The_Admiral

Josh Cooper Is an Irretrievable Dullard, chapter infinity:

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LAS VEGAS – When Barry Trotz coached the Nashville Predators, he could have pushed a more rigid defensive system in the team’s early years after expansion.

This may have led to more wins, but Trotz knew it wouldn’t attract more fans as the Predators tried to cement themselves in a non-traditional hockey market.

 

Yeah, all I remember from the early 2000s is talk about that riverboat gambler Barry Trotz and his go-go Predators sacrificing wins for excitement. You are a bad writer. Never write again. Your newspaper told you they would rather have no beat writer at all than have it be you and they were right.

No one in Boston knows how to dress. It's bordering on a national crisis. As a friend of a friend once wrote

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Boston is like America's Bad-Taste Storm Sewer: all the worst fashion ideas from across the country flow there, stagnate, and putrefy. To be fair, it's hard to be a fashion capital when half of your population is made up of undergraduate hoodie monsters, including those unfortunate coeds who don't realize that leggings-as-pants were supposed to be paired with tops large enough to conceal their cameltoes. Yet when they graduate, they can wear their Uggs and still fit in at the country's largest frat party on Lansdowne behind Fenway, where they can take breaks between body shots to admire just how long boot-cut jeans can stay in style in one place. And any classy lady from Beantown is bound to be impressed by formal sportswear. "But Boston is the epicenter of prep style!," you say? That's true, but it's with a little extra that ends up ruining everything: Khakis!—with pleats. Boat shoes!—with socks. Knit ties!—actually, no one in Boston seems to have ever seen one of these. For the more proletarian-minded, there are the modest little burgs of Cambridge and Somerville, where everyone dresses like the proprietor of his or her very own meth lab. If you wonder how a people can live like this, well, it's Jurassic Park for fashion troglodytes: life finds a way.

What the hell is that outfit Bill's wearing to host a television show? What's he trying to go for there?

Yeah, I hate that stuff. Too many interviewers don't realize it's about the guest. You're always here, they're not. The guy doing mornings on our sports talk station is the worst I've ever heard at answering himself and at least three follow-ups before the poor guest can even open his mouth.

Over-eager geeks talking about the NBA, my dick is so hard right now.

http://miketothmedia.com/2016/06/20/if-strombo-does-go-its-a-no-brainer/

This blog post is an interesting look at the unsurprisingly insular world of Toronto media, but buried in there is this solid gold nugget of prime Strombo:

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As mentioned, I didn’t buy in from the start but Strombo officially lost me during a telecast last fall to promote the upcoming World Cup of Hockey in Toronto. Strombo was up on stage interviewing a number of international NHL stars such as Zdeno Chara, the Slovakian-born captain of the Boston Bruins. Whether he forgot Chara’s first name, didn’t know how to pronounce it, or perhaps wanted to appear “hip and cool”, Strombo spent the whole conversation calling him “Chara”; as in, “Chara, where does the World Cup rank on your list of thrills?” and “What’s the key to success when you’re playing international hockey, Chara?”

I am real-life laughing out loud at the mental picture of Strombo circumlocuting "Zdeno" by just calling him "Chara." The best part is that Canadian broadcasters take a steaming dump all over foreign pronunciations every time they air a hockey game, so short of calling him "Steve," how wrong could he have even gotten it?

This is choice, too:

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George will continue to host his Sunday music show on CBC radio and it won’t be long before he lands another prominent TV gig in either Canada or the U.S., as he spends most of his time these days living in Los Angeles.

I've said it time and time again, there is nothing more Canadian than moving to the States.

Calgary doesn't run their farm team to turn a profit or compete but their prospects always suck. The Rockford IceHogs only exist as a cheap and local pipeline, but at least they've reliably produced NHL talent.

Look at this crap tweet, it's like they have LadyStanley running p.r. for them. "Goodness me! The Sharks almost but didn't break a record among four of NBC's eleven Stanley Cup Finals that generally had poor ratings. (And that's good news going forward.)" 

This sucks for journalism, but so did outing Tim Geithner's brother to get a blow in on Reddit.

1 hour ago, HedleyLamarr said:

And now look at the mess Winnipeg is in...that franchise has had nearly 20 years of acquiring draft picks and prospects, and they still haven't had anything close to resembling long-term sustained success.  One division championship, two playoff appearances, 0-for in the playoffs.  How is that even possible?  That franchise would strive for being snake-bitten.

