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[hockeygod]

European invasion

Jeff Marek, Sportsnet.ca, October 8, 2011

On HOCKEY CENTRAL Friday, John Shannon talked about the future of the NHL in Europe and you better get used to it folks, because it isn't going away.

As a matter of fact, the league is looking to expand there. As John mentioned, starting as early as next season, don't be surprised if games are not played at the beginning of the season, but rather in the middle of it.

And what's the end game for the NHL in Europe? A TV footprint? Expansion? Sell some merchandise? Extend the brand? All of these things have been discussed at length by the board of governors.

Two years ago I received a collection of documents from 1994 outlining meetings and plans between the NHL and IIHF to set up a two-tiered league in Europe, and while I don't think the NHL has any plans in the immediate future to set up shop overseas in that fashion, there are a number of highly influential owners who see Europe as an untapped goldmine for the league.

Los Angeles is most likely at the top of that list with the parent company of the Kings, AEG, owning a number of rinks across Europe. The NHL has plans to do much more overseas and that's also why the league's relationship with the IIHF, and KHL for that matter, is crucial to unlocking the treasure chests that exist in Stockholm, Moscow, Helsinki, Prague, Trencin, etc.

This is one of NHL deputy commission Bill Daly's pet projects.

I know it was against a rookie-laden Ottawa Senators team, but you can't help but be impressed at how the Detroit Red Wings looked Friday night. It was no rust, all polish in a 5-3 win against the Sens.

As we talked about on HOCKEY CENTRAL Friday, many still marvel at the job the Wings have done with Todd Bertuzzi. Mind you he's bought in, chiseled his body down from the 240 he used to play at for the bulk of his career and is playing "Wings hockey."

Bertuzzi looks like he still has plenty in the tank too. Add him to the list of reclaimed hockey payers who's careers have been turned around in Detroit just like Kris Draper, Dan Cleary and as I mused about in my last blog, I'm betting they do the same with Fabian Brunnstrom.

How'd you like that pass by Sergei Kostitsyn to set up Ryan Suter for Nashville's first goal Friday? A thing of beauty in my books, but I suppose you could look at it a number of ways (much like how hockey people have been trying to figure out the Kostitsyns for years).

On the one hand, I don't know many players who would surrender an almost perfect shooting lane like that to feather a sweet pass that put Suter in the clear. On the other hand-and maybe knowing how the Preds like to play a very conservative game this is how Barry Trotz felt about it-he turned a solid scoring chance into a high risk situation. Thankfully for Sergei, Suter buried it behind Steve Mason.

However you feel about the Don Cherry rant from Thursday, one thing that can't be factually denied was his stat about players committing suicide.

Grapes alleged that previous to Rick Rypien and Wade Belak, since 1999 eight players have committed suicide and not one of them was a fighter. Trevor Ettinger took his own life in 2003, Jake Gilmour in 2005, Mark Potvin in 2006. All three were noted scrappers with high penalty minutes.

Chris Nilan fired back at Cherry early Friday morning on Sportsnet 590 The FAN on the Brady and Lang show and demanded that Grapes apologize to him on Coache's Corner for misrepresenting his comments.

Anyone think that's happening?

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
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[hockeygod]

Raiders' Al Davis dies at age 82

JOSH DUBOW, Oakland— The Associated Press, Saturday, Oct. 08, 2011

Al Davis, the Hall of Fame owner of the Oakland Raiders known for his rebellious spirit, has died.

The team announced his death at age 82 on Saturday.

It was not immediately clear when and where he died.

It was Davis' willingness to buck the establishment that helped turn the NFL into THE establishment in sports — the most successful sports league in American history.

“Al Davis’s passion for football and his influence on the game were extraordinary,” said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in a statement.

“He defined the Raiders and contributed to pro football at every level. The respect he commanded was evident in the way people listened carefully every time he spoke.

“He is a true legend of the game whose impact and legacy will forever be part of the NFL,” he said.

Davis was charming, cantankerous and compassionate — a man who when his wife suffered a serious heart attack in the 1970s moved into her hospital room. But he was best known as a rebel, a man who established a team whose silver-and-black colors and pirate logo symbolized his attitude toward authority, both on the field and off.

Davis was one of the most important figures in NFL history. That was most evident during the 1980s when he fought in court — and won — for the right to move his team from Oakland to Los Angeles. Even after he moved them back to the Bay Area in 1995, he went to court, suing for $1.2 billion to establish that he still owned the rights to the L.A. market.

Until the decline of the Raiders into a perennial loser in the first decade of the 21st century he was a winner, the man who as a coach, then owner-general manager-de facto coach, established what he called “the team of the decades” based on another slogan: “commitment to excellence.” And the Raiders were excellent, winning three Super Bowls during the 1970s and 1980s and contending almost every other season — an organization filled with castoffs and troublemakers who turned into trouble for opponents.

Davis, elected in 1992 to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, also was a trailblazer. He hired the first black head coach of the modern era — Art Shell in 1988. He hired the first Latino coach, Tom Flores; and the first woman CEO, Amy Trask. And he was infallibly loyal to his players and officials: to be a Raider was to be a Raider for life.

