert Smith retiring from football in 2001 when he still had a few good seasons left, since that was his personal decision. Mocking former running back Onterrio Smith for getting busted at the airport with something called an Original Whizzinator is also out since that incident was symptomatic with his problems with addiction (read the post one of Smith's one-time teammates, NFL tight end George Wrighster, and then say Onterrio Smith is fair game).

The rest is in play, as far as anyone knows.

20. Starting quarterback, Spergon Wynn

Spergon Wynn III was hardly cut out to be a CFL quarterback, let alone a NFL quarterback. The epitaph for his career in Canada came courtesy a one-time B.C. Lions teammate, Carl Kidd, who once said, "Spergon can be a good quarterback at times." The rub is none of those times involved the two starts he made for the Vikings late in 2001. He went 48-for-98 for passing with one touchdown and six interceptions and never started another game. He is the answer to a great trivia question: Who started at QB in the Vikings' last game under Dennis Green and the first under Mike Tice?

19. Drafting Troy Williamson

He's open deep and ... oh, he can't hang on! There is another NFC North team which is synonymous with spending first-round draft choices on wide receivers whose 40-yard dash times turn out to be fool's gold, but Williamson's ignominy ranks with any of the approximately 72 receivers Matt Millen drafted when he was doing to the Lions what a bunch of dopes in suits did to the U.S. auto industry.

Williamson, the No. 7 pick in 2006, was expected to give the Vikings the deep threat they had lacked since Moss left. Three years later, his name is mostly a punchline and he's an entry in Worst Man Drafted tournaments. Some of his drops were so bad that the director of a cheesy football comedy wouldn't have even included them, for lack of believability.



18. Paul Ferraro's special teams unit (2008)

Seven return touchdowns allowed in one season, a NFL record. The crazy part is Ferraro moved up the coaching ladder after that showing, since he was hired by the St. Louis Rams to coach their linebackers. Granted, that means worrying about three players, not all 11 on the field at one time.

17. Tony Dorsett runs 99½ yards (Jan. 3, 1983)

Perhaps it was not disappointing in the classic sense. It's just that the NFL Network seems bound by policy to have to air the clip of Dorsett's dash at least once every 24 hours. No one remembers that the Vikings actually won that 1982 Monday nighter, no mean feat when you allow a running back to go 99 yards on a play when his team lined up with only 10 guys. True story.

16. Vikadontis Rex (1995-2000)

There is only room for one lame dinosaur mascot in the four major sports. The Toronto Raptors totally called this one. Vikadontis was introduced in the wake of the Jurassic Park phenomenon in the early '90s, probably as a way to appeal to the kids. Of course, the Vikings already had a mascot, Ragnar, played by a guy who holds the world record for shaving with an ax, so it just ended up muddying the brand.

15. Antonio Freeman's catch (Nov. 6, 2000)

A semi-legitimate sports journalist is conditioned to eschew using the word fluke. However, what happened on the night of Nov. 6, 2000 was nothing but a damn fluke. The Vikings and Packers never should have been in overtime in the first place, but in a driving rainstorm, the Vikings botched the hold on a last-second field goal. In OT, Freeman slipped on the wet field on a deep route and Dishman appeared to bat it to turf. However, it hit Freeman, who managed to complete the catch, get to his feet without being tackled and cut inside a defender to score and give Green Bay an ill-gotten 26-20 win. It also cost the Vikings home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.



14. Dennis Green tries to sue the team (1997)

To be fair, you might call a lawyer too if you had coached a perennial playoff team and found out the highers-up tried to replace you with a rah-rah college coach like Lou Holtz who was a failure in his one shot in the NFL.

13. Randy Moss' long goodbye (about 2002 to '04)

There are reasons Randy Moss is great and wonderful beyond him being in the picture when people talk about the greatest pass receivers in NFL history (after Jerry Rice and somewhere in there with Marvin Harrison and Lance Alworth from the AFL and if you include Terrell Owens in there, you're asking to get punched in the balls).

Moss showed an outcast could make it in an American team sport. That point was generally lost amid the "I play when I want to play," the meter-maid bumping and leaving the field before the game was over. No one really got that at the time, except perhaps for Karl Taro Greenfeld, but he didn't profile Moss until after he been traded to the Oakland Raiders for next to nothing. Meantime, there was so much lost potential left back in Minnesota, even though it's hard to begrudge Moss on NFL Sundays when he's catching touchdown passes from Tom Brady and polishing that

12. Daunte Culpepper's knee injury (2005)

When pro football historians (how do you get that job? Is there a test, like the foreign service exam?) talk about the great passing combos whose first names need not be mentioned, they'll talk about Montana-to-Rice, Manning-to-Harrison, Unitas-to-Berry, and Brady-to-Moss. It will ignore Culpepper, who threw to Moss during his prime years, from the time he was 23 until he was 27.

It went so well for long, then one day it did not anymore. Since '05, Culpepper has played for the Dolphins, Raiders and the Detroit Lions, so you could say the injury was career-ending.

11. Pass not intended for Darrin Nelson (Jan. 17, 1988)

Plenty of teams have seen their Super Bowl dreams dashed in the final minute of the conference championship game, just yards from a tying or winning touchdown. The killer is that the final play of the 1987 NFC championship vs. Washington, the underdog Vikings ended up with Anthony Carter and running back Darrin Nelson in the same area of the field. That made it easier for Hall of Famer Darrell Green, who was covering Carter, to break up the pass. It was intended for Nelson, but considering that Carter had set a playoff receiving record the week before, it's hard to perish the thought Wade Wilson was throwing for him.



In hindsight, the other kicker two decades later is the Vikings, as a blue state team, could have won on the field and on principle. That was the season when the NFL used scab players for three games during a players' strike. The fake Vikings went 0-3, but they still made the playoffs and were six yards from victory.

10. Super Bowl IV (January 11, 1970)

The first of the Vikings' four Super Bowl losses might not be well-remembered. The fact remains is they were 12-point favourites going in against the Kansas City Chiefs and lost by 16. No team ever favoured by such a large spread ever lost again until 1998, when a certain bunch of Cheeseheads, thanks to a couple key turnovers by a quarterback wearing No. 4, lost to Denver after being favoured by 13.



9. Smoot boat scandal (Oct. 6, 2005)

Easy enough to laugh this off now, but the general mood was less tolerant in 2005. Between Moss leaving and Culpepper suffering a thermonuclear knee injury, it was a rough few months.

8. Jim Marshall's wrong-way run (1964)

Marshall's record of playing in 282 consecutive games across 20 seasons basically makes him the NFL's answer to Cal Ripken Jr., except Ripken did not have to get cut-blocked or leg-whipped on a semi-regular basis. However, there's a belief the member of the Purple People Eaters is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame all because of one boner he pulled in 1964.



7. Nooooo! Nooooooo! (Dec. 28, 2003)

Six years later, the question how? remains unanswered. An 11-point fourth-quarter lead against the worst team in the NFL should have been safe. Somehow, the Arizona Cardinals, led by depth-chart fillers such as Josh McCown and Nathan Poole scored two touchdowns inside of the two-minute warning, helping Favre and the Green Bay Packers get into the playoffs, keeping the Vikings out after they had started the season 6-0. It also inspired an epic rant. Of course, since the best a Vikings fan can usually hope for is justice delayed, several years later the NFL changed the so-called force-out rule, so Nathan Poole's end-zone catch would not count if they were playing the game today. Of course, they're not playing the game today, even if some of us are just replaying it over and over.

6. Metrodome opens (April 3, 1982)

Let's get this straight: You gave up the best home-field advantage in the NFL? How did that work out? Baseball's Twins, the NBA's Timberwolves and the University of Minnesota football team have each scored swankier digs, but only the Vikings remain unable

5. Korey Stringer's death (Aug. 1, 2001)

As a fan, there is a lot you-don't-wanna-know when it comes to the sacrifices pro athletes have to make. Springer's death due to complications from heat stroke uncovered the dark side of the sport. Pushing someone that far was so needless, so unnecessary that it hardly seemed like a game.

4. 41-doughnut (Jan. 14, 2001)

Have you ever sat there as a sports fan after your team lost by a slim margin and wondered if it would have been easier to take if they had never been in the game? Losing 41-0 in the NFC championship game to the New York Giants, getting shut out by a defence which had Jason Sehorn on it, well, there's your answer.

3. Drew Pearson pushes off (Dec. 28, 1975)

Pass interference is like obscenity. There is no definition of it, but everyone knows it when they see it. Pearson's look of restrained jubilation after catching the Hail Mary pass from Roger Staubach to beat the Vikings in the '75 playoffs is all the proof one needs to know he pushed off on Hall of Fame defensive back Paul Krause, even if the replays are actually inconclusive.



2. Herschel Walker trade (Oct. 12, 1989)

The trade was so bad the temptation is to believe it was a conspiracy to restore the Dallas Cowboys to NFL prominence and help the league's TV ratings recover in the wake of the 1987 strike. It's easier to accept that

1. Almost perfect (Jan. 17, 1999)

All together now: Damn! One can finally laugh a little about it now that has been spoofed by a semi-popular sitcom. It's a burn, not a serious one mind you since this is just football, to never know how Randall Cunningham and Cris Carter might have done in a Super Bowl. It is clear the Vikings might have been headed for a fall, having flown to close to the sun on the wings of bad song parodies.



