BREAKING NEWS: Crisis Counsellors on alert in Capital region; Alfredsson to undergo surgery

The Ottawa Senators season just took a strange turn. Sportsnet is reporting that Ontario's second favourite Swedish hockey player is to undergo surgery.

Bone chips. No word on how long he will be out. It's better now than May, but the Sens will need every point they can get to be sure they are playing in May.

EDIT: They are saying two weeks. So, not bad. But, to paraphrase The Meaning of Life, every point is sacred in today's NHL.

ALLARD: OF ROENICK, RED AND THE RAYZOR

Some things are worth fighting for, some feelings never die. Jean-Pierre Allard isn't asking for another chance for the Ottawa Senators, he just wants to know whyyyyyyy .... there's no easy way out, there's no shortcut to the Stanley Cup.

Reading about how Jeremy Roenick played Game 7 hero once again on Monday only served to remind me of my reaction last September when Sharks GM Doug Wilson took a flyer on the former Flyer.

Of course, I couldn’t resist revisiting my epitaph on MVN.com a few days later in which I alluded to Ray Emery continuing to be a huge bummer should Martin Gerber steal his job.

Which only made me curious as to why I would even bother sending a riposte to venerable Red Fisher when he came to the defence of then-Senators GM John Muckler in June 2007 after he was canned by Eugene Melnyk.

Even before the Senators hit the ice in September 2007 and eventually proved everybody wrong, old gal Edna was warning us all that a hard rain was gonna fall in Ottawa this season.

No one was listening.

Just like hardly any one from the Senators' players, coaches and brass are likely still watching the playoffs right now. Pity, for they could take notes on how to come up with a winning recipe for the next real season.

UP AT 6: CAPITAL IDEA STOPPED AT THE BORDER, PLUS MORE SHENANIGANS

As you were trying to convince T.C. to let you borrow the chopper...

• Eric McErlain offers a window into the brave new world of bloggers and the MSM mixing on the Washington Capitals beat. Read it and weep if you live in Canada, since the teams up here are years away from even considering letting in the great unwashed.
• Praise the lord and pass the NHL draft guide; the Leafs are done. Most lapsed Leafs fans will admit that they were almost back on the bandwagon, but then they decided to keep living their lives.
• Rogers Sportsnet's Dean Brown and Ian Mendes both slipped "shenanigans" into the last night's Sens broadcast, hours after it appeared in the Ottawa Sun's sports poll. Nicely played, sirs.
  
  
• Senators centre Chris Kelly committed a Freudian slip when he told Sun Media of his ankle injury, "It could (have happened a) week later, which would mean missing the playoffs." He meant start of the playoffs, right, or deep-down in his subconscious, did he figure it will be a short stay for the Sens?
• Resident OHL expert Trevor Stewart's picks are looking pretty good, aside from Brampton over Barrie in five. (Barrie is up 3-1, but will probably blow i.)
• The Lehigh Valley IronPigs (né Ottawa Lynx, 1993-2007) are in a Best Logo Tournament at CNBC. Yes, it would be retty low-down to encourage people still in mourning over the late and lamented Lynx to head over there and vote for the opponent, eh? Perish the thought.
  
  The IronPigs are in the second round against the Clinton LumberKings. Good thing it's a logo contest, not a spelling bee. Voting closes at 9 a.m. today.
• There's a great symmetry to this: Zing Ottawa city councillor Clive Doucet ("We might get the CFL back, but not as soon as 2010 -- Clive Doucet needs more time to polish his special poem for the debate") one week and then open up the Ottawa Sun to see him use a phrase that's very near and dear to describe Mayor Lare. Doucet called the Ottawa Mayor Larry O'Brien's office "a gong show."
  
  Back in the day at the Portage la Prairie Daily Graphic, there was a two-man sports department (names redacted) which took great delight in working "gong show" on to the sports page whenever possible.

Shenanigans ... gong show ... the revolution is gaining traction.

UP AT 6: LIVE AT THE HOSERDOME

As you were getting the car towed out of the lake...

• Holding a pre-game ceremony to raise a banner for winning the conference championship is not the least bit bush-league.
  
  Signed,
  The 1995 Vancouver Canucks
  
  The NHL's back in full swing, which means it's the season for push-the-bile hoser pathos. God love us but Hockey Night in Canada sometimes spurs the question of how any cool people ever come from this country.
  
  Sure, the Senators completed a two-game sweep of the Leafs last night, but that's off-set by the totally trite decision to play U2's Beautiful Day while the banner was being raised. The Senators are far from that only NHL organization that would select a song that would have been totally cliché at a high school commencement five years ago, but they were the only one who did so last night. Next time, find something from Bob Seger's catalog. He's 62 years old and still badass.
  
