Monthly Archives: March 2010

Have the 7-11 Bombers Improved? Or Should Fans Still Be Patient.

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

Sure, the Canadian Football League is still 2 ½ months away from the start of training camp, but do you get the sense the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are a long way from being a contender?

In fact, last year at this time, many of the local football experts were worried that the team being assembled by Mike Kelly was starting to resemble the team that was assembled in 1998 by Jeff Reinebold. Plenty of no-names and an untested quarterback caused many of our great local football minds to question the new head coach.

Wonder where they all went this year?

I mean, really, has anyone noticed that the Blue Bombers have lost both of their good young defensive halfbacks? Jonathan Hefney signed with the NFL’s Detroit Lions while Lenny Walls was released to Montreal. Granted they signed aging Lavar Glover, 32, but right now they look old and slow.

Meanwhile, the Bombers traded away young, gifted Gavin Walls for a knee-injured Canadian defensive end named Stan van Sichem and they still need a real middle linebacker.

They lost two good young receivers to the NFL in Dudley Guice and Titus Ryan and their new quarterback was a backup in Saskatchewan who has one career start, has thrown only 152 CFL passes and was unwanted in Edmonton.

Are the 7-11 Bombers a better team yet?

Just asking.

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I Believe Favre Will Be in Minnesota. Tomlinson? Not so Much.

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

On the bright side for Minnesota Vikings fans, the Vikes should get quarterback Brett Favre back.

It’s true, if you believe Larry Fitzgerald Sr., the sports editor of the Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder, who looked me right in the eye last Sunday on press row at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul and said, “Yeah, he’ll be back. Of course, he’ll be back.”

That’s the good news for Vikings (and, yes, I believe Larry because he probably has the best NFL contacts of any media guy in, well, maybe the world).

Now the bad news. After losing versatile runningback Chester Taylor to the Chicago Bears, it’s very likely the Vikings won’t get veteran LaDainian Tomlinson either.

Tomlinson, who was released by the San Diego Chargers after an injury-plagued 2009 season, visited with the Vikings on Wednesday night and Thursday morning and then moved on to visit with the New York Jets.

And the Jets didn’t spend any time fooling around.

After visiting New York on Thursday evening and Friday morning, Tomlinson had planned to return home to San Diego on Friday afternoon. But the Jets convinced him to stay and according to fanhouse.com, Tomlinson, 30, will be offered a two-year $5 million contract that could be made even sweeter with as much as $3.5 million in incentives.

Tomlinson, who ranks eighth on the NFL’s all-time rushing list with 12,490 yards and second with 138 career rushing touchdowns, told the Jets he would go back to San Diego on Friday night, speak with his wife and make a decision. It’s likely he’ll choose the Jets where he will be the No. 1 back. He will not be No. 1 in Minnesota. That role belongs to Adrian Peterson and it isn’t going to change soon.

However, Tomlinson told reporters in the Twin Cities on Friday: “This is not the end of the road at all. I’m not retiring. So I am very excited. I really believe I am going to have that opportunity to win a championship.”

With Favre back, the Vikings are certainly as much a threat to win it all as the Jets next season. When it comes to acquiring Tomlinson as a No. 2 back, Favre is probably the only thing the Vikes have in their favor.

*               *            *

8:30 a.m., Sunday, May 14: The San Diego Union-Tribune is reporting that it is “100 per cent certain,” that LaDainian Tomlinson will sign with the New York Jets.

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More Hockey Talk As The NHL GMs Meet in Florida

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

There were nine NHL games on Tuesday night in the NHL, five more on Wednesday and 10 more on Thursday night. After 14 days at the Olympics, the NHL has a lot of catching up to do. It will be difficult to keep up.

In the meantime, from new rules regarding hits to the head, possible new shootout rules and a lawsuit against the former owner of the Phoenix Coyotes, this is just about the busiest March of the decade.