(It was the end of the 20th century. You try to forget, but booze only helps so much.)

Of course, there was more to it than Gary Anderson (who's now retired and owns a fly-fishing business ... in Canada), missing a 38-yard field goal that would have wrapped up the NFC title when he had not missed all season. There was more to it than the irony that the Atlanta Falcons' winning field goal was also from 38 yards and it was kicked by Morten Andersen, a Dane, meaning the Vikings' fate was sealed by an actual Viking.

It was the aftermath. In this case, it meant having to go out afterward to cover a hockey game for The Queen's Journal while wearing a Moss jersey (going home to change was not an option) and being asked, "So, who won? Last I checked Minnesota was way ahead."

The point is the obvious. Vikings fans have been through much. After reading the magic words, "Top 20 most disappointing things," it took maybe forty-five seconds to come up with about 18 of the items on this list. Put all of it together and we're Brett-proofed. Bring him in, already.

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Wherefore art Werek headed?

Kingston Frontenacs brass has bigger fish to fry than promoting its players, so it probably would not hurt to pass along with Ethan Werek-related linkage.

• One of Coming Down The Pipe!'s mockups of the first round has the Chicago Blackhawks taking Werek in the first round, 28th overall.
  
  
• Werek is No. 41 in TSN's final draft rankings.
  
  
• Ryan Kennedy at The Hockey News sees Werek as a second-round steal:

  "A highly recruited scoring pivot who played Jr. A with 2008 second-rounder Corey Trivino, Werek’s Ontario League career got off to a spotty start, as did the entire Fronts’ organization this season. But once Doug Gilmour came to town as coach, Werek was unleashed and his stock is bouncing back."

Anyway, Fronts management can focus on stifling the local media and planning the going-away party they're holding in Kinger's honour. Let's hope they reconsider their decision to have it the day after he leaves town.

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Joey Votto makes fans, reveals other fans' hang-ups

From the when-the-going-gets-weird files: Some sports fans would be more comfortable with a gay ballplayer than one who, as Joey Votto self-defined, is dealing with "real life shit."

Please bear in mind it's best to focus on the positive. Votto, the Cincinnati Reds slugger who's from Toronto, handled it like a champ on Tuesday when he sat in the dugout at Rogers Centre and calmly explained (full audio is on YouTube) how the death of his dad, Joseph, at age 52 last summer led to what the Reds would only call "stress-related issues." Most of the media coverage was empathetic. The announced crowd of 30,000-plus gave him a warm ovation when he came to bat in the top of the first inning. It showed how much society has turned the corner with mental health issues, even within the last 10 years. Twenty-five years ago, Jim Eisenreich, who had Tourette's Syndrome, was run out of baseball for a time because people took his nervous disorder to be a "case of nerves."

It is amusing to read after the fact was that in some dark corners of the Internet, there was persistent speculation that Votto is gay. In other words, some twitbags could not comprehend a 25-year-old ballplayer who just lost a parent being depressed, so that has to be their default for everything. It's so stupid. No one should making that speculation about anyone. Doesn't that beat all?

Jim Buzinski at Outsports.com wrote, "I think this is a weird kind of progress. It was not too long ago that many fans denied there were gay players in pro sports. The acceptance of these rumors as being at least plausible shows that the average fan realizes that his favorite team might have a gay player."

(Jeff Pearlman noted that it is puerile to traffic in the "is-he-or-isn’t-he-gay? bullsh$# we affix to celebrities.")

Anyway, this is really about Votto. This space was already duty-bound to cheer for him since he is a Canadian ballplayer, but hopefully he made a few fans with the way he handled everything on Tuesday. For someone who is supposed to be a very private guy, it was pretty illuminating.

There is a fine balance for people with anxiety and depression. You need to make people aware of your condition, since at best it can only be managed (whether by meds or holistically, i.e., diet, exercise, staying engaged socially). At the same time, one cannot demand sympathy. Everyone else has their own stuff to deal with. The Cincy Enquirer ran most of his quotes in full:

"I got sick in May. I had the upper respiratory thing and the ear infection. It was the time away from baseball and recovering from being sick when, for the first time, all the emotions that I had been pushing to the side, that I had been dealing with and struggling with in the winter, hit me. They hit me a hundred times more than I had been dealing with.

"I was taken out of three separate games. The first game it was a combination of me being ill. But I could tell there was something going on. I couldn't recover. I had this feeling of anxiety. I had this feeling in my chest.

" ... I'm seeing doctors and being able to talk to them and doing the therapy part has been the biggest thing. I really hadn’t acknowledged how important it was to express the things that I had been dealing with on the inside. I hate to sound to like a real dramatic person. These were serious things that I was dealing with. To have someone to talk to was really important. To be able to talk to the team was really important. That’s probably been the most important thing."

Votto stressed that he had great support from the Reds, notably manager Dusty Baker and GM Walt Jocketty. One should not idly speculate how the situation would have been handled in a certain ice-based pro sport which normally dominates sports headlines in Southern Ontario.

Meantime, one has to laugh like hell that some people broke out the Jump To Conclusions mat when the Reds were keeping a lid on why Votto, their first baseman, had gone on the DL.

Of course, that would come to light when it's PRIDE Week in Toronto. D'oh!

Related:
Father's death affected Votto; Depression led to panic attacks and disabled list (John Fay, Cincinnati Enquirer)
Votto: 'I thought I was going to die' (Jeremy Sandler, National Post)
Player stressed, so fans conclude he must be gay (Jim Buzinski, Outsports.com; via Jeff Pearlman)

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Who’s the Next Great Rap?

Perhaps this question cannot be answered immediately, but we may be able to answer who Bryan Colangelo and the Raptors will draft on Thursday.

This draft has not been as hyped as it has been in the past few years, where we have had such names such as LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Michael Beasley and Derrick Rose. Blake Griffin is expected to be the first overall pick by the Clippers, but what the Raptors choose at No. 9 depends on a lot of factors.

Such as, is Bosh part of the Raptors future? Future as in beyond the next year when his contract runs out. It also depends on what they plan to do with Shawn Marion and if he will be a Raptor next year.

Since very few have answers to these questions, we must go on speculation

The following are the two most probable picks for the Raptors on June 25.

Gerald Henderson Jr. – In his junior year the Duke guard was putting up 16.7 points a game.

He should be able to score consistently, something which they haven’t had from a shooting guard. He also plays defense, which may be even more important for the Raptors and that is something they have lacked for quite some time. Henderson is the son of Gerald Henderson Sr., a 13-year veteran of the NBA. The Senior Henderson also played the shooting guard position. A strong basketball tradition in a family is usually passed down especially the characteristics of work ethic and dedication.

DeMar DeRozan – A big guy for a shooting guard, but the Raptors might skip on him because of his raw talent. The Raptors may not want to get a player who’ll fulfill his potential in a few years since they haven’t had much luck with the waiting game. Rafael Aruajo (can you even believe he was a lottery pick?), and Joey Graham have not worked in this regard. Nevertheless, DeRozan’s potential is known by many and if the Raptors are interested in building for the future, it’ll probably be a good idea to pick up the South California player.

These two seem to be the most likely outcomes for the Raptors in the first round of Thursday’s draft. But a lot can happen in a draft and there are always surprises, which is why the Raptors are likely to have a plan B, C and D. There is also the rule that many general managers and teams follow, which is draft the best player available. One team’s resource is another team’s treasure and that could be the Raptors ticket to a major trade in the near future.

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Tuesday afternoon ...

What's not bothering you today, since it's all raisins off an Oldsmobile ... oh, and an Islanders beat writer says the team will take Matt Duchene No. 1 overall.

... Being the only person who ever saw a resemblance between Oren Koules and Michael Bluth from Arrested Development (it was the hair). The comparison is totally apt, considering what's happened to the Tampa Bay Lightning. At this rate, they'll soon be holding a Save Our Bolts fundraiser?

... CBC going ahead with a figure skating reality show. At least they showed a sense of humour by casting Glenn Anderson and Stéphane Richer as figure skaters. Talk about meta.

... Rosie DiManno getting into it with the entire city of Hamilton after she called it "a dump." Shame on her for violating the unwritten rule to never to point out the Hammer's failings in print. She missed the point that people love Hamilton, Ontario, the way you love a three-legged, half-blind, hard-of-hearing dog with a flatulence problem (so sayeth the guy whose sister and brother-in-law live in Stoney Creek, so hold the hate mail).

... ESPN.com failing to put Peyton Manning on its All-Decade NFL team.

... sports columnists who go on about the Tiger-and-Phil overkill during major golf tournaments. Please just explain to people that the way it works is the PGA's corporate sponsors expect the big names who move product to get more camera time, regardless of the leaderboard. Looking for serious storytelling on a golf broadcast is like looking for chastity in a cathouse.

