The Two-Line Pass

With the year finally winding down, we can now look back on the prior 350-something days and start to put together some conclusive feelings about them. It seems, to me at least, that this has been literally the stupidest calendar year of hockey in maybe a decade.

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There have been a myriad of ways the NHL has repeatedly screwed over its longtime fans, but the most egregious of these just might be the way it’s handling the Winter Classic at Wrigley Field.

Today, the league announced that it would hold a lottery for the general public to get tickets.

A general public random drawing will be held to determine who will have an opportunity to purchase the remaining tickets with a limited number of tickets set aside for the community ticket initiative described below.  Fan registration for the random drawing will be conducted through the Chicago Blackhawks’ official website (www.chicagoblackhawks.com) beginning on or about Noon ET/11 a.m. CT, Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008, through on or about 11:59 a.m. ET/10:59 a.m. CT, Friday, Nov. 28, 2008.  Registrations received after the deadline will not be accepted.  There is no fee to register.  Limit one entry per person.  Each registrant selected will have an opportunity to purchase a limited number of tickets.

Which would be cool. Except this ignores that guaranteed opportunity to purchase tickets to this is only given to full Blackhawks season ticket holders.

So the 14,000 full season ticket holders will take up 34ish percent of Wrigley’s 41,000 seats. The NHL then has the right to decide who gets the rest. They’ll give out some to local youth hockey programs, which, if you look at the seating chart I posted last week, won’t be that many. So call it 25,000 seats the NHL gets to give out to whomever they like apart from youth hockey programs. The league will certainly hand some out to local sponsors and the Red Wings organization will take about 8,000 (that’s the rumor at least), what’s that leave?

Oh know who else gets a crack at tickets before the general public? The “NHL Winter Classic partners” meaning the clowns at AMP Energy and all the other stupid crap they’re always peddling on Versus. Doesn’t make a lot of sense because the Winter Classic is ostensibly for the benefit of the fans, right?

They are effectively ignoring the Blackhawks’ partial season ticket holders, the Red Wings’ full season ticket holders, and hell, even Cubbies’ season ticket holders who deserve it more than the clowns the NHL will eventually give these tickets to.

Good work, Bettman.

The good news is that a front-row seat for the Winter Classic costs $75. The bad news is that the nosebleeds cost $325.

Not sure I get it either.

Yeah, the NHL released its Winter Classic seating charts yesterday and, well, you figure it out.

What a disaster this turned out to be. Seats out in center field that are an easy 250 feet from the rink cost $75, the same as seats that are closer to 100 but apparently have obstructed views of some parts of the rink. Why only three pricing levels? Why so expensive? Why no seats on the field? It’s going to look stupid with a full baseball outfield of NOTHING as the backdrop to the game.

At least Gary Bettman isn’t Bud Selig, right? Right?

So Jason Blake is a healthy scratch for the Leafs’ game with the Bruins tonight.

In his place: Ryan Hollweg.

Hard to figure what Ron Wilson’s thinking here. He says Blake’s game lately has been flat, and that’s certainly true. But I don’t see how replacing him with Hollweg helps the fact that the Leafs can’t put the puck in the net.

“It’s a challenge for me,” he said. “I had a lot to think about [during the suspension]. I just have to be careful.”

Uh huh. You’ve had a lot of suspsensions to think about this though, so I don’t know that this talk of contrition exactly rings true. The good news is that, unlike the Blues (against whom Hollweg has gotten his last two suspensions), the Bruins have guys like Milan Lucic and Zdeno Chara who’ll actually, y’know, beat the piss out of Hollweg if he so much as looks at a star player the wrong way.

For the record, I have nine minutes of ice time before he really tries to run somebody.

I was working on a long, well thought-out, hilarious post on the NHL’s Board of Governors discussing the relocation of a current team to Toronto, to be the area’s backup Maple Leafs.

“Why shouldn’t we put another team in the best and biggest market in the world?” one of several NHL governors who spoke anonymously said of the Greater Toronto Area.

Makes sense to me. Hell, they sold out every seat in Hamilton and those guys didn’t even HAVE a team.

Ah the jokes I was making. “The CBC can finally live out its dream of an all-Toronto Hockey Night in Canada.” “I hope the new Toronto team wins a Cup the first year out of the box.” “For all those fans who think the Leafs are just too good.” You get the idea (and yes, I acknowledge that none of those could even begin to fit the average person’s definition of funny).

Well, turns out I had to delete the whole damn thing.

“The story is nonsense,” one highly placed NHL source told the Star. “Perhaps the musings of one team representative. Expansion to Toronto has never been discussed with the board, the executive committee or any other league committee.

“And its never been considered internally.”

So much for that. You’ll have to make TSN2 and Cliff Fletcher jokes for yourselves now.

From the Organization that Can’t Do Anything Right™ — the people that brought you hits like “Erik Christensen: First Line Center,” “Vowing to Make the Playoffs With an Unbelievably Bad Team,” and “Alienating Every Star or Potential Star” — comes another terrible decision.

