Saturday, March 07, 2009

Snark break ...

Canada-USA on tap...

The cash-poor clowns who own the Tampa Bay Lightning really should get raked over the coals for what they did to Gary Roberts. Their egos wrote cheques they couldn't cash, they overpaid for a 42-year-old hockey player who now gets tossed away like a hardware store flier.
The TSN2/Rogers/Raptors kerfuffle has come out in the wash, essentially. The only reason to follow the Raptors is if you have one of their players in a fantasy league, and that just requires checking the boxscores. To wit, how did Andrea Bargnani manage to only get two rebounds on Friday?

Shane Victorino, the Flyin' Hawaiian, is starting in centre field for Team USA against Canada at the WBC. Has anyone checked to see if his Hawaiian birth certificate is a forgery and he's not eligible for the office?

The Florida State Seminoles football team got four years' NCAA probation. This never would have happened if Bobby Bowden was still alive.

Far be it to say the Kingston Frontenacs are out the race. There is the one to see if the Frontenacs can finish with is many points in two seasons as Belleville or London have in one. Right now, it's London 95, Kingston 93, Belleville 90.

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting:
  • It was all over the blogosphere Friday, but here is the Sports Illustrated article where Tony Mandarich apologizes for lying about his steroid usage.

    It would be a fun, if not lucrative, project to find the the Northwestern Wildcats defender whom Mandarich "drove 20 yards into the end zone before pile driving him into the turf, after which Mandarich stood over the player and shouted, 'Now stay there!' " Northwestern grads do some pretty amazing things, compared to grads of other schools which wear purple and have Western in their name.
  • Truer words never spoken, via Walkoff Walk: "... if you're looking for some intelligent analysis, don't go to Drunk Jays Fans."

2 comments:

Dennis Prouse said...

No question the Lightning ownership situation is a complete Gong Show. That trade they made with the Leafs at the deadline, shipping a bunch of injured guys, is awfully stinky. It sure looks to me like the Leafs agreed to pay those guys for the balance of the year in exchange for a favour later on. The trade really should have been voided by the League.

Having said all that, Gary Roberts' career came to the same end as do the careers of most 42 year old pro athletes - unwanted and on the waiver wire. If you play that long, you guarantee that someone else is going to choose your ending for you. That 10K per game bonus was raised as a stumbling block, but there were plenty of teams out there with the cap space to deal with it. The fact is that no playoff bound team thought he could help them. It sucks, but the end of the line comes for all players, and when it comes it usually isn't pretty.

Navin Vaswani (@eyebleaf) said...

Lightning management is borderline berserk, but that doesn't mean they need to be blasted about Roberts. They made a mistake, and they rid themselves of that mistake. Period.

Roberts should have retired 2 or 3 years ago. The game has passed him by. That's not Tampa's fault.