caucasianheat

If the spot is vacant, I’ll jump in. 

Can't wait. Only 3 more Super Bowls until the real football kicks off!

Montreal has so many question marks. Is Galchenyuk going to become a top center? Is Drouin? Where are the defenders with the ability to skate the puck out of trouble? I just see a team that thinks they're a lot closer than they are and who keep shuffling pieces around sort of haphazardly. Price really feels like the only sure thing they've got for what they're trying to do.

Marleau's contract came in pretty high but I don't think Toronto would have done it if they weren't totally comfortable. He's a pretty significant upgrade on Matthews' wing (most likely). That line couldn't really be called Toronto's top group last year - I think that changes now. Marleau is an iron man and is much better equipped to play tough minutes than was Zach Hyman.

Watching Washington get dismantled without having actually won the Cup is pretty interesting. Kuznetsvov bent them over by using the threat of the KHL. They had to give Johansson away for a song, couldn't negotiate with Alzner or Williams or Shattenkirk, lost Schmidt to expansion, and they're not out of the woods yet. Burakovsky and Grubauer need new contracts and they've got to budget for a hefty John Carlson raise a year from now. I think they're still a good team but wonder if they'll need this year to refocus and make a new plan.

2 hours ago, Kevin Elliott said:

I'm in the same boat.  I didn't know you could do a monthly subscription. I did read on demand isn't available for 2 days after the game though. Is that true or was that a misread?

I'm using it for the first time this season as they offered it free with my wireless account. On Demand is available instantly unless the game is blacked out in your region, in which case it's a 48 hour wait.

11 hours ago, Gabriel said:

Any of my fellow Canadian EWBers use the Rogers GameCentre Live subscription program?

I just found out that I can do a monthly subscription for $30 a month, but I want to make sure it's worthwhile. For the record, my team is out of market for me, so I can't watch most of their games on television (if I had cable)... but I can watch all out of market games on the application. I just want to make sure that the live streaming is good, and that if I have to miss a game and watch it on demand, that I'm not going to have to go through a bunch of spoiler-filled garbage just to turn on the game I want to watch. I would like to be able to choose a game on-demand without the result being spoiled for me, but early on with GameCentre, I remember people complaining about how the main menu had all of the most recent or live scores displayed as large or larger than the menus to select what you want to watch.

This has not changed, the score is shown right next to the 'Watch' icon.

Kid could've backchecked harder on that OT winner...

Green Ranger's phone is probably blowing up right now.

!!!

GeneralFanager rolled out a neat tool for wasting time running a mock expansion draft. Should be fun to tinker with as rosters settle and the date gets closer.

http://www.generalfanager.com/teams/expansion

 It begins.

Lou Lamoriello is the new GM in Toronto

Damn, home run for Calgary. Boston gets a nice bounty of picks but no player they get with them is likely to be as good as Hamilton is/will be.

Sharks tweeted out a photo from the draft table, shows that Columbus and Toronto may have switched picks in the first.

(... or they're testing the board and nothing has happened. One of those two )

Really intrigued to see how 3v3 and coach's challenge shake the games up next year.

I think the league would likely expand in the West first to even it at 16 teams for each conference, but who knows. Vegas is on everybody's mind obviously and Seattle has some hurdles to jump yet. But Houston is an interesting destination in that they had an AHL team up until an arena contract dispute two years ago and business analysts have pegged it as a strong market for expansion. Nobody's really talking about them.

From what I read the other week, the city of Phoenix told the Coyotes that they would welcome them back if the Glendale arrangement falls through. Short of ownership dropping out again, I think the plan is to stay in Arizona at all costs.

I just finished the series about a week ago and my compulsion was immediately to start over because I don't want it to be finished. I'll probably end up watching it all again.

Season 2 feels like the most self-contained of the 5 because of how heavy they go into the dock worker stuff and the fact that some of those characters and details are sort of meaningfully done with at season's end. I'm pretty confident Season 4 is the best episode run of any show I've ever seen.

Not a secret but also not covered with any teeth by conventional sports media for a long time, especially the boxing press who have spent years swaddling Mayweather because he's the golden goose.

If ISIS made a video about what a piece of shit Floyd Mayweather is, I would consider the source but it probably wouldn't change the veracity of their argument either. I think as many people as possible should be talking about his *other* fight record and condemning it, even if their intention is more personal than altruistic.

It also feels less old school and sleazy. Boxing just makes me think of cigar smoke-filled auditoriums with no air conditioning in the 1950s or something.

Pretty much what I love about boxing can be boiled down to this. It will always feel more gritty and sort of plucked-out-of-time, where MMA has a very modern approach and just seems more loud and garish. It's interesting the way fans are divided between.

I think it's easy to wax fatalism about boxing being done as a mainstream sport. People forget that Pacquiao was a no-namer to the general public less than 10 years ago. He was making chatter in boxing circles, but his name didn't ring out the way it does now. His ability and persona plus the boxing media's crafting of a narrative for him made a star, made this a fight people wanted to see. It's not out of the realm of possibility to me that that combination of things could be put together again. It's just time and having the right factors. Having fights back on network TV and basic cable is hopefully going to do a lot more for the sport's mainstream visibility than years of being hidden away on pay TV did.

Fight itself was boring which was not unexpected but also didn't make it less boring. I had it 116-112 with maybe one round up in the air and it went almost exactly like I imagined. The shoulder injury is unfortunate if true because I think the expectation was for Pacquiao to come on much stronger and his punching looked a little bit reserved. Don't care to see a rematch and probably don't need to see either guy fight ever again, either.

Very sad. I was stunned to learn it was basically a one-man operation, then more stunned to find out he was still a full-time sports writer in Halifax while running CapGeek. The site was basically indispensable for hockey fans; I would use it pretty much daily and nobody has been able to replicate it all that well.

Kimmy Schmidt is great. I have really enjoyed the sort of non-sequitur endings they keep using but...

... the extended "Daddy's Boy" tag blew the rest out of the water, if you will

Last Man on Earth was really good, I loved that they tried to make it a little bit dark. I could have watched many more episodes of affable Forte descending into madness, but I get why they cut it kind of short. Great cast (including the dudes at the bar!) and a really out-there premise that I think will be fun to watch develop.

Duclair and a 1st is so steep. I think the Rangers will regret it unless the plan is to lock up Yandle for the rest of his playing days. Even then.

I suspect Pens fans will like Winnik as a slightly-less-talented Dupuis. Pittsburgh has no cap space but with this trade, they get an elite depth forward and don't have to add any more salary than they had before.

That Evander Kane scratch got a whole lot more intriguing in the last day or so. It sounds like he could sit on IR until they find a trade for him. You get the sense his teammates want him gone and have now openly run him off.

LA puts Mike Richards on waivers. Also, NJ puts Tim Sestito on waivers.

— Bob McKenzie (@TSNBobMcKenzie)

January 26, 2015

From what I've gathered, #LAKings were working on multiple deals to trade Richards over the weekend. Final one fell through late last night.

— The Mayor John Hoven (@mayorNHL)

January 26, 2015

Kings waive Mike Richards

Not surprising at all. The Flyers always play especially dirty hockey against Pittsburgh and it usually works to narrow the score. I don't know how you could be a hockey beat reporter and yet somehow be shocked that "hey let's rattle these guys tonight" was a pre-meditated strategy.

Rinaldo is garbage and I do hope the league slaps him with some substantial time off.