But it was his rebellious spirit, that willingness to buck the establishment, that helped turn the NFL into THE establishment in sports — the most successful sports league in American history. He was the last commissioner of the American Football league and led it on personnel forays that helped force a merger that turned the expanded NFL into the colossus it remains.

Born in Brockton, Mass., Davis grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, a spawning ground in the two decades after World War II for a number of ambitious young people who became renowned in sports, business and entertainment. Davis was perhaps the second most famous after Barbra Streisand.

“We had a reunion in Los Angeles and 500 people showed up, including Bah-bruh,” he once told an interviewer in that combination of southern drawl/Brooklynese that was often parodied among his acquaintances within the league and without.

A graduate of Syracuse University, he became an assistant coach with the Baltimore Colts at age 24; and was an assistant at The Citadel and then Southern California before joining the Los Angeles Chargers of the new AFL in 1960. Only three years later, he was hired by the Raiders and became the youngest general manager-head coach in pro football history with a team he called “the Raid-uhs” in 1963.

He was a good one, 23-16-3 in three seasons with a franchise that had started its life 9-23.

Then he bought into the failing franchise, which played on a high school field adjacent to the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland and became managing general partner, a position he held until his death.

But as the many bright young coaches he hired — from John Madden, Mike Shanahan and Jon Gruden to Lane Kiffin — found out, he remained the coach. He ran everything from the sidelines, often calling down with plays, or sending emissaries to the sidelines to make substitutions.

In 1966, he became commissioner of the AFL.

But even before that, he had begun to break an unwritten truce between the young league and its established rivals, which fought over draft choices but did not go after established players.

And while the NFL's New York Giants' signing of Buffalo placekicker Pete Gogolak marked the first break in that rule, it was Davis who began to go after NFL stars — pursuing quarterbacks John Brodie and Roman Gabriel as he tried to establish AFL supremacy.

Davis' war precipitated first talks of merger, although Davis opposed it. But led by Lamar Hunt of Kansas City, the AFL owners agreed that peace was best. A common draft was established, and the first Super Bowl was played following the 1966 season — Green Bay beat Kansas City, then went on to beat Davis' Raiders the next season. By 1970, the leagues were fully merged and the league had the basic structure it retains until this day — with the NFL's Pete Rozelle as commissioner, not Davis, who wanted the job badly.

So he went back to the Raiders, running a team that won Super Bowls after the 1976, 1980 and 1983 seasons — the last one in Los Angeles, where the franchise moved in 1982 after protracted court fights. It was a battling bunch, filled with players such as John Matuszak, Mike Haynes and Lyle Alzado, stars who didn't fill in elsewhere who combined with homegrown stars — Ken Stabler, another rebellious spirit; Gene Upshaw; Shell, Jack Tatum, Willie Brown and dozens of others.

Davis was never a company man. Not in the way he dressed: jump suits with a Raiders logo: white or black, with the occasional black suit, black shirt and silver tie. Not in the way he wore his hair — even well into his ‘70s it was slicked back with a ‘50s duck-tail. Not in the way he did business — on his own terms, always on his own terms.

After lengthy lawsuits involving the move to Los Angeles, he went back to Oakland and at one point in the early years of the century was involved in suits in northern and southern California — the one seeking the Los Angeles rights and another suing Oakland for failing to deliver sellouts they promised to get the Raiders back.

But if owners and league executives branded Davis a renegade, friends and former players find him the epitome of loyalty.

When his wife, Carol, had a serious heart attack, he moved into her hospital room and lived there for more than a month. And when he hears that even a distant acquaintance is ill, he'll offer medical help without worrying about expense.

“Disease is the one thing — boy I tell you, it's tough to lick,” he said in 2008, talking about the leg ailments that had restricted him to using a walker. “It's tough to lick those diseases. I don't know why they can't.”

A few years earlier, he said: “I can control most things, but I don't seem to be able to control death. “Everybody seems to be going on me.”

As he aged, his teams declined.

The Raiders got to the Super Bowl after the 2002 season, losing to Tampa Bay. But for a long period after that, they had the worst record in the NFL, at one point with five coaches in six years.

Some of it was Davis' refusal to stay away from the football operation — he would take a dislike to stars and order them benched.

The most glaring example was Marcus Allen, the most valuable player in the 1984 Super Bowl, the last the Raiders won.

For reasons never made clear, Davis took a dislike to his star running back and ordered him benched for two seasons. He released him after the 1992 season, and Allen went to Kansas City.

Davis' only comment: “He was a cancer on the team.”

The small incorporated city of Irwindale, 20 miles east of Los Angeles, learned an expensive lesson about dealing with Davis. The city gave the Raiders $10 million to show its good faith in 1988, but environmental issues, financing problems and regional opposition scuttled plans to turn a gravel pit into a $115 million, 65,000-seat stadium. The deposit was nonrefundable, and Irwindale never got a penny back.

When he fired Mike Shanahan in 1988 after 20 games as head coach, he refused to pay him the $300,000 he was owed. When he became coach of the Denver Broncos, Shanahan delighted most in beating the Raiders and Davis. And when Davis fired Lane Kiffin “for cause” in 2008, withholding the rest of his contract, the usually humorless Shanahan remarked:

“I was a little disappointed, to be honest with you. When you take a look at it, I was there 582 days. Lane Kiffin was there 616 days. So, what it really means is that Al Davis liked Lane more than he liked me. I really don't think it's fair. I won three more games, yet he got 34 more days of work. That just doesn't seem right.”

