A Million Vacations

is what I've got in mind.


I'm away until roughly July 9th, at which point the entire NHL landscape will have changed. A few notes, both major and minor:

• Apparently - FINALLY - the salary cap figure will be agreed upon today or tomorrow at the NHLPA executive board meeting - it could go as high as USD$50 million. Last year's cap was at USD$44 million. Prepare for the annual round of logic-defying head-shaking contracts. I expect to get a number of mind-blowing text messages on Sunday when free-agent season begins.
  

• In another exclusive-rights deal, the Atlanta Thrashers traded the rights to free agent center Keith Tkachuk back to St. Louis for the conditional first round pick they gave up when originally acquiring his useless carcass at the deadline. I can never understand why rebuilding teams would re-sign retreads like this.

• The Hall of Fame committee meets tomorrow and will vote in one of the greatest classes ever, led by Mark Messier. Other possibilities include Ron Francis, Scott Stevens, Al MacInnis, Adam Oates, Igor Larionov and Claude Lemieux. A maximum of four can be inducted each year.
  

• On the (very) light side, Wayne Gretzky is getting into the wine business in Southern Ontario despite admitting that he doesn't "know a whole lot about wine." Rumours that he plans on hiring Jeremy Roenick, Owen Nolan, and Marty McSorley to pick grapes are unfounded.
  

Please follow the critical hockey links in the right-hand column below to keep tabs on all goings-on over the next few weeks.

people: "All-Star" does not mean "best"

i've been out of commission for a while (still recovering from the Ontario weekend apparently) but the all star rosters were finally announced this week, and predictably what followed was my usual two-headed response of "what a sham" and "it doesn't mean a damn thing"

just as in recent years i've sadly cared less and less about things like the Hall of Fame (edwzipper over at SportsFrog had a brilliant writeup on the latest Baseball Hall of Fame lunacy - some day when i'm really bored i'll write a nice treatise on the ignorant process on voting for Hall induction), the All-Star game has also lost any charm it once had for me. It also falls under the enormous umbrella of "human fallibility" - anytime you allow people to be subjective about something you're going to see mistakes.

Fortunately, in any scheme a hockey allstar game means jack shit so the fact that Eric Staal and Simon Gagne get in while Marc Savard, Rod Brind'Amour, Thomas Vanek, and Max Afinogenov sit home is fine. I guess.

it's just that even the terms "star" and "superstar" at their core don't have true attachment to quality or talent. it has always had far more to do with popularity and/or notoriety than actual on-the-field/ice talent.


update: my treatise is unnecessary when others have done my work already - my bad on not mentioning the brilliance that is and has been the people at Fire Joe Morgan with regards to the Hall voting.

another update: the YoungStars game appears to be a far more palatable option than the actual All-Star game. A four-on-four contest pitting only players on their entry-level contracts, by definition the rosters would be less slanted towards the well-known and more results-driven. Thanks to HP for the link.