... Peter C. Newman saying Heather Reisman "saved the publishing industry." Apparently saved is synonymous with running independent booksellers and small publishing houses out of business, but hey, Newman's books still sell at Chapters once they're marked down to $9.99.

... the MuchMusic Video Awards getting a worse ass-kicking than Perez Hilton. CBC got twice as many viewers by showing Happy Gilmore, a 13-year-old comedy.

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Two more seasons of 'FNL' ...

There is an off-chance some of you might be fond of Friday Night Lights (it might have been mentioned here a time or two), so it wouldn't do to not share an interview that Connie Britton did with Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello which was posted yesterday. Mrs. Coach says the series will run two more seasons it's been guaranteed, then it will be a wrap.

"In this economy, to know you have you two years of work ahead is amazing. Also, in the TV world, that almost never happens. Maybe you're lucky if you get one ... the other thing that's really great is that weknow we're going to shoot two seasons and then it's going to be done. So even for our writers, for all of us, we can really have a strong sense of a full arc that we're creating.

"I don't think there's any scenario where they will be like, 'oh, let's keep it going for another season.' Full intention is two more seasons and that will be it."

Cripes, the show's writers even know how to do the toughest thing: When to call it quits. (No, it did not slip notice that Steven Soderbergh's Moneyball will not be made into a movie just yet. It just didn't rate a post, since it's understood that in Hollywood, all that "turnaround" means is everyone turns around before they lie again.

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Cuban missive crisis; why it took so long to address Ibáñez and Sosa

Here you thought you were crazy for thinking the blogs vs. MSM debate was as talked-out as, well, steroid use among major league baseball players.

(Since it was on this blog that Stephen Brunt anticipated the desire to make a hero of former sportswriter Steve Wilstein, a post was appropriate, even at this late date.)

That is a best stab at feeding two birds with one scone. It hangs off Mark Cuban's wingnuttery about ESPN needing to put up "a page of blacklisted blogs and websites whose posts they won't comment on or report on in any way" and the whole "PED blame game" (Buster Olney, ESPN.com) which has dominated baseball news over the past fortnight.

The latter is embodied by the Jerod Morris-Raúl Ibáñez controversy and the leak about about Sammy Sosa being one of the 104 major-league baseball players who tested positive in 2003. What all of this can be boiled down is that some, present company included, have more trouble than others accepting that everyone has a way to express an opinion. (Present company included, sometimes.)

To be completely honest, the first thought after seeing Cuban's post on Friday night was to laugh it off. If Cuban wants to think, "ESPN and local newspapers, radio and TV media have become the patsies of bloggers," with respect to how trade rumours are reported in sports, well, that's his journey. A rich man saying whatever is on his mind with no consideration of logic, gee, that has never happened before.

Point being, whipping up a post with a headline such as "Mark Cuban has stupid ideas about blogs" accomplishes sweet eff-all. The blogs vs. MSM debate is also a go-nowhere play, since it does not get at why Jerod Morris became a flashpoint. Try to get past the snark.

Maybe mentioning Cuban is just a way to make this seem fresh. There are similarities with how Morris v. Ibáñez played out over the past fortnight. As the creator of the Clavin Rule, I'm inclined to agree with Cuban's point about trade rumours (it's best left to the people who specialize in it), but don't miss the point. Cuban dislikes that any doofus can whip up a trade rumour.

It was a similar story with how Morris vs. Ibáñez played out. It was not really about whether "a blogger" (see Bucholtz's explanation) said Ibáñez is a 'roidoid because sports nuts are cynical about why the 37-year-old Philadelphia Phillies outfielder's production far surpasses his career statistics.

Buster Olney blew that canard all to hell:

"Some of the mainstream media outrage to the (Jerod Morris) column was fascinating, because some of the same writers who have said they will never vote for a player they suspect of using steroids are saying it's wrong for others to blog about their own suspicions of players' steroid use. Think about the laughable inconsistency there."

Exactly. At the heart of it was a desire to control the narrative with baseball's steroids saga. This involves protecting the privilege of who gets to call someone a cheater. The latter is basically expressed as, "Hey, you must have been in journalism this long before you can say that!"

Those in paying media gigs would like to keep that for themselves. Like Colin Quinn on mid-1990s Saturday Night Live, they have their story and they're stickin' to it.

That lent itself into turning Jerod Morris into a straw man. When traditional media such as The FAN 590's Prime Time Sports did not bother using Morris' name, it made it easier to do this. If "a blogger" wrote Ibáñez's "great start was probably due to steroids," hence all bloggers wrote Ibáñez's great start was probably due to steroids.

(For the last time, Morris did not say it, see for yourself.)

'Closing the book'

Then you have baseball writers' general desire to close the book on the Steroid Era and have people believe it was mostly confined to the '90s and early 2000s. It's completely understandable why that would be the case. Jeff Pearlman savaged that mindset in a piece for Slate ("Pee No Evil," June 2, 2006):

"After having been duped by the men they cover, America's sportswriters are playing dumb again. One year after being dismissed as a has-been, steroid-using fibber, Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi is the toast of New York. Recent articles in metropolitan newspapers have praised the steadfastness and resiliency that have led him to hit a team-high 14 home runs. But where, oh where, are the doubters? At the start of spring training in 2005, Giambi looked smaller than in seasons past. Now, he has muscles atop muscles atop muscles. Yet unlike the San Francisco Chronicle, which dedicated itself (journalistically and financially) to learning the truth about Bonds, none of the New York dailies have assigned an investigative team to the case.

"... I, for one, don't believe him. During my six years at Sports Illustrated, I fell for the trick and covered Giambi as the hulking, lovable lug who cracked jokes and hit monstrous homers. All the while, he was cheating to gain an edge. So, why — when MLB doesn't administer a test for human growth hormone — should I believe Giambi is clean?"

Three years later, a lot of traditional media outlets are slashing budgets and staff and expecting fewer staff to produce more and produce it quickly. That makes it tougher, not to mention less high-reward, to assign an investigative team to anything, let alone a sports story.

A lot of journalists are angry and defensive, even though many papers are still profitable. It also means that the fortunate ones with paying gigs, in many ways, have been reduced to the same footing as some of the well-informed amateurs. If idle, ill-informed speculation was outlawed, sports talk radio would cease to exist by tomorrow.

Meantime, it is only human nature to wish to pretend away something unpleasant like the reality of the Steroids Era (that athletes might use steroids if a professional sport sticks its head in the sand over steroids, especially if there's a feeling it's a common thing among her/his peers). It was icky. It was sleazy. It was just embarrassing how so many people got sucked in during the days of Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and Sosa.

The rules of the day and the media's complicity were enablers, as Jonah Keri wrote last week:

"Just can't get worked up at over Sosa or anyone taking PEDs. MLB policies enabled it. I'd take Substance X if it made me umm ... write gooder.

Of course, it's easy enough to tell people what they should hear instead of telling them that all the evil-doers PED-taking ballplayers are going to pay (since bin Laden and all the AIG guys are harder to bring to justice).

That is too logical by half for some people. That is why you get the rear-guard action brought down tenfold on the unfortunate Jerod Morris. It is easy to see why the sportswriting profession, to quote Deadspin's Tommy Craggs, "simultaneously flays itself for not bulldogging the steroids story hard enough and congratulates itself for starting the conversation."

Craggs' words are in a similar vein to what The Globe & Mail's Stephen Brunt, who is ultimately smarter than us, cited in 2008 when he explained why declined his ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame:

"I also retain a very strong memory of the great home run derby, and especially of the baseball-writing community's reaction — or non-reaction — to the andro story. I was at the first McGwire press conference the following spring training (in 1999), and one guy in the room had the balls to ask a question about andro. The rest of the writers looked at him as though he'd farted.

"Anybody who has a HOF vote now was writing then. Also I recall that when I wrote about McGwire and andro, wondering why we celebrated him while crucifying Ben Johnson, the fan/public response I received was almost one hundred per cent negative. Leave McGwire alone, they said. Totally different thing. Don't wreck a great story.

"So the same writers who were celebrating Big Mac back then, and pissing on the reporter who wrote the andro story, suddenly got religion last year. I got sick reading all of those 'what will I tell my children if I vote for him' columns."

If only everyone was as transparent as Brunt and Pearlman.

Meantime, desperation is a stinky cologne

Hopefully, this is providing some background on the buzzsaw Morris walked into two weeks ago. It also reflected something that Vancouver Sun managing editor Kirk Lapointe touched on last week when he blogged, "The tradition in news organizations is to believe their work is definitive. The corollary of that belief is that others' work is inferior. The product of that belief is to dismiss, disregard and even discredit anyone else's work."

Of course, that is on the way out. The journo's job is best summarized, "We don't know everything, but know where to find what we don't know."

A lot of those well-informed amateurs know as much or more about a sport or a particular sub-section. Case in point: When the Ottawa stadium debate was going on, I didn't bother to read a lot of the news coverage. I just e-mailed Pete Toms to get his take.

