More Jack Todd foolishness

Should I just create an Automatic Jack Todd Column Generator already and get it over with?

The Montreal Gazette’s sports columnist today declares the NHL dead in the U.S. because he couldn’t find league news in the local media in Louisville, Kentucky on All-Star weekend (ht: Eric via Facebook). A city with a legendary inferiority complex and smoke-and-mirrors claims to be the 16th-largest city in America (try 50th by metro area) ignores a league with no teams playing closer than 3.5 hours away. And for this reason, the NHL needs to abandon the South entirely and, of course, put franchises in Winnipeg and Hamilton, Ontario. (Why not Quebec City, Jack?)

Of course, after the Jets left, Winnipeg built a brand-new arena 3,000 seats short of NHL standard. And the biggest obstacles to Hamilton getting a team are the Toronto Maple Leafs and Buffalo Sabres (who draw a portion of their support from across the Niagara River). But let’s not let that stop us!

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Learning to Share

Big showdown in the hockey blogosphere this week over attendance and non-traditional markets, with Tom Benjamin playing Prince of Darkness against usual foil Chuq von Rospach and dean of hockey bloggers Eric McErlain of Off Wing Opinion.

The battle actually started with Mike Chen, when he pointed out last week that the ebb-and-flow of attendance can be most easily explained by paying attention to the local team’s performance. Tom proceeded to cherry-pick statistics and work from absolute numbers rather than trends to get in as many slams on non-traditional hockey markets as he possibly could in a piece ironically titled Inconvenient Truths, and basically blew off the fact that the bottom end of the attendance figures correlates very closely with the bottom of the standings. Chuq tore him up, and Eric followed by challenging Tom to lay out his vision for a successful hockey league, as opposed to merely complaining about everything wrong (and a lot of things that aren’t) with the NHL.

Tom accepted Wednesday with his proposal for Canadian secession from the NHL. Far better than my initial response of a stream of obscenities, Eric responded with an eloquent appeal to history:

Part of me wishes I could pass Tom’s words onto some of the great Canadians who spent the better part of their professional lives trying to win a foothold for hockey in the United States. I’m talking about men like Lester Patrick and Art Ross. Men who left their homes North of the border and took on the challenge of selling the game in regions that had little or no history with it. I wonder what they’d think about Tom’s strategy. […] Then again, men like those loved the game so much, that they were committed to growing it no matter what the cost.

I’ve always found it curious that people like Tom, who claim to love hockey, choose to express it by aiming to strangle the game’s growth. Those guys Eric talks about — they’re heroes of the game because they succeeded in importing hockey to what were once foreign markets and now are considered core to the sport. (Even Tom acknowledges that he’d want those franchises back, once the American remnant league failed and they came bowing in supplication to their Canadian masters.)

Game 2 and Hockey Cultures

Taking a quick run around the blogs in response to Eric’s excellent-as-always roundup on Game 2 — the first game I’ve gotten to watch since Game 5 in the Eastern finals. Something about other priorities.

That was a good, old-fashioned beating the Canes handed to Edmonton last night, and the Caniac blog crew is mostly keeping their heads about them. I have one slight disagreement to make with Cason out in Tucson (does that rhyme?) over Laraque’s third period and the Canes’ non-reaction, though.

Seriously, that crap out of Dredy Locks Laraque was absolute thuggery. He takes a run at Wallin’s legs then boards Andrew Ladd when the boy’s head is down. And the Canes take it?

First problem: my initial reaction, like his, was that Laraque was out on an intent-to-injure mission. I have a small suspicion, though, that at 6’3”/240 with a pronounced tendency for mayhem, if he had really wanted to cause an injury, he’d have been successful. Furthermore, the Canes handled it exactly right. In the first round, Calgary began to lose control against Anaheim when Jarome Iginla let François Beauchemin goad him into a scrap. Any of our players on the ice are worth more than that goon. When you’re about to go up 2 games to none in the Stanley Cup Finals, you can let your opposition rage up to anything short of death or dismemberment. You’ve made your point already — it’s hanging above center ice in lights. Read More »

More Randomness!

The Fill BTN With Random Stuff ‘06 campaign continues this week, as we again wander North America through the text of a blog.

Up in the True North, Canadians elected a Conservative government for the first time since 1993 on Monday. Prime Minister-designate Stephen Harper immediately provoked a minor spat with the USA by announcing plans to outfit three new naval icebreakers for Arctic duty; Canada claims sovereignty between the lines of longitude of its northernmost points of land all the way up to the North Pole, a claim generally ignored by everyone else on the planet; the Arctic was a submariners’ playground throughout the Cold War, and various countries have continued to sail below the icepack since. For my money, this is, as usual for Canada, a domestic political play thinly disguised as a foreign-policy dispute. Firing off a few small-caliber shots at America never hurt a Canadian pol, and Harper is in a tenuous position as the leader of a minority right-wing government that will have to work point-by-point coalitions with three opposing left-wing parties: the traditional rival Liberals who they forced out of power, the wacky near-socialist New Democrats, and the separatist Bloc Québécois. The Liberals in particular knocked Harper off in 2004 by trying to paint him as “George W. Bush-lite”, and cut into a once-big Tory lead this year the same way; being mildly irritating to us before he even gets into office is probably sound strategy. It’s vaguely disappointing, but Harper merits withholding judgement for now; if he can stay away from the spite that characterized Canadian Liberal governments’ transborder relations, he’ll be a major upgrade for both countries.

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Seattle/Vancouver Scorecard

Actual content (like a football preview) coming very soon. Meanwhile…

• United standby rules 1, originally-scheduled 12:18 AM PDT (3:18 AM EDT) arrivals SEA 0
• Evergreen-flanked highways 405, concrete jungles 5
• Canadian Olympic coverage 99, US coverage 5
• Canadian Olympic medals 7, US medals 76 (at last count)
• Canadian border at White Rock, BC 60, US border at Blaine, WA 10 (low score wins here)
• Pacific Northwest/Lower Mainland rain 2, Vancouver touring plans 1
• Modern technology 1, freshman BT bus schedule confusion 0 (press one button and say my name in Blacksburg, and within seconds I’m talking to you from a fish-and-chips shop in west Vancouver, British Columbia)
• Josh’s Canadian coin collection 7, circulation 1 (still couldn’t find the St. Croix quarter…)
• Garmin iQue several million, geographic confusion 0
• Seattle high 68°, Richmond high 85° (again, low score wins)
• Josh’s Denver-mint state quarter collection 2, circulation 20 (yeah, that didn’t work so well)
• New states on the return trip 1, delays :45
• Said state’s sales tax at SFO about 9%, Josh’s wallet 0
• Hotwiring a Dulles hotel $83, 1:20 AM IAD-Richmond drives 0