(Late) morning with Mr. Canoehead...

Stuff that should bounce off you like raisins off an Oldsmobile ...

Wondering how new Montreal Canadiens coach Jacques Martin will handle the insatiable Quebec media after being in a southern U.S. city and big-small-town Ottawa for so many years. Roy Mlakar won't be there to ride herd.

Hockey fans who complain "superstars get all the calls" in the NBA when the NHL did not suspend Penguins star Evgeni Malkin for starting a fight in the last five minutes of the game. Jeff Blair's suggested title for Colin Campbell: "NHL Vice-President and Director Of Figuring Out What’s A Cheap Shot." The greasiness was compounded by the fact the NHL announced Malkin was off the hook via a press release at 11:48 p.m. (literally, the 11th hour.)

Michael Vick being a contentious issue, while there is a barely a peep about current Atlanta Falcons player Quinn Ojinnaka being allowed to play in the NFL after he allegedly "spat at his bride, tossed her down some stairs and then threw her out of their Georgia home in the wee hours."

What Vick did was carried out over a number of years, but it's not as if striking a woman is completely random. Take it away, Bud Poliquin:

"What Vick, Ojinnaka's former Atlanta teammate, did to become a pariah will forever and properly be considered heinous. Training dogs to fight, and then executing those who don't win, is certainly reprehensible . . . and Vick has the shattered life, career and finances to prove it.

"But at the end of the day, shouldn't battering people be more prominently placed in the great photo of disgraces than any act of abusing (and, yes, killing) dogs? And isn't battering people made even more abominable when the alleged batterer is a 6-foot-5, 305-pound man, and the identified batteree is a woman of significantly less height and ballast?

The knowledge that HBO, which passed on Mad Men and Breaking Bad, has given Joe Buck his own show.



Conan O'Brien debuting tonight as host of The Tonight Show. The commitment NBC has made to Conan is truly amazing. They've given him the best lead-in that petty jealousies can buy.

(Lord, please forgive anyone whose reaction to seeing Jay Leno sign off last Friday night was to scream at the TV, "The show should have gone to Letterman in the first place!" The line of succession should have gone Carson-Letterman-Conan. It's a pain that never ends.

It's a sin to say that about Leno. Like Stewie Griffin once said, the fact is the man is out there every night with fresh material and he's charming.

Last but not least, having to be the guy who makes this joke: "Kingston Frontenacs defenceman Erik Gudbranson was taken in the Continental Hockey League draft today. Playing in Russia would be an easy switch since he's already in junior hockey's Siberia." So much for trying to quit making Frontenacs jokes.

(Kingston's own Taylor Hall was taken too. Three OHLers were taken and two had Kingston ties. Crazy.)

Snark break ...

It has been a sweet start for the Jays (Jesse Litsch's tightness in his right forearm notwithstanding). Try to ignore that the Baltimore Orioles had the best record in the American League nine days into last season, or that the Jays had an 11-game win streak last season vs. AL Central teams, which is all they've seen so far.

(Tonight's starting pitching matchup must be Debbie Downer vs. Buzz Killington.)

C'est la vie for the CBC: "For weeks, it will be the all-hockey channel. After that, it's all over for the CBC of the last two seasons." (John Doyle, Globe & Mail.)

Some would like to see Toronto get a second NHL team. You know the old joke: They should start with one.

The Calgary police are warning people to watch it on the Red Mile while the Flames are in the playoffs. Edmonton would like to have that problem.

Roy Mlakar would never toot his own horn, but an awful lot of media folk are going out of their way to say he should remain as Ottawa Senators president. It just seems curious. The Senators radio contract is up for renewal, which is presumably a rubber-stamp for The Team 1200, since who else is going to do it?

It was amusing how almost no one paid attention to the women's hockey worlds all last week. Then Canada got gobsmacked in the gold-medal game, which could have been seen coming.