  Just before that, Ron MacLean was doing his pre-game standup in front of group of kids about 12 and 13 years old, one boy surrounded by a bunch of girls, and said something that sounded like, "We've got Jordan here with his harem," not that any of the kids noticed since they were just so caught up in being on TV. Evidently, Ron MacLean has decided he's bulletproof at the See Bee See and is going to push the envelope this year by saying totally idiosyncratic and borderline inappropriate stuff. Around then we winked out and flipped over to baseball.
• All of that was probably just anger at Martin Gerber for letting in two goals and robbing us of an ingenious parlay that Toronto FC would outscore the Leafs last night. OK, so that bet was never made, but imagine the odds you would have had. (FC won 2-1 and only needed New York to score once into its own net.)
• Those of a certain junior-high mindset who remember the rumours that have dogged NFL QB Jeff Garcia, thanks largely to then-teammate Terrell Owens slurring him, might find this photo kind of amusing. On a larger point, how sad is it for the NHL that the Tampa Bay Lightning are so hard up for star power they have to trot out Garcia, who's played for five teams in five years, to whip the crowd up?
• Friday Night Lights season premiere, 9 p.m. Eastern, tonight.

MUCKLER WILL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME FOR 'MATLOCK' RERUNS... HEY, IT'S ON NOW

It's all happening. Bryan Murray is in and John Muckler is out as the Senators general manager.

Let the speculation, sane and not-so-sane, begin over who will coach the Sennies in 2007-08. Anyone with a M surname can be considered a candidate.

Muckler, quoth James Mirtle (hey, he has a M name, how about him?), "may have just unwillingly retired."

(Mirtle also has a good post up about how it could get really ugly on the ice in Nashville next season if the NHL holds up the sale to Jim Balsillie.

UPDATE: And just like that, the Predators deal their best defenceman Kimmo Timonen and a top six-forward, Scott Hartnell, to the Flyers. In return? The first-round draft choice Nashville gave up in the Peter Forsberg.

Get a guy who can play, for less than you thought you'd pay... SellOffPredators.com.)

NHL'S DRAMA MORE PARODY THAN PARITY

The Wonderful World of Gary Bettman's Great Leap to establish the NFL on skates can chalk up one success.

Success might have to be set off in quotation marks, although an open mind is recommended. This feeling has been percolating for a couple weeks now, perhaps only a resistance to the bombardment of will-they-or-won't-they about the Leafs' playoff lives, which still maintains a EKG reading after last night's 5-2 expiration against the New York Islanders.

There's an element of the whole playoff race that just seems forced. The unbalanced schedule, the point-for-everybody setup with all the overtimes and shootouts, has created the NFL on skates, minus the U.S. television revenues and Pacman Jones.

Where's the clarity sports fans generally prefer? The NHL now has something like the NFL, where late in the season you're regularly subjected to bullflop about how 23 or 24 of the league's 32 teams are still alive for a playoff spot -- yes, even the Arizona Cardinals with a 5-9 record. (This was actually the case a couple years ago.) In football, with the parity scheduling weak teams become, voila, good overnight, but it means no one can really tell the difference between who's bona fide and who isn't worth a damn. Teams lack an identity. Never mind that fans would rather have someone help them figure out who's good and who isn't worth a damn.

There are more good players than there were 20 years ago, which has evened out the talent level everywhere except Chicago (the AHL's Wolves notwithstanding). That's created a kind of parity everyone can live with.

Then there's the other kind of parity, which is a parody. One team, as New York has, gets eight games against the worst team in the league and one of its rivals for a playoff spot gets only four chances to beat up on the Flyers. They don't play the same teams from the other conference, and you can get a point in the standings for playing just well enough to lose -- there's just so much potential for the wrong team to benefit.

The Islanders might still be better than the Leafs and Canadiens. No format, save for a shorter regular season, could override the reality the poor conditioning the Leafs were criticized for under former coach Pat Quinn has risen to the fore lately. Players' aerobic and anaerobic thresholds don't improve overnight.

Don't miss the point, though: The NHL has created a muddle. It's cynical and it does a disservice to the game, since like the NFL, it's a tacit admission that hockey is only interesting when your team still has a shot at winning something -- and we know otherwise. Contrast that with baseball, where a September game between two long-out-of-it teams can still be riveting, since you're watching highly skilled people practise their craft -- powered by something they cannot define -- and that alone create high stakes. (Sorry it that sounded a little too much like the Cake song The Distance.)

The players and coaches on the two teams who are left on the outside looking in after the Islanders' final game vs. the Devils on Sunday afternoon will say the usual Cliches 101 stuff about, "We honestly believe we had the better team," and you know, they might be right. We just won't know; what

So are the Islanders going to win the final Eastern playoff berth and face the Sabres in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, or will it be the Leafs or Canadiens? It's essentially arbitrary. Even for a Leafs follower, it's hard to buy in without feeling a bit like a tool of Gary Bettman, the cable sports networks and Hockey Night in Canada. By extension, if you plan on taking pleasure in seeing the Leafs or Habs go down, you're an even bigger tool.

What the NHL has given us -- and talk about lucking out that it has the historical weight of Leafs-Canadiens -- makes great TV. It just isn't necessarily compelling sport. Sure, it's exciting right now. In a couple years, if this final-week frenzy keeps up with no clarity over who's really a playoff team, it will quickly become tired.

Just like the Leafs in the third period last night.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.