I think they're going to turn the corner with Laine, Connor, Ehlers, Morrissey (giggle), and full-time Hellebuyck. Much like the Panthers with Ekblad and Barkov, you can screw up in this league for a long time, but eventually you'll have so many life jackets thrown at you that you simply can't sink anymore, even if it's just a matter of the life jackets piling up into a giant orange man-made island to wash up on. I'm not convinced Cheveldayoff and Heisinger are the best men for the job, but then again, the crusty old doofus who would trade his wife for any puppy-soft forward from Michigan is a win away from a second Stanley Cup. Pace-not-pace Jerry Krause, organizations don't always win championships.

Good stuff. Kind of reminds me of the expansion Browns and how to this day they've never been able to outrun the terrible mistakes the team made early on (though the biggest mistake of all was the NFL giving them the shortest lead time an expansion team has ever had).

I read something about how Jennifer Garner's Capital One commercials are more than just Capital One commercials. It's a minor miracle I'm not dead by my own hand.

"Sorry, son, I spent your inheritance on Chad LaRose." What a bad dad.

Cocaine: it's not just for NHL players anymore!

Columbus doesn't even have an argument for moving. They got their bailout years ago.

The thing that's interesting about the Beej is that you've rarely or never heard a thing about shady, incompetent, or downright inexplicable business practices, the stuff we've grown more than accustomed to with other NHL teams. As a business, they're run just fine. With them, it's simply been a case of really awful hockey operations, where everything they touch turns to crap. I don't think there's anything about Columbus in and of itself that makes them this way -- if anything, being able to chill out in a giant white-collar suburb is a net positive -- it's just that talent is finite on all levels and they always wind up on the ass end whether it's players or coaches or scouts or GMs. As we've seen with the Thrashers to some extent, if you up and moved the Beej wholesale and didn't change anything about what they were doing, they'd be in the same position they're in today. If there's an argument to be made about Columbus and franchise placement, it's simply not to expand any further.

Columbus is doing fine enough. They haven't brought shame upon themselves by getting kicked out of their arena or cleaning out the owner's kids' inheritances, which is good. You can't reasonably expect a place like Columbus to have a much higher ceiling than just puttering along.

On the other hand, I do do that and yell "REALLY SNAPPY DIALOGUE AARON SORKIN" during mumblecore films.

Las Vegas is gonna be hot garbage when it comes to TV households. As I can't emphasize enough, whatever faults Hartford qua Hartford has or had, I'll take a TV channel that gives me all of New England minus Fairfield County (and it's arguable a Connecticut team would get CSNNE limited carriage in Fairfield) over, well, basically just Nevada. That's five times the population in about two-thirds the area. I think Peter "Robbing Peter Junior To Pay Staal" Karmanos would agree more than he'd care to admit, being the kind of stubborn ass who has doubled down on stupid more times than I can count offhand.

No Hope Left

3 hours ago, BeerGuyJordan said:

Detroit has no difficulty regularly selling out games

It's getting butts in the sold seats that appears to be the problem. You've seen one Datsyukian deke, you've seen 'em all, huh, guys?

30 minutes ago, DG_Now said:

I hate when online hate-everythings use the word "sportsball." Come on, you dicks. You know the Seahawks play football.

Wussell Rilson

Can you imagine if Joe Buck discovered all those pindicks like Ryan Lambert and NBA Twitter?

"I'm Joe, he's Troy, and we're here for today's game between the Eagles and the Cowboys, or as I like to call it...sporps. The Cowboys are going to try and control time of possession. I think most people would agree that's a good thing."

"Joe, it looks like Tony Romo wants to come up big in the clutch today."
"Actually, there's no such thing as clutch, Troy, but that's okay, enjoy your sportsball."

2 hours ago, DG_Now said:

My problem with the Fox #1 team is they always sound so disinterested in the (Cowboys) game they're broadcasting. They always sound so perfunctory.

There was a line in the Ringer piece that lauded Buck for opening telecasts with a tossed-off "I'm Joe, he's Troy" as if he was puncturing the artifice of sportscasting or something. Again, maybe that would work from someone else, but from him, it just sounds bored. 

The problem with this new "Ironically Detached Joe Buck" is that sincerity always triumphs over irony in the end.

Joe Buck is technically sound (he once dropped in on a Blues telecast and just by wingin' it, immediately sounded better than the lower third of NHL pbp men), but the terse verbiage and silence that seemed momentous from Summerall and Scully here seem like a guy who's seen it all and would rather be someplace else. He's like the perfect #2 announce team guy, but always feels like a wet blanket on big moments in championships.

1 hour ago, KittSmith_95 said:

None of you see the easy move?

 

Put Nashville in the East, move Columbus and the 2 new teams to the West.

I was surprised when Winnipeg didn't go to the Central with Nashville sliding into Atlanta's NASCAR Division spot, especially considering all the overtures the Perds made to the alienated Atlanta faithful. I think the Jets ended up saying they liked being in the East those two years because it was, believe it or not, easier travel!