The Two-Line Pass

Actual Barry Melrose quote: "HE'D BE A MALE MODEL." (yes, I pictured him yelling this and possibly pounding his fist on the table.)

If he had been allowed to ramble on for another few sentences, Dateline’s Chris Hansen would have asked Barry Melrose what he was doing in the interview.

See, Melrose sat down with the St. Pete Times’ Damian Cristodero to talk all about a young man you may have seen named Steven Stamkos. The Bolts’ new coach heaped praise upon the 18-year-old center, saying the way he skates is “beautiful” and raving about his quick-release wrister.

If calling anything about Stamkos “beautiful” and bringing up his quick release wasn’t borderline-odd enough for you, the interview takes a turn for the truly bizarre a few more paragraphs down.

“He’s cut,” Melrose said. “He’d be a male model if he wasn’t a hockey player. But he’s slim. He’s 18 years old. He’s not a man yet. Vinny (Lecavalier) looked like a beanpole with shoulder pads on, too. Matter of fact, Stamkos is thicker than Vinny when Vinny came in.”

Uhhhhhhhhhh…?

Melrose went on to say that Stamkos is the type of player that plays better when he has better players around him (now you see why he got that coaching job), and namedropped Radim Vrbata and Ryan Malone as potential linemates. Both were 27-goal scorers last year, but Malone couldn’t pop in 30 playing with Geno Malkin, and Vrbata scored 27 after having never scored more than 18 in his previous five NHL seasons. So I don’t know about how good those two would be as linemates if you want Stamkos kickstarting the second-line offense.

Shed not a tear, Bryan. Where you're going, no one will care how many goals you get torched for.

Bryan McCabe is finally done with the Maple Leafs, and it looks like he’s going to be traded to the Florida Panthers.

Reports started to trickle out last night that he would be traded to Florida within a few weeks. They’re just waiting for some $2 million bonus from the Leafs to clear.

A delay in the announcement is linked to the Leafs willingness to pick up a $2 million bonus McCabe is due on September 1st. After the payment is made only then will the transaction be accepted by the NHL.

Now this trade prompted a lot of speculation from the Toronto-based national media that still has obsession with the Leafs despite their, um, awfulness (witness 23 of next year’s 37 Hockey Night in Canada 7 p.m. games being Toronto-centric).

Who would the Leafs get in return? Promising young centerman Stephen Weiss? Outstanding winger Nate Horton? Embittered defensive standout Jay Bouwmeester? Toronto’s air pollution problem? A bag of Tim Horton’s coffee beans?

Well, because the aforementioned players are all young and all very good, the Leafs won’t even get autographed hockey cards of them. Not for McCabe, who is not young and not very good AND has a monster contract.

Instead, the scuttlebutt is that the Panthers, possibly the only organization in the NHL more inept than the Leafs, will for once do the right(ish) thing and send over oft-injured defenseman Mike Van Ryn. What they should send is a 137th round pick and possibly a Miami Dolphins bumper sticker, but at least the Panthers are unloading Van Ryn’s contract, which has two years remaining on it at $2.9 million per.

By the way, click on the above link to the Sportsnet story and look at the picture of McCabe they use. Just outstanding.

This picture is in the top drawer of every Pens executive's desk for massively inappropriate reasons.

The picture I have in my head of what goes on all day in the Penguins front office. It’s everyone just constantly reloading Sid Crosby’s Myspace and Facebook pages for updates. This is the stalker-level love the organization seems to have for him.

For further proof, witness this tidbit mentioned in passing by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the Pens breaking ground on their new rink:

With Mario Lemieux appropriately at the center of the line, officials from government and the Penguins ceremonially broke ground on a new hockey arena today, using shovels with shafts made from star Sidney Crosby’s sticks.

Creepers.

The sticks were probably also cut with his skates, and the dirt was composed of his infinite love. The arena’s ice will also be made from his sweat and the seats will be filled by his rugged good looks.

This video, taken from the Russian equivalent of MTV, was presumably filmed before Ovie met his internet girlfriend. However, this is possibly the best Ovechkin video ever and needs to be shown regardless.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsPC-JNIPzI]

I mean, you don’t even have to say anything after that.

By the way, the next great Ovechkin quote to enter the hockey lexicon should definitely be:

“They say hello, I say hey, the next thing you know they say rape.”