But for most of his life, few people laughed at Al Davis

With files from Reuters

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

The fork in the road for Jets’ boss Cheveldayoff

roy macgregor, Globe and Mail, Oct. 10, 2011

Kevin Cheveldayoff was given an abject lesson by his 12-year-old son on what it means to care so much about a hockey team that you will go to the wall for it.

It was late June of 2010, and the new general manager of the Winnipeg Jets was then assistant GM of the Chicago Blackhawks, a team that had just won the Stanley Cup but was so overloaded with contractual challenges that the league's salary cap was forcing management to dismantle their championship team.

At the NHL entry draft in Los Angeles, Cheveldayoff and his boss, Chicago GM Stan Bowman, struck a deal to send several of the team's looming contract problems, including blossoming forward Dustin Byfuglien, to the Atlanta Thrashers for future picks and prospects that helped Chicago stay within the cap.

Cheveldayoff thought he'd had a great and successful day, and shortly after midnight returned to the hotel suite he had rented for his family to join him.

“I opened the door,” Cheveldayoff remembers, “and out of the dark my son suckers me to the side of the head and says, ‘I can't believe you traded Buff!'”

Serendipity, then, that little more than a year later Cheveldayoff is GM of the Jets, the team that only months ago was located in Atlanta, meaning Buff is back in the fold and all is well again in the Cheveldayoff family.

If that's not full circle enough, Cheveldayoff, Byfuglien and the rest of the Jets will be in Chicago Thursday to take on the Blackhawks.

Things have a way of working out. Consider, for example, how this native of Blaine Lake, Sask., finally made it to the NHL – even if it wasn't at all as he had dreamed.

Cheveldayoff was hockey obsessed while growing up. So was everyone else, though few actually chased the dream. Older brother Ken turned to football, went to college, then into politics and has held several portfolios in the Brad Wall provincial government.

Cheveldayoff had the skill, and the drive, to make it. It all came from inside. His parents ran a grain farm but put no pressure on him whatsoever, he claims.

“The best thing my father did for me was what he didn't do,” Cheveldayoff says. “He never pushed me at all to play the game. He enjoyed it. He knew I enjoyed it.”

The youngster was good enough to make the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League and good enough to be considered an excellent prospect. He was also a fine student. While his father worked the farm, his mother taught school, and Cheveldayoff was named the junior league's scholastic player of the year in his draft year. It seemed all was going according to plan.

But then that dream began to take unexpected turns.

His father, Alex, died suddenly of a heart attack. Cheveldayoff was just 17, and suddenly hockey didn't seem quite so all-important. “I was forced to grow up at a young age,” he says. “I was always someone who was very realistic about playing.”

He was still drafted high – 16th overall in the 1988 draft by the New York Islanders – but the following season he blew his knee out so severely that it required reconstructive surgery in New York. All four ligaments were torn. The knee never truly came back.

Unable to crack the Islanders lineup, he moved about the minor leagues, the high point being his winning the Unsung Hero Award for the Salt Lake Golden Eagles. He got it for fighting, unable to contribute much through skill: “I'd say I lost a step except I never really had one to lose.”

He never forgot something his father had told him. “I fought a lot when I played junior hockey,” Cheveldayoff remembers, “and he'd always come out and say, ‘You know, you better watch it, some day you're going to get your clock cleaned, so be ready.'”

He just didn't see exactly what would clean his clock as a player. It turned out to be his good friend and former teammate Butch Goring. Goring had retired and was running the Denver Grizzlies. He called. “I thought he was going to invite me for a tryout,” Cheveldayoff says. But it wasn't. Goring needed an assistant coach and an assistant GM. Was Kevin interested?

“I talked to my wife,” Cheveldayoff says. “I told her, ‘Look, I'm not going to make the National Hockey League as a player, I know that, and this is the direction I want to go.'

“From that point on it only solidified my dream to make the National Hockey League, and when I had to get out of playing in the sense that the opportunities weren't there for me to be a National Hockey League player, I set my focus on wanting to become a National Hockey League manager.”

He was 24, and never looked back. In 15 years managing at the International and American Hockey League levels, he played a role in a remarkable seven league championships. His greatest success came with the Chicago Wolves, from which the Blackhawks plucked him not long before they, too, won the league championship.

When time came for True North Sports & Entertainment to select the general manager who would guide the reborn Jets, Cheveldayoff was at the top of the list, highly recommended by any number of hockey insiders.

No one else was even interviewed.

Cheveldayoff's hope is to bring Prairie work ethic and determination to the new team, to have high expectations and to do whatever it takes to meet those expectations. He knows from growing up here – and knows, as well, from his son's reaction to the Byfuglien trade – just how much a team can mean to people.

He recalls flying in from Chicago for the press conference that was going to announce his appointment. No one was supposed to know, but it seemed they already did. When the family – Kevin, Janet, Chase, now 14, and Alexis, 11 – moved to the customs booth, all the customs agents left their posts and gathered around.

“‘We only have two questions,' they told me. ‘What's the name of the team? And when are you going to win the Stanley Cup?'

