Fronts: Irritating minds want to know...

Limestone City lily-gilder Doug Springer, chief cook and bottle-washer of the Kingston ice hockey concern, likes to throw around numbers.

It might pique the Frontenacs owner's interest to know that converting the OHL standings to read the way they do in baseball gives a more accurate position of where his team stands.

Battle of Alberta regularly runs baseball standings for the NHL. It eliminates having to talk about "games in hand." The Belleville Bulls are one point ahead of the Brampton Battalion for the top record, but the Battalion, with its three games in hand, have a one-game lead, and so forth:.

1. Brampton: --
2. Belleville: 1
3. Ottawa: 5½
4. Oshawa: 6
5. Niagara: 7
6. Barrie: 7½
7. Sudbury: 8
8. Mississauga: 8
   
9. Peterborough: 8½
10. Kingston: 12½

Springer is on record saying the Frontenacs' goal is to have home-ice advantage in the first round, so the sporting thing is to give him a helpful guide of "whatever it takes" to have a winner. The Frontenacs are already 6½ games behind the Oshawa Generals for that No. 4 seed in the slushpile that is the OHL's Eastern Conference. Well, maybe they can just try to be among that elite 80% of teams who get in the playoffs and call the season a success. Well, they're already 4½ lengths behind 'Sauga for the final playoff berth.

The lads over at Fronts Talk have laid out the remaining schedule, which includes five games against Ottawa, five against Oshawa (granted, John Tavares isn't long for the 'Shwa), four against Belleville and two apiece against division leaders Brampton and London. That's 18 out of the remaining 39 games where you'd have a hard time imagining Kingston winning. They do have four games left against Peterborough and three against Mississauga (two of those are away), but only play Sudbury once, imperiling their ability to make up ground on the Wolves.

Sorry, but when a team has six wins in 29 games after its owner promised big things, it's time for an agonizing reappraisal of the whole situation.

Hey, this is only being written in the spirit of helping.