What the hell are they even doing, and should we even care either way? But we thank you for caring enough to listen.
Football is over so we have to talk about hockey more now. Every single one of you is our Valentine.
vs 
Game Time: 7:00PM CDT
TV/Radio: NBC, CBC, SportsNet, WGN-AM 720
Where’s All The Stolen Liquor, Danny Ocean? Did You Hide It Up Your Butt?: SinBin, Knights On Ice
With the series now “shifting” to the Hawks having home ice tonight and tomorrow, it offers them a chance to claw back into the series after going down two games to none on Thursday night, squandering an opportunity after forcing overtime against the much faster Knights. This of course, operates under the assumption that the Blackhawks have a competent coach who will utilize his ability to free up his top players with last change, which they absolutely do not have.
There is no pleasure in writing about an NHL winger named Kane who has had sexual assault allegations brought against him in the past. I certainly don’t envy the position Sharks fans are in here one bit – when the Hawks stood by Garbage Dick you saw it coming because you knew they wouldn’t abandon their star child and face of their franchise. He was already here and given his status you knew he wasn’t going anywhere. In some sense, you could understand it, no matter how much it made your skin crawl.
But I imagine there is somehow a more gross feeling when your team actually goes out and acquires an individual like this. It’s one thing to stand by a player you already have when he reveals himself as a fuckstick, but it’s entirely another to invite one a fuckstick into town knowing full well he is a fuckstick. And as we around here have experienced, trying to analyze and cover a player like Kane (take your pick which one I am referencing) is a delicate balancing act, and sucks a good bit of the fun out of doing this.
Part of that balancing act is just being able to break down the actual hockey of a player like this. Both Kane’s are good players, and hockey-wise this is a good move for a the Sharks to get Evander for their playoff push. But trying to engage in that side of it objectively when you feel negatively about them personally is really hard. Fear The Fin editor Sie Morley bravely and excellently articulates what her vision is for doing so, and I think her plan the right one. It’s pretty much the approach I’ve taken personally, and this blog has taken as a whole.
So welcome, Shark fans, to the club of fans whose teams have deciding selling their souls for hockey results is a defensible move. It’s fucking miserable here.
Game #64 Preview
As was noted in the preview, Sergei Bobrovsky was never going to allow much tonight, what with his .970 and total of 10 goals allowed for the month coming into tonight. Fortunately Corey Crawford was every bit of Bobrovsky’s equal tonight, while the rest of the team never really had to get out of third gear.
vs 
Game Time: 7:30PM CST
TV/Radio: CSN, WGN-AM 720
Uncle Dale’s New Dysfunctional Family: Litter Box Cats
Dale Tallon just can’t seem to find an organization that doesn’t have dysfunction among the front office braintrust. And after getting kicked upstairs this past summer, his replacement Tom Rowe has now descended to behind the Cats’ bench after unceremoniously launching Gerard Gallant on Sunday after a mediocre 11-10-1 start. And Tom Rowe will make his NHL head coaching debut at the United Center tonight as the Hawks return home from the final Circus Trip ever.
Coming into tonight, there purveying wisdom regarding the Habs was that they ran their offseason like a bunch of assholes, and that their success to this point, was largely built on the back of Carey Price. And tonight’s result did nothing to shift opinions one way or the other.
Yesterday, we participated in Puck Daddy’s summer series, having been commissioned to submit the Top 5 Weirdest Moments in franchise history for the Hawks. We as a group felt a responsibility to include the events of last summer in the list, as to ignore it would be fully remiss on our part. The version that ran was heavily edited from what we originally submitted, as Yahoo presumably wanted to avoid any blowback, and felt it was not tonally appropriate for what was supposed to be a “fun” and “lighthearted” piece. But this organization has made it very difficult to be either of those things for the last year, and it would have been dishonest to not reflect that. After the jump is what we had originally intended to run.
Tonight marks the NHL’s annual award ceremony in Las Vegas, where F-list celebs uncomfortably deliver patter at the podium prior to drunk hockey players receiving replica trophies and mumbling through an acceptance speech in between impossibly poorly curated musical acts. It truly is one of the greatest events in all of show business and sports.
So naturally, because nothing Cardinal John McDonough and his PR cadre ever do is on accident, the night before he could walk home with as many as three trophies, information “leaked” that Garbage Dick is on his best behavior this summer here in the placid lakeside outpost that is Chicago under the team’s watchful eye, rather than in the cesspool of temptation that is Buffalo, New York.