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Luke Richardson: Depressed? Talk about it

By AEDAN HELMER, QMI Agency, Oct 10 2011

Senators assistant coach Luke Richardson spoke about youth mental health and the suicide of his daughter Daron during a press conference at Scotiabank Place, Feb. 24,2011. (ERROL McGIHON/QMI Agency)

OTTAWA – Luke Richardson knows the pain left by his daughter Daron’s suicide will never go away.

But with three high-profile NHL tragedies attributed to depression this summer, he also knows the need for suicide prevention awareness has never been greater.

“There’s been a lot of awareness in the last little while and unfortunately it takes some tragic circumstances to do that,” said Richardson, who dropped the puck at the Ottawa 67’s Do It For Daron game Sunday. “Now we just have to make sure we follow through with it, and that goes for our DFID campaign, which is focused on youth, right up to the top fields, whether it be the NHL in hockey, or in the business world, or the medical world, whichever.”

Richardson said mental health and suicide was the one topic he never discussed with his daughter, who took her own life in November 2010.

“We wish we would have,” said Richardson. “We’re very open in our family in our dialogue about everything, whether it be drinking and driving, drugs and alcohol or sex. But they’ve all crept into our society while mental health and suicide is really pushed to the outside. We just want to create awareness to get rid of the stigma and make people comfortable to speak about their feelings and know that they’re not alone. There is help there.”

The deaths of Wade Belak, Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien have only underscored the need for the conversation to continue, said Richardson.

“In the culture of the sporting world, you don’t want to make yourself vulnerable, or open yourself up to someone to consider you weak. That’s the old-school scenario of the sports world,” said Richardson. “If we can get to the youth to make them understand (depression) is a pretty prominent thing and it’s okay to talk about it and get help, and to talk about their feelings at a younger age, then that just cuts it off before it gets to a point where they feel there’s no way out.”

“It’s not a comfortable or fun situation to be in, but we’re in it, and we’re not getting out of it,” he said. “If we can help one person, it’s worth it.”

To learn more about the campaign or to contribute, visit doitfordaron.com.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

The Best Passing Quarterback Ever
It's just too bad Anthony Calvillo plays in the CFL

By Michael Weinreb, GRANTLAND..COM, OCTOBER 9, 2011

The quarterback won a championship and went to Disneyland, and no one really noticed he was there. The few who did were polite and courteous, and they took pictures and shook his hand and walked away, and it is at moments like these that Anthony Calvillo finds himself thankful that he never made it anywhere near a Super Bowl. "I don't think Peyton Manning could take his kids to Disneyland," says his wife, Alexia. "I'll bet it would actually be dangerous."

On Monday, presuming he throws for at least 258 yards, this man you've probably never heard of will become the leading passer in the history of professional football. He has accumulated more yards than Peyton Manning, more yards than Dan Marino, more yards than John Elway and Jim Kelly and Fran Tarkenton and Joe Montana and Brett Favre, and he has done it all without ever being even marginally famous in the United States. This in itself is a remarkable accomplishment. That he is 39 years old and still considered one of the two or three best players in his adopted country is another. That he has continued to play football even after both he and his wife fought cancer is still another. Not only is Anthony Calvillo the most prolific anonymous quarterback who ever lived, his is one of those great American stories, an epic tale of failure and adversity and redemption. It just happened to take place in Canada.

A confession: Until midsummer, I had no idea who Anthony Calvillo was, either. But I've long harbored a fascination with the Canadian Football League, with its colorful nicknames (Eskimos and Blue Bombers and Argonauts) and its bizarro edicts (110 yards instead of 100, three downs instead of four, 12 men instead of 11), with the idea that there is a league just like ours and yet completely different, as if it were birthed on an alternate plane of reality. Is there a more apt metaphor for how America sees Canada than how Americans view the CFL? Most of our knowledge is acquired out of desperation and boredom; the CFL regular season starts in June, when we are jonesing hard for football, and when it does show up on our television — say, on an otherwise idle Friday night on the NFL Network — it is more Rube Goldberg than Vince Lombardi, because of its extra-man-per-side and its stretched field and because it allows us to reconnect with former college standouts we had otherwise forgotten. In Canada, Ken-Yon Rambo and Avon Cobourne are stars. Every so often, some underevaluated or late-blooming talent will find his way from CFL to NFL stardom (we may refer to this as the Warren Moon Exception, of which the most recent example is the Miami Dolphins' Cameron Wake), but this is such a rare phenomenon that it still seems like a hiccup in the system when it happens. The truth is nobody in the United States grows up dreaming of winning a Grey Cup.

Of course, I realize that the previous paragraph is a biased assessment of the CFL. I realize that Canadian professional football has its own rich history, and that it holds a unique place in the Canadian psyche that, as an American, I could not begin to adequately characterize. But part of what makes the CFL so charming is that I'm not sure Canadians can really characterize it, either: Author Steve O'Brien's book about the CFL (subtitle: The Phoenix of Professional Sports Leagues) — one of the only comprehensive league histories I could find — begins by paraphrasing Winston Churchill's "riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma" quote, discusses for 300 pages the league's errors of judgments and perceived inferiority complex, and ends with a quote from Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" about not knowing what you've got 'til it's gone. When I told the customs agent at the Montreal airport that I was a sportswriter, he assumed I was here to cover a tennis tournament, and when I told him I was here to write about Canadian football, he stared hard at my passport, crooked his head, and said, "Really? You know it's not very good, right?"

