The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Ah the tantalizing mystery of the Orient.

It’s been a long time since even hardcore hockey fans here in North America have seen Jaromir Jagr play. Two years ago, he took his ball and went home — well, “home” — to the KHL and has literally spent those seasons playing in freaking Siberia for Avangard Omsk.

How far away from his last NHL team, the New York Rangers, is Omsk? Well, to give you an idea of how remote it is, the nearest semi-major Russian city appears to be Kurgan (pop. 345,000 or roughly the size of Santa Ana, California), a 325-mile drive down M-51. Whatever that is.

So I figured it’d be interesting to see how this once-great superstar was playing in what must be the dying years of his career. If his skills had deteriorated in the intervening time since his last NHL season, in which he scored 71 points in 82 games, how bad was that erosion? By the look of things, it had to be considerable, right? I mean, he hasn’t yet scored at a point-a-game pace in a league that plays on that offense-increasing, 200-by-100, international-sized sheet of ice in a league that unironically considers Kevin Dallman to be its best defenseman. He had to be crap at this point, which would be understandable since his NHL debut came when Sid Crosby was three years old.

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The Lead

See, there are three kinds of Leafs fans right now and all of them are intolerable and stupid.

The first kind is the one that is ironically going, “LOL LET’S PLAN THE PARADE.”

These people are annoying because everyone on the planet knows the Maple Leafs are still going to finish with a lottery pick. How do they know that, those of you who have been furiously F5ing Lost fansites all week for the latest theory on the smoke monster (he’s a dinosaur made of smoke what’s not to get?) might be asking? Because their second-line center tonight was like John Mitchell or something stupid like that. Have you heard of John Mitchell? I have. He’s the crippled old dude from Lost that is the boss of The Island or something. I don’t know. I barely watch that show. Anywho, yes, the team is crap so you’re calling attention to how crap it is by acting like it’s not crap. We got it.

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