Snark break ... drop the hockey shtick and walk away, Renée

The Florida Panthers are rolling with Pete DeBoer and Jim Hulton behind the bench. Meantime, in the 613, the teams which respectively could be employing them, the Ottawa Senators and Kingston Frontenacs, are third-last and dead last in the NHL and OHL, respectively. (It's like their owners, Eugene Melnyk and the Fronts' Doug Springer, are on the same Ork cloud.)

One suggested nickname for the Senators' owner: The Eunibomber.

One sportswriting trope which must be allowed to die is segueing into a feature on a Canadian athlete by referencing his hockey experience. It was cute once and now it's just tired, like Renée Zellweger's acting shtick.

Not to nitpick, but the "grand total of the Canadian content in Super Bowl XLIII is wrapped up in the well-travelled right leg of Pittsburgh punter Mitch Berger?" The Cardinals' Sean Morey makes his off-season home in Toronto with his spouse, who played hockey for the Brampton Thunder (she was known as Cara Gardner) before "she broke her femur in a snowmobile accident and decided to have a family." (New York Times.) It doesn't get any more Canadian.

If MMA training can help the Minnesota Vikings' Tarvaris Jackson improve as a quarterback, then it should be legalized in Ontario.

Two words which can never again appear together in print: "Star punter."

A Yale student was taken aback that author Buzz Bissinger "swore often" during a talk he gave there recently. It pisses the shit out of me to know some people are so well-adjusted that they don't follow sports obsessively, thus missing out on Bissinger-Leitch.

TSN's Gord Miller and Pierre McGuire are great on most nights and McGuire's anti-fighting stance is admirable, but then there's the times when, no doubt by some producer's edict, they have to jazz up a mid-season game, like the Panthers' pounding of the Habs.

The low boiling point was reached somewhere between McGuire describing a play as "fantastically good" (forgetting Rick Reilly's ASS rule, Adjectives Sorta Suck), praising a referee for having the "courage" to award penalty shot after a (uh, he made the correct call, and it favoured the home team) and Miller saying, "These are not your father's Florida Panthers," and repeating it during the next intermission.

Of course they aren't your father's Florida Panthers. When my pops was the age I am today, it was 1984. The Panthers did not exist.

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting

• An online sportsbook had to close betting on Bruce Springsteen's setlist for the Super Bowl halftime show.
  
• Argos coach Bart Andrus' son, Travis Andrus, has committed to play wide receiver for the Montana Grizzlies, who are coincidentally Kinger's favourite Football Championship Subdivision team as of this morning.
• The XMp3 radio got another solid review, this one from Sun Media. Incidentally, XM channel 27 (The Bridge) is pretty sweet.
• Charlie Murphy (the funnier Murphy brother) is going to publish an autobiography later this year.
  

Please tune in to hear Kinger's sports show, Offsides, today at 4 p.m. on CFRC 101.9 FM and cfrc.ca elsewhere. The campus radio station is in the middle of a funding drive. Don't make them have to send in the muscle. Kinger hates it when he gets his knuckles all lined up for nothing.

Two minutes for tippling; the loud and the plowed

Gold, frankincense and mirth.

Some Senators-centric sites have found succor in being played for suckers by creating a series of parody ads entitled "A Farce United," but there's also a Fire Hartsburg website, complete with a petition. Sources say the latter is the brainchild of one of the members of Great Scott, Ottawa's foremost AC/DC tribute band.

It's implied that there might have been some tippling involved among the beautiful minds behind Scarlett Ice, The Universal Cynic, Five for Smiting, Sens at Land's End, and Hockey Schlock, so show them support and tell them, in the words of Jack Black's character in High Fidelity, "Relax, it's gonna be OK." Whatever people need to feel better, eh.

No one knows this better than a Leafs fan.

Sennies, Santa and Sour Grapes: Out there, people are talking

It is good to pass along a couple alternative viewpoints on a day when Eugene Melnyk is promising the Senators will be a top-four team in the Eastern Conference and Don Cherry's war on dressing down continues unabated.