And so I think it's fair to say that Anthony Calvillo, who has played for the Montreal Alouettes since 1998, is famous in certain Canadian households and a complete unknown in others. Of the top nine passers in the history of North American professional football,2 Calvillo's name is the least recognizable. He is not an NFL icon, and he is not the brother of a Pro Football Hall of Famer (as is the longtime CFL star Damon Allen, brother of Marcus), and as far as I know he's never had a cereal named after him (as with Doug Flutie, who acquired yards and fame both north and south of the border). He gets recognized on the street by fans, and yet a vast number of Montrealers have no idea that his team even exists. His own wife, born and raised in this city, had never heard of the Alouettes until she began dating Calvillo. When I tried to get a cab driver to take me to the stadium on a game night, I had to show him on a map. Then he asked if I was going to a handball match. "I didn't know anything about the CFL myself," Calvillo says. "Not until I started playing in it."

This summer, as the NFL players were locked out and the season appeared to be in jeopardy, I wondered if the CFL would have a crossover moment in America, as it did during the players' strike of 1982, when the networks were desperate for something to fill the empty hours on Sunday. Anthony Calvillo thought about that, too. How could he not? He grew up in East Los Angeles, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, and like the rest of us, he dreamed of someday playing quarterback in the NFL, though it never seemed a particularly realistic goal. Upon graduating from La Puente High School, Calvillo had no scholarship offers, so he attended Mt. San Antonio, a local junior college; after two years at Mt. San Antonio, Calvillo had three offers: one from Louisiana Tech, one from Southern Illinois, and one from Utah State. His size was the primary issue: Calvillo is listed at 6-foot-1, one inch taller than Drew Brees (and at least three inches taller than Doug Flutie), but this was the early '90s, when "short" quarterbacks were still considered anathema. The other schools seemed too far away from Los Angeles, and so Calvillo committed to Utah State, where the offensive coordinator was Jim Zorn and the coach was Charlie Weatherbie, who played for a season with the Edmonton Eskimos.

"The guy had ice water in his veins," Weatherbie says of Calvillo. "Bombs could go off around him and he wouldn't even see it. He could throw in the pocket, and he was a great decision-maker. We'd throw something like 46 times a game."

In Calvillo's senior season, he threw for 3,148 yards and 19 touchdowns, and Utah State won the Big West Conference championship and defeated Ball State in the Las Vegas Bowl. Still, no one in the NFL showed much interest. "They just didn't think he could see well enough in the pocket," Weatherbie says. Zorn made inquiries to the CFL, and an expansion team called the Las Vegas Posse put Calvillo on its negotiating list, meaning he'd have to try out with them if he wanted to play. This was a watershed moment for the league, as it had decided to expand into America, primarily out of financial desperation (which is always the foundation for a sound business strategy). Teams sprouted up in Shreveport and Sacramento and Baltimore, as well, and no one seemed to understand exactly why this was happening or what it meant or how the hell Canadian football was actually played. The people were vaguely curious, and then Labor Day came around and they forgot it existed.

Calvillo had already presumed he would seek out a job as a coach and teacher, but he went to the tryout in Vegas nevertheless. As he remembers it, there were 13 quarterbacks in camp, from Oklahoma and Illinois and Northwestern, names he can still recite — "guys I watched on TV," he says. "I thought, OK, I'm not gonna compete with them. But after that first day, and after I saw them throwing, I knew right away that I could compete."

Calvillo not only made the team; he became the starting quarterback. The Posse practiced in the parking lot of a casino and played their games in 120-degree weather before an ever-dwindling fan base (their largest crowd all season was 12,000). They played one season, went 5-13, and folded. In 1996, as Art Modell completed his backroom negotiations to move the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, the CFL's American experiment met its inevitable demise. The Baltimore Stallions wound up in Montreal, and Calvillo, thrown into the league's dispersal draft, played three middling seasons in Hamilton, Ontario, before moving to Quebec, where both he and the franchise appeared to have equally indeterminate futures. In his first season with the Alouettes, Calvillo threw six touchdown passes and 10 interceptions, and then everything changed: The Alouettes adapted to their identity just as their quarterback adapted to the CFL.

They sell smoked-meat sandwiches at Alouettes games, and while this should not come as a surprise, it is a wonderful regional anomaly. Smoked meat (salted and cured beef brisket piled to excess on a couple of hapless slices of rye bread) is to Montreal as cheesesteaks are to Philadelphia, the defining food of a city with a myriad of artery-clogging establishments, including a place called Au Pied de Cochon, where the specialty of the house is a lobster crammed inside a pig's head, and where the waiters periodically towel the grease off the fixtures. To outsiders, Montreal is a city of indulgences, a haven for youthful misbehavior and sloppy bachelor parties, and the crowd at the Alouettes game reflects that. They are here for a good time, to consume Canadian beer and smoke cigarettes on the concourse and bask in the evening; for many of them, the action on the field seems a secondary concern. The stadium is a gathering place.