Many journalists realize you have to engage with your audience. The next generation, people such as Kinger, are already doing this very well.

What Morris v. Ibáñez showed is how entrenched the old way of thinking is, but hopefully for not too long. Craig Calcaterra, the ShysterBaller, realized as much by late last week.

"I can only conclude one thing, and that's that the Morris-Ibanez thing wasn't about steroids and it wasn't about ethics ... It was an effort to breathe life into a tired blog vs. MSM turf war and old-fashioned media sensationalism. A couple of years ago that observation might have made me angry and might have inspired me to unleash a screed or two. As I sit here this evening, however, I can only shake my head and smile.

" ... no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. It seems to me that the sporting press in the mainstream media is giving it the old college try. For my part, I'd be lying if I said that I thought idiocy and sensationalism would one day be gone from journalism entirely. But I am optimistic, based on what I've seen here and what I've seen on many other blogs in the wake of the Ibanez stuff, that the idiocy will constitute a less prominent place in journalism as time goes on."

Thankfully, Calcaterra made sure to get some mileage out of the furor instead of sitting and stewing, like a certain resident of Sageritaville we could name (Neate S.? No, too obvious, N. Sager). The topper was creating the Geoff Baker Rigidity Award to honour sports columnists who have tossed around baseless PED allegations.

There will always be value in having the time and ability to do some digging and being able to write, no matter whether you do it for pay. The point is that there was a method to keeping quiet about all this until now. There is little to no point in going into blogs and MSM, especially when one no longer believes in either term (both are kind of limiting, and traditional media works better for the latter). Meantime, it's always better to think for yourself rather than collecting some celebrity's thoughts. Maybe one in 15 of Cuban's ideas are good.

It's up to people to try to learn something out of all this instead of running over the same ol' ground and not learning anything. The point with Cuban and Morris-Ibáñez is sooner or later, the snark and sideshow aspects, while necessary, get old. People can work past that and come out the better. Goddamn it, we are still capable of understanding nuance, no matter how often the news cycle suggests otherwise.

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John Tavares, Reggie Bush redux and the Gretzky no one remembers

One question du jour is whether Garth Snow will really take someone whose name does not rhyme with "avares" for the New York Islanders with the No. 1 overall pick.

Actually, it's three questions, posed the way Homer Simpson did when he and Apu met the head of the Kwik-E-Mart: Are you really not going to take John Tavares? Really? You?

Ours is not to divine the intent of Snow, who has warned he "won't be ruled by popular opinion." (Newsday.) One point that might not have been as emphasized as it should have been is that what's happened with Tavares over the past several weeks also goes back to something a young Wayne Gretzky pointed out 30 years ago.

The rules in hockey for players under the age of 20, which tend toward the one-size-fits-all, make sense for 99.9 per cent of the players. As you know, Tavares ended up with four seasons of junior before becoming eligible for the draft, instead of the standard two. He had an extra season at the front end, when the OHL let him into the league as a underaged 15-year-old in 2005. The OHL acted logically. There was no budging the age cut-off for the NHL draft, even though Tavares was clearly one player who had overcome early-year bias to become regarded as Everyone's First Overall Pick.

You likely know that Gretzky turned pro at age 17 in 1978, signing with the World Hockey Association, which folded a year later (the Edmonton Oilers and three other teams from "the Waaaaaaah" joined the NHL in an expansion which the league called a merger, but was really an expansion). What is less remembered is Walter Gretzky's version of how that came to pass, as he told it in Gretzky: From the Back Yard Rink to the Stanley Cup, a memoir published in the mid-'80s.

As the elder Gretzky put it, Wayne suggested going after his junior team, the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, made a mid-season coaching change. He called home and asked his father to call the late John Bassett, Jr. Bassett, who owned the Birmingham Bulls, was a bit of a precursor to Jim Balsillie, a rich guy from Southern Ontario who was not above firing a shot across the bow of the NHL. In Bassett's case, that meant signing players before they were old enough for the NHL draft (at the time, the league drafted players at age 20)

"... in the very year the two leagues had agreed to go ahead and keep hands off under-age players, he'd gone and signed Ken Linseman, an 18-year-old playing for the Kingston Canadians. The way Wayne had it figured, if Mr. Bassett would sign one under-age player, maybe he'd sign two.

"He was really upset. I tried to clam him down and said I'd call Mr. Bassett. Twenty minutes later the phone rang again. 'Did you get him?' Wayne asked. 'What did he say?'

"Now, I had no intention of calling Mr. Bassett. I just let on I had while I tried to settle Wayne down. 'Stay in junior,' I said. ... 'You've got three more years of junior. You can play one year as an over-age ... In four years ou can go just about wherever you want and name your price!'

" 'If I stay here four more years," he said, "I'll never play pro. The longer you stay the more fault they'll find. Call Mr. Bassett! Please!" (Emphasis mine.)

That seems to shed light on what's happened with the public perception of John Tavares. The two extra seasons in junior gave everyone a longer window to conduct their fault-finding mission, pick at his skating, his dedication to defensive play. They simply had a better chance to build a case that he's less The Franchise than a premier offensive talent.

(It's also fair game to ask what playing a half-season for the London Knights, whom some call "The U of junior hockey," did for Tavares' rep. The Knights, in certain puckhead circles, are a bit like the Miami Hurricanes in college football back in the day. They're talented, but tend to let people know it, which doesn't play well in hockey.)

The point Gretzky made 30 years ago is something to consider as background to whatever you have/will read about Friday's NHL draft. Everyone has just had so long to size up Johnny T. the way one would an apple, and start paring off pieces. For pity's sake, even an estimable hockey writer such as Pierre LeBrun stresses, "I really don't know the gap between Tavares, (Swedish defenceman Victor) Hedman and (Brampton Battalion's Matt) Duchene other than what NHL scouts tell me," so who really knows with certainty which of them should be the first pick?

Like LeBrun says:

"The average hockey fan has been hearing about Tavares for a few years, the same way fans were warned repeatedly of the eventual arrivals of Alex Ovechkin, Sidney Crosby and Patrick Kane in recent years.

"If Snow doesn't select Tavares, he better be sure of himself. The backlash in his market, I think, would be sizable; Isles fans have been talking up Tavares since Christmas."

One does wonder how analogous this might be to the lead-up to 2006 NFL draft and what happened with USC teammates Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart. The average football fan heard more than her/his fill about those two from 2004 through '06.

There was talk Leinart might have been a No. 1 overall pick after his junior season. In the fall of 2005, as he led USC to a 12-0 regular season, it became evident Leinart was little more than, "a gutsy Heisman winner who doesn't have the physical ability to succeed when the guys on defense get bigger and faster." (Josh Lewin, Slate, Oct. 17, 2005.)

The talk became that Bush, who ran like like the second coming of Gale Sayers for three seasons at USC, was the drop-dead No. 1 pick. The above-linked article concluded, "in a few years, the accountants will be lining up outside Reggie Bush's door." All the wiseguys were making Bush Bowl cracks when the Houston Texans and San Francisco 49ers, who were vying for the worst record in the NFL, met in a late-season game.

You know the rest of the story. The kneejerkers howled when the Houston Texans took Mario Williams, a pass rusher from North Carolina State. Doing so meant passing on Bush, not to mention a Texas Longhorns QB named Vince Young, who was a Houston native. (Leinart, meantime, dropped all the way to the 10th overall pick.) Meantime, three years on, Williams is an All-Pro defensive end. Bush, who went No. 2 overall to the New Orleans Saints, has gained fewer rushing-receiving yards in his first three seasons than the Minnesota Vikings' Adrian Peterson has in his first two. Young is a head case. Leinart is a punchline.

That might be an apples-to-pears comparison. Different sport, eh. There are a few common threads. One is that fans and by extension the media had heard a lot more about one player than another. Another is that both involved a franchise struggling to build an identity and brand awareness. The Houston Texans were (and are) an expansion franchise which has never made the NFL playoffs and they share a state with the Dallas Cowboys.

The Islanders are so lost in the shuffle in the New York media market that, as George Vecsey reflected in a great piece for The New York Times last month, it's reasonable to wonder if "hockey has come and gone on Long Island."

Anyway, who knows what Garth Snow is thinking going into the final 96 hours for draft night. Chris Botta, the team's former public relations staffer turned blogger, has been a first explainer, hinting that something crazy might go down on Friday night. Again, who knows. The point is the obvious, the longer a player is in the spotlight, the greater chance to disprove the hype. It will probably happen next season with Kingston's Taylor Hall, who like Tavares had to wait an extra year to be drafted due to where his birthday falls.

That is why it keeps coming back to what Wayne Gretzky supposedly told his dad three decades ago. It turned out No. 99 had nothing to worry about, but he sure was on to something about the folly and wisdom of talent evaluators, though.

(As for the NHL draft, the main interest for this site is when the Kingston Frontenacs' Ethan Werek is taken. Bob McKenzie has him ranked 41st.

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Aumont gets an aggressive promotion

(And there is a bit of a bromance going on with Tyson Gillies, all of a sudden.)