The biggest, of course, is that Erin Nicks, perhaps as an über-obscure homage to early 1990s Saturday Night Live sketches, has written the ultimate kiss-off post over at The Universal Cynic.

The OSHC can continue to lurk around here all they want, but they should know they're wasting their time. It's one thing to suck; it's quite another to put people to sleep in the process. We all know how much the Sens "hate it" when fans and the media pile on. Be very careful what you wish for, ladies. Let's see what happens when observers finally throw in the towel, stop caring and move on to other interests. Check the falling numbers on the attendance. Listen to the frustration and hopelessness of the fans on the post-game show. News flash, Mensas: You're losing them. You're losing your fans in a fairweather town, and you're too damn proud to admit that this time, you f*cked up huge. Bravo.

On the Melnyk front, Puck Daddy has a good summation of the Senators' sputtering season: "Can the Senators really be expected to be contenders with okay goaltending and zero secondary scoring?"

Meantime, Ray Emery was on the FAN 590 talking about his experiences playing in Russia. Why couldn't The Team 1200 score an interview with him?

Meantime, our man Jean-Pierre Allard is taking on a couple of issues revolving around men in loud, red suits. He's got a letter to the editor in the Toronto Star suggesting Cherry be appointed the Senators' fashion consultant, and meantime, he's suggesting a Christmases Future should come with fewer gifts.

In other words, it's just getting good in Hockey Country. It's a helluva toboggan ride.

Related:
Dreamy optimism meets harsh reality in embarrassing Ottawa (Sean Leahy, Puck Daddy)

Forget about your Sens, give the audience a grin

There is an upside to Jeffrey Simpson's takedown of the Ottawa Senators in this morning's Globe & Mail.

The Senators rate being ripped in Canada's National Newspaper. Do not push back against this, Sens fans. Do not do as some doofleberries did in the comments section, playing shoot-the-messenger over Mr. Simpson writing that the team's "collapse is the biggest untold story in Canadian hockey ... the culmination of a series of dubious or bad management decisions, not one of which caused the plunge but, taken together, rotted the team."

(Untold story? Mr. Simpson, you have evidently not read Jean-Pierre Allard's invaluable contributions to this site. Speaking as a fellow Queen's Journal alumnus, that hurts deeply, sir.)

This is your just desserts. Many of you in Hockey Country have kvetched for years that the Toronto media didn't give your precious team its due, even when it was going to the Stanley Cup final in 2007. It's taken 18 months and a slide to the middle of the Eastern Conference, but attention is often overdue in coming, c'est la vie.

Point being, try to see the good in the fact that The Globe believed the entire country needed to hear that the Senators, at the quarter-pole in the NHL schedule, are on pace for 74 points, which hasn't been good enough to make the playoffs since the days of the old Campbell Conference. Typically, a dismal hockey team's plight only gets national play if it is the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Senators are established enough to get blowback.

This is a positive, really, so don't lose the lesson. If life in Hockey Country seems jolly rotten, there's something you've forgotten, and that's to smile and laugh and dance and sing, like the way Leafs fans have been known to after the team wins a first-round playoff series. Leafs fans have read a bajillion bits of bombast all over the years, and really, it's slides off champagne off an Anaheim Duck's cheeks back in June 2007. It's called being bulletproof.

So please, let Mr. Simpson have his moment. There is no hay to be made trying to equivocate and wondering what is the difference between someone who's not normally on the hockey beat suggesting Pierre McGuire or Steve Yzerman as a possible Senators GM and the same suggestion coming from some ass-talker with a blog. Try not to get hung up on questions about whether Sens-carving is already dated, whether someone who is on a minor beat such as Canadian federal politics (face the facts, Jeff) should be trusted to write about hockey, since people actually care about hockey. Granted, going from Parliament Hill to Scotiabank Place is an easy switch, since the only thing that moves slower than the wheels of government is Jason Smith.

