The Two-Line Pass

Athletes sometimes attach themselves to very odd products.

Baseball superstar Fred McGriff has the Tom Emanski videos (back to back to back to back national champions!), a shirtless Bill Clement has Deep Woods Off!, and OJ Simpson has double murder Hertz Rent-a-Car. But it takes a rare athlete indeed to come out with his own personal line of products. These are players whose names are synonymous with success and athletic excellence.

Jordan.

Tiger.

Beckham.

Wisniewski.

That’s right. James Wisniewski. The currently injured guy on the Blackhawks, and, according to the banner at the top, “your favorite Chicago Blackhawk.” He’s got his own clothing line. WizWear43. Who wouldn’t want a $20 t-shirt with a goalie mask wearing sunglasses? Just $15 bucks for the girls’ shorts? Is there a way to send my money faster than my cable modem will allow?

This is possibly the worst idea in the history of sports marketing. Not only is this a player that wouldn’t be in the top 10 current Blackhawks named by any Chicago sports fan (and even then, ehhhhh), but “Wiz Wear” sounds like the rubber underpants you give a kid that can’t hold it during a spelling test. Terrible name for a terrible product, alliteration aside.

On the plus side, the site allows you interact directly with the Wiz through a Q&A form. Feel free to ask him such questions as, “Do you think anyone is going to buy this?” or “Seriously, what the hell were you thinking?” or even “Can you get me Jonathan Toews’ autograph?”

Besides, my general rule is that I don’t buy things that cost more in dollars than that player’s career goal total, which effectively prices Wisniewski out of everything that’s over 11 bucks.

If you were hoping to hear the classic Hockey Night in Canada theme when you tuned into Wednesday’s Canadiens/Bruins game on TSN and RDS, you’re out of luck. TSN, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to replace the beloved song with a much, much worse version.

Montreal-based girl-rock band Simple Plan (who also recorded a new, lame goal song for the Canadiens) has been asked to come up with their version of The Hockey Theme, and unfortunately obliged. And it won’t stop at just Wednesday night’s game, even though TSN has asked a number of artists (Stompin’ Tom Connors had best be among them).

Simple Plan’s rock version of The Hockey Theme will be used in TSN and RDS broadcasts during intermissions at various points throughout the NHL season.

Great.

But fear not, people who don’t like awful pop punk!

But purists need not worry, Milliere said.

“We will always open our hockey broadcasts with the classic, 54-piece Toronto Symphony Orchestra version of “The Hockey Theme” and we’re just giving them another feel throughout the broadcast with a younger version.”

The TSN release describes the song as jaw-dropping. From what I heard, that’s not far off. That blimp crash in Lakehurst, N.J. was pretty jaw-dropping too.

Remember how awesome Martin Brodeur’s mask was? It was just that simple Devil on his forehead for so many years, and it worked perfectly.

Awesome.

According to the Devils’ website, he had it from 1993-94 until last year. With it, he became the best goalie ever, won three Stanley Cups and four Vezinas. But he unveiled the new one at practice this morning. It stinks.

“It’s going to be hard to notice, I think,” Brodeur said. “It’s the same color scheme. For people facing me, there really won’t be a difference. It’s really more for TV or even for people looking up from top. I don’t think it should be a big difference for people.”

Boooooo. Shut up!

There’s just nothing you can even say to that. The worst part is, it’s all to promote his new website, MB30.com. We’re now one step closer to having “GoldenPalace.com” on someone’s mask, probably a goalie Rick Tocchet knows.

Miikka Kiprusoff had two outstanding seasons where he went to the Stanley Cup Finals and then won a Vezina the following season. In those seasons he posted GAAs of 1.69 (an NHL record, thanks) and 2.07, and sv% of .933(!) and .923. Then he changed his mask design from those badass orange flaming skulls and look: 2.46/2.69 and .917/.906. Awful. Come on Marty, what happened to the classics? There’s precedent and everything!

Terrible idea.

Yah, ya know, all you kids out there, let's get some more-a them Staal boys on every team, eh? No more of these Euro kids with their visors and whatnot. Okay, stop right there. Now look what he's doin...

You know all those great young foreign players that have come over to North America to play juniors? Alex Edler, Alex Radulov, Ales Hemsky, Radim Vrbata, Marek Schwarz, Ole Tollefsen, and so forth? Know how they were much better prepared for the North American game because they played in the CHL?

They were all brought to this hemisphere by the CHL Import Draft, and that might soon be a thing of the past.

“It will be either to reduce or completely eliminate import players,” QMJHL president Gilles Courteau said Thursday. “But before we do something, we want to get a position and take it to our Canadian Hockey League partners.

“My personal opinion is that 10 years ago - or maybe longer now - the decision to bring import players to the CHL was something very good. Now it’s getting tougher to bring those players. Second, we must look at the calibre of players we are bringing over now. Third, we must look and see if we can improve the situation we have with them.”

