The Jets might have a fitness issue
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Whoever the strength and conditioning coach is in Winnipeg, he’s getting paid far, far too much. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that a team with Kyle Wellwood and Dustin Byfuglien on the roster would be one that wholly fails to keep tabs on the physical fitness of its players, but man, even Evander Kane?
I don’t know what about this story is the funniest. That a guy who scored 30 frickin’ goals in the NHL last year can’t get more than 11 minutes a night playing for Dinamo Minsk, or that it’s because he’s out of shape.
The line for Kane’s play through four games reads like he and two of his more rotund teammates standing next to each other — 0-0-0 — with 13 penalty minutes (presumably from putting opponents in Hulk Hogan-style rest holds when his shifts go longer than 20 seconds) and a minus-3 rating. And it’s not like this guy is competing for ice time with anyone particularly noteworthy. The best player on his team is Tim Stapleton, ferchrissakes.
His coach says he’s “Not in KHL shape,” which given the pace of the game over there (from what I’ve seen) means he can’t skate from one end of the rink to the other in less than three minutes. What did Kane do? Smoke a carton a day and go on the Supersize Me diet for the entire summer? Did he eat that whole fish Dustin Byfuglien caught? Come to think of it, because we haven’t heard anything about the guy in a while, did he eat Dustin Byfuglien?
Some more conspiratorial hockey writers will try to lump this in with the fact that the Jets waited until they were physically incapable of waiting any longer to re-sign him, as though they would give someone $31.5 million if they thought he was mainlining Thousand Island dressing instead of skating all summer.
Meanwhile, no one on Earth is talking about the fact that Ondrej Pavelec is giving up goals in the KHL at a greater rate than he did in the NHL last year, which you’ll recall was, umm, considerable. His line in the Czech league through six games, I swear to you, was 4.62/.863. Has he extended his drinking habits from “before driving” to “between periods?”
But hey, at least he’s not Kane, right? That fatso stinks and isn’t worth the ridiculous money Winnipeg gave him this summer.
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