There's been an urge to write a Phillippe Aumont post for a while now, since he is halfway through his first season as a reliever. Well, wouldn't you know, the Hull native whom the Seattle Mariners are sweet on making their closer has been promoted to Double-A ball. At the age of 20. This is baseball-nerd brain candy.

U.S.S. Mariner can better explain how Aumont has done this far as a closer (click below the jump):

"So, what have we learned about our ‘07 first-round pick in the past few months? Aumont struggled out of the gate, with some mediocre command marring his April performances and leaving him with a 9/6 K/BB in 10.1 innings. This improved significantly to a 16/2 in 14.1 May innings, but it was coupled with a few more of his hits leaving the park. In June, his performances were more towards the middle; his control wasn’t quite as good, but his home run rate wasn’t quite as bad and hitters were having some difficulty making contact off of him. It would seem that he’s been in the process of adjusting back and forth over the past few months in response to what’s happening around him, which is definitely a good sign."

Aumont started this season in the California League ("High-A" ball) with the High Desert Mavericks. He had 12 saves and a 3.24 ERA in 29 appearances, with 35 strikeouts in 33 1/3 innings and a measly .197 opponents' batting average.

There will always be an element of the road less travelled as long as the Mariners keep Aumont in a reliever's role. He made it to the Futures Game (the minor-league all-star game held two nights before the MLB All-Star Game) held at Yankee Stadium last year, but he missed it due to elbow problems. The Mariners' thinking might be that a 6-foot-7 pitcher who throws darts has the countenance of a closer.

Meantime, there is big stuff going on with the sundry Canadians in Seattle's system. Outfielder Michael Saunders might get called up from Tacoma to play left now that Endy Chavez might be done for the season with a knee injury. (It's either Saunders or put Ken Griffey Jr. in the field.) Erik Bedard should be back in 10 days to two weeks.

The Mariners also have another B.C. ballplayer, 20-year-old centrefielder Tyson Gillies, a line-drive machine who played youth baseball with the Langley Blaze and is legally deaf.

Gillies is on-basing .442 (third in the Cal League) for High Desert and has nine triples, tied for most in the league. The temptation is to compare him with Curtis Pride, the one-time Ottawa Lynx who was legally deaf and had a long career as a quadruple-A outfielder.

Gillies might be the classic toolsy outfielder (he's fast and comes advertised as having a great arm), but the question will be if he'll hit for enough power to progress in baseball. A lot of guys can put up a sick OBP in the lower minors. Gillies has more triples than doubles (9-8). Prospects guru John Sickels did not have him among his top 20 Mariners prospects coming into the season. Still, when you consider the disadvantage of being legally deaf, you have to root for him.

Related:
Aumont joins Diamond Jaxx (Jay Yencich, U.S.S. Mariner)

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Zen Dayley: Cito and the DH thingy, Part 2

Sports And The City pointed out something that works as a follow-up to Friday's post about Cito Gaston getting away with botching a double switch. Jeff Blair noted in his column today

"Despite managing in the NL, Alou loved the designated hitter because it made managing the offensive side of the game more interesting.

" 'Strategy,' he told me one time with a frown. 'What's the strategy in having a guy with a bat in his hand not knowing how to use it? What play can I put on besides a bunt?' "

That cuts right to the heart of the matter. There is little strategy involved when the decision is dictated by the player's limited skills. Pitchers are OPSing a sub-sub-McGlovin .358 (ironically, their AL counterparts are doing slightly better, .369). This is better than having a NPH (nondescript professional hitter) in the lineup why?

As Bob Elliott noted, it was not the first time the Jays won a game in Philly despite Gaston not making a move out of Baseball 101, to use Mike Wilner's term.

A lot of the in-game decisions managers make comes out in wash, regardless of how much Seamheaded analyzing-to-death occurs after the fact. The Jays got out of it after going into the bottom of the ninth with only two pitchers left and a slim lead against a team which was very capable of forcing extra inings (the Phillies are far and away the NL's best-hitting team). The rub is you cannot logically credit Gaston just because it did not blow up in his face. It's like ascribing genius to someone who forgets to lock the front door of his apartment, goes out for a few hours and returns later to find out his place did not get burgled.

Gaston, via Blair, admitted as much:

" 'I thought about it, and then after I went to the mound, you couldn't do it,' Gaston said Friday night before the first game of a three-game series against the Nationals. 'You have to approach the umpire first and I went to the mound first. I had intentions of it (a double switch) but I screwed it up.

" 'The way it turned out was okay. But it's something you think about."

One can only imagine the fallout if Boston's Terry Francona or the Yankees' Joe Girardi goofed by not going to the umpire to make the substitution. Incidentally, both of those managers, as did Gaston, played in the National League, so they should be familiar with how it's done. Baseball is not as widely obsessed over in Toronto and we just figure, hey, Cito knows what he's doing, even when he admits he did not know what he was doing.

(The other time in Philadelphia, as you likely know, was that famous 15-14 slugfest in Game 4 of the 1993 World Series. The Blue Jays, aided and abetted by a near-historic meltdown by Mitch Williams, won a game where they were down by five runs with only five outs remaining.

Gaston just knew his guys would pull off greatest late-inning comeback in a World Series since 1929 in the eighth inning, so that is why he let reliever Tony Castillo bat for himself one inning earlier. Of course, if you were 16 years old, a Jays fan, and had been watching Mitch Williams self-destruct throughout the 1993 playoffs, you probably figured the good guys still had a chance.)

It's a couple days old, but FanGraphs' Dave Cameron has a look at the Jays' first-round draft choice, righty pitcher Chad Jenkins:

"The Blue Jays love groundball pitchers almost as much as I do, but the ones they've had success with have developed good secondary stuff. That's going to be the key for Jenkins as he gets into Toronto’s system. If he can refine his change-up and make it a real weapon against lefties, he has a chance to be one of my favorite pitchers in a few years. If he can’t, I hope he likes hanging out in the bullpen."

Related:
Second-guess Cito Gaston at your peril. Even when he appears to be wrong, things tend to work out for him (Bob Elliott, Sun Media)
Of double switches and Expos nostalgia; Cito Gaston's mistake on Thursday afternoon in Philadelphia ended up working out for the Blue Jays (Jeff Blair, globesports.com)
Felipe Alou is wise (Sports And The City)

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Kevin O'Neill at USC: It's the circle of life

There's irony in your eye: The Raptors might draft DeMar DeRozan, who put in his one season at Southern Cal before that program blew up, while the reins of what's left of the USC basketball team have been handed to, wait for it, former Raptors coach, Kevin O'Neill.

Here you thought O'Neill, a McGill alum, walked into a buzzsaw in 2003 when he became coach of the Toronto Raptors right when Vince Carter was beginning the Big Sulk. The "highly flammable" one (FOXSports.com) has been hired to head a USC team which is in hot water with NCAA investigators these days. The reaction has been less than warm.

For those who have not been following it, USC is facing an NCAA investigation which mostly revolves around the recruitment of O.J. Mayo, who did his obligatory one year of college and became a NBA lottery pick in 2008. Former coach Tim Floyd has already resigned. The L.A. Times' Adam Rose notes:

"A USC spokesperson confirmed this is not considered an interim hire, which surprised this writer. Terms of the contract, including length, have not been released. O'Neill may ultimately prove just to be a stopgap measure. But, hey, anything can happen in sports. Carroll certainly wasn't the choice for the football job."

They might as well go with O'Neill. USC might need a coach with a us-against-the-world mentality, since recruiting is going to be very difficult.

NBADraft.net's latest mock has the Raptors taking shooting guard Gerald Henderson from (guh) Duke ("Polished wing scorer owns high hoops IQ and will clearly fit as a nice piece for a good team. Lacks the explosiveness to be a star," Providence Journal). DeRozan is more of a project.

Related:
USC hires Kevin O’Neill to replace Floyd as coach (The Associated Press)
USC hires Kevin O'Neill; fans don't seem thrilled (Adam Rose, The Fabulous Forum)

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The CB4 farewell tour — Colangelo mulls sign-and-trade (again)

Bryan Colangelo, you sound like a man who's trying to make a commitment to a course of action, although this is hardly new.

"... I have to reiterate the point that keeps being overlooked - we're the only team that can offer him a full six years versus five years, 10.5% increases versus 8% increases ... Basically equates to a $30-million dollar difference. So, even if he wants to leave, he's still better served, and we're better served if he works a sign-and-trade with us where we can get some sort of an asset back from the team that he's going to. And, I think that's probably the thing that we'll both push for because he'll benefit from it and we'll benefit from it, and that's why it's probably not time to panic now and make a bad deal." — Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo, on the FAN 590 today

Your question about why this has not been reflected in most of the coverage about is as good as any. Sign-and-trade deals are not quite as commonplace as they once were, partially since they did not to send sit well with the media or fans. It seemed too much like meek capitulation. The team getting Bosh would have to give up an awful lot, so hey, maybe this is not so bad.


The most prominent sign-and-trade in recent years came in 2007 when Rashard Lewis went from the Seattle SuperSonics, who don't exist anymore, to the Orlando Magic, whom he helped lead to the NBA Finals.


