Sorry, my head hurts again. Between the Coyotes bankruptcy case in Phoenix, the CFL’s officials’ mistakes in Vancouver and the sad, ugly circus that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have created for themselves, I hit the Advil pretty hard last night.
Let me get this stuff out of my cranium…
1) NHL commissioner Gary Bettman talks like those far-right Republican loons in the United States — lots of confidence and hatred and bluster, but no apparent logic.
On Friday, Mr. Bettman was lamenting comments by Phoenix Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes, a man who lost approximately $300 million of his own money on a franchise that doesn’t work now and will never work in the future. Moyes suggested he has been treated badly by the NHL.
“I just don’t think I’ve been treated right,” Moyes said. “I gave it a 100 per cent try and I feel betrayed by the NHL. Hockey will not work in the south. Mr. Bettman’s plan is not working out. You got Phoenix, you got Dallas, you Nashville, you got Atlanta you got Tampa Bay all in trouble. These teams are not working in the south. You have to go north where people love hockey.”
Bettman, of course, responded like a petulant child.
“I’m disappointed in those remarks,” Bettman told Rogers SportsNet. “Considering the NHL has been operating this team for the past year when Mr. Moyes was supposed to be, I find that disappointing.”
Moyes lost about $300 million on that dog of a franchise and the guy who lied to everyone — everyone! — for an entire year about taking over the operation of the team, says he’s “disappointed.”
The illogical hubris of that remark makes me gag.
2) The Canadian Football League said last week that the B.C. Lions’ 19-12 win over the Montreal Alouettes will stand despite the fact that “mistakes were made by officials as the clock wound down.”
“While the errors were unintentional,” said commissioner Mark Cohon, “the league’s regret at this incident is deep and profound.”
Odd response. Deep and profound sounds good, but it just doesn’t cut it. Cohon has both teams in Montreal this week. Send them out on the field before the main game starts and replay the final minutes (and perhaps overtime) of last week’s game. That will fix the problem.
Or is the real problem that CFL officiating is lousy and now the league has pretty much admitted it’s lousy? That’s not good.
Of course, there is another problem here. With the crossover playoff rule, if the post-season started today, the B.C. Lions would be in and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Toronto Argos would be out. If those “mistakes” in B.C. cost a team a playoff appearance then, what you have, is a pretty illegitimate league.
(Listen to my complete rant on this issue before the Saskatchewan-Winnipeg game on Sunday at about 2 p.m. CDT. I’ll be on the pre-game show with Roger Currie on 620 CKRM in Regina)
3) The Stefan Lefors quarterback experiment in Winnipeg is over for the season — and it just might be over period.
The 3-6 Bombers put their former starting quarterback on the nine-game injured list on Thursday because of recurring pain in his non-throwing shoulder. He might undergo surgery.
Guess I was wrong. Stefan Lefors wasn’t the second coming T.J. Rubley. Sadly, he wasn’t good enough — or unbreakable enough — to be the second coming of T.J. Rubley.