The Two-Line Pass

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Brett Favre in action.

Weren’t disgusted enough with the hideous logo, awful color scheme or terrible name? Here’s another reason Anaheim’s new minor league franchise, the Iowa Chops, sucks: it is not above cheap gimmicks.

Hoping to capitalize on all that ESPN furor over whether or not Brett Favre will return to the NFL, the geniuses in Des Moines decided it would be hysterical to offer him a contract! Haw haw haw, get it?

Boy I can just picture the conversations going on in Iowa right now.

“Hey dad, did you see that new hockey team offered Brett Favre a contract?”
“I sure did son! Do you think we should get season tickets?”
“Will Brett Favre actually play for the team?”
“No.”
“Then why would we?”

Yeah, it might get your team’s name on the news, or even Pardon the Interruption, but it’s stupid, cheap publicity stunts like this that make people dislike minor league sports. People will go to hockey games because they like hockey, not because the team offered Brett Favre, Manute Bol, or Jesus Christ a contract.

Favre and the Iowa Chops do have something in common.  They both have received a large amount of publicity the past couple weeks, but for completely different reasons.

Here’s another thing they have in common: Of all that publicity they got, none of it has been good.

“We can offer him plenty of bone-crushing hits, read-and-react plays, and thousands of fans cheering for him, so what’s not to like about that?” said Nitzel.

I legitimately don’t like this Steve Nitzel guy. He seems like a wiener (LOL MEAT PRODUCTS GET IT).

How about this: Brett Favre doesn’t like getting hit and the “thousands” of fans cheering for him would be, at best, 10 percent of what he’s used to.

The Iowa Chops announced their new team name over two weeks ago and have still been receiving a wide amount of publicity regarding the announcement.  Fans, media and the hockey community still are a buzz about the new name, and the team has struggled to keep up with demands for the new Iowa Chops merchandise.

I find that last part nearly impossible to believe, except for people who love camp value. The reason people are “a buzz” (sic) about the name is because it’s dreadful.

Please, Iowa Chops, for the sake of the sport, stop being a hockey franchise.

Dan Carcillo is a monster

Reason No. 163 why Dan Carcillo rules: he sat down with NBC Sports and gave tips to help players be a good NHL middleweight pugilist.

Carcillo had 324 penalty minutes last year (three hundred twenty-four!) in just 56 games despite rarely being the biggest or strongest guy on the ice. Being a total lunatic obviously helps him a lot.

1. You have to want to do it
Unless you’re 6-8, 250 pounds, you should never let a coach force you to fight. I’m a pretty mellow guy off the ice; a lot of people who get to know me say I’m totally different than the guy they see at the arena. But I’ll tell you something my coach, Wayne Gretzky, and my teammates already know: I like to fight.

He sure does. He got into 19 scraps last year, seventh most in the league, against some pretty tough dudes (Jared Boll, Darcy Tucker, Darcy Hordichuk, Dave Clarkson, Raitis Ivanans, etc.) and he even got that sissy Corey Perry to go. And not only does he like to fight, he’s good at it. According to HockeyFights.com, he went 10-5-4 last year.

2. Sometimes, though, discretion really is the better part of valor
I fought Raitis Ivanans in L.A. even though I really didn’t want to. I’d scored a nice goal and was kind of revved up and skating around being an idiot. … We traded punches, he hit me on the forehead and I went down. It was quick, but it was one of the worst beatings I’ve taken in hockey.

Yeah, Carcillo got rocked, but he did open Ivanans up.

3. Even a bleeder has to have thick skin
I know hockey fights supposedly are about showing up — not who wins and who loses — but when you get beat up, it’s pretty tough to swallow.

Watch that Ivanans fight again and try not to feel embarrassed for Danny.

4. Make the guys who really deserve it pay when you have the chance
I had a lot of fun beating up Vancouver’s Alex Burrows this season in Phoenix. He’s just a little rat; he goes around starting trouble but doesn’t back up what he does on the ice with his fists too often. … It was kind of like a caveman beating; he was on his knees and I was whaling away.

Carcillo’s right about two things here: Burrows is a punk and he got his lunch handed to him.

5. Just throw ‘em
Everybody fights differently — and most of it is instinct anyway — but the best middleweights try to grab the center of the other guy’s jersey and just throw and throw.

Watching any Dan Carcillo fight, you can see this is his strategy. He just gets a handful of shirt and rains bombs.

6. But work the body, too
I mean your own body. Summers are tough; everyone assumes we just play golf, but that’s nuts. I took three weeks off after the season ended and then I was back in the gym training, with special focus on my legs and my core.

Apparently the punching alone keeps his arms in shape.

The rest aren’t great, except for the last one, which is an important thing to remember for fighters at all levels.