Again, to be blunt, expertise about how player moves work in the NBA is not our forte. The best that can be offered is that it's was already time to brace for BWOB (Basketball Without Bosh) and try to figure out what can be gleaned from the situation. Jay Triano, Colangelo and Maurizio Gherardini would like to play an up-tempo style, but they need personnel who can make it work. There should be no fear about Bosh leaving ... there is plenty out there. Just from doing a quick surf around the series of tubes, possible trading partners would include Atlanta (how about Marvin Williams at small forward, how does that sound?). The Phoenix Suns power forward and Amare' Stoudemire and shooting guard Leandro Barbosa are about to get shopped around (oh, to be a fly on the wall when Barbosa and Leo Rautins meet up, since the analyst and national team's coach son, Andy, hurt his knee while defending Barbosa in the FIBA Americas Olympic qualifier in 2007). The Portland Trail Blazers could take on Bosh, and they're deep.

Anyway, no sense in denying Bosh could leave.

Related:
Raptors to sign-and-trade Bosh? (Truth & Rumors, via Andrew Bucholtz's Twitter)

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David Branch out to show the 'O' does not stand for 'Omertà'

Sunaya Sapurji, of Loose Pucks fame, touched on a topic that is near and dear to junior hockey fans, noting the Ontario Hockey is "in the market for an enforcer to lay down the law for teams when it comes to the existing rules regarding hazing, draft manipulation and excess player benefits."

This is kind of amusing, with Sapurji's gum-shoeing coming out on the very day that Kingston's Scott Harrington signed with the London Knights, which he just happened to fall to at the 19th overall pick after saying he was going to college:

"A survey of 17 of the OHL's 20 general managers conducted by the Star shows 13 believe there are teams manipulating their annual priority selection. However, when asked — off the record — if their own team has participated in draft manipulation, all 17 answered 'no.' "

However, Darren Ferris, who is adviser for, wait for it, Scott Harrington, might have hit the nail on the head:

"They don't need an enforcement officer, they need a development officer to go after the teams that don't develop players."

The kneejerk reaction is to wonder how much success Branch can have making a league with such an omertà culture more transparent.

It is a noble goal, though, and it is possible that there are younger, more open-minded people coming into the league who realize it's bad for business if there's a perception of a lack of oversight. The reality of the digital age means it would be harder for the league to keep something under the rug (imagine if the Windsor Spitfires hazing scandal had occurred in 2008 instead of 2005).

Sapurji's story note this enforcer's duties would cover everything, including draft manipulation, hazing and good old-fashioned payola (far be it to say that if someone wants to buy a 16-year-old's parents a new house in order to try to win a Memorial Cup, that's their problem).

Like Ferris said, this could go one step farther. Teams should be subject to audits of their entire hockey operation, especially those who give contract extensions to general managers who are 0 for the last 11 seasons when it comes to building a team which can win a playoff series.

The teams are franchisees and if the way they're running things are not up to snuff, the league should be able to take action. It is the same principle Harlan Sanders used to work on when he was building Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Meantime, feel free to interpret this as if the situation with Harrington was a last straw. Draft manipulation is nothing new in junior hockey and it's not even clear if it's completely negative.

The players and their parents deserve some say in where their little Dylans and Conors end up playing. Some might say the teams who pay the price are those who won't pay the price to get top-end players. The onus is a two-way street.

However, this is business and the league is right to worry about fallout from another Windsor or a feeling that the games are not on the level. After Harrington just happened to fall to the London Knights, there was an enough's-enough feeling.

Related:
OHL plans crackdown on teams breaking rules (Sunaya Sapurji, Toronto Star)

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Don't bother giving baseball a purity test

Further to the point made four months ago that baseball's shame over steroids "will serve to liberate it from the conceit ... that baseball is the best game of all because of its record book."

Bill Simmons has drawn a lot of eyeballs with a column attempting to define what was the purest era in baseball from a statistical and competitive viewpoint. He settled on 1988-92, a era of modest offence (someone could win the batting title hitting .313, or win the home run crown with 36, as Fred McGriff did for the 1989 Blue Jays), which "now seems Jonas-level pure, after the fact. Cocaine had become passé, and the number of suspicious statistical guys -- we could create the word "'roidy" here, just for kicks -- was a handful, at best. Er, worst. They clearly didn't damage the game any more than the spitballers, scuffers and corked-bat guys of earlier eras."

Craig Calcaterra, the ShysterBaller, weighed in:

"(Simmons) may be right, even if the definition of 'pure' is a bit unclear and maybe not that useful. What is useful, however, is Simmons' highlighting the fact that, at just about every single point in baseball history, there was something, be it drugs, or rules, or racist policies or whatever, that altered the statistical and competitive landscape. Some of them -- and I'm thinking segregation here -- were borne of even more malice than the cheating of the steroids era.

"Simmons' observation puts lie to the notion, so popular in recent years, that the steroids era's greatest evil was that it somehow sullied a heretofore pure record book. There was nothing pure about it, and certainly nothing consistent about it. Lefty Grove would have been a Hall of Famer whenever he played, but there's no escaping the fact that a lot of the guys he got out wouldn't have been able to sniff the big leagues if black players had been allowed in the game. Bob Gibson would likewise be celebrated, but his 1.12 ERA in 1968 would never have happened if he was pitching from a modern mound in a modern retro-park. We talk about baseball's wonderful continuity all of the time, but things have changed in radical ways over the years, and no one has ever presented any evidence to convince me that steroids impacted things any more radically than did high pitchers' mounds, huge strike zones, segregation and dead balls." (Emphasis mine.)

It is gratifying to see that meme filter up to someone who deservedly has a larger platform. The point is the obvious. The game was never perfect, and it's good to rid yourself of the idea that baseball was once this perfect, incorruptible game or that it was better when you were younger. It's a mental construct which seems to come up a lot in hockey, too. People believe the NHL was somehow better when 57-point teams could almost make it to the conference final, as the Maple Leafs almost did in 1986.

Here's what this site said in February, when the excrement hit the aerofoil device over Alex Rodriguez:

"Rodriguez breaking the home run record... good thing: Contary to what you might have heard, Rodriguez has not destroyed the game's history. His shame will serve to liberate it from the conceit, kept up by self-appointed gatekeepers such as Bob Costas, that baseball is the best game of all because of its record book.

"Those of you who have also watched all 18½ hours of Ken Burns' Baseball, six times over in the past 15 years might remember this part. At one point, Costas says the grand old game stands alone since you can rhyme off numbers such as 56, 755, 4,256, .406 and everyone will get the reference. In other sports it is, "How many yards did Jim Brown have when Walter Payton passed him? How points did Wilt Chamberlain have when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar passed him to become the all-time leading scorer in the NBA?"

"Statistics are a good backup for confirming what you saw or filling in what you missed. It's mostly a reflection of the competition player faced, the conditions (i.e., segregation, scouting, home ballpark), the way the game was played at the time and whether he was fortunate enough to enjoy a long career. Everything needs to be put into context, not just the Steroid Era.

"The failure to understand is this is why Dick Allen, who played in the low-scoring 1960s and early '70s, is not in the Hall of Fame ... Oh, and remember, anyone who played before the game was fully integrated, their numbers are a bit suspect too."

It cannot be stressed enough that this is not an attempt to usurp credit. That's a bit like the end of the Family Guy "Blue Harvest" episode

Chris: "Didn't Robot Chicken already do this three months ago?"
Peter: "I wouldn't worry about it, Chris. I don't think people are even aware of that show's existence."

Related:
Baseball has never been pure (Craig Calcaterra, Circling The Bases)

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The Infamous Book of Unwritten Rules

People have tried to put together lists of unwritten rules for various sports ever since the term came into sports culture. Writing a list of unwritten rules (ignore the obvious irony) has often sparked serious debate among those involved in sports over what should be expected of athletes, coaches, fans, the front office and owners in specific situations. These rules and controversies vary from sport to sport, but in team sports there is one that is generally universally excepted.

If you're playing in a game that is useless for you, but means something for your opponents and other teams in the league, you play a full squad.

If you don't know which event I'm talking about yet, last night Toronto FC won the Voyageurs Cup after beating a Montreal "B" squad 6-1. Toronto went into the game needing at least a four goal win to prevent Vancouver from taking home the Voyageurs Cup. Montreal had lost every game in the tournament up to this point and had nothing at stake (except the apparently irrelevant factors of dignity and pride).

Last night's performance from the Montreal Impact showed a lack of respect for the Voyageurs Cup, and Canadian soccer. Montreal's 2008 Voyageurs Cup victory was considered by many supporters to be their greatest moment in club history. It also became the stepping stone for a successful CONCACAF Champions League run in which the Impact played a quarterfinal in front of 55,000 people at the Big O. Just to put this in perspective on average there are two sporting events in Canada every year that attract this type of audience, the Grey Cup and the Blue Jay's home opener. After Montreal realized the potential that winning the Voyageurs Cup presents one would have thought they would have shown more respect to the other two teams in the competition by playing a full squad.

