Friday, July 04, 2008

Professional Appreciator: Jaromir Jagr

Talk among yourselves about how Jaromir Jagr will be remembered now that he's headed to the Russian Superleague for $35 million across the next three seasons. (How's he going to fit that money belt under his hockey pants?)

Jagr might go down as hockey answer's to Bob McAdoo, the superb talent who dominated the league when it was at its worst. His peak seasons came in an era when the NHL was so bogged down by trapping and overexpansion that you could win the scoring title with 102 points, as he did one season. That's a stopper when it comes to having fond memories of him, to say nothing of the mullet. Throw in the mercenary attitude that he projected, some good old-fashioned xenophobia and the puckheads' general reluctant to give full value to what players do outside the NHL, unless it's for Team Canada (it still boggles the mind that anyone would question putting Igor Larionov in the Hockey Hall of Fame when he was one of the best forwards in the game for a decade), and Jagr probably won't be remembered too well.

He was great, though, when he felt like it. Puck Daddy has a Jagr post up already, by the way. 

At some point we will start having polls on Out of Left Field. It wasn't viable before since the low voter turnout would have just been embarrassing (hey, it hasn't stopped Dalton McGuinty). since polls should be used to decide everything. What's right is always popular, no matter what a sympathetic adult figure might have said back in high school.

(Bob McAdoo? Two Buffalo Braves references in one week?)

2 comments:

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

that was a low blow against my boy Dalton.............i'll let it slide, this time.

sager said...

Ah, McGuinty is just all right by me, next time we'll zing Stephen Harper.

It's all in the name of getting Garth Turner to write a blog calling us losers!