Man I love watching Ranger games.

Well one thing of which the NHL cannot be accused is being unaware of which side its bread is buttered on.

The new national TV schedule, released today, certainly confirms that.

From the NHL press release:

VERSUS opens its fourth year of NHL coverage with an international doubleheader on Sun., Oct. 5, when the Lightning and Rangers face-off in Prague at 12 p.m. ET, followed by the Penguins-Senators match-up in Stockholm at 2:30 p.m. ET. VERSUS’ schedule includes a season-high eight appearances by the Boston Bruins, Buffalo Sabres, Minnesota Wild, New York Rangers and Penguins. The Red Wings, Philadelphia Flyers and Washington Capitals are all making seven appearances each. In total, VERSUS will televise 56 regular-season games, All-Star weekend, games in each round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs and the first two games of the Stanley Cup Final. Every game on VERSUS is produced and shown in HD where available.

After NBC launches its NHL coverage New Year’s Day with NHL Winter Classic 2009 from Wrigley Field in Chicago, the NBC NHL “Game of the Week” drops the puck on Sunday, Jan. 18 when the Penguins host the Rangers.

By my count, that’s 11 nationally-televised games for both Penguins and Rangers, even before NBC makes any decisions about which games they’ll air (those are made 13 days before they’re shown) or the playoffs begin. For some reason, those two teams also show up on the CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada a combined 13 times and five more on TSN.

A full breakdown of Versus games by team follows (unabashedly stolen from Wyshinski and reformatted, though it should be noted because this is all subject to change because — surprise — Versus dicked the whole thing up on its website):

Sabres and Wild: 9 (huh?)

New York Rangers and Penguins: 8

Bruins, Red Wings, Flyers and Caps: 7

Devils: 6

Avalanche and Blues: 5

Stars, Islanders and Lightning: 4

Blackhawks, Canadiens, Sharks and Maple Leafs: 3

Thrashers: 2

Ducks, Hurricanes, Blue Jackets, Panthers, Predators, Senators, Coyotes and Canucks: 1

Flames, Oilers and Kings: 0

How do the Thrashers get more than the Ducks, Senators or Canucks?

Boston fans love this for some reason

Ray Bourque is on the first day of the annual Jimmy Fund telethon (donate! They want to raise $4 million over the next two days.) right now, in a roundtable with the Celtics’ Glen “Big Baby” Davis and the Red Sox’ Curt Schilling (who says he’s heavily leaning toward retirement), and he was just asked a question about the support he got from Boston fans after he got traded to Colorado.

The above quote was part of his response. Now here’s something I have to say about that, because this is my blog and I get to bitch about things if I want to.

That’s one of the things I’ve always greatly disliked about that whole situation, and subsequently the dishonesty put forth by Bourque on this subject. A guy requests a trade out of town because he wants to win a Stanley Cup, which is understandable. But then his long-time team’s fans cheer for him over their home team despite the fact that he basically sold the team and city out.

Look, he was obviously never going to win in Boston, but he requested a trade out of town. Ray Bourque is obviously an iconic Bruin and one of the sport’s all-time greats but the Hub’s fans are total suckers for buying into this myth that he deserved better. If you’re going to claim you’re a Boston guy first and foremost, you don’t beg out of the city to play with a better team. It’s really that simple.

Even if he had let his contract expire and signed with a team, it would be totally different than asking for a trade. Did getting Brian Rolston, Sami Pahlsson and Martin Grenier plus the first-round pick that eventually became Martin Samuelsson help the Bruins? Kind of. Rolston scored 90-something goals in Boston over four seasons. Better than nothing, I guess.

If a beloved captain who played with the team his whole career and became an all-time great like Jarome Iginla asks to be traded out of Calgary so he can win a Cup, that’s his prerogative. But if he came waltzing back into Calgary with that Cup after a year and a half out of town, only a city full of fools would give him a parade. Boston did it.

I’ll never understand why Boston fans don’t feel hard done by over this. It just seems ridiculous. The way other beloved guys like Manny Ramirez or Antoine Walker were run out of town is in many ways regrettable, as an entire fanbase turned on them because of the way the front office handled the situation with the media. Quite the opposite with the Bruins and Bourque, though a lot of that probably has to do with the way Bruins ownership is perceived in Boston.

Bruins fans have a lot to gripe about in the team’s history, like the trade that sent Bobby Orr to Chicago or the nickel-and-diming Jeremy Jacobs is perceived to have done with the team from the mid-90s until the lockout, but the fact that this isn’t among them is baffling. It’s perfectly okay to love Ray Bourque and all he did for the team and the community, but if anyone else had done what he did, words like “traitor” would be thrown around liberally.

ZzZzzzzzzzzzzZZZZzzzzzzzz

Girls in short skirts running around for two hours should be a hell of a fun thing to watch.

It isn’t. Believe me, I tried.

To further the insult, this is considered “hockey” by most of the world, while our beloved sport is “ice hockey.” Ouch, International Olympic Committee. Ouch.

Go to NBC’s Olympic Field Hockey website and try to suffer through five minutes of any of these matches. There’s no commentary on any of the games and I defy one person alive to figure out the rules of this sport. If I can understand the concept of icing, I should, in theory at least, be able to figure out why there’s a whistle every eight seconds in field hockey. Alas, there’s no explanation.

After closing four seperate women’s games, I decided to take a crack at watching a men’s affair, hoping it would be more physical, and it is. I guess. What I was hoping for was almost-Rollerball. What I got was tiny Dutch men running into a bunch of guys from Great Britain who were presumably too small to play rugby and uncoordinated to play cricket or soccer. At least the whistles came a bit more infrequently.

Hold on though, here’s a game with Canada in it. Perhaps our friendly neighbors to the north can show me how this game, like it’s icy counterpart, is meant to be played.

Update: No. This game has almost bored me to tears. Also, some of the Pakistani players literally have written their names on their jerseys with a Sharpie.

Wait! Only 20 minutes into the video, there is now someone bleeding from the face! Two players got tangled up going for the ball with their inexplicably tiny wooden sticks (Go composite, guys! It works for Dion Phaneuf!). The Pakistani gentleman, Adnan, is the one with blood around his eye, writhing in agony. After watching the replay twice, I still can’t see why. The best explanation is that he may have fallen on the knob of the Canadian players’ stick. Maybe.

For those curious, Canada lost 3-1. In a form of hockey. To Pakistan.

Final conclusion: This game takes my two favorite sports, hockey and soccer, and puts them together. After removing anything enjoyable about either of them, the result is field hockey. Every game seems to be 70 minutes of boredom broken up by penalties for which there seems to be no set rules.

And Canada sucks at it.

If the NHL really wants to attract fans, it should just show video of this sport and say, “See, the trap doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?”

Since July 30, things have been different around the Phoenix Coyotes’ front office.

No, they haven’t magically turned into a good hockey team, but what they have done is become a more eco-friendly franchise, taking a cue from both the Players’ Association and the League.

As a way to reduce waste from concession stands, the arena will use biodegradable cups made from corn, which decompose in a few months.

“You’d swear it was a regular plastic cup if you saw it,” said Doug Moss, Coyotes president and chief operating officer. “These are really incredible things.”

Plates and bowls will be made of molded fiber from 100 percent recycled materials, and the utensils will be made of vegetable starch.

ARAMARK, a food-services facilities-management company, is working with the Coyotes to provide the new utensils, plates and cups by October, when the hockey season starts.

Crum said the company is aware of the amount of water and power the arena uses. It is looking into installing timed faucets and using compact fluorescent light bulbs to save water and energy.

That’s pretty rad.

The Flames have been carbon neutral for a few years, and the Bruins are headed that way as well, thanks in no small part to the work of all-around good guy Andrew Ference.

Last year, Ference started the entire Player’s Association on its effort to be carbon neutral. Over 700 of the league’s 900-plus players had agreed to neutralize their 10-ton (yikes!) carbon footprint through last winter before all the teams had even been met with. The NHLPA’s offices in Toronto are entirely carbon neutral, as is the NHL office in New York.

Hockey, for obvious reasons, is probably the most eco-unfriendly sport just because of the amount of energy it takes to run an arena and the rink’s cooling system and everything else.

So kudos to the Coyotes for going green, but I doubt high energy bills are the reason the team is hemorrhaging money.

It's Sundin's world. We're just livin' in it baby.

I can just picture it:

The Sportsnet reporter giddily called into the central desk yesterday.

“We got it!” he proclaimed triumphantly.

“Are you serious?” asked his producer.

“Totally. Sportsnet exclusive, baby!”

There was a joyous popping of champagne corks, a steady flow of confetti from the ceiling and a party the likes of which Sportsnet hasn’t seen since Pratt and Taylor won their timeslot that one time. And why not? It was an exclusive interview with Mats Sundin!

An enterprising Sportsnet reporter caught up with the long-pontificating centerman on a golf course in Sweden in hopes of getting the definitive word on Sundin’s future. Go on. Guess what he said.

“I haven’t decided yet,” Sundin said. “I think sometime in August I hope to come to a conclusion on what I’m going to do — if I’m going to play or not this year.”

The 37-year-old unrestricted free agent also reiterated that he has no deadline for a final decision.

“I never had a deadline,” Sundin added. “I know there was talk about first of August, but I never said. I said sometime in August hopefully I’ll be able to make a decision. I won’t make that until I really feel comfortable with making a good decision.”

Hey Mats, let me finally make the decision for you. Stay home, and shut up.

At this point, I can’t imagine that a single person gives a quarter of a crap whether or not you play. Sign in Montreal, sign in Vancouver, sign in f-ing Turkmenistan for all I care. Just go away.

“Sometime in August hopefully.” You have to be kidding. You’re an adult. One of the few standing members of the old guard of the NHL. You’ve been around so long that you played for the freaking Quebec Nordiques. Can’t you show a little bit of class and at least offer a “no comment?” Is that too much to ask?

“I haven’t even worried about any teams,” Sundin insisted. “I’m just trying to bring my mind to a point where I can make a good decision whether or not I’m going to play hockey right now. That’s my first decision and we’ll go from there after that.”

It’s sad that it doesn’t matter to Sundin what he’s doing to his legacy, the sport, and the fanbases and organizations of the several franchises that are still inexplicably interested in signing him. Sundin has become the ultimate “me” player in the NHL. Maybe he’s the nicest guy in the world. I haven’t met him. But this is just making him come off like a total douchebag.

We know, Mats. It’s really tough trying to decide if you have enough money (which HockeyZone Plus says is more than $74 million just in NHL salary) or if you really need that extra $6-10 million. Put it this way, if he cared about or had any passion the game at all, he wouldn’t still be going through this tired routine.

And shame on the Canadian media, too, for breathlessly reporting every time Mats Sundin has a bowel movement, and what said bowel movement thinks of all this talk of playing in Montreal. I understand it’s the dead of August (because what type of an idiot starts a hockey blog in mid-July) and stories are running awful thin. This whole Sundin saga has certainly provided me with a lot of words’ worth of opinion to blather on about, but I’m just a jerk with a laptop spewing crap into an infinite void. You’re an entire international media corporation. Surely there’s more upon which to report than this. Hell, fabricate some story if you have to. God knows you’ve milked this phony piece of garbage for all it’s worth.

The collective hockey world, including the fans upon which you depend for things like ratings and pageviews, is at wits’ end.

Shut up about Sundin. I promise I will.

A world of possibility/crude penis drawings awaits.

Canucks’ hat model/backup goalie Curtis Sanford is a pretty cool dude. He opens the bench door for his team’s defensemen, he holds a clipboard for the assistant coaches, and now he’s letting fans design his mask.

“I’m pretty much open to anything, I’m not too superstitious when it comes to what I have on my mask, I just hope that people come up with some pretty good ideas,” said Sanford, who will be entering his second season with the Canucks this fall.

The Design Sanford’s Mask contest, which ends at 5 p.m. PST on August 25th, gives Canucks fans the chance to not only create a one-of-a-kind design, but the top entries will also have their work showcased in a gallery on Canucks.com following the deadline.

Sanford will then choose his favourite design and Ian Johnson of Excalibur Airbrushing will reproduce it with precision shortly after, meaning the netminder will begin training camp for the 2008-09 season with the unique mask.

The winner gets an autographed Curtis Sanford jersey and will even get to meet him and ask him, “So what’s Roberto Luongo REALLY like?”

Go here for a template if you really want to design a mask. And send your entries to me first. (If I get one, I’ll be shocked.)

One last thing:

“I’m looking forward to all of them as long as they are tasteful and everything.”

Damn it.