The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Mike Cammalleri’s had a pretty decent two weeks.

Coming into tonight, in his last five games, he had six goals and two assists. So the fact that he bailed Calgary out from an horrendously bad defensive game, one which it eventually won 5-4 in a shootout, with another two goals was both fortuitous and somewhat expected.

Twice tonight, Calgary scored a goal that tied the game and surrendered another go-ahead marker within roughly 30 seconds. RJ Umberger opened the scoring for Columbus almost right away and Jarome Iginla answered with his first goal in eight games a while later. And just 31 seconds after that, Umberger scored again because Calgary just decided to let its entire defensive system break down and Miikka Kiprusoff simultaneously opted to ignore the rules set forth by conventional positional goaltending.

In the second, it got real wacky. Cammalleri scored a power play goal at 17:40 that was the result of a beautiful rush that collapsed the Columbus box while the puck was still in the neutral zone. It was glorious. Literally 10 seconds later, Jakub Voracek answered to put Columbus back up 3-2, and 40 seconds after that David Moss leveled the game again.

In the third, both teams had the decency to space out the goals from Rick Nash (a pretty shorthanded breakaway goal) and Cammalleri by about 10 minutes. Todd Bertuzzi ended up winning the game with the only shootout goal allowed by either Kiprusoff or Steve Mason, neither of whom impressed tonight.

Games like this are exactly why I don’t think the Flames will get too deep into the playoffs. They can’t stop the counterattack and, with increasingly enfuriating frequency, they can’t get Kiprusoff to show up and keep the friggin’ Blue Jackets from scoring four goals on 33 shots. Blerg.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hoo boy did Eric Duhatshek go a little overboard this morning in the Globe and Mail.

Separated at birth?: IGINLA: HOCKEY PLAYER, OBAMA: PRESIDENT

The Calgary Flames captain has a lot in common with the new U.S. commander-in-chief, including leadership abilities, respect and never backing away from a fight

Uhhhhh.. okay? One plays hockey (and hasn’t scored in seven games god dammit), one could blow up the entire world with the push of a button. Makes perfect, borderline-racist sense. You see, both Jarome Iginla and Barack Obama are half-black(!).

The parallels in their personal histories are startling, remarkable even.

They are both products of an interracial marriage. Their fathers, black, hailed from Africa, one from Kenya, the other from Nigeria. Their mothers, white, hailed from the hinterland, one from Kansas in the American Midwest, the other from Edmonton in Canada’s frozen north.

STARTLING! But there a number of other hockey players that remind Duhatshek of Barack Obama, including but not limited to: Dustin Byfuglien, Kevin Weekes, Kyle Okposo, Grant Fuhr, Mike Grier, Manny Malhotra, Anson Carter and, of course, Manute Bol.

If there wasn’t a 16-year gap in their respective ages - Obama is 47, Iginla 31 - you could almost argue they were separated at birth.

No, you really, really couldn’t.

I just imagine Duhatshek meandering around the dressing room at the Flames’ practice rink yesterday going, “So that Barack Obama, huh?” until finally Craig Conroy, who will talk to anyone about anything for any length of time they like, said, “YEAH! I’M FROM AMERICA!” and talked at a rapid pace for 45 minutes straight. Kudos to Duhatshek for pulling any type of story out of this, I guess, but it has to be the most asinine piece of front-page news ever.

The Lead

It’s been 11 months and one day since the Sharks last lost a regular-season game in regulation at HP Pavilion. That night, Feb. 14, 2008, they dropped a one-goal game to Edmonton before reeling off a home record 28-0-2.

Until tonight. Calgary went into HP Pavilion and did what had seemed impossible, beat the Sharks in just 60 minutes, by a score of 3-2. And really, it wasn’t anything the Flames did especially well that punched the Sharks’ ticket. Rather, the Western Conference frontrunners didn’t take care of the puck, were often ineffectual on the transition and failed to capitalize on any of the five power plays afforded them by Calgary and that includes a 5-on-3 opportunity.

But before the game, Mike Keenan had quipped that SOMEONE had to snap the Sharks’ home winning streak, so why shouldn’t it be Calgary, which kicked the Sharks’ balls in 5-2 just over a week ago.

