The Kopecky hat trick is still a favorite:ESPN
Never tell me the odds:NESN
This was a big one:Blackhawk Up
This gives a new meaning to Hockey-Tron:LGH
Well that’s encouraging: NHL
The somewhat interesting news in the hockey world yesterday came when the Calgary Flames extended Mark Giordano to a 6-year, $40.5 million extension. The deal will kick in when Giordano turns 32 and will carry him into 2022 when he is 38 years old. Along with that will be a $6.75 million cap hit, which in years 37 and 38 will probably be (Borat voice) NOT good.
So what does that mean?
I won’t put “trigger warning” at the top of this, but “soccer warning” instead. It’s a summer Friday, so let’s get a little loose and I know a lot of you aren’t the footy fan I am.
After three parades in six seasons, it’s almost easy to forget, even for a lifelong fan like me, just how dark the days were for the Hawks and their fans in the late 90s and basically all of the first decade of this century. It might as well have occurred in a different lifetime, and for a lot of Hawks fans, it did.
But to be reminded, I only need to look at another sports team in town, who are seemingly in the exact same position, except their owner hasn’t pickled his own liver and pretty much entire body and thus probably isn’t a death risk like the Old Man was. It’s the Chicago Fire. You might not have heard of them, even if you’re a soccer fan. They sure haven’t made much of an effort to get you to notice, that’s for sure.
If you haven’t seen it, the Trib today ran a profile of the Erie County DA who will be handling this case, if it becomes a case, Frank Sedita III. I’m almost certainly in above my head when discussing the nuances here, and this post probably best serves as a launch point for the various lawyers who are friends of the site to explain it out better in the comments.
Obviously, to everyone certain things jump out. His “choosiness,” for lack of a better term, is one. But I’m guessing like most other big city District Attorney offices, Erie County’s would have limited time and resources and prosecuting every case that comes into it is an impossibility, especially if Buffalo’s court system is anywhere near as backed up as Chicago’s. I don’t know what the proper balance is here, and I hope someone or a few can hash it out in response to this.
The discussion today on Twitter, according to my very intensive research of looking once, looks like it springs from Adidas’s acquisition of the jersey-making rights for the NHL in a couple years (though they own Reebok so have kind of already been doing this). This has led to speculation, if not outright acceptance, that ads on jerseys are coming and we’re all just going to have to get used to it.
This feels like a subject that I should get a little angry about. And I kind of want to. But I don’t. Maybe it’s just straight up defeat, as we all know what’s coming so why waste emotion about it. Or maybe it just isn’t that big of a deal? Honestly, I’m not sure which or what combination of both it is. We also seem to go through this every couple of years with every new deal or some owner or commish bringing up the idea, and then it never quite happens. But we know the vending machine is really rocking back and forth on it now.