And it is a beautiful stadium, nearly 100 years old, named after Percival Molson, a prolific athlete who was killed by a German howitzer during World War I. Until 1998, the Alouettes played at a half-filled Olympic Stadium, the staid and cavernous dome that the Montreal Expos called home, but in 1998 (the same year Calvillo arrived) they were forced to host a playoff game at Molson Stadium because of a U2 concert, and they never went back. It's not really an exaggeration to say U2 rescued football in Montreal: By embracing the intimacy of their new home (with a capacity of 25,000 rather than 56,000) and its stunning views of the city skyline, the Alouettes have found a niche. To get to Molson Stadium you walk up the steep incline of Mont Royal, past the dormitories and science labs of McGill University, past worn fraternity houses, past a pair of husky scalpers whose Expos jerseys are one of the few things that separate this walk from the one you might make on a Saturday afternoon in South Bend or Ann Arbor or Tuscaloosa. The other, of course, is that people are speaking French.

Hearing a French public address announcer at a football game is like listening to a version of Remembrance of Things Past as read by John Facenda. It doesn't make intuitive sense. (If someone spoke French at an SEC game, it might spark a riot.) But this is Canada, and leaving aside for a moment the intricate French-Canadian politics that define Quebec as a province, the CFL was constructed by splitting differences: first with British rugby and then with American football, producing "a uniquely Canadian version that evolved through protracted compromise," according to the sociologist Robert Stebbins. Ever since abandoning America and paring its membership down to eight teams, the CFL has tried to emphasize Canadian nationalism in its marketing.3 An advertisement on the JumboTron melds together sepia-toned footage of dudes tromping through the snow and hoisting the Grey Cup over their heads before fading into the slogan: Notre Ligue. Notre Football. (Our League. Our Football.) Hence the three downs instead of four, and the 12 men per side instead of 11, and that cavernous playing area (110 yards plus a 20-yard end zone on each side, and 65 yards wide rather than 53⅓), and the goal posts set at the front of the end zone, and the unlimited motion in the backfield preplay, and little idiosyncratic touches like fluorescent penalty flags.4 I went to see Calvillo play against the Edmonton Eskimos in August, and every time I felt like I was settling into watching a football game something odd would happen: A 12-yard field goal or a second-and-10 from the 52 or a score of 20-4.

That "4" was put up not because the Eskimos sacked Calvillo twice in the end zone, but because of the novelty concept known as the single, or rouge: One point is awarded when the ball is kicked into the end zone by any legal means other than a made field goal, and the receiving team is unable to scuttle the ball out of the end zone by either running or kicking it back out, which can lead to a back-and-forth straight out of Benny Hill. As an American, you probably find the rouge an idiotic perversion of the game, and I wouldn't blame you. Even Canadians are self-conscious about the rouge, and there's been discussion about abolishing it. Thirty years later, the rouge was the first thing Charlie Weatherbie mentioned when I asked him about adapting to the peculiarities of the CFL.

"For me, the biggest thing to adjust to [in this league] was the size of the field," Calvillo says. "I learned right away that there are certain throws you just should not make because of the size of the field. Like the out route — it's a 40-yard throw and the ball stays in the air forever. At first, I just ran the play that the coaches presented to us. Looking back at it now, you just do what you're told. It wasn't until I got older that I learned the philosophy of what you're trying to do as an offense."

Calvillo is not very big — he is listed at 213 pounds — and he struggles against pressure, but when he finds a rhythm he is still the best quarterback in the CFL: In a September game against Hamilton, he completed 31 of 45 passes for 421 yards and four touchdowns. He leads the league in touchdown passes, passing yards, and quarterback efficiency. He happens to wear Kurt Warner's no. 13, and this almost seems like too obvious a comparison given their equally improbable backstories, but it's hard not to make it anyway. The CFL's rules place a premium on the passing game; with three downs and unlimited motion, every offensive coordinator has to think a little bit like Mike Martz,5 and Calvillo has completed more than 60 percent of his throws every year since 2003. That's the advantage of a wide-open field: An open receiver has a tremendous amount of room to run, and Calvillo has a knack for finding his wideouts in space. It's what's enabled him to anchor a dynasty in Montreal.

Since 2000, Calvillo has played in eight Grey Cups; in 2002, the Alouettes beat Edmonton 25-16, but Calvillo completed only 11 of 31 passes, and after he lost four more Grey Cup games between 2003 and 2008, he became something of a tragic figure among the media,6 a nice guy who got lucky once and looked like he might never win the big game again.7 "For a long time, all people wanted to talk about was those games, those games, those games," Calvillo says. "The one thing I told myself is that I was never going to quit on it. I was never going to give up. And the last two years, people aren't talking about those losses anymore."

Now, after two straight Grey Cup victories, people have begun to ask Calvillo about retirement. Now he has become Brett Favre without the tabloid sleaze, and people want to know how much longer he can keep doing this, and Calvillo has come to embrace the publicity he gets rather than guarding himself from view. (He's not making NFL money, but he is making enough to live comfortably.) In 2007, his wife was diagnosed with lymphoma, and she insisted that he keep playing rather than sit in a hospital room with her; last offseason, Calvillo announced that he'd been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and he had surgery but never really thought about quitting. He says that he's in the best shape of his career. He's given up gluten and dairy products and sugar, and he's working with a local trainer who promised him no more pulled hamstrings, and so far it's worked. "When I started this [regimen] going into the 2009 season, after every game, I felt like I could go play another one," he says. "Which was sick, because I'd never felt like that before. This year, it's taken me a bit more to maintain my body. With the thyroid surgery, they had to cut some muscle in my shoulder, and that's made it even tighter."