Ryane Clowe, who, it seems, has had 114 percent of his career scoring come against the Flames, drew first blood just a minute into the game and I quickly began thinking of Calgary’s last trip to San Jose this season (a brutal 6-1 loss). Craig Conroy answered early in the second before Calgary surrendered a turdy goal a few minutes later to Joe Thornton thanks to Dion Phaneuf’s hesitance to take the body as Jumbo Joe cut into the middle of the ice.

But then Daymond Langkow answered on the power play when he found himself inexplicably open in front of the net for a tip-in. And when I say open, I mean he could have taken a quick nap and fixed himself a sandwich before Doug Murray, the nearest defender, got within a stick’s length.

Phaneuf made up for his Thornton-related miscue (and admittedly Joe was the best player on the ice tonight) by scoring the game-winner off the stick of Marc-Edouard Vlasic. Memo to Vlasic: Don’t block shots with your blade. It never works out how you’d like.

Big win for the Flames, huge loss for the Sharks, at least mentally. It wasn’t like Calgary came in with a perfect road game and outplayed them. On the contrary, the Sharks were dictating play. But apart from the Conroy goal, the rest of the Flames scoring was the result of a bad play by a Sharks defenseman, and San Jose was just awful on the power play. That one’s gonna sting for a while, and give the already surging Flames a very nice boost going into a stretch in which they play seven of their next 10 at home, where they haven’t lost in regulation since Dec. 2. That’s a big chance to make up some ground right there.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

You may or may not have gotten the memo on this, but Jarome Iginla is a pretty decent hockey player.

Tonight he almost singlehandedly willed the Flames to a 6-3 win over the St. Louis Blues on the strength of a two-goal, two-assist performance. One goal was lucky, one goal was scary, one assist was beautiful and the other was heads-up. If there’s a more complete player in hockey, I’d like to know about him.

Iginla opened the scoring with what can only be described as a goalscorer’s goal, as a bouncing shot from Cory Sarich deflected off the inside of a falling Iginla’s glove and in just 4:14 into the game. His second goal, which came at 17:38 of the first, was one of those vintage Iginla plays where he finds himself in acres of space for some inexplicable reason and loads up a trillion-mile-an-hour snapshot off one foot. How does any team allow Iginla to find himself with a puck on his stick and no defenseman within 10 feet of him? Note to NHL defenses: Giving Iginla this kind of space is not conducive to winning hockey games.

It should be noted, before continuing, that were it not for the play of Chris Mason during that first period, things could have been a LOT worse for St. Louis than 2-0. He made 13 first-period saves and a great many of them were of very high quality. He certainly prevented Iginla from having a hat trick in the opening 20, that’s for sure. And for a while, Miikka Kiprusoff, who had far less work to do than did Mason in making eight saves in the first, made it seem like this game would end up being a goaltending battle. But once Iginla got that second goal, the Flames were off to the races.

Matt Lombardi scored his third of the year early in the second before the Flames defense decided to take 10 minutes off and let the Blues cut it to 3-2 — and Adrian Aucoin’s giveaway on the Patrick Berglund goal was so good he should’ve gotten an assist — before Iginla hefted the Flames onto his back again, setting up consecutive goals from Mike Cammalleri (and what a beauty this feed was) and Aucoin, via an ahead pass to Lombardi that sprang them for the 2-on-1.

From there, the game was academic and Iginla had career points Nos. 796, 797, 798 and 799. To give you an idea of just how important Iginla is to the Flames, he has scored at least one goal in 12 games this year and the Flames are 11-1-0 in them. That’s a .917 winning percentage! When he doesn’t score, they’re 6-10-3 for a winning percentage of .395. That’s an awful big swing, obviously, and it points to both the Flames’ frustrating inconsistency and Iginla’s inherent value to the team. He may be on pace for “only” 44 goals and 98 points now, but if he shows up, the Flames are nearly unstoppable.

As a Flames fan, I wish he’d shown up to more than just 12 of 31 games this year.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

I knew the Flames would lose this game the second the Sportsnet broadcast compared the first two games of the team’s four-game road trip to the infamous six-game trip from last season that saw them win all six and outscore their opponents something like 25-16 (of course they ignored the fact that none of those six teams made the playoffs last year. That was neither here nor there). Calgary had, after all, beaten St. Louis in overtime and shut out the so-so Rangers.