This time, it’s a new third jersey and, like the Thrashers themselves, it stinks on ice.

Yeesh. I understand season ticket renewals are in the crapper in Hotlanta, but to pretend you’re a basketball team just to put asses in the seats is low-rent.

(And don’t expect the crowd in the background to get much bigger than that once the season starts.)

Compare those jerseys to that of the Atlanta Hawks from a few years ago:

Pretty hard to believe no one saw this ripoff similarity and said, “Yeah, maybe we stay away from this.” It’s not like people go to Hawks games either.

And no, you’re not counting wrong, that’s four assistant captains. But the fun doesn’t stop there, because Mathieu Schneider is an assistant captain too! The Thrashers have said they’re naming a captain “soon” but, uhh, you guys host Washington on Friday, sooooooo…

Shovel this load of crap on their continuously growing pile with their inability to sign the only person on their team worth showing up for (the erstwhile Mr. Kovalchuk) and ability to make their phenom goaltending prospect demand a trade by promising him things and not backing them up, and you’ve got a top-flight organization.

At least Lil Jon shows up to games! Get T-Pain or Lil Wayne and maybe hip hop fans will care.

"I know! They'll BOTH start!"

They’ve got some brilliant hockey minds in Chicago these days. Just brilliant.

Remember how the Blackhawks signed Cristobal Huet to a huge deal out of the blue and are currently contributing $12.375 million of their cap number to goaltending? They meant to do that, and they’re going with a two-starter system.

Really.

“We’re going to push each other to play and to compete,” Huet said. “It’s going to benefit the team. He’s definitely a great goalie. There’s going to be competition, obviously, [but] it’s always like that with any NHL team. This year is going to be a little more than the average team, but it’s great. We’re going to work together and make it happen every night so we can [get] some wins.”

Wrong-o, Mr. Huet. The best NHL teams tend to be the ones with clear-cut starters and an above-average career backup (Detroit obviously being the exception to this rule). Were it not for injury and deadline deals, almost every playoff team in either conference would have had one goalie play 50-plus games and a number of backups pick up the slack. Only Montreal (early uncertainty about Carey Price, their now-clear No. 1) and Pittsburgh (Marc-Andre Fleury injury) don’t fit the bill in the East, and only Detroit (Osgood/Hasek tandem) did it in the West.

Newsflash: Chicago is not as good as Detroit, or even close. Chicago allowed an extra 5.1 shots a game last year and hasn’t improved defensively this year, so why go this route? Oh yeah, “it’s all about winning,” right?

“It’s all about winning—it’s not about keeping people happy,” Tallon said. “We want to have an opportunity … to have the best goaltending every night. If by chance that’s not going to work as far as number of games played or not wanting to be here then we have to look at that. … If it’s keeping Khabibulin, we do that. If it’s not, then we move on and we try to do something that makes sense for both of us.”

Trade Khabibulin for whatever you can get right now. He’s too old and too expensive to make any kind of sense on a team that’s trying to grow.

Oh, and Tallon hasn’t talked to Khabi about this yet.

”Nik’s in Belarus. It’s hard to get ahold of him there,” Tallon said. ”But I did talk to his agent the day after [Huet's signing], and we had a great conversation.

”I’m sure [Khabibulin] was taken aback, and rightly so. No one saw this coming, except within our staff. But this is all about winning. It’s not about keeping people happy.”

Tallon reiterated that he doesn’t plan to trade Khabibulin.

Read that last line again and try to wrap your head around it. It’s making my brain hurt to think that an otherwise competent organization is spending more than $2.5 million over the cap right now and won’t trade one of the two players making more than $5.6 million, of whom they can only play one per night.

Chicago will be able to compete for a postseason berth by virtue of the entire Northwest division falling all over itself to get worse and not take up three playoff spots (more on that tomorrow), but this strategy is mind-numbingly stupid.

Jay Bouwmeester would appreciated it if you traded him immediately

These days, you can’t pay people to stay in Miami.

In a move that has HFBoards posters falling all over themselves to put together terrible trade proposals, highly sought-after defenseman Jay Bouwmeester apparently turned down Florida’s latest overture, a multi-year deal worth over $5 million per.

People wonder why Florida never competes. Here’s a defenseman who would get offers north of $7 million from just about any team in the National Hockey League who’s just 24 years old. He scored 15 goals last year and was only a -5 on an awful Panthers team despite playing a whopping 27:28 a night in all situations. So Florida, despite having all the cap room in the world, lowballs him. Badly. A deal in the mid-5s would have him paid less on average than Bryan McCabe, Andrei Markov, Mathieu Schneider, and Roman Hamrlik. ROMAN HAMRLIK.

J-Bo is obviously waiting for the day he gets his arbitration hearing (and he’ll get pretty close to that $5 million if they screw him there) and can beat a hasty retreat the hell out of Florida. Who can blame him? NHL GMs will be lined up around the block to get this kid on the free agent market, and most will be calling the Florida front office with trade ideas about three seconds after his arbitration hearing lets out.