He knows the end is coming soon. He just isn't ready for it to happen yet. Nine years ago, Calvillo had a brief window open with the NFL; he met with the Jaguars and the Seahawks (he calls those workouts "ridiculous," and says they were more meet-and-greets than actual opportunities), but he had a real chance to catch on with the Steelers, who were starting Tommy Maddox and preparing to jettison Kordell Stewart. If Charlie Batch signs elsewhere, they told him, they'd bring him in as a backup. And then Batch re-signed and the window closed, and Calvillo went back to Canada, back to that alternate reality, back into a world where quarterbacks may not make NFL money but can also walk unmolested through the streets of their own city.

"I remember him saying to me, 'What boy doesn't dream of one day being the best in the world?'" Alexia recalls. "He said, 'I know I could play down there, but you have to be given the right chance at the right moment.' I think there was some disappointment, but it wasn't like he was looking for a job. He knew he had a good thing going here. This was his life. And we're just normal people moving through life like everyone else. Our daughter lined one of his trophies with princess stickers, and he refuses to remove those stickers."

On this night in August, Montreal beats Edmonton 27-4, and Calvillo throws for 261 yards and is unhurt despite absorbing one of those frightening hits in which his legs get bent back in a direction that legs aren't meant to bend. (When I ask him if he attributes this to his conditioning program, he tells me he attributes it to luck.) When it's over, the Alouettes emerge from a cramped locker room and sign autographs, and one woman delivers a tin of cookies to her favorite player, and it all feels a lot like the aftermath of a high school football game in Ohio. Calvillo is one of the last to emerge, and we stand out near the middle of the field and remark on its sheer scope. He'd told me earlier about the advice Doug Flutie gave him when he was thinking about jumping to the NFL ("The media is 10 times worse, because there's so many more of them"), and he told me that he didn't want his records to be compared to those of Favre or Montana or any of the others, and he told me that he no longer worried whether people in America knew who he was.

"This is it," he says, and he throws his arms up into the vast expanse, a man who has come to relish the compromise.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[DaveM]

The Return of the Jets
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7084203/the-return-jets
The Return of the Jets – For one night, Winnipeg was the happiest town on earth
By Chris JonesPOSTED OCTOBER 10, 2011

Yesterday, in the hours before the doors were opened for the Winnipeg Jets' first regular-season game, fans congregated on the streets outside the MTS Centre. Many of them were wearing the city's newest status symbol: vintage Jets jerseys, with names such as Hawerchuk or Selanne or even Hull across their backs. Not so long ago, those jerseys were packed away in closets and basements, sad reminders of what this city lost in 1996. Now they, like the Jets, are back in fashion.

Inside the arena, the Zamboni flooded the empty ice. Beer kegs were tapped. The storied, visiting Montreal Canadiens laced up their skates. And the air in the arena's upper reaches was that crisp, telltale cold: It was the good kind of winter in Winnipeg once again.

It had been a frantic few months since an ecstatic May 31, when Mark Chipman, the co-owner of True North Sports and Entertainment, announced that he had purchased the Atlanta Thrashers and would be moving them to Winnipeg. Fifteen years after the National Hockey League had left — relegating Winnipeg to the minors, abandoning a fading city that had already taken its fair share of blows — it would return. This was not small news here. The team met its goal of selling 13,000 season tickets — in 17 minutes.

When the first incarnation of the Jets left to become the Phoenix Coyotes — how's that going, by the way? — Winnipeg was a different city. It occupied a different space in the universe, at least. From a hockey standpoint, it faced any number of obstacles: an outdated barn of an arena, a weak Canadian dollar, tapped-out ownership, a dejected and increasingly absent fan base. But more important, and more calamitous, the city itself was falling apart. Winnipeg has always been a tough town, an easy place to get your ass kicked. But downtown especially had begun a long, depressing turn. It was held together by holes.

"My city's still breathing but barely, it's true," local hero John K. Samson sang, "through buildings gone missing like teeth."

Even the intersection of Portage and Main — one of Canada's most famous crossroads — had become desolate, a feeling made worse after traffic engineers had decided to push pedestrians underground. (One of the "Save the Jets" rallies, when people literally threw coins and crumpled bills into plastic bags in a vain effort to keep the team, was that rare remaining day when a crowd gathered there.)

And then that first Jets-less winter blew in.

In Winnipeg, winter isn't so much a season as it is a perverse test of human resolve. It's cold and dark enough here to make people wonder whether they're in the middle of a four-month-long solar eclipse.

A winter in Winnipeg without hockey to help count down the days?

It was perpetual. It was nuclear.

It's hard to overstate the hold that hockey has over Canada. Two-thirds of the country — 22 million people — watched Sidney Crosby score his winning goal at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Six of the 10 largest riots in Canadian history have somehow been related to hockey. The back of the $5 bill depicts children playing shinny on a pond.

Even the prime minister, hockey historian Stephen Harper, attended last night's game.