What, then, could possibly go wrong against a team like the Canadiens that are, y’know, good? Oh, right, the Calgary Flames played after winning two in a row and coming off a dominant performance. Any time this year the Flames have played a good opponent after a dominant performance, they have lost because they just don’t show up every night.

Tonight, in a 4-1 loss to Montreal that, coupled with a Canucks win, saw them drop out of first place in the Northwest, the Flames were victimized by not only an outstanding performance by Canadiens backup Jaroslav Halak, but also their own disappointing lack of hockey sense and puck luck.

Halak saw 14 shots in the first period and stopped all of them, which, based upon the quality of those shots, was the only reason it wasn’t 3-1 through 20 minutes. Instead, Robert Lang scored off a goofy bounce on a centering feed that hit Mark Giordano’s leg and got behind Kiprusoff.

The second bad bounce came in the second period when a shot from Calgary’s point hit a shinpad and bounced back to center ice like it had been shot out of a cannon to spring Matt D’Agostini for a breakaway and his fourth goal in as many career NHL games. Dustin Boyd pulled the Flames back within one just over two minutes later but Lang added an insurance goal to double the Montreal lead late in the period.

But when Calgary got a power play early in the third, the game was officially put out of reach by Calgary’s own stupidity. A Habs forward broke his stick while on the PK, but instead of forcing the puck to that side and trying to draw him out to the point and create space in front of the net, Calgary kept it on the strong side and passed back and forth between the point and the man on the halfboards before eventually sending it down low. Not the worst idea in the world but it should’ve been on the other side of the ice. However, when the puck comes down low, the other Canadiens forward trips a Calgary player to draw a 5 on 3.

And this is where the insane part comes in. With 28 seconds left in the original penalty, instead of giving Montreal the puck or putting something low at the net to hope for a scrum, a rebound or Montreal control, Todd Bertuzzi backs out and tries to uncork one from a goofy angle, only to see the puck sail about a mile high and wide and bounce out of the zone and to center ice. At this point, it still doesn’t occur to the Flame that retrieved it to just give the puck to Montreal. Instead, all six Flames CLEAR THE ZONE and regroup for a rush down the center of the ice that somehow doesn’t get a shot on net. By this time, Alex Tanguay, who took the original penalty, has come out of the box and is the first Hab to touch the puck. The game was lost right there. The fact that Andrei Markov scored 39 seconds after Montreal killed the second penalty was just hilarious salt-rubbing.

This was just another game Calgary simply wasn’t prepared for and, no matter how well they played on Sunday or Friday, you have to come to play against good opponents. I would’ve thought Calgary got that note by now, but they pull this all the time. Oh and Detroit’s tomorrow night? Yeah, that should go well.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

Somewhere in the immediate vicinity of New York City, Gary Bettman just woke up fully aroused.

For those that thought last night’s Columbus/Edmonton game was a delight to watch, kill a puppy if you have to in order to obtain a tape of tonight’s Calgary Flames/Nashville Predators game. In the New NHLiest game I maybe have ever seen in my life, Calgary won 7-6 in a game that featured a few breakaway goals, four power play goals, THREE shorties, a penalty shot, and nine goals in the last two periods alone.

At one point in the second period, Calgary led the game 5-0 and seemed to be ready to take this one in a laugher. The Flames had scored four goals on just 10 shots on Pekka Renne, well, Dan Ellis hasn’t really inspired much confidence of late either. But because the Flames got fat and happy on their five-goal lead, Nashville began to claw its way back in.

The Preds scored three times in the space of 5:25 to cut the Calgary lead to two, but a goal 60 seconds later from Daymond Langkow, who had another goal disallowed earlier in the period, put the Flames up three again. The teams went into the second intermission with Calgary up 6-3.

The third period was perhaps both teams’ worst 20 minutes of hockey all season. Jarome Iginla scored his second of the game on the power play just 38 seconds in to make it 7-3 and the game appeared to be out of reach, especially considering the Flames had allowed just seven third-period goals all year coming in (tied for second-best in the league). But the Flames tried to sit on it and fiddle around with the puck too much, and Nashville came roaring back. David Legwand scored at 5:26 but Calgary seemed to go into lockdown mode again until the final few minutes, when they got lazy, stupid and careless.