I understand, certainly, that there may be many cashflow problems with running a junior hockey team in Chicotoumi or wherever the latest QMJHL team is setting up shop, and I understand that all this pain-in-the-ass IIHF nonsense is making it difficult to deal with European players and leagues, especially those that appear to be good, young prospects.

And look, guys like Andrej Meszaros, Anze Kopitar, and Ilya Kovalchuk were all taken in import drafts and never came over. Would those guys have not been worth whatever you paid? Even a step or two below Ilya Kovalchuk’s level, still provides a pretty damn good hockey player.

But for the sake of the sport, both at the junior and professional level, completely doing away with the Import Draft is an awful, terrible, no-good, very bad idea.

First, it theoretically lowers the quality of hockey in both the junior leagues and pros. It’s understandable that teams don’t want to pay good money to import Petr So-and-So from Riga, Latvia and have him turn out to be not very good, then have to stick him on the third line where he’s taking time from a good, young Ontario/Quebec/Saskatchewan boy (who not-so-incidentally costs the team much less). Sure, would a team really miss, say, Alexander Edler? Maybe not, and like all drafts, a lot of picks don’t work out for whatever reason. However, it’s become pretty clear over the last however many years that the CHL has a pretty proven record of fast-tracking people to the NHL. How much harder is he to pry from his European team as an 18-year-old first-round pick? Certainly, coming to the NHL from Brandon is a lot easier for all involved than coming from Belarus.

Second, getting rid of the import draft probably only widens the talent gap in the CHL. A team like London, for example, would be in a much better position to sign several top-quality European free agents than most CHL teams. The Knights’ pockets are deep, as is the existing talent pool. Theoretically at least, these teams are all businesses. I get that. But I believe an old saying goes something along the lines of, “You have to spend money to make money.” Say a struggling Canadian team suddenly drafts and signs a top-level talent like Alex Radulov, who helped lead Quebec to the Memorial Cup in 2006 (not that Quebec City is a small market, but you see my point), does that get people to show up and help the franchise make money? Yes. With a draft, anyone can get Radulov. Without one, some CHL juggernaut with big money to throw around will get them most of the time.

So what’s the solution? If the import draft is hurting the CHL financially, I doubt there’s little that can be done outside of the NHL somehow partially financing it. But that seems less likely than Alexander Radulov coming back to the Predators this year, so I doubt that’s anyone’s Plan A. Plan B, though, can’t be resigning an entire league to have a lower-level quality of hockey at the risk of playing some toeheaded kid from Saskatoon instead.

The whole point of a draft is talent dispersal, right? To ensure that deep-pocketed teams don’t stockpile all the Grade-A talent and leave the scraps for everyone else? Would it be fair if the New York Rangers, who have all the money in the world to throw around, had been able to sign Sidney Crosby, Alexander Ovechkin and Dion Phaneuf right when they turned 18 just because they could afford it? But that’s what would happen if imports are either no longer drafted (bad idea) or banned completely (worse idea).

Smarten up, CHL. This is bad for business and bad for the sport.

Mmmm borscht

If you’re ever in Magnitogorsk and looking for a place to eat, why not swing by Evgeni Malkin’s VIP Zone restaurant, where vistors will get all the fun and ambience of a Siberian gulag.

Barred windows and ceiling, lamps designed as police flashlights, barbed wire and excerpts from the Russian Penal Code are significant parts of the interior design at VIP Zone, Magnitogorsk. You can have a seat on a plank-bed (there are comfortable chairs for the more delicate) and eat your food with an aluminium fork. When you have finished, waitresses dressed in striped prison wrappers will bring you a bill dotted with fingerprints.

‘I wanted to open a restaurant that would be something absolutely new, like nothing before it,’ Malkin told Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.

Well mission accomplished. Know why no one would have thought to make a prison-themed restaurant, Geno? Because it’s a terrible idea.

But say you’re looking for an upscale experience and still want to feel like you’re on the set of “Oz.” Malkin has the solution.

VIP guests are taken to the ‘chief’s office’ - a room in crimson with heavy furniture and portraits of Soviet dictators like Stalin and Beria, donning maps marking all the Russian prisons.

‘Designers suggested making it look like a maximum security prison. I now plan to establish a network in other cities,’ he added.

Great, another chain restaurant. Hell, the Hard Rock Cafe is barely a good idea and people actually like going there. And for a country like Russia to have as much of a history of.. let’s say unjust prison sentences, maybe you don’t want to go around bringing that up or indeed trying to make money from it.

But wait, there’s more!

In spite of the grim interior, the food is nothing like prison meals. However, you can order authentic chifir — a popular Russian prison drug made from tea. And if a visitor drinks too much, the person is driven home in a police car.

And by “driven home” they mean strangled.