The idea seemed to befuddle American defenseman Dustin Byfuglien when he was asked about playing in front of such an important national figure. "Realistically, we probably won't even see him — or her," he said, just in case.

Because Byfuglien had no clue.

There is a feeling up here, both justified and terribly insecure, that Americans don't understand us, the inhabitants of America's hat. As a country, we define ourselves more often by the things we are not — as in, those ways we differ from Americans — than by the things we are. But in hockey, Canada has perhaps its most defining feature, a game that, at its best, embodies the traits we'd like to think represent us at our own best: a gritty kind of grace, equal measures beauty and endurance.

That's how Winnipeg, even in its worst moments, saw itself. "The city of Winnipeg is a collective act of will," Chipman likes to say. "Winnipeg is a hockey city, and it deserves a hockey team."

Now: There is a great danger, especially during days like yesterday — when the fans stood and cheered at the tops of their lungs, tears streaming down so many of the faces here — to get caught up in the sentimentality of it all. It's really tempting to wax poetic about something like hockey in a city like Winnipeg. It's too easy to make yesterday into something bigger than it was.

The truth is hockey is just another game. There are many things we do that are more important. Winnipeg is just another city. There are many towns that fell on harder times. And the Winnipeg Jets, these Winnipeg Jets? They're just the Atlanta Thrashers — a bad, bad hockey team — in different jerseys. They're a corporation like any other, an exercise in revenue generation for some very rich men, including David Thomson, the richest man in Canada. The Winnipeg Jets are not a miracle. They will save no lives; they will put out no fires.

And yet there is no denying their power as a symbol for this rebounding city. Winnipeg remains far from perfect. It is still missing many teeth. But there are cranes in the sky for the first time in years, building new airports and museums and football stadiums; the dollar is close to par; there's a new arena and committed, charismatic ownership. The view is changing here. Yesterday, Montreal came to town. New York, Washington, Boston, Los Angeles, and Toronto are coming, too.

On 41 nights this winter, this city will be oversize, playing host to a city bigger than itself.

On 41 nights, it will be more of a winter in Winnipeg.

Montreal also happened to pound Winnipeg 5-1 last night. These Jets will lose many more times this season. They would have been nervous yesterday, those holdovers from Atlanta, playing in front of actual fans. But they are still a collection of mostly young, defensively suspect players. Their numbers include 18-year-old Mark Scheifele, a capable-seeming kid with a bright future. But it's the rare team that puts teenagers on the ice and dominates.

And no matter what magic happens in Winnipeg in the coming years, the Jets will always remain a small-market team. Nothing will change that. Their very existence is only possible because of the collective bargaining agreement, and the salary cap, that followed hockey's 2004-05 lockout. The MTS Centre holds only 15,004 fans — making it a terrific place to watch a game, loud and intimate, but a small building by NHL standards.

There are so many things charmingly … hokey … about this team. PORK FOR PEAK PERFORMANCE, the scoreboard reminded the crowd last night on behalf of Manitoba's hog farmers. Pork, in this instance, was being employed as a noun. (The Winnipeg Jets: Fuelled by Passion, Sponsored by Meat.)

If sentimentality is a mistake here, however, so, too, is cynicism. How often do we complain about the growing distance between us — between the fans and their teams? About the unstoppable, brutal machines that our leagues and associations have become? About the hype, the excess, the debauchery, the shame?

In the Winnipeg Jets and their performance-enhancing pork products, we have our collective antidote. This might be the one big-league city in North America that can claim a pure soul. Here, it won't much matter whether the Jets win or lose. All that matters is that they exist.

A strange thing happened at the end of last night's game. Winnipeg was down by four goals. There was less than a minute to go. The stands were still full. The crowd stood and cheered — the way they had stood and cheered 15 years ago when the Jets played their last game, a loss a million times worse — and then, as the clock raced closer to zero, they began to chant: Go, Jets, go!

It was one of those pretty, perfect moments. Not that there were any doubters in the building, but if there were, that was the instant they changed their minds: The National Hockey League is better for having Winnipeg in it, and Winnipeg, in turn, is better for having the Jets in its heart.

This winter couldn't come soon enough.

[hockeygod]

Edmonton arena blackout beaters
Bettman muzzles arena parties, but not before they hint at intentions

By TERRY JONES, QMI Agency, Oct 12 2011

NEW YORK – Only minutes before Gary Bettman issued the media blackout to Daryl Katz and Mayor Stephen Mandel, the Oilers’ owner decided he had something to say.

“We are here to get it done,” Katz told QMI Agency before Wednesday’s crucial meeting with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who is playing the role of facilitator to get the Edmonton downtown arena project back on the rails in time to get the deal done by Katz’s Oct. 31 deadline.

“We commend everyone involved in their willingness to meet, particularly the mayor and Gary Bettman,” said Katz.

“We have some significant issues to resolve. We’re confident where there’s a will, there’s a way.

“We’re hopeful we’ll be able to come away with an agreement which will enable us all to move forward. We have to get this deal right for the city of Edmonton and ourselves.

“We feel this is about seizing the opportunity to transform our city and lock the Oilers into longtime sustainability in Edmonton.”

A lot of on-the-record-words there, for Daryl Katz.

But maybe Bettman’s lack of words spoke the loudest.

About 35 minutes into Mandel’s meeting with Bettman here Tuