Everything Else

Could You Try To Try, Comcast Sportsnet Chicago?

By 1638

Hey there, CSN. I know you know me. I give you a lot of shit on Twitter. I don’t particularly want to, though I’ve come to appreciate it. But I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t really suck at the one thing you’re supposed to do, which is present sports. Sometimes it’s little things. Like how the filters on your cameras still make it look like the Hawks are playing in a garage. Or how you regularly don’t have the right replay angle for whatever Eddie O is blabbering about (Eddie O blabbering isn’t really your fault, but I sometimes take it out on you). Or your occasional tendency to have someone who knows nothing about hockey on your hockey coverage.

Sometimes it’s bigger stuff. Like the way you fired Josh Mora for doing his job (full disclosure: Josh is a close friend). Or the whole Susannah Collins debacle, though I know that was driven by the Hawks themselves and you just carried out their wishes. Or your insistence on putting Bobby Hull on my screen, when it’s pretty well known that Hull is a human hemorrhoid.

And yet you dig the hole deeper.

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Actual Convention Tidbits

By 1245

Normally, the week of Prospects’ Camp and the Convention yields nothing more than a bunch of self-congratulatory hot air (though when it’s on the heels of a parade that’s usually pretty deserved) and a bunch of puff pieces about prospects that will never ever matter. This time around, the prospects that might matter only scrimmaged once so there wasn’t much to get a read off of. And the Convention actually yielded a couple things worth talking about, even if it’s just July Space Madness and we’re all speculating for the sake of speculating (and it’s better than talking about the asinine idea of trading Kyle Schwarber for a fucking reliever or the White Sox… well, the White Sox).

So first things first, and the drum we’ve been beating about Marian Hossa slotting down this season to be a checking line winger with Marcus Kruger.

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The Chicago Bruins

By 1653

Day late to this, was traveling yesterday so apologies for the delay.

As we spent a season watching the Hawks fuck up pretty much every chance to make themselves likable as an organization, or even appear competent in the ways of PR or understanding, yesterday’s post-trade bus-tossing of Teuvo Teravainen shouldn’t really be disappointing considering the heights of incompetence and deafness they’ve already scaled. And yet it’s another minor notch on the post showing that the Hawks aren’t really anywere near the first-class organization they love to tell us that they are. Maybe they were once again too busy filming an ad with a sick kid they use to sell tickets where they don’t tell us what disease or condition that child has and/or provide information where others might find out where to learn and help.

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We Like To Watch – May 16th: The Good Fortune Of Mistakes Not Made

By 1399

If you haven’t read Ryan Lambert’s What We Learned on Puck Daddy today, you should. It’s pretty instructive on not just how luck plays a huge part in playoff success on the ice, but also off the ice. And considering how most NHL teams are run, the moves you don’t make–or more to the point the ones you aren’t allowed to– can shape an organization’s future and present. It also kind of lets you know just how backward a lot of teams still are.

And that also applies here. While everyone still rushed to praise Stan Bowman and his staff, even though they might be the most born-on-third front office in the history of the game, there are slices of good fortune in moves they weren’t allowed to complete that played a huge role for them.

Everything Else

When Is It Now, Hawks?

By 1711

Well, here we are again. Me staring at you, wondering if this is finally the time you’ll do the right thing. You think you’re sick of it…

This one’s obvious. This one’s easy. You don’t have to wait around for the NHL to act, and as we all know there is no guarantee that they will. You don’t need to follow their lead. Take the lead, just once in what has been an utterly miserable year for a section (and a growing one) of your fanbase. For once this season, don’t marginalize a section of your fanbase, one that you’re happy to cater to when it’s a photo op and really a celebration of you. But this is the real test.

Suspend Andrew Shaw yourselves for tomorrow’s game. Don’t wait around for Gary Bettman or the DOPS or whoever else. Take. The Lead. Declare that no current or future player will be allowed to wear your jersey (with however offensive it actually might be in itself) and represent your organization this way. Make it clear it will not ever be tolerated.

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What A Way To Run A Railroad

By 1770

Another banner day in great Hawkdom and hockey in general. It’s gone beyond comedic to the surreal at this point. A listless, 5th straight loss to the decidedly in-the-middle Wild, the Hawks most important player looking at some sort of suspension, an organization continuing to act in a most callous, cowardly fashion, and a league that if it were any more balloon-handed would be able to carry the dude’s house from UP to Jupiter and back. Let’s see if we can’t get through it all without opening wounds on our collective faces.

-Let’s start with Duncan Keith. While his elbow on Shooty Twin from 2012 and his high-stick can’t actually be considered in whatever discipline is coming his way, past displays of behavior can, which essentially is the same fucking thing. I suppose the technicalities would come up in any sort of appeal, which I’m fairly sure is going to come up.