The Flames allowed a shorthanded breakaway to Vernon goddamn Fiddler of all people and Adrian Aucoin felt it necessary to hook him for a clear penalty shot opportunity despite the fact that Fiddler had two strides on him at least and any hook would have been superficially helpful in stopping him at best. Fiddler, of course, buried his penalty shot, because why wouldn’t he? Shea Weber’s second goal of the game, which was also shorthanded, came with just 20 seconds left, and even after Nashville called a timeout, the Flames gave up another decent scoring opportunity.

Mike Keenan left the bench shaking his head, and it’s not hard to tell why. His team, which had already lost two in a row prior to tonight, couldn’t even nurse on a FIVE-GOAL LEAD through the remaining 40-odd minutes of a game that should have ended 9-2. Calgary missed too many empty nets (Iginla put it into the end boards on a breakaway and the third and fourth lines missed tap-ins) and gave too many second and third opportunities and good chances.

Put it this way, you NEVER want to have the final minute of a game you led 5-0 in the second period be a nailbiter. It just shouldn’t happen on any level. Nashville did a great job coming back to make it interesting, but Calgary did a better job letting them do it and nearly erased strong contributions from Iginla (2-2-4), Craig Conroy (2-1-3) and Todd Bertuzzi (0-3-3).

Weber keyed the Nashville comeback with his two goals, but both Martin Erat and David Legwand chipped in with 1-2-3 lines and Jason Arnott and Vernon Fiddler each had a goal and an assist.

In the goaltending gong show, the three goalies combined to allow 13 goals on 58 shots, with Miikka Kiprusoff stopping 23 of 29, Rinne making six saves on 10 shots in his one period of work, and Dan Ellis having the best night of the bunch with 16 saves on 19 shots. Yes, the runaway best goalie in the game had a save percentage of .842.

This game was a total mess from start to finish but hey scoring in the league is up this year so hooray for goals at the expense of legitimate hockey!

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

(Oh yeah, like I wasn’t writing about this one.)

That much-heralded Dion Phaneuf/Milan Lucic tilt didn’t happen (boooooo, Ference and Iginla), but that was not enough to prevent the Flames and Bruins from playing a pretty decent hockey game tonight in Calgary.

Phaneuf scored and added a helper and Lucic picked up one assist, but the Flames emerged 3-2 victors and spoiled Boston’s perfect road trip. For the Flames, it was their fifth win in a row.

For the Bruins, it was the first time they allowed more than zero goals (really) on their three-game swing through Western Canada. And really, all it took was one bad period to doom the Black and Gold. Boston gave up four power plays in the second and Calgary capitalized on two of them to first level at one and then take a lead. Phaneuf’s goal came first when he followed a Jarome Iginla shot and tipped it over a diving Tim Thomas. The second came when Mike Cammalleri tipped a patented Dion Phaneuf rocket from the point. That was all Calgary needed, essentially. Dustin Boyd’s early third-period goal was very nice and proved the eventual game-winner, but once Calgary went up, the Saddledome was alive and the Bruins didn’t stand a chance.

That is not, however, necessarily their fault. Tim Thomas had an extraordinarily busy four-day trip, stopping 58 shots in Edmonton and Vancouver on back-to-back nights and getting the shutout both times, and then facing a 38-shot onslaught tonight. Something had to give, and the goals that Calgary scored were on a rebound, a redirection and another rebound. Two were on the power play. None were exactly his fault. Plus you have to question the fairness of the NHL supercomputers that schedule the B’s for a game in Edmonton Monday, Vancouver Tuesday then head back to Calgary Thursday. Why not two Alberta games back-to-back? So much for the NHL going green, eh?

The Bruins have to leave Calgary happy with the results of the road trip overall, but disappointed in the offense. Only four goals in nine-plus periods is not the best output in the world, even if you allow only three over that same stretch. But Boston will also return to the east coast with its No. 1 starter firmly established. Thomas made the point clearly and emphatically that Manny Fernandez, for all the cash the Bruins are dumping into his lost-cause contract, deserves to be on doorman duty until such time as Thomas asks for a night off. You only give up three goals on 96 shots during a road trip and keep the Bruins in a game in Calgary where they were outshot 20-8 in the second period, you earned that No. 1 spot. Let Fernandez get his requisite 15 starts the rest of the way and nothing more, because this is and, despite the Bruins’ silly insistence to the contrary, always was Tim Thomas’ job.

