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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

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Blackhawks insider LoHo is on the case.

If that happened to Leery, his tweet would be a short and succinct “ You, me , hallway, now “ .

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Proud member of the white guy grievance committee

It aint the six minutes. Its what happens in those six minutes.

to be honest I forgot hockey existed

What a sleuth.

McD undoubtedly helped usher the Hawks into the mainstream and was a marketing guru. Helped in italics, because the winning plays a big role, too, in case that was lost on anybody. But he isn't a hockey guy and meddling in hockey decisions was not going to get him far.

Excited to see where this goes now.

Boys and Girls, this is what 60K/year buys you if you chose the journalism program at DePaul University.

I cant decide if this or CH saying there may not ever be any more NHL is funnier?

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Dale Tallon brought in:

Hossa
Toews
Kane
Keith
Seabrook
Sharp

I hope that's helps you decide.

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The only thing Tallon did wrong was mismanage the cap, and he did that poorly. I believe he was the guy that forgot to check the box to make Versteeg a truly restricted free agent.

Tallon fell in love with his players. And he brought a lot of good ones here.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Dale over played his hand against McDonough.

Stan Bowman had the job of checking the box.

The Hawks won three cups with his core guys.

There cap has been fucked ever since they over paid Kane and Toews. That was McDonough.

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It’s not Kane and Toews. Right after the first one they gave bad contracts and started chasing cap space right away. Bickell was the first big Seabrook the last.

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Elections have consequences.

He -- or someone -- forgot to tender qualifying offers to the restricted free agents, which would have made them unrestricted.

Incidentally, it's kind of inconvenient that the league year starts on July 1st, which is a national holiday for the Canadians (and Moving Day for the Quebecois). But what are you going to do, lots of fiscal years start on July 1st.

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Yes.....this I agree with. There was no way getting around paying Toews and Kane. There were some really bad moves that followed and then you also had Toews regress toward above average. Nothing wrong with that but you can't have above average guys taking super star chunks of your salary cap.

Bowman was clearly in charge of many bad decisions. I still find their whole handling of Crawford really shady.

I won't lose any sleep over McDonnough gone.....but Bowman needs to go and we will have to reserve judgment until we see who is hired run the hockey side of the team. it was nice when we could just say General Manager but they all have to have fancy VP titles now

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This is a good point. The Blackhawks have had one of the more...how you say, streamlined front offices in the league: coach reports to Bowman who reports to McDonough who reports to Wirtz. Compare with the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have like eight general managers or vice presidents of hockey operations and are owned by two competing phone companies. I'm sure we're looking at least a three-headed GM going forward.

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Bullshitting bag of wind frontman for Rocky. Does anyone know what he did? Couldn't blow his nose without Rocky's ok.

The Score made him sound like scum.

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Be well

GO BEARS!!!

Edzo may be in the mix

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The first hour of Bernstein was more positive than negative. Bernstein gave McDonough a lot of praise but also mentioned the heaviness with which he managed.

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Lay off that whiskey and let that cocaine be.

Dale Tallon can confirm the heavy hand.

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I would expect them to trash him since he is the one who black listed The Score. The Perez Hilton style reporting on their players by Jules and Bernstein was not appreciated or unnoticed. Jules was and still is a nobody but to designate someone your rape expert and then let her fantasy verdict dictate her reporting of the case is bad form. Bernstein blabbering pure gossip about Sharp and Keith was completely unprofessional and out of line. I don't understand why he doesn't get hammered for that. In a way the fractured relationship between The Score and the Hawks is all Icegirl's fault.

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

The Score's bad relationship with the Blackhawks goes all the way back to when the Blackhawks were buying time. They lost the 06-07 Bulls to CKG as a result and made no secret of their resentment on the air. North, of all people, was the loudest about this.

Bernstein always had a problem with McDonough shoving the Blackhawks down everyone's throats, especially when it conflicted with his indulgent desire to push the Rose/Vinny Bulls down everyone's throats. The whole engine behind "stop talking hockey/talk more hockey" was that McDonough was out there whipping the city into a froth over hockey. Dan used to lose his shit that news anchors were too positive about the Blackhawks and made us feel like Green Bay. I think we've forgotten just how many favors McDonough called in around town to really get the Blackhawks into public consciousness before they'd even won a playoff round.

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All those young white whores getting knocked up at cup celebration parades.

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Elections have consequences.

Dan changed his Hawks tone quite a while ago once the organeyezation started to take care of him.

Listening to that first hour now and I'm not sure Dan's math is right on the Blackhawks losing money. He did acknowledge that WirtzCorp accounting has always been shifty, but he didn't push back very hard on how the 50% owner of the United Center would lose money. He also said that only the Canadian teams make money "because of their deal with the CBC," but there is no deal with the CBC. There's a leaguewide contract with Rogers that all the teams draw revenue from. There was also a $500MM expansion to Seattle, which is $16MM per team that does not count as hockey-related revenue for the purposes of the salary cap.

Anyway I'm getting into the weeds here but the point is the Hawks weren't losing money and certainly not because John McDonough paid for high-quality card stock.

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I think a lot of that had to do with his son being a big fan and playing hockey.

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The Blackhawks lose money because they count things like paying for liquor (which the family owns) and rent (for a building they own).

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Big misstatement from Greenberg on the NHL "walking away" from ESPN2 because they were insulted by being on the second channel. Not exactly the way it went down. Mark Shapiro hated hockey and wanted the NHL off the entire ESPN family of networks to make room for the NBA and original movies (you may remember the Dale Earnhardt biopic: all ah wanna do is race, daddy!). The league was heading into Lockout II and Shapiro made them an offer that was designed to be rejected, which it was.

Obviously, the NHL didn't increase its leverage by shutting itself down for an entire year, but if ESPN really doesn't want you so that they can make movies, what are you supposed to do? In the end, the NHL fell ass-backwards into having a respectable broadcasting imprimatur again only because our federal government didn't see fit to stop Comcast from buying NBC. It didn't look like such a bright idea when they were signing with the freaking Outdoor Life Network.

A great deal of the NHL's business woes can be traced back to Lockout I and a new-on-the-scene Gary Bettman completely botching the CBA negotiations, leaving Leafs and Flyers ownership to clean up his mess and draw up an agreement that was great for the Leafs and Flyers but less so for most everyone else, leading to the league collapsing so horribly by 2004 that Bain Capital tried to buy the whole thing for pennies on the dollar.

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I remember by the final season with ESPN, ESPN was so disinterested they skipped a Flyers-Devils playoff game to show a program putting the Yankees "on trial". Then when the league came back they were split between OLN and Mark Cuban's HDNet for regular season games.

The Score's bad relationship with the Hawks goes back even further than missing out on the Bulls in '06, this was also in the final season before the lockout but people were actually bitching that the Score cut off the Westwood One broadcast of the Packers-Eagles 4th and 26 playoff game to go to whatever death march Hawks game was on that night.
It was a bad marriage born originally of the Hawks being in the middle of a 5 year contract with WMAQ when MAQ was killed off to move the Score to 670. Then the Score let the Hawks buy time (I remember the broadcasts being billed as "The Chicago Blackhawks Radio Network, 670 AM") because 1000 still had the Bulls for 3 more years.