The Two-Line Pass

More stupidity at FlamesNation.

I should be fired into the sun.

Photoshop silliness over at FlamesNation.

Can you tell I slept on my deadlines?

This one’s from FlamesNation and it’s about how sports fans suck.

This week’s What We Learned, covering ugly jerseys, a lack of Marian Hossa and the raging debate over which Brian, Rolston or Gionta, is going to have a better season is up now at Puck Daddy.

It recently came to my attention that those of you who follow this crummy blog via sites like Feedburner are largely unaware that I write other places, such as FlamesNation and Puck Daddy. To rectify this, I will, in the future, put up a post here with a link to those sites so that you can continue to read my brilliant, insightful, oftentimes hilarious opinions on these sites with no fuss and only a minimal amount of muss.

Here, then, is my latest post at FlamesNation, regarding Miikka Kiprusoff and the upcoming season he will spend under more crushing pressure than the crew in Das Boot.

The Lead

Remember back after the Habs got demolished in the playoffs and some reporter told Bob Gainey all about how even his wife was questioning Gainey’s use of Carey Price in the playoffs?

Well now I gotta wonder if the Habs can get her signed up to be GM, because Jesus tapdancing Christ on a grizzly bear, Bob Gainey has lost his goddamn mind.

We all thought he was a little bit thick for taking Scott Gomez’s retardo contract off Glen Sather’s hands, giving up New York native Chris Higgins and extremely promising defensive prospect Ryan McDonagh in the process.

“But hey,” the few Habs fans who weren’t cutting letters for death threats out of magazines might’ve been saying at the time, “Gomez is still a pretty decent player, and if they can get him a decent trigger man, it might be worth it.”

Well Gainey heard those calls, then went out and dropped $11 million a year on Brian Gionta — no doubt hoping to rekindle what my Devils fan friend calls “that ‘03 magic” — and Mike Cammalleri. So they now have a quote-unquote top line that makes 18.357 million dollars combined against the cap but only scored 75 combined goals, which, you will note, is about $244,760 per goal. Which, you will further note, sucks.

And maybe the staunchest of Habs supporters would say even that’s not SO terrible, all things considered because, hey, Alex Ovechkin makes $9.538 against the cap and he scored 56 goals this year, which means he was paid about $170,321 per goal. The dropoff’s not THAT precipitous.

But can the Habs really afford to drop that much per goal for an entire top line, especially one that’s taking like 30 percent of your cap space away, when their defense last season had more holes in it than the average kitchen sponge? Before the real Habs diehards (i.e. members of Gainey’s immediate family) say oui, let’s not forget that Gainey replaced a 27-year-old Mike Komisarek with a 35-year-old Jaro Spacek, and at a discount of just $700k per year, and 34-year-old Hal Gill, who is awful.

And maybe even that would be fine IF HE HADN’T ALREADY TRADED RYAN MCDONAGH LIKE A LUNATIC IDIOT.

By Christmastime, when the Habs are 12 points out of the playoffs, Gainey better be praying he can pick up a new vocation. Maybe that reporter’s wife can teach him to be a baker.

Read the rest of this entry »