Across the rink from Thomas, Miikka Kiprusoff continued his hot streak, surrendering two goals on 31 shots and generally looking impressive. The only goal of the first period came when Kiprusoff made a mess of a handled puck behind the net and Patrice Bergeron picked his pocket for an ugly wraparound. Blake Wheeler’s goal midway through the third was an awful pretty shot following a cross-ice pass and and was also awful unstoppable.

(Note to Peter Chiarelli: Psst, I heard the Blues, Kings, Thrashers and Islanders might need goaltending help. Just sayin’.)

P.S. For those keeping score at home, this is Calgary’s second win in which Jarome Iginla goes without a goal.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

(Please note before I begin this post that I had no intention whatever of writing about the Flames again tonight, but their performance against Nashville dictated it. If you were looking for me to talk about Buffalo, I apologize thoroughly. Onward then…)

If Mike Keenan still has a job tomorrow morning, it won’t be because he deserves it.

The Flames have played seven games now, I don’t think there’s been one yet where they looked like anything you could call a contender for the Northwest division crown. That’s all on Keenan.

The Flames may have gotten four third-period goals, including two from Jarome Iginla to complete a hat trick he started in the second period, but it’s important to differentiate Keenan’s lack of coaching from Iginla’s team leadership and ability to take over a game. You or I could have looked like a genius for that just by standing around behind the bench and enjoying a nice piece of Dubble Bubble.

But through seven games, the Flames have continually played undisciplined, largely ineffective, defensively irresponsible hockey. Two straight wins is great to look at, but those games have been impossibly hard to watch. I sat through the entirety of both of them despite strongly considering flipping to another game (I’m a masochist, I guess). I was eventually rewarded for my efforts, such as they are, but these games have been just brutal. The Flames picked up another 23 more minutes in penalties tonight, including giving the Preds a pair of 5-on-3 opportunities, one of which was a full two minutes because Jim Vandermeer decided to high-stick the nearest opponent after Rene Bourque had already been whistled for slashing. This while the team trailed 3-1. It was unbelievable.

The problem is there’s no accountability on this team from the coaching staff. Stupid play isn’t punished with a benching, and any line shuffling has just been abysmal. At one point tonight, Iginla was on a line with Vandermeer and Wayne Primeau with Cory Sarich and Dion Phaneuf at the points. This was actually a strategy that an NHL coach employed in a two-goal game.

The Flames were also hopelessly outplayed in the early going, getting outshot 14-4 in the first period and 24-15 through two. If not for a hilarious Nashville meltdown sparked by Iginla’s goal late in the second period and the Preds’ trying to sit on the lead, this would have been an utter embarrassment for Calgary on the first game of its brief road trip during which they fly from Calgary to Nashville to Phoenix back to Calgary in three and a half days.

Miikka Kiprusoff continued to play pretty well (two starts in a row! what a streak!) in making 35 saves on 38 shots, but he shouldn’t have been that busy. Nashville’s shots per game is 28.3, and that’s 20th in the league. Spot a better team 10 shots above their season average every night and see how many goals you give up. A hint: more than three. None of the goals were really Kipper’s fault. That, obviously, is on the defense, which ultimately is on Keenan.

The Flames will talk about how important the comeback was and how big it is to get two points on the road after trailing 3-0 for more than half the game, but it never should have gotten there. Keenan has coached a perfectly good team into Turdsville, Alberta (no, not Edmonton) and something needs to get squared away coaching-wise soon, because wins like this won’t keep happening.

By the way, the Flames are now 3-0 when Jarome Iginla scores. When he doesn’t, they’re winless. Think about that.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

I just watched maybe the worst hockey game I’ve seen in five years.

That Capitals/Flames game in Calgary was the very definition of a sloppily played hockey game. The Flames escaped with a 2-1 win because they simply played less badly than the Caps.

This was a game that saw 43 minutes of penalties handed out — 33 of which resulted in power plays — and one power play goal. Washington squandered a full nine-minute power play in the first power play (you read that right. N-I-N-E.), and Calgary got one power play goal out of 10 opportunities, including four separate 5-on-3s. It was an unmitigated disaster on both sides of the ice.