This disrespect for the competition was not one shared by Vancouver in 2008, in fact Vancouver played a big part in helping Montreal win the tournament. They beat Toronto 1-0 at BMO Field, then tied Toronto 2-2 at Swangard, giving Montreal an opportunity to close out the tournament against Toronto which they did. Vancouver played these games after they had lost both their opening games to Montreal, which essentially eliminated them from the competition. Vancouver was apparently wrong in assuming that Montreal would have remembered this favour.

Even if these factors weren't evident, even if this match had been a useless friendly the prospect of a Toronto-Montreal match should have been enough to yield a full line up from both of these teams. These two cities share a rich history of sports rivalries with the Habs and the Leafs, as well as the Argos and the Alouettes. This rivalry between the Impact and Toronto FC seemed to be shaping up nicely, but Marc De Santos, the Impact coach, seems to have deemed that games against the likes of Miami and Austin to be more important.

Now maybe De Santos believed the team he put out against Toronto had the ability to beat them, or at least hold them to a three goal win. If this is true then he was well in his right to send out a team that could benefit from the experience, while maintaining the competition's integrity. It would have been evident at 3-1 that Toronto had some chance of pulling off this improbable victory. Maybe it took until 4-1, but eventually it would have been obvious that Toronto was in with a shout. So why not bring on the array of talent available on the bench to calm the match down a little if nothing else. Team MVP Sandro Grande, the team's top forward Roberto Brown, and young Canadian standout defender Alex Surprenant, were all on the bench to start the match. They were all still there after the ninety minutes were up.

With all this being said, last night obviously was an embarrassing night for the Impact, a disappointing night for Vancouver, but before anyone says that last night was bad for the competition, look again. It was by far the most drama that this Nutrilite Canadian Championship tournament has provided. The football Toronto played last night was not only entertaining, but a display of some of the best quality they've shown in a long time. In the final game of the Canadian Championship, the man who really lifted Toronto to the Cup was a Canadian, Dwayne DeRosario, who scored the first ever hat trick in Toronto FC history. Most importantly the biggest club in terms of fan support, media attention, and cash is going to the CONCACAF Champions League which can only mean more exposure for footy in Canada.

[Cross-posted to The Canadian Stretford End]

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Zen Dayley: Cito and the DH thingy

Plus more Vernon Wells vitriol and a short dissertation about tradition...

Just another day from the "Cito Gaston is not the brilliant tactician I thought he was" files. The same manager who complained about pitchers having to bat in National League parks after closer Scott Downs injured his big toe running out a ground ball almost ended up running out of pitchers on Thursday because he did not double-switch in the eighth inning in order to, wait for it, avoid the pitcher's turn in the order. As Mike Wilner put it:

"The Baseball 101, incredibly obvious, only correct move - especially since the Jays only had two pitchers left in the bullpen ... was to bring Rod Barajas in to catch as part of a double-switch, with (Jason) Frasor coming in to bat in the 8th spot and Barajas, the new catcher, batting ninth and leading off the ninth.

"Instead, Gaston only brought in Frasor, with the intention of having him lead off the ninth inning if he had been able to hold the lead." (The Phillies tied the game.)

" ... It was a ridiculous non-move to make, and almost cost the team the game. If Gaston didn't realize that the double-switch was the move, then one of former National League manager Nick Leyva or former National League coach Brian Butterfield should have been screaming in his ear. Just terrible.

You know the rest of the story. The Blue Jays ended up winning, 8-7, by the margin of Barajas' pinch-hit home run in the ninth inning (a fastball up and away that he hit over the centrefield fence 401 feet from home place). The dude who replaced the dude who was replaced by the dude who hurt himself running to first base (duuuuude, just say Jeremy Accardo got the save) ended up getting the save. The Jays won the damn game to complete a series sweep of the World Series champions (which was probably just an evenout since they could not be as bad as they were last weekend vs. the Florida Marlins), so what is it to anyone if the manager and his coaches flunked Baseball 101?

There is much less receptiveness for playing armchair manager when the team ends up winning the game. However, talk about a manager flirting with disaster The amusing part, speaking personally, was arriving at work shortly after 4 p.m., having forgotten the Jays had a day game and assuming it was over. It took all of 10 seconds to establish that the score was tied and, hey, what was regular catcher Barajas doing batting .in a day game after a night game? It seemed strange it had come to that point. It was even stranger that Gaston, after saying, "My pitchers don't take batting practice every day and don't run, so things like this are going to happen," would risk putting another pitcher in that situation only two days later. But hey, he is the manager.

To be fair, he did have a point

Gaston's rant did blow the dust off the DH debate. Whether it should be in both leagues, or just used for all interleague games (there is no political will to change it, since the AL is dominating once again in the interleague play contagion).

Not to over-intellectualize it, but one's position might hinge on a working definition of tradition. It seems like to some tradition connotes doing something the way you believe it's always been done just because. Tradition, though, means something is handed down, passed over to another generation. It's more like a trust to keep and if there's a way to improve on it without making a radical change, you do it.

Sun Media's Bob Elliott, to whom this author is very indebted, wrote a follow-up column on the skipper's comments. Elliott quite rightly pointed out that it was a bit of a CYA move to complain about Downs getting hurt. As he noted, the Jays knew interleague was coming. Downs had also hit before, plus running to first base should not be beyond a pro athlete's grasp. Plus, the Jays had left a lot of runs on the table.

"Gaston had every reason to be angry, but not at the National League designated hitter rules.

"He could have been angry at Alex Rios having a brain cramp and neglecting to tag with the Jays down 3-2 in the eighth when Marco Scutaro lined to left-centre.

"Or he could have been angry at the Jays hitting 2-for-17 with men in scoring position, or leaving 15 men on base in regulation."

Those were all good points. The rub is eight of those 15 stranded runners were a byproduct of starting pitcher Ricky Romero batting in a real game for the first time in his professional career. Romero struck out three times. On eleven pitches. José Bautista or Kevin Millar would have stood a far greater chance of driving in a couple of those runners.

The craw-sticker, though, was the closer, "Pitchers hit in the NL, and it's how baseball was created." That is very well and good. However, the counter to that is that the players would still go without gloves if everything was done according how baseball was created.

Games and sports evolve. Football pays a lot of lip service to tradition. However, with regard to specialized roles, they stopped asking the quarterback to double as a free safety generations ago. You don't see the starting split end (as wide receivers used to be called) coming off the field to get his kicking shoe on before he tries a field goal, straight-ahead style.

The best compromise as an American League guy is that the NL is free to keeps its antiquated rules. It's not necessary that the so-called senior circuit swings with the times. It just can't impact on any meaningful game affecting an AL fan's favourite team, or any game of significance. Sound fair?

P.S. ... about Vernon...

What was that about how Vernon Wells' production (his OPS is down to .676) might be about as good it gets?

"Of course, there was no mention of something most sentient Jays fans have already contemplated, that maybe this is as close to as good it gets for Wells. Five minutes of reading The Hardball Times or FanGraphs combined with a willingness to reason will show anyone that 40% of the way into a major league baseball season, a player's production has usually close to finding its own level, just like water."

Take it away, Fangraphs:

"ZiPS doesn’t see Wells improving all that much this season with the bat, ultimately finishing with a .254/.310/.400 line. The projected 15 HR and 18 SB help elevate the wOBA to .316, but a below average rate like that coupled with a UZR perhaps on pace to be worse than -15 runs makes Wells a replacement player. In a full season in 2007, Wells produced just 1.2 wins. He added another 0.8 more last year albeit in just 108 games. This year: -1.0 wins. Rios is proving that he can be a good, not fantastic player, while Wells is showing that he does not deserve a starting spot in the big leagues, let alone one at such an important position." (Emphasis mine.)

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McKee among allegedly bilked NHL players

Chances are, you heard something about the some 19 NHL players suing a resort developer who took their money for an estimated $25-million US. He is said to have taken their dough and used it to throw put-Caligula-to-shame parties for baseball stars, most of whom you would think do not need help getting a little somethin'-somethin'.

Anyway, the St. Louis Blues defenceman Jay McKee, a native of Amherstview west of Kingston, is among the plaintiffs, many of whom seemed to have played for the Boston Bruins, Buffalo Sabres or Washington Capitals at some point. This is probably better topic for Puck Daddy.

Related:

NHLers: Our Cash Was Blown on MLB Porn Party (TMZ)

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A tale of three cities

The seemingly-impossible 6-1 victory Toronto FC pulled off against the Montreal Impact tonight gives them the Voyageurs Cup, the one fact everyone can agree on. Apart from that, there's no clear lesson or moral to draw from this one, though. It means drastically different things to fans of all the teams involved, and there's no one right answer. Read on for my thoughts on what this result means to fans in each city.

Toronto: It's a great day to be a Toronto FC fan. Almost everyone wrote them off after the Vancouver game; sure, they've got a solid team, but a four-goal victory on the road is hard for any side. For a team that's suffered some significant setbacks recently, including a brutal home loss to the L.A. Galaxy, a series of fan protests and a recent roster makeover, this is a huge step forward. They finally have the CONCACAF Champions League berth they've coveted for so long, and they have some tangible silverware to show their fans. The load on Mo Johnston's shoulders just got significantly lighter; regardless of how TFC do in the remainder of the MLS season, this year will be seen as at least a partial step forward thanks to tonight's events.

