octopusonice

Minnesota Vikings and Colorado Rockies? Those don't belong on the list either

Game over on that issue. As far as getting paid for speaking, endorsements and doing other things, those would not be compensation from a team and wouldn't apply to the CBA. I think that you can have other jobs if you are a player; you just can't do it in a way that circumvents the CBA. If you are paid $7M to be Mike Ilitch's gardner, the league will call bulls*** on that quicker than a Pavel Datsyuk deke on a shootout. If a player were to get paid $50K to do some accounting on the side (don't know why anyone would do that if they were making a living as a player, but it's just a hypothetical example) that would not be a problem, because it makes sense for the kind of work being done.

I don't like the idea of the league having a controlling interest in fining Niedermeyer or any other player for missing training camp. That's a payroll issue and should be a matter for the Ducks, Niedermeyer and the union to resolve.

Chicago's full of slackers and a giant low pressure system.

Where Barry Smith coaches. If Igor comes back to the Wings' FO, he'll definitely have a lot of Russian contacts.

No, because I don't think that high draft picks automatically equate to successful teams. There are numerous examples of top five picks in any sport that turned out to be total busts and late round picks that ended up as All Stars and HOFers. I think that the kind of players the Red Wings want are less likely to be found in the top five picks anyway. It's more about finding someone who has a better all around game than someone who is a flashy goal scorer. As long as we have the GM and scouts that we do, this team should be strong for awhile. They have done a good job of transitioning from the Money is No Object era to the era of managing salaries and personnel intelligently.

I voted a few times for Detroit, but can't see them winning. I doubt if you'll get very many votes outside of Michigan on this one. It looks like Boston will win it.

Actually, Phoenix and other desert cities like Las Vegas, get cold at night in the winter time and can even get down to freezing. I have stayed in Phoenix overnight in November and awakened to frost on my windshield. Do it at night in January and it should be OK. Besides, as long as it wasn't in the sun, it should work with normal refrigeration equipment. If you held the game in a Sun Belt city at night it's probably no worse than holding a SCF in June in an indoor facility.

That would force compliance pretty quickly

^^^ That post is pretty close to how I feel. Smizik makes some good points in the column he wrote, but I would not give the Pittsburgh fans a hard time for booing. I went through a similar phase as a Padres fan here in SD in 1999 after we just made it to the World Series, only to get swept by the Yanks. We ended up losing Steve Finley, Ken Caminiti, Greg Vaughn and our ace pitcher Kevin Brown who signed an ungodly contract of 7 yrs and $105M to that hated team up the freeway from here, the LA Dodgers. Brown was not a trading deadline acquistion, but we only had him for one year. One time the Dodgers came to town and the local fans let him have it. Every time he batted, every time he had the ball, they just gave him an earful. Someone made an effigy of Brown full of play money and beat it up. Brown had probably the worst night of his career and we won 9-2. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Padres celebrated the 10th anniversary of that team/ Brown was there and the fans cheered him. Glad to see that, but it made me realize that at times we can be big hypocrites as fans. So, I don't plan on giving the Pens fans a hard time, cuz I've gone through the same in other sports.

Maybe the Bears said no, so they could not do it at Soldier Field? Or maybe the people of Chicago wanted to see what it was like to have a defending champion play at Wrigley Field.

Ryan Miller wasnt looking to be a Wing. That's about as surprising as Ellen DeGeneres revealing she's a lesbian 10 years ago.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

I think they decided to rotate around the league and it was Chicago's turn. Detroit made the most sense for an opponent.

I think it is Shanny. I can't see Yzerman doing that. I have a lot of the 2001-2002 games on VHS, but they are all in storage. Damn! I have one from a Wings/Blues game where Cheli gets put in the penalty box, yells at this guy from across the ice and in a mocking fashion pretends to be scared.

I would imagine the commissioner would step in and force compliance or issue penalties/punishment for non-compliance. I looked at the CBA which can be found at http://www.nhl.com/cba/2005-CBA.pdf. Section 50.5 (a) deals with salary caps and floors and basically says that to have a team salary total below the floor is not allowed, but I could not find anything about penalties or punishment for not complying. Maybe we have some lawyers in here that want to take a stab at it.

If Sundin signs with the Wings after getting Hossa, I'm going to need smelling salts.

Maybe he has a line of authenticated collectibles and that there is an agreement that his genuine signature can only appear on those pieces of memorabilia. It may be a personal thing where he doesn't want to provide memorabilia dealers with articles of value. Signed memorabilia is always going to be worth more than his signature on a plain piece of paper and it's more likely to come from a fan rather than a dealer out to make a buck, so that may be why he signs mail, but not cards.

All we need now to top it off is for Hockey Scores to become the new theme song for HNIC.

I'm confused. I thought StubHub was a place where people who had tickets could make them available to the public, and I thought these tickets were not yet for sale. Is this game available to Blackhawks season ticket holders? Does StubHub also act as a ticket broker?

As long as Detroit wins the Trophy That Really Counts, Crosby and Ovechkin can continue to be the NHL equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain while Hank continues to be the NHL equivalent of Bill Russell. On an individual level, I would rather see Hank win Conn Smythe trophies than Art Ross trophies.

"WTF is going on over there? You idiots!" Maybe something like that?

Looks like that remark has been edited out. The article was flagged because the text does not cite any sources, so anything about a local ban on the song or a Detroit jinx doesn't have much credibility. I like Wikipedia as a quick and dirty reference on various topics. A lot of times, I will hear a hot topic in the news for a couple of weeks and wonder how the whole thing started, and it's helpful for the background info, but it's open editing leaves it vulnerable to misinformation and abuse.

You're hard to please. You have one goal that turned out to be a Cup winner and another that won a playoff series in dramatic fashion and you liked neither one. I can see the reasoning that McCarty's goal was less dramatic because there was still a lot of hockey left to play after he scored it, but to discount Yzerman's goal because the Wings did not go on to win the Cup that year is being implacable. You might as well discount most DRW highlight goals then, because out of 80+ DRW seasons only 11 of them resulted in Cups. Using your reasoning, any goal scored in a non-Cup season is a non-highlight no matter how spectacular or impressive.

Good. The offseason is a good time to get it fixed. I'm also sure that with the post 9/11 issues that public venues deal with and this arena being in the greater NYC area that there will be hell to pay if it is not fixed quickly.