Everything Else

As You Were – Hawks at Blues Preview, Dog And Pony Show

By 1505

evil empire at bluestrumpet_jersey

Game Time: 7:00PM Central
TV/Radio: NBCSN, TVA-S, WGN-AM 720
Literally A Fucking Radioactive Trash Pile: St. Louis Game Time

Because literally nothing John McDonough and Jay Blunk do is on accident or by coincidence, the NHL’s quiet announcement that they have concluded their “investigation” of Patrick Kane and have predictably found nothing calls into question a couple other media blips over the past 24 hours.

First, yesterday afternoon the geniuses running the Hawks’ social media department thought it was important to include Patrick Kane and his mother in a tweet acknowledging International Women’s Day, which is insulting and disgusting. And today it leaked that Sports Illustrated will be doing a (regional) cover story on just how much Garbage Dick has had to overcome this year on his way to being the league’s leading scorer and a Hart Trophy front runner. Because John McDonough is very good at his job, these events are not to be viewed as anything other than deliberate and connected.

And the purpose of it is potentially two-fold. At the very least, with any bureaucratic loose ends now tied up with the conclusion of the NHL’s farce of an investigation, which allows McDonough and Blunk to start building a ground game and controlling a narrative ahead of what they figure to be a bright and direct spotlight once again on this team into May and June. The second more stomach-churning purpose is for a potential Masterton Trophy nomination, the NHL’s perseverance award for which every team submits its candidate. It would be a tremendously nauseating and ballsy move on their part, considering recent winners include a widower, a bereaved father, and an MS sufferer. But John McDonough is known for big moves after all.

[extremely sportsy radio host voice]….just like tonight’s big rivalry night tilt in St. Louis between the Blues and Hawks!

Everything Else

Race To The Bottom – Kings vs Hawks Preview, Returned Goods Authorization

By 1315

king vs evil empire

Game Time: 7:30PM Central
TV/Radio: CSN, NHL Network, SportsNet Affiliates, WGN-AM 720
Dean’s List: The Royal Half, Jewels From The Crown

The Kings and Blackhawks have one of the modern NHL’s true great rivalries, with the two teams alternating Stanley Cup titles over the last four years. But their competitiveness with one another extends to off the ice issues.

While last year’s Hawks team was clouded by rumors and innuendo of off-ice misdoings, the Kings came right out in the open with it by having both the now departed Jarret Stoll and Mike Richards arrested separately for drug possession. And that’s on top of Slava Voynov being essentially convicted and deported for beating the shit out of his wife. However, in a seemingly unending game of one-upsmanship, the Hawks’ highest profile player made himself the subject of a sexual assault investigation, something the Kings were familiar with three years ago with Drew Doughty. But where the case against Doughty was largely forgotten and evaporated through strongarming the victim, Kane was removed from a video game cover and is still under investigation.

It wasn’t just limited to the players, either. After Dean Lombardi allowed Slava Voynov to skate with the team while suspended because he felt like he needed it, John McDonough basically undid a career of evil public relations genius with a single ass-showing press conference at the haven of progressive sexual politics and scandal-free placidity that is Notre Dame. But these are competitive men who have helmed these teams to near dynastic levels of on ice success, and Dean Lombardi was not going to go quietly into the night. Upon reaching an even more dubious settlement after his evil outright termination of Mike Richards’ contract, Lombardi literally shed tears over how he was duped and how wronged he felt by Mike Richards’ addictive spiral with pain killers, as if the bullshit tough guy culture of the sport didn’t basically strong arm him into using them to keep himself on the ice. Lombardi did not feel wronged or duped by Slava Voynov’s violence towards women however, and still holds’ Voynov’s rights should he ever be allowed in the US again, at the very least preventing him from playing for another team.

Even the fans get into the act as well. Whereas Kings fans initially just spouted typical victim-blaming vomit (serious trigger warning), or in the case of most fan-run outlets just forget in the face of Stanley Cups and Norris finalist campaigns about Drew Doughty’s misdoings, Hawks fans took things to another level. Staging rallies, organizing Twitter hashtags, threatening sports radio anchors to the point of calling out of work, or demanding apologies (that are never, ever, EVER fucking coming), they’ve taken the empty-souled fanboy routine to dizzying new heights.

And now with the first meeting of these two teams happening tonight at the United Center, everyone on both sides is surely breathless with anticipation with what the next step in this rivalry will be.

Everything Else

God, What A Mess, On The Ladder Of Success

By 2280 0

So I was going to kick off our season preview today, but Mark Lazerus’s column today in the Sun-Times is deserving of focus. And a lot of it. There is so much to parse out from it. If you haven’t yet, read it and come back to this.

So let’s take it on in no particular order.

-In some ways, this situation is a lot simpler than it looks, and a lot more complicated in others.

For instance, if Kane is charged, it probably works out pretty easily. He’ll be suspended by the league or Hawks or both, whoever gets there first I would imagine. And he’ll almost have certainly played his last game for the Hawks, unless through the process of finding out what the evidence during hearings and a possible triel is it is glaringly clear he is not just “not guilty,” but innocent (and there is a difference, which it feels like some people don’t get).

Everything Else

The Buffalo DA And Other Notes

By 1705 0

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.