I knew there was a neck joke out there somewhere

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

As far as Nashville is concerned, at least they embraced hockey, if that's what you want to call it. Imagine if they had an exciting style of play...

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

4 years/4.3 mil per year for Versteeg to stay in Florida, sounds about right for a 50 point guy.

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

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1923-1927-1928-1932-1936-1937-1938-1939
1941-1943-1947-1949-1950-1951-1952-1953
1956-1958-1961-1962-1977-1978-1996-1998
1999-2000-2009
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XXI - XXV - XLII - XLVI

This is a essentially a steal for the NYR.

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I like Dubinsky, but that could have a lot to do with the Blackhawks being so bereft at center that anyone who can play the position seems enticing. Anisimov is a nice piece too; it was really pathetic when the league collectively threatened to lynch him for celebrating a goal.

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I guess it's a good thing Howson is the GM for a team in the Hawks division. He has to be the worse manager of assets in the NHL (actually quite an accomplishment). He pretty much executes a glorified Kovalchuk trade picking quantity for quality. Sure, Dubinsky is a pretty good player but he's getting paid 4.2 million and you're getting 10 goals and leadership (!). So now Columbus has a nice 2nd line center and shit wingers for him to dish it to. Awesome.

Thug GM...

Jersey losing their captain, and now this? Rangers fans must be on top of the world, too bad the Penguins are still in their conference. With the new realignment, they're going to have to overcome them every season just to make it to the final 4... The next decade is going to be great out east.

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

Nothing news worthy, just an article about the wings sucking it up this off-season. Figured it would be worth reading on principal alone for most of you...

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

Nashville matches the offer on Weber. Now they have to pay him $90 mil over 14 years. Kinda hefty for a team that loses money.

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Carolina picking up Semin for 7 million

poor Detroit...

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

This is a no-lose deal for Carolina. If you have cap room in the NHL, blow it on a 1-year gamble. Can't lose.


Fuck Detroit.

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Reports are out that a team other than the Rangers have offered a 4 year 28 million dollar deal to Doan. Holy Shit. That is leverage right there. I'm thinking that it has to be a team like the Islanders or maybe Detroit(lolzers). Speaking of the broken wings, they are looking to trade for Bouwmeester(lolzers x 2).

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team Mully & Hanley
team Meatpants

$7MM a year is more than twice what Doan is worth. I bet it's the Coyotes, since they don't seem to inhabit the same world of profit and loss as the rest of us.

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Tomas Holmstrom retires. Good riddance. Fuck that dude.

Brian Burke fired as Toronto Maples Leafs GM. He was awful and deserved this.

Yup. If anything, they took a step backwards with him in full control. Team still has no sign of getting better in the near future.

Mikhail Grabovski would be the perfect solution to the Blackhawks longtime 2nd center problem.

Other than Reilly and Colborne the Leafs minor league system sucks. Kadri hasn't lived up to his draft slot. Bowman could you please float some prospects for Grabovski? Thanks.

A little summary of 2013 happenings:

Notable UFA Signings:
G Mike Smith $34M 6Y
G Niklas Backstrom $10.25M 3Y
D Mark Streit $21M 4Y
D Sergei Gonchar $10M 2Y

Notable Trades:
CAR: D Andrej Sekera
BUF: D Jamie McBain, 2nd

NJD: G Cory Schneider
VAN: F Bo Horvat (9th Overall)

MIN: F Nino Niederreiter
NYI: F Cal Clutterbuck, 3rd

TOR: G Jonathan Bernier
LAK: F Matt Frattin, G Ben Scrivens, 2nd

A few thoughts:

-What the fuck Don Maloney?! Thanks for fucking up the goalie market you dipshit. Crawford is up next year and this just fucked things up big time. Just fold the 'Yotes already. They add nothing to the NHL.

-Feels like NYI sold really low on Niederreiter or I guess his stock really has tumbled. I thought this guy was going to be a stud. Oh well.

-Fucking Vancouver. Don't stop being yourselves.

G Sergei Bobrovsky $11.25M 2Y

Goalies are getting paid. What the hell is Rask going to ask for?

At least Bobrovsky won the Vezina. Giving Mike Smith $34 million over six at age 31 with only one season (age 30) being very good--or indeed even NHL-quality--is completely irresponsible, and you have to wonder if this deal, like the Shane Doan contract, is a poison pill against an ownership group that tries to move the team.

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From Darren Dreger's Twitter:

A few more inches of height?

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

Tonight is a big night. Will the city of Glendale, AZ vote yes or no? Let us hope they vote to let the team move on to Quebec or I guess Seattle. I could tolerate Seattle. Fuck the coyotes though.

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

This, Its like Atlanta people move to Phoenix not from there. No one cares.

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Elections have consequences.

Seattle would be almost as much of a shitshow as Glendale. KeyArena is woefully unsuited for hockey (the seating bowl was built to be too small for a rink, so it has to protrude into one end of the seats; ironically, this is the same setup as America West Arena, the Coyotes' old home, which was also built as basketball-specific and forced them to build a hockey-specific arena in buttfucking nowhere) with only 9,000 non-obstructed seats. Also, putting an NHL team in Seattle is kind of like the answer to a question no one asked. The city's plan and sports fans' hope has always been to get something they could call the Supersonics again, with a hockey team as co-tenant being a nice fringe benefit if they can get it. In fact, the financing for the new arena they want next to Safeco and Qwest has always been contingent on securing an NBA team and not an NHL team.

Quebec City is the only place this team should go. They're constructing a new 18,000+ seat arena, and with Canadian TV contracts (from which all 30 teams share revenue) up for bids, it's in the best interests of the league to create more Canadian content, which will trickle down to Nashville, Raleigh, Florida, and all the other problem markets. The only problem, though, is that they would be a very French entity, more than Montreal, and way more than the lip service from Ottawa, and it's feared this would make them kind of a null in the footprint for the Anglophone fans.

From what I understand, there's kind of a split among the NHL's power brokers, with Bettman and his cronies in New York (surprise!) wanting a small slice of a big American city, while other owners want the guaranteed money that would come from Quebec City. There are a few holdouts who want to stay put in Phoenix, most notably Jeremy Jacobs, but I think most owners and governors are admitting it's over.

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I thought someone wanted to go to Hamilton and they were like 30k tickets waiting. I even heard a 2nd Toronto team would work.

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Elections have consequences.

Yeah, Jim Balsillie, who used to be the CEO of BlackBerry. He tried to buy the Predators in 2007, but he sold provisional season tickets to the "Hamilton Predators" without anyone's permission, which pissed off Bettman something fierce. He tried to buy the Penguins, but they got their new arena. Then he tried to buy the Coyotes in bankruptcy court in the summer of '09, but the NHL went to court to stop him from buying the team in bankruptcy (thus circumventing league approval of his ownership and of relocation to Hamilton or Kitchener-Waterloo) and bought the team themselves. And here we are.

The open secret was that the Maple Leafs were not going to give up an inch of their territory, which goes from about Windsor to Kingston and includes pretty much every populated part of Ontario except Ottawa, and so they pushed hard to keep a team out of Hamilton.

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Watching a live stream of them talking to the council. Why can't they just accept this whole thing is a disaster and move on? Talking about how Shane Doan is the best captain in the league and how they have passionate fans and that they'll surely make money in Phoenix, blah blah blah. It's done, over. Get this team to Quebec asap.

The problem seems to be Bettman's or the owner's insistence that they expand around the US. It doesn't matter the big TV contract is not coming anytime soon anyway.

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Elections have consequences.