This is a glorious day, Sens fans. This is a chance to learn that as a hockey fan, you come from nothing, you go back to nothing, what have you lost? Nothing!

You wanted the rest of the Canada to care about your team's ups and downs almost as much as you wanted a Stanley Cup parade down Bank St. Well, you know what they say about being careful what you wish for ... everyone is now supposed to care. So it goes.

(And when is Jeff Simpson going to write that column about the Raptors? Thanks to The Tao of Stieb for the link. By the way, Coming Down The Pipe! has a good primer on Team Sweden for the World Junior Hockey Championship, which start one month from Wednesday. )

Related:
A capital collapse; With the Senators swooning, can major changes and a new GM such as Yzerman be far behind? (Jeffrey Simpson, The Globe & Mail)

Allard: Time for a Brian Murray Accountability Act

From time to time, Jean-Pierre Allard will sit down at the keyboard, open a vein and bleed, just to let the prodigal plodders who make up the Ottawa Senators know that he, along with a lot of angry fans, are pretty displeased.

There is big, big trouble brewing for the once proud and happy family known as the Ottawa Senators. All kinds of new faces, (even an as yet-to-be-online new black jersey despite it being part of a sales pitch) can’t mask the obvious that this is still, alas, the S.O. S. (Same Old Senators), a gang that cannot play 60 minutes of hockey, game in and game out.

To a tee, they all talk a great game but melt down in the heat of the ice. Shall we baptize them the Ottawa Bullchippers. The media, which has long had a vexing habit of issuing free passes to all the usual culprits, so fearful of upsetting the suits at Scotiabank Place, most notably Mr. RAM (team president Roy A. Mlakar) and losing their perks in the process, are starting to notice.

Only this week have we begun to hear criticism being handed out to players such as the "Little Three" (as Red Fisher referred to Daniel Alfredsson, Jason Spezza and Dany Heatley in the Montreal Gazette after the great Canadiens crunching) and the overpaid, underachieving Mike Fisher, Chris Phillips and Antoine Vermette, just to round out the core of what is fast becoming a bad apple. They are even questioning first-year coach Craig Hartsburg's strategy and line combinations.

Any day now, someone not named Allard will have the fortitude of questioning Alfie's leadership, especially in these turbulent times where his team is now a mere shadow of the very good ones of just a few years ago. Seriously people, what is our brother Daniel saying, or not saying, that the led the sucks to give us that disgusting effort against the 30th seed Islanders last Thursday?

Yet, inexplicably, no one in the print media has thought of criticizing Bryan Murray's track record as GM, or his choice to recycle a coach (as this site's Duane Rollins said five months ago). What is this nonsense? Another home town discount?

Maybe I have it wrong and it's Murray, not the players, who’s been around this town far too long. Because, just like government, mediocrity quickly sets when you operate under a climate of patronage and senate-like appointments, which is exactly what the Pontiac Professor has done since he replaced John Muckler as GM in June 2007. I am not sure where his mind was when he offered those long-term, no-trade or no-movement clause contracts to Phillips, Alfie, Fisher, Heatley and Spezza but he will rue the day.

OIt might also help if Murray had refrained from losing stars to free agency for zilch or getting players one or two years too late. The current team is thus left with an aging and lead-footed defensive corps, two No. 2 goalies and an alarming lack of offensive punch past the Pizza Line. That is, whenever Hartsburg sees fit to give them more than the obligatory power play duty.

I offer you Exhibit A, the players that have left Ottawa under Bryan Murray’s tenure and Exhibit B, the players he brought over during the same time span. You can't excuse all of this to the salary cap.

• Exhibit A: Tom Preissing, Brian Pothier, Peter Schaefer, Patrick Eaves, Ray Emery, Wade Redden, Andrej Meszaros
• Exhibit B: Luke Richardson, Shean Donovan, Jason Smith, Joe Corvo, Alexandre Picard, Filip Kuba, Jesse Winchester, Jarkko Ruutu, Alex Auld

With every loss that the Senators, a very banal 34-37-10 ever since they conjured up vivid memories of the 1976-77 Canadiens by starting last season 15-2-0, are built with the pre-lockout dump-and-chase play in mind much more than the game that we have enjoyed over the last three years.