Let’s look a little deeper inside the NHL…

1) On Sunday, the 92-CITI-Sports Machine was in St. Paul, Minn., to watch the suddenly strong Calgary Flames drill the Minnesota Wild 5-2. So what suddenly changed in Calgary?

Simple, as we told you on Sunday, Flames head coach Brent Sutter put Jarome Iginla on a line with Rene Bourque And Matt Stajan and on Sunday, the line combined for 10 points as Iginla had his 10th career hat-trick.

Not bad, for only the second game together and they were pretty darn good on Tuesday night in their third game together. Bourque and Iginla each scored once and added an assist and the Flames won (4-2)  a rare one in Detroit.

2) If there was one team that would frighten me if I were the San Jose Sharks or Chicago Blackhawks, it would be the Detroit Red Wings.

The Wings have been banged up all season long. For months, they had at least three of their best players out of the lineup. They were half a hockey team for much of the season. But now they’re healthy, the playoffs are beckoning and if Jimmy Howard gets the job done, the Wings could be the sleeper of the playoffs.

But first, they have to play better than they did against Calgary on Tuesday night.

3) This weekend while I was in St. Paul, a number of hockey experts watched the newly formed Iginla-Stajan-Bourque line and wondered aloud which line was the best in the game today.

A couple suggested Alexander Ovechkin-Alexander Semin and anyone on the other side, but the consensus seemed to be that the best line in the NHL was New Jersey’s No. 1 line of Zach Parise, Jamie Langenbrunner and Winnipeg’s own Travis Zajac.

If nothing else, it’s one of the few lines in the NHL that has been together for most of the season and it provide salmost all of New Jersey’s scoring.

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It’s Run-To-The-Playoffs Time in the NHL.

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

ST. PAUL, Minn. – As the Calgary Flames whipped the Minnesota Wild 5-2 on Sunday afternoon, the NHL started its run to the playoffs.

Most NHL teams now have 16-18 games left this season. We’re solidly past the three-quarter-pole and there are just five weeks left in this rather odd season.

After a 14-day break for the Olympics, the NHL is loading up on games and there will be some tired superstars once the playoffs roll around. Until then, let’s take a quick look around The League.

1) Monday night (actually Tuesday morning at 12:10 a.m.), I’m Eric Nelson’s guest on the Eric Nelson Show on 8-3-0 WCCO radio in Minneapolis and we taped the segment on Sunday at the Xcel Energy Center.

Eric asked me to set the NHL’s final four. I told him, Chicago and San Jose in the West and Pittsburgh and Washington in the East. He then asked, “Which teams are the darkhorses?” I told him that question was more fun.

In the West, Detroit is finally healthy and they could be scary when it counts if Jimmy Howard can get the job done in goal. I like Vancouver, too, if Roberto Luongo doesn’t choke like a dog as he did last year.

In the East, I like Buffalo and New Jersey because they both have great goaltenders (Ryan Miller and Martin Brodeur). As Brian Burke always said, “We call it the Stanley Cup playoffs because we can’t call it goalie.” He may not have been right about Ian White, Alexei Ponikarovsky or Matt Stajan, but he’s right about that.

2) There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when a Canadian player in the NHL’s Top 10 in scoring was a rarity. A decade ago, the stats were dominated by Europeans.

However, while Euros such as Alex Ovechkin and Henrik Sedin are at the top of the NHL’s scoring stats today, there are now five Canadians and one American in the Top 10. What is even more interesting is that Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby took over the goal-scoring lead on Saturday with his 43rd and 44th and young Steven Stamkos scored his 40th of the year on Saturday. Youth is also being served.

Maybe that Canada-U.S. Olympic final will be a trend, not a fluke.

3) Metis star Rene Bourque hadn’t scored a goal in 15 games until Calgary Flames head coach Brent Sutter put him on a line with Jarome Iginla and Matt Stajan. You’d think it was the return of the Hot Line.

Sunday night at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., the Bourque-Stajan-Iginla line combined for 10 points as the Flames drilled the Wild 5-2. Iginla had three goals and an assist, Stajan had two assists and Bourque, suddenly playing the best hockey in more than a month, had a goal and three assists.