10. For fighters of all sizes …
Learn where competitiveness ends and chaos begins. I didn’t set out to have 324 penalty minutes. There were too many major penalties and game misconducts in there. I crossed that fine line too often, and I guess I’m still learning where it is. In Nashville, I lost the fight to Hordichuk — my first loss all year — and I got really pissed off and pretty much just lost it. I pushed a linesman, got a 10-minute misconduct and a game misconduct. Wayne got ticked off at me and sent me down to the minors for a week. You talk about a wakeup call. Why would anyone want to mess with his own career like that?

Personally, I watch enough Coyotes games to see that Carcillo has all the raw talent in the world to pop in 30 and still get 250+ penalty minutes. He’s the kind of guy that can turn heads with his hands, be they soft or clenched into fists.

This is pretty cool

For those Sabres fans yearning to relive the glory days of the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, which shut down in 1996, it turns out all you need is a crowbar and the cover of night.

Last fall, three guys had the bright idea to break into the Aud and take a bunch of pictures, and what they found was pretty awesome. Nearly everything was intact, from board advertisements with old corporate logos (who remembers the Tostitos Cowboy?) to hand-done boards showing the team scoring race through 63 games. Steve Nichol had 14 goals and 32 points in 55 that year.

Want to know how long it’s been since 1996? A large beer was $4.25! You can still get your tickets to that Hartford game on April 4, too.

Go ahead and click through all the pictures. They’re really awesome.

Take your $2.76 million and beat it.

With yesterday’s signing of Dennis Wideman to a four-year deal that will pay him $3.875 million per, this was only a matter of time.

The Bruins are one step closer to, at long last, buying out Glen Murray.

The Bruins have placed Glen Murray on unconditional waivers, the first step of the buyout process.

Finally.

Murray has been a $4 million anchor almost from the moment he signed his deal nearly three years ago. For that low, low price, Murray has scored just 69 goals in 186 games over the past three seasons, all while not playing defense and being too slow to keep up with just about everyone. That’s down from 111 goals over the previous three seasons with Joe Thornton running Murray’s pivot.

Despite what should have been Murray’s leadership, the Bruins made the playoffs just once since he signed that contract (not entirely his fault, but the point remains), and when they did make the playoffs this year, he scored exactly 0 points in seven games.

The move will trim Murray’s cap hit from $4 million this year to just $1.383 over the next two. A more prudent move Peter Chiarelli could not have made.

I know fans are all atwitter in the Hub of Hockey for now, but beware. Michael Ryder at the same price might end up looking just as bad.

"I don't know what's worse, these shirts or our chances of ever winning a Stanley Cup again"

(Ed. note: A few days ago, I posted a story about Rick DePietro meeting some pro wrestlers and made a few jokes about how bad the Islanders are. This did not sit well with Island residents.

Said IaM Polynomial C of Islander Mania, the official message board of the New York Islanders:

Whoever that guy is, he obviously is full of ****. Probably a Rags fan or just somebody who REALLY hates the Isles.

Neither in fact, I just go for easy targets because I’m lazy. Whatever the indignities hurled my way — being called a Ranger fan! — it appears that trashing the Islanders will get my hitcount up, so here we go again.)

For Islander fans, no news should probably be considered good news.

I’m no expert, but if Sports Illustrated does a 27-page photo essay on your team, you don’t want the following words in its opening paragraph: “Wallowing in mediocrity,” “almost comical ineptitude,” “14 losing seasons.”

But that’s how SI’s spread on the Isles started. And it really only got worse from there.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Isles’ catastrophic slide began, but the 1988-89 season seems as good a place as any. Under Terry Simpson, the third-year successor to legendary coach Al Arbour, the team opened by winning only seven of its first 27 games, prompting GM Bill Torrey to bring back Arbour — to no avail. The Isles finished tied with Quebec for the NHL’s worst record (28-47-5).

Ouch.

SI goes on to detail the many ways in which ownership and management drove the team straight into the ground since those glorious years of the late 1970s and early ’80s, and the adjectives are perhaps not as flowery as Isles fans would like.

Just to hammer the point home and really stir the pot over at Islander Mania, who here recognizes these guys? SI is so full of ****, probably Rags fans or a publication that REALLY hates the Islanders.

Funny, that doesn't LOOK like franchise goalie Rick DiPietro!

This is actually the law now.

I didn’t think the phrase “_______ sucks” would ever get into legitimate legislation, but it looks like I have underestimated the Tiny Toddlin’ Town.

So when Quigley put together an official resolution Tuesday celebrating the Hawks’ outdoor showdown against the Red Wings on New Year’s Day at Wrigley Field, he included a secret message to the reigning Stanley Cup champions and their fans.

He used red capital letters in the last line of his resolution to spell out a favorite chant he learned while growing up a Hawks fan ”in the second balcony in Chicago Stadium.” The letters spelled out, ”DETROIT SUCKS.”

That doesn’t seem especially secret. In fact, it appears to be rather conspicuous. But no matter, it’s awesome that people are getting this fired up over a regular season hockey game that’s almost six months away. Those Wrigleyville cretins might be on the verge of riotous action by the time this game rolls around.