Vancouver: For Vancouver fans, it's the opposite. The championship seemed in their grasp, and it would have been a perfect stepping stone on the road to MLS as well as a way to bring some well-deserved Eastern media attention to the Whitecaps. To have that ripped away by a stellar TFC performance would have been bad enough. However, the way this went down was much worse. Their old archrivals, the Montreal Impact, first decided to dress a B-squad, including former Whitecaps' backup goalkeeper Srdjan Djekjanovic. That B-squad then went on to roll over and play dead (after notching the game's first goal on a penalty) in a manner that made the Montreal Screwjob look positively fair, all but assuring TFC's triumph. The faces of head coach Teitur Thordarson and the Whitecaps in the stands told the story of the night; first joy, then cautious optimism, then worry and then disbelief.

In the end, though, Vancouver fans don't have anything to be ashamed of. Their side put in a great tournament and may have deserved the trophy. With a credible effort from Montreal, they might even have won it. There's no point in kicking themselves or their franchise over something that in the end was out of their hands. You can bet they'll be fired up for Saturday's USL game against the Impact, though.

Montreal: In many ways, Montreal fans come out of this in the worst situation. They just watched their side demonstrate that they don't care about the Voyageurs Cup when they don't have a chance to win it. The appalling effort shown by the Impact tonight gives Montreal fans nothing to be proud of, and that's made worse by their lacklustre performance handing the championship to their Toronto-based rivals. Montreal's going to take a lot of criticism over the next few days, and much of it will be deserved. That's not the fans' fault, but it's going to be awfully tough for them to defend their franchise at the moment. Tonight's showing brought back horrible memories of the Santos Laguna defeat, and perhaps was even worse. That was an Impact team that had overachieved; just making it to that point was an accomplishment, and getting any sort of result in Mexico is always difficult. Losing by six goals at home to an MLS team with a poor recent run of form? It's hard to find a way to rationalize that.

In the end, I don't think it necessarily means much for Canadian soccer as a whole. Toronto FC will make a great representative for the country in the CONCACAF Champions League, but as I argued a while ago, Vancouver would have as well. Each would bring a different audience to the table, and a run by either will be good for the game. For Toronto, their focus now shifts to the CCL; for Vancouver and Montreal, the mission's now to succeed in the USL and come back hungry for the Voyageurs Cup title next year. It's been a great, thrilling, dramatic tournament, and it's really shown that these sides at their best can compete with each other and give us some fantastic soccer to watch. In my mind, that's the most important thing to take away from this one.

[Cross-posted to Sporting Madness].

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Media comings and goings: New portal of call for Adnan Virk

Toronto sports commentator Adnan Virk, who spent most of his formative years in the Kingston area, is leaving The Score after six-plus years at the network:

"... Virk is on the move and will land at Leafs TV/Raptors NBA TV. He replaces Paul Johnson, whose contract was not renewed."— Chris Zelkovich, Sports Media Watch

It's always great to see someone from the hometown succeeding in his chosen field. Adnan brought a lot to the table when The Score had him on basketball, whether it was moderating the panel on their Raptors telecasts or NCAA Tournament coverage. The man has charisma.

He is a basketball guy who grew up following the game and played it, so Raptors NBA TV ought to be right in his wheelhouse. His fellow Kingstonians can only be happy and proud to see him take start another chapter in his career.

(Toronto Sports Media has more details ... Zelkovich elaborates: "Former Score guy Adnan Virk is going to be one busy man in his new job with MLSE. He's going to be the pre-game host for all Maple Leafs, Raptors and Toronto FC games on Leafs TV, Raptors NBA TV and GolTV. He'll also be writing a blog on the teams' websites."

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The end of an era in arena anachronisms!

Brian Kilrea's coaching career ended when the Ottawa 67's were eliminated in Game 7 overtime by the Niagara IceDogs in the playoffs, but really, this would make it official:



That post from a Facebook 67's fan group might not be 100 per cent spot-on. During the World Junior championships in Ottawa last winter, the benches were on the north side, where the Soixys normally sit. The sundry IIHF off-ice officials were on the south side, which is normally the visitors' bench. It is noteworthy that such talk is afoot now that Killer is no longer the coach. There's an off chance that Kilrea might have resisted the move to have the benches on the same side. That has become a requirement throughout hockey, but it's understandable that Kilrea might have resisted, since he was used to having it a certain way (here one thinks of his contemporary Don Cherry's opinion, oft-expressed over the last 20 years, about putting the benches on the same side).

The setup kept the 67's from having to make a long change during the second period, which was arguably an unfair advantage for the home team, but no more so than those 3-in-2 weekends OHL fans must abide. Granted, the impact of the Civic Centre's unique architecture, where all of the seating on one side of the ice, has worked both ways in how it impacts the game. A poster on the New OHL Open Forum (which totally gets credit for this post idea) argued it has hurt the 67's:

"The biggest problem for the 67's was the opposing team had the opportunity of looking into the stands on the high side and seeing the capacity rink. All the 67's saw from the bench was the WALL. So, when you have 10,000 people cheering you on, you don't see them; therefore, you don't get as pumped up."

There was also the fact the visitors had an easier time making a change on the fly when a penalty expired, since the penalty boxes have been on that side of the ice.

The crux of this, though, really goes to what's lost when teams move into new arenas. This should not be taken as a young fogey's lament for an era that he is barely old enough to remember. The pathological nostalgia is best left to baby boomers. It's the loss of the little quirks of each arena which became part of the game's lore. The Civic Centre has its square corners, which as my contractor father points out, are peculiar to arenas built in Eastern Canada. The Peterborough Memorial Centre has similar square corners.

The Kingston Memorial Centre has benches on opposite sides of the ice. There was some intentional comedy during the third-last Frontenacs game there in February 2008 when Larry Mavety started to walk on to the ice during a shouting match with the Plymouth Whalers coach. The Memorial Centre also has its 200-by-92 ice surface, which was the Olympic dimensions when that arena was built (in the 1940s, not the 1890s, as some snarkers might have cracked). It was always a kick, as an adult, to overhear a group of four 11-year-olds looking at the ice surface, "Is that NHL size?" ... "No," the knowitall of the group might reply, "It's bigger," and of course his friends would doubt that an old barn in Kingston would have a rink seven feet wider than those in the NHL.

It something which could only be absorbed by cultivating the habit at an early age, being a fan. You don't live in the world you were born into, though. Plus ça change!

(Thanks to Jason Cormier for the tip.)

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CIS Corner: Dig this, Queen's to host v-ball nationals

This might make Kinger's head explode, but whatthehell: Queen's has been awarded the 2012 CIS men's volleyball championship, eight weeks to the day of the opening of the Queen's Centre.

The opulent new digs (shame on you for doubting our ability to make a volleyball pun) have not been without their controversies. Regardless, it is a pretty big coup for Gaels coach Brenda Willis and AD Leslie Dal Cin. It will be the first time Queen's has hosted a national championship in a winter team sport. Several of their current players, such as outside Joren Zeeman and two Ottawa natives, middle Anthony Pitfield and libero Alex Oneid (who played for Glebe when it won the OFSAA quad-A title in 2007), could potentially still be on the team.

Via the press release:

"The entire Eastern Ontario region has a strong core of avid volleyball followers," said Dal Cin. "Our new venue combined with additional areas of athlete support and general excitement about volleyball in Kingston will make this a memorable event for participants and fans alike."

The Queen's Centre, with 2,000 seats, is also optimal size for a major women's basketball event, just saying. The women's tournament is moving to a 16-team, two-weekend format for this season and next, so if the highers-up opt to stay with that beyond 2011, there would be ample opportunity for Queen's to host a regional.

The construction of the Queen's Centre has had the usual controversies (cost overruns, the decision to scrap an arena and the way some student fees that went to the construction were passed). Kinger has vehemed about it at great length from time to time on Kingston's most-listened-to hour-long sports show, Offsides (which has two editions left).

However, getting a national championship is something new for the university and for Kingston. The region has been on a building booms with arenas; in fact, the three big junior hockey teams, the OHL's Kingston Frontenacs, OJHL's Kingston Kimco Voyaguers and the Junior C Napanee Raiders all play in arenas which are less than five years old. (Kingston Mayor Harvey Rosen said last night that he is confident the Voyageurs will host the RBC Cup in three years ago, so there could be more big stuff going on in K-town in 2012.)

Queen's has the CIS cross-country championships this fall; previously, the only nationals they had hosted were cross-country in '99 and men's soccer back in '91.

(It was almost cold enough that day in '99 for cross-country to count as a winter sport.)

Gee-Gees: Congratulations are in order for Ottawa women's basketball assistant coach Mario Gaetano, who was honoured by the National Capital Secondary Schools Athletic Association for his many years in hoops.

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