The Flames have been struggling, but since Sutter created this line, Calgary has won two straight solidified their hold on ninth and are now only one point out of eighth and two points out of seventh.

At this stage of the season, a simple move like a line change can positively alter a team’s fortune. Sutter’s decision to create the Bourque-Stajan-Iginla line might have been the move that gets Calgary into the playoffs.

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Deadline Day Can Tell Us a Lot About the State of the NHL.

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Scott Taylor| Leave a comment

It was trade deadline day in the NHL Wednesday and it was a good day for… the American Hockey League’s Manitoba Moose. Amazing.

Moves by the Moose’s parent club, the Vancouver Canucks, meant that Vancouver’s AHL affiliate got to add centre Yan Stastny and veteran defenseman Brad Lukowich. That just about summed up the 2010 NHL trade deadline day. It didn’t do much at the NHL level, but quite a lot at the AHL level.

It also meant that the Ottawa Sun’s 300 rumours were all wrong. Or made up.

There were a record 30 trades made on deadline day involving 55 players and 27 draft picks and not one of them could be called a blockbuster. In fact, here was the trade deadline in one, single word: Dull.

Of course, that’s what a salary cap will do.

Because of the cap, instead of taking a big plunge in a search for stars that could lead teams to a Stanley Cup – oh, yeah, and cost a lot of money, too — the buyers made a lot of small deals that didn’t change their cap levels much. That’s why, after making seven small deals and being well under the cap, the Phoenix Coyotes were Wednesday’s big winners.

That didn’t make the other NHL owners happy, but by adding a bit to their own payroll, the Coyotes got considerably better. They acquired Derek Morris from Boston, Wojtek Wolski from Colorado, Mathieu Schneider from Vancouver and Lee Stempniak from Toronto. Sure, when a team the league bought for $140 million is likely going to lose between $50 million and $70 million this year, it would definitely piss off the some of the owners of other NHL teams because they not only have to foot the bill for the losses, but also to improve the club.

Of course, if the Coyotes don’t make the playoffs, they’ll lose the $70 million end, not the $50 million end. With only six weeks left in the season, the players acquired at the deadline won’t really cost that much.

Meanwhile, deadline day was a perfect time to illustrate the wait-until-next-decade attitude of the Toronto Maple Leafs. On Tuesday the Leafs dealt Alexei Ponikarovsky to Pittsburgh for defenseman Martin Skoula and middling prospect Luca Caputi.

The Leafs then sent Skoula to New Jersey for a fifth-round draft pick. In other words, the Leafs sent a big forward who will play on a line with Sidney Crosby – and was probably their best player — to Pittsburgh in exchange for a fifth-round pick and the slow, journeyman Caputi.

Now isn’t that an illustration of the state of the Toronto Maple Leafs?

Deadline day was good for something.

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Jonathan Toews Could be the Best Hockey Player in the World.

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Scott Taylor| 1 Comment

If there was one thing we learned from that wonderful Olympic hockey tournament it’s this: Winnipeg’s own Jonathan Toews could very well be the best hockey player in the world.

Amazing then, that Toews was the 13th forward selected to Team Canada and for many of the Eastern experts who “pre-picked” their own Canadian Olympic teams, Toews wasn’t good enough to be considered.

But then came the Olympics and Toews proved how good he was. Especially when the gold medal was on the line. The captain of the Chicago Blackhawks not only scored Team Canada’s first goal in the gold medal game, but for the next 2 1/2 periods, he was, consistently Canada’s best player. In the end he was named the tournament’s top forward and a tournament all-star, but more importantly, he had an Olympic gold medal and Canada was back on the top of the hockey world.

So no, Jonathan Toews is not the best goal scorer or the best passer or the best checker or the best penalty killer or the best power-play specialist or the best shooter or the best stickhandler or even the best captain. But he’s in the Top 3 in every one of those categories and if you throw in winner and leader, then he IS the best hockey player in the world.

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