That nine-minute power play was an especially ugly thing to watch. Rene Bourque went to the box after he jumped Tyler Sloan, who at 27 was making his NHL debut, for a huge, clean hit in the neutral zone on Daymond Langkow, and got a fighting major, an instigating minor, and unsportsmanlike minor, and a misconduct with Washington only attempting seven shots in that time (though it was broken up by a minor penalty to Michael Nylander) and getting a paltry three on net. The Flames’ penalty killers matched that total. It was one of the most pathetic pieces of special teams play I’ve seen in a long, long time. Still the Caps led 1-0 after a period thanks to Sergei Fedorov’s redirection. That goal, by the way, tied him for the most all-time goals by a Russian-born player at 473 with Alex Mogilny.

The Flames, though, weren’t much better. Despite goals 1:42 apart in the second period, one a hard shot from Jarome Iginla on the power play that shouldn’t have trickled past Jose Theodore and the other a rocket from Matt Lombardi that would’ve beaten any goalie alive, the Flames’ man-up play was appallingly poor. I mean, 1 for 10 ain’t how you want your power play to run, especially if you get four cracks at going up two men. Even AFTER this game, the Caps’ penalty kill is still just 24th in the league (75.7 percent), and they got a ton of help padding that stat tonight.

But hey, the Flames’ defense was pretty solid for once, and though Alex Ovechkin tallied just a secondary assist, he was much better than I’ve seen him this season. Very menacing play despite the continuing lack of stats. Miikka Kiprusoff was just as good behind them, making 30 saves including a few rather nice ones. At the other end, Theodore for sure wants the Iginla goal back (he got a pad on it but it somehow got behind him) but he made a few quality saves as well. On a night where the teams split 57 shots, no forwards looked all that great.

I think some changes need to be made, and quickly, in Calgary. The Flames were lucky to pull this one out of their asses, and they probably wouldn’t have done so had they not been afforded NINE STRAIGHT power plays. The defense and goaltending was fine (for once) but this Calgary offense remains punchless — that 2.67 goals a night is good for 20th in the league. I’m not exactly for drumming Mike Keenan out of town just yet (not that I’m specifically against it — it was his 59th birthday today, so go easy on him for now, eh?), but he’s on deathwatch. Obviously his relationship with Kipper is a wee bit testy, but I don’t know how much of Bertuzzi’s resurgence is his doing.. whether Bert’s thriving on Keenan being a dick. The Flames need Jarome Iginla (or hell, ANYBODY) to be a lion most nights, and it’s no coincidence that they’re 2-0 when he pops one in.

Read the rest of this entry »

How can you not love this man?

Remember a little while ago when the Flames first signed Todd Bertuzzi, and everyone in the organization went into full damage control mode because the entire city of Calgary was ready to become Oiler fans?

At the time, Flames fans were overwhelmingly against the move, with 54 percent on the Flames’ diehard message board saying it was bad but tolerable, and another seven percent saying they would be boycotting the team until Bertuzzi was out of town. Not even Bertuzzi bringing his adorable son to the meet-the-media presser and refusing to talk about his past, err, indiscretions seem to have dampened Cowtown’s intense dislike for the former Canuck.

It was thought, though, that the furor might die down a bit as time went on.

According to the Calgary Sun, it hasn’t, at all.

The Flames sparked a firestorm of publicity when they signed forward Todd Bertuzzi this summer, but the buzz hasn’t ignited sales of No. 7 jerseys.

At the Sunridge Mall Jersey City, a replica is draped over a mannequin, but not many shoppers are taking notice and sales have been slow so far, said Kris Singleton, a staffer at the store.

“I think we’ve sold one so far,” he said, noting the Bertuzzi jerseys have only been in stock for about week.

That’s enthusiasm.

I’m sure, as the article states, that a few reasons go into the fact that they’ve sold just one (that to an immediate Bertuzzi family member, one assumes). He’s on a one-year contract, first of all. He’s also kind of got to prove himself to Calgary fans as a changed man, in a way.

What this actually is: a non-story. It’s the crummier of the Calgary papers, the one with the blowhard writers (Eric Francis, this means you) and an awful reputation for rumor mongering trying to dredge up a “grrr Bertuzzi” story that will surely have the thicker-skulled Calgary fans angrily shaking their fists and breathing heavily.

What this story isn’t: meaningful. The Sun, for some reason, is trying to run Bertuzzi out of town on a rail, presumably because he won’t talk about the whole Steve Moore thing.

Still, only one jersey? That’s rough.