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If I were a coach I would take a Rivers over Kronwall any day. But what do I know, I only played defense for 20 years. You, on the other hand, post a lot on interweb message boards. Good job. High on something, anyway. What do Babcock, Holland, Andersson, and the rest of the Wings brass know? You played pickup hockey! Go tell them a thing or two!

Tentative deal with Kitna And, the Lions resign Eddie Drummond and Kalimba Edwards.

see, the problem with Tuesday is this: once you leave work on Tuesday, you've just finished a full weekend's worth of work days. and you still have more than twice that left to go. Sunday is a better day than Thursday, but Thursday evening is far better than Sunday evening.

Tuesday is the worst day of the week.

Well, Cross isn't exactly a young buck....he's 35. Still, that's nine years younger than Cheli. Even though he's getting up there, I was pleased with the trade before the Chicago game and even more so afterwards. Most importantly, it sounds from his intermission interview that he's excited to be a Wing and hungry to prove he belongs. Just the kind of guy we need.

And we lost R.W. McQuarters - I don't like that, McQuarters is solid.

If you want to get really technical about it, the Lions franchise started scheduling Thanksgiving games on their own. By the time Dallas (bastards) started doing it (some 30+ years later) the league was more organized, but the NFL itself still had nothing to do with Dallas starting to play on Thanksgiving. Much like the Dawg Pound trademark (the NFL, not the Cleveland Browns, is suing to recover the trademark from an apparel company in Hawaii) it is a local tradition adopted and continued by the NFL. Ford may be holding advertising dollars over the league's head, but if such an influential owner as Lamar Hunt of the Chiefs (who originally, a couple years back, proposed taking the Thanksgiving game away from the Lions and Cowboys) can't get what he wants (the third, rotating game is a compromise), then I think the Thanksgiving game is pretty well entrenched in Detroit.

NIT bracket is out now too. Michigan's a #1 seed. The ACC is represented by six teams in the NIT. The only ACC teams not seeing postseason action are VT (suck it ) and GT.

Too many teams in the middle of the pack beating each other up. FSU, Maryland, UVA, and Miami were all scrapping to grab a bid, but they all had more bad losses than good wins. UVA, for example, had some nice upsets over UNC and Boston College but that wasn't good enough to balance out losses to Georgia Tech, Clemson, and Fordham. FSU had a nice win over Duke, but that didn't top the previous loss to Virginia Tech and the ugly tournament loss to Wake Forest.

Well....the Blackhawks game is nearly over, and I think Cross definitely made a good first impression. Goal on his first shift, good physical play along the boards, and even mixed it up a bit there near the end. Paul MacLean had good things to say about his play. Seems to me like Cross is well on his way to establishing himself as a regular and bumping Woolley from the rotation.

No bid for Michigan. Rats. They really screwed the pooch by losing to Minnesota. How did Tennessee get a #2 seed over UNC?

You know that every Big Ten team skips two other Big Ten teams every year on a rotating basis.....right? Otherwise there'd be no room for non-conference games.

Looks like UVA won't be dancing this year then again, we were unanimously expected to win at most 2 or 3 games in the ACC all year....so the upcoming NIT bid already means we've had a damn good season. Let's see if Michigan can snag a lucky bid. Losing to Minnesota - NOT GOOD. Maybe at best a 9th or 10th seed. More likely the NIT

So should the Packers be forced to put heaters under Lambeau Field so they won't have such an advantage at home? After all, the Frozen Tundra is a Green Bay-only tradition - the rest of us don't enjoy it so much. Or maybe Cleveland's Dawg Pound, a Cleveland-only tradition, should rotate stadiums each week. And how bout sharing some of those Super Bowl rings, Steelers fans? Or do you kind of want to keep them to yourselves? The third game on Thanksgiving that rotates is a fine solution. Let the Lions keep theirs. Unless the league would like to rotate Super Bowl eligibility so that "everyone can share in the tradition."

Jon Kitna is supposed to pay a visit to the Lions. If he were happy as a backup, great, I'd love to have him as a backup, but he wants a starting job. The Lions took a big step toward improving their offensive line by letting Kyle Kosier sign with the Cowboys.

The dance team is almost always hotter than the cheerleaders.

A Leafs fan friend of mine told me he felt Cross looked bad in Toronto because Toronto is always asking defensemen to play higher on the depth chart than their ability. (Case in point: Aki Berg.) They tried to use Cross as a 4th d-man and he's not. He did do well in Edmonton, and I think once he gets on the ice with the Wings, people will be pleased with his play.

Agree with a lot of that, but why the anguish over the 4th rounder? Not a lot of success in the 4th round for the Wings, and really, the 3rd is the last round you can expect to find an NHLer. Everything after that is a crapshoot. For every Evan McGrath the Wings have found in the 4th, there's four of Brent Hobday.

We could traded our 1st with Mowers, Woolley for Salei??? We don't use draft picks???... That time is over my friend with the salary cup... Right now we need to keep these ''high'' picks... There is no FA shop. time like in the past... Wait....we ought to have traded our 1st rounder to get a better D-man, but we don't want to lose the high draft picks? Point is, the fourth round is just as much a crapshoot as the 7th.

A list of our 4th round draft picks in the last ten years: Mattias Ritola Evan McGrath Ryan Oulahen Johan Berggren Drew MacIntyre Miroslav Blatak Stefan Liv Dimitri Semenov Alexander Seluyanov Jari Tolsa Brent Hobday Quintin Laing Johan Forsander Oh boy. For comparison's sake, the 7th rounders: Bretton Stamler Steve Covington Tomas Kollar Derek Meech Jimmie Svensson Henrik Zetterberg Jeremy Goetzinger Mike Laceby Colin Beardsmore Zetterberg among the 7th rounders, McGrath and Liv from the 4th round. Out of 22 players, three worth talking about. I'm not sweating the draft picks.

Not if I'm part of the consensus. Cross is better than Rivers, in my not-so-humble opinion. GuloGulo put it pretty well, I think.

Unless Cory Cross has progressed significantly from when I saw him play all the time in TO, I'll take Jamie Rivers thank you very much. You are underselling Rivers, IMO. He was a better depth d-man than he got credit for. The fact is, and I repeat for the thousandth time, Cross could not hold down a spot on the worst defensive squad in the league. Anyways, though acquiring Cory Cross is indeed pretty insigificant, the fact that at the end of the day we shipped Jamie Rivers and a fourth out for Cross and a seventh kinda perplexes me. What was Holland hoping to accomplish? What did Rivers ever do to convince you he was worth anything? Myself, I've never been too happy with his play. As for Cross, there's lots of instances where players just don't fit with the teams they're on. He was perfectly decent in his past stops in Edmonton, Toronto, and Tampa Bay.

Why? Cross has 5 inches and 30 pounds on Rivers, Rivers doesn't hit and isn't much of a penalty-killer, while Cross does (occasionally) and is. Maybe Rivers' one lonesome assist this season is proof of his offensive firepower.

For the prices paid for the defensemen that went, I wouldn't. Todd Simpson - even for a sixth rounder, I think he would have cost the Wings more than he would have contributed. It wouldn't have been worth it to trade from Grand Rapids for a d-man that'd be no better than a 6th guy, and that's probably what it would have taken for a Keith Carney.