Unless Hartsburg, already on his third NHL stint and who was hired with a very clear mandate of making the team more accountable but has failed miserably thus far, can miraculously turn around this dysfunctional bunch, and fast might I add, Craig’s List Of Heartless Burgers will likely miss the playoffs this year. No one is holding their breath on that one though. Why? Maybe because his personality and image remind us much more of Rick Bowness than Mike Keenan. Or Pat Quinn and John Tortorella, all coaches who will never be accused of being yes-men.

While Ottawa missing this year's dance wouldn’t be catastrophic, and in fact may be conducive to those long-awaited changes that many observers have been clamoring for, I am not sure this team could afford a long and dry spell.

Hence more reasons for owner Eugene Melnyk to grasp the urgency of the situation and clean house immediately. There are no longer any valid reasons to wait, especially since GM Brian Burke is currently available and will undoubtedly be scooped up by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the next week.

I hear that Mlakar and Burke are old buddies. Why then, it’s quite simple. Move Murray up to become the Mighty SOPO's full-time aide-de-camp and bring in Burke to be GM with carte blanche to do as he pleases which, would include, getting a kick-ass coach and firing the entire marketing crew, among other things.

So it is Eugene's move. Whether Gene Gene The Dancing Around The Obvious Machine acts with the blinding speed of Alexander Ovechkin going to the net or of Jason Spezza back-checking will go a long way in determining the future of this suddenly very fragile franchise.

Previous:
Captain Alfie's toughest task is staying blameless (Oct. 21)

Allard: Captain Alfie's toughest task is staying blameless

From time to time during hockey season Jean-Pierre Allard will favour us with his unique take on Ottawa pro sports, namely the Sennies ... it's early yet, but he already has some concerns about the Ottawa professional hockey concern, and he has truth and fun on his side.

Only five games in and it is already panic time for the Ottawa Senators and their fans. A new coach, five new players and a new so-called attitude can’t mask the obvious about the Senators. It is not yet a gang who can manage to play 60 minutes of hockey, game in and game out. Maybe these dudes have been hanging around way too long in this government town.

Things could change in a hurry if all the players buy into Craig Hartsburg's message at yesterday’s practice in which he bluntly declared they have to start competing harder because the reality is that they’re not more talented than any other opponent. No word yet if the media members choked on their pompoms upon being informed of this shocking revelation. Nor was there any advanced intelligence of Jason Spezza still smiling like he’s already won three Stanley Cups upon being unceremoniously advised by his coach that he was being demoted to second-line duty on Craig's List.

Still, these players have been called on the carpet previously. Why would this year be any different?

Sooner or later, the finger must be pointed at Captain Daniel Alfredsson, seeing that virtually everyone else but The Mighty SOPO and SpareMeCat have been blamed since 1999.

No one will ever question his tremendous hockey skills, offensive consistency, durability and high level of devotion. One must wonders how truly inspiring he is in the dressing room. Consider.

He has bounced back miraculously from injuries and surgeries, yet he cannot get his Spezza to stop playing like a selfish little bantam, to make the switch Steve Yzerman made midway through his career. He has scored huge playoff goals, yet he could not get the team to come out and play 20 minutes of spirited hockey in their most crucial period in the Cup finals two years ago. He leads an exemplary life as a goodwill ambassador for the team, yet he failed to display any noteworthy influence in last season's self-destruction. He has a perennial all-star, yet he’s made curious on-ice decisions over the years (aping Mats Sundin, shooting the puck at Scott Niedermayer, etc).

In Ottawa’s only other run at a Cup in 2003, he was a non-factor in the Eastern Conference finalswhen his team fell one late lousy goal short against the Devils.

Ever wonder why you seldom read quotes from Alfredsson in the Ottawa papers? And when you do, they’re usually of the one-line, terse variety, not to mention never earth-shattering. So like, if he can’t feed the paparazzi, then how can he strike some nerves in the room? It’s only been four years now that our friend John Muckler alluded to the need for Ottawa to fix their dressing room.

Daniel Alfredsson is a great hockey player but I’m not entirely sure he is the right man to captain the Ottawa Senators, especially in these turbulent times.

So let’s see if I got this straight.

In addition to having a questionable captain, the Sens have never had a No. 1 goalie in their 15-year reincarnation, nor have they benefited from a head coach with a killer instinct. They’ve also never had a true quarterback on the power play since the early days.

They ran their best player ever out of town by painting him as a villain and never tried to sign the defenceman that is the most feared to play against in the NHL because they preferred overpaying Wade Redden, the big softie, for two years and getting then get zilch in return when he became a free agent this summer. They have another defenseman who is still looking for his first NHL fight and a third-line centre who is getting paid $6 million this year and who shows up at training camp and quickly pulls his groin.

They have also turned their backs on recruiting francophone players when everyone else, even the Ducks, know the great majority of these players have what it takes to win a championship. They don’t even have enough smarts to get the type of solid plumber that every other team seems to have or an enforcer that can actually skate and score the odd goal.

And people still wonder why they haven’t won a Cup. Meanwhile, the suits keep on smiling while it seems like some of the media know it's better to serve up more Mlakarery®, lest they get treated like young David Berry from Covered In Oil.

I predicted the Sens would miss the playoffs before the season started. After seeing a few periods here and there in their first five games, I’m even more convinced.

To see how hard a task it will be for Ottawa to be in the final 8 come April, let’s look at the teams that are sure bets to make it in the East and work our way towards the maybes, shall we?

SURE BETS (in order of the highest chance)

1. Penguins
2. Canadiens
3. Capitals
4. Flyers
5. Bruins
6. Rangers
7. Devils
8. Sabres

MAYBES (same order)

1. Hurricanes
2. Senators
3. Panthers
4. Lightning
5. Thrashers
6. Islanders
7. Maple Leafs (Neate: "Tank for Tavares!" ... "Let it go to hell for Hall!")

Scary, ugh? I just can’t imagine the Hurricanes missing the playoffs a second season in a row. Or the Lightning for that matter. One of these years, the Panthers will start their annual drive in December instead of March and it may well be this year. Atlanta cannot be discounted as long as it has Ilya Kovalchuk and a Southeast Division schedule.

So which of the above eight teams will Ottawa have to beat in order to slip in the backdoor? Stay tuned, but don’t mortgage the house on getting playoff tickets.

(Editor's note: At least in Ottawa, you only have mortage your hourse for playoff tickets -- in Toronto, you have to do it in the regular season.)

Jean-Pierre Allard
Ottawa, Ontario
October 21, 2008

Nothing's the matter with Alfie, thanks to Stockholm Syndrome

Over at The Universal Cynic, Erin Nicks is getting a lot of mileage out of mocking the Senators' latest promo.

This might be the symptom of having built up a tolerance over time for the Mlakarery® that emanates out of the mothership set down in the middle of a former cornfield in Kanata ... but it didn't seem that weak. Not having a francophone player such as Antoine Vermette on the French-language version of the promo when you're a team in a bilingual city, along using that cringeworthy A Force United slogan, that's bush-league.

To build on a point once made by Sun Media writer Chris Stevenson, the Sens Army slogan is self-serving. For pity's sake, this is a franchise owned by a man, Eugene Melnyk, who lives in Barbados so he doesn't have to pay personal income taxes that actually support our troops.

Hey, at least the Sennies are sponsoring the the city's team in the Canadian Women's Hockey League. They did more for the women's game with that one move than the NHL has done in 15 years.