Everything Else

August Reader Participation Series – Your Most Hated Opponent

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We try this every year with varying degrees of success. August is clearly the purgatory of hockey coverage. While we still wait any news of a Bickell or Versteeg trade, there is pretty much nothing going on anywhere. Everyone head for cottage, basically. So every August, we come up with an idea where you are invited to share your stories and experiences, and we’ll post them. We’ve done First Hawks Game, Most Hated Hawk, First Hockey Hero and the like. Well today, and this one probably has the most potential, is the opponent that drove you the most nuts. From any era (and the older the better, because those could turn out hilarious). We’ve spent enough time bitching about Burrows or Kesler during normal hours. You can dig deep for this. We don’t care if it’s rational in the least, a widely despised player or one that only drove the bile to rise in your throat and your throat only. Whatever. We want ’em.

So of course, I guess I’d better kick this off, right? You got it. Paul Fuckin’ Kariya.

Everything Else

Midnight In The Garden Of Olives: The Hogs Offseason

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As the summer continues to slip away from all of us, I thought this would be as good a time as any to update everyone about the doings in Rockford so far this offseason. Obviously, the moves Stan Bowman makes figure heavily into how the IceHogs roster could look come fall.

There has been activity in Winnebago County that will factor into the mix, however. Several players have been signed to AHL deals. If you care to follow me into the rabbit hole, I’ll try and sort out who has come and gone since the past season came to a close.

Everything Else

Friday Foofaraw: My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult (Sort Of)

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It’s Friday, so that means we get to do whatever we want. And it’s surprising that I’ve never written about this before, as big of a part of my life as it was. But I strangely got the urge to see it all on the page a little bit ago, and now seems like the perfect time to do it. As a few of you know, before I started doing this I did stand-up comedy for six or seven years. I don’t say I WAS a stand-up, or that I worked as one, because I so rarely got paid for it. But whatever, semantics. It certainly shaped everything that came after it, and I almost certainly wouldn’t be doing this, or at least as well, if I hadn’t decided shortly after college to put every shred of dignity I had on the line.

Everything Else

West Side!

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You know we’ve really hit the hockey desert of the summer when the only news is that the Hawks have finally found an area to build their new practice facility. This has been going on for a while, two years I think, and the problem was that the land that the Hawks owned around the U.C., none had a lot big enough to fit the kind of facility they wanted. The Bulls basically took the one that would have worked, and everything else was kind of sandwiched by the pink line tracks (which should raise a question about just why the United Center doesn’t have an “L” stop, but we’ll have that discussion at another time. If you want to read more about that, check out this article.). There’s also the new office building being put up directly east of the arena complicating things.