And kudos to Quigley for making Wrigley Field and its surrounding area to be “octopus free.” We loved the way Gary Bettman banned octupus tossing incensed Detroit fans, and this will surely bring equal amounts of rancor.

Besides declaring Jan. 1 will be ”Chicago Blackhawks Day” in Cook County, Quigley’s resolution designates Wrigley Field and the surrounding area an ”Octopus Free Zone” — a dig at Red Wings fans’ tradition of throwing octopi on the ice after their team scores.

Good one. But looking at the way the rink will be set up on the field, the only person who could possibly throw an octopus that far is the kid from that movie “Rookie of the Year,” and he’s from Chicago anyway.

Quigley saved the best truism for last though.

”The good thing about being a Blackhawks fan,” Quigley said, ”is you don’t have to live in Detroit.”

I think even Detroit fans can agree with that one.

ESPN was just waiting for this day.

The only thing separating our beloved sport from women’s basketball, at least in the minds of ESPN executives, was the fights.

Now hockey doesn’t even have sole propietorship over that.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=uhnxUbUi_nM&feature=related]

Last night in the WNBA game between Detroit and LA, a big brawl broke out because two players fell over. The end result was Rick Mahorn shoving Lisa Leslie to the ground and a bunch of outrage from girls that don’t understand sports. They couldn’t even get a tale of the tape graphic up in time.

We are now one step closer to hockey being completely irrelevant to the WWL. I’m sure the rockheads in Bristol are thrilled.

And if we learned one thing in all this, it’s that Mahorn is the Scott Stevens of the WNBA. Leslie, of course, is Eric Lindros.

PHANEUF'D

This is the setup for the NHL Winter Classic at Wrigley Field on New Years’ Day.

Unless they add seats on the field, no one in attendance is going to have a good view of this.

Hey whaddaya know he was a Cub fan!

It is shockingly easy to find unflattering pictures of Gary bettman

Over the last few days, it has become abundantly clear that Gary Bettman (get ready) screwed up royally in selling the Nashville Predators to a group of local investors that included William “Boots” Del Biaggio.

Now, Mr. Del Biaggio is under both bankruptcy protection and FBI investigation. And amid allegations that the NHL failed to perform due diligence on his background, it turns out that he had outlined to investors a scenario in which he would move the team to the noted hockey hotbed of Kansas City.

Great job, Gary.

While I agree with the larger sentiment of this article that the NHL shockingly screwed the pooch in its aggressive overexpansion into markets that were at best indifferent to the sport, I doubt that anti-Canadian bias is what has fueled Bettman’s almost psychotic desire to not move American teams to Hamilton or Winnipeg. It’s pride.

By allowing Jim Balsillie, who would have paid much more than the local investors, to move the Preds to his native Hamilton, Bettman would have been admitting in some way that he was wrong, that the American South could care less about hockey unless the team is winning, and typically only if it is. It might have proven that moving the Jets to Phoenix, the Whalers to Carolina, and the Stars to Dallas maybe wasn’t the brightest idea (which awarding the very successful Wild franchise to Minnesota had already partly done). It would have definitely proven that expanding to Nashville, Anaheim, Tampa, Atlanta, Miami and Columbus was a remarkably ill-conceived idea.

So Bettman blew up Balsillie’s plans to buy what could be turned into another successful Canadian franchise that sold out every night and never struggled to keep its stars in order to keep its head above the high-tide line of red ink. To call it anti-Canadian is to give the NHL too much credit for its foresight. Bettman and Co. have no plan except to not be made to look foolish by a near-success in Nashville hit the fan.

Canucks Corner has a great writeup of the financial particulars, and it shows with great clarity the many acrobatic ways in which the NHL bent over backwards to allow for the local group, who never had the kind of financial stability Balsillie did, to purchase the team. A discount of almost $20 million on the originally agreed-upon price seems a little odd, doesn’t it?

Well, the Tennessean has that covered: the league didn’t even investigate Del Biaggio properly.

Doug Bergeron, a California-based Canadian investor and entrepreneur and president of DGB Investments, was among those to whom Del Biaggio tried to market a share of the Predators.

Bergeron said Del Biaggio told him in December that National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman’s office had given special permission for Del Biaggio to buy a share of the team without being subjected to all the scrutiny the league usually gives to prospective owners. Del Biaggio told him the commissioner’s office did not require him to show audited financial statements before it approved him.

The NHL’s deputy commissioner, Bill Daly, issued a kinda-sorta denial.

“With respect to Mr. Del Biaggio’s apparent claim that the League waived certain of our standard financial background checks, we do not believe that to be the case.”

Don’t believe? This is some real Watergate talk. Wouldn’t it be smart, and indeed incumbent upon the league to flatly deny this? It either did waive the background checks or it did not. Either way, the mounting evidence doesn’t look good for them.

Gary Bettman might, and probably should, lose his job over this, if any of it is true. Maybe he can ask David Stern for another job with the NBA. They can chit-chat with Bud Selig about which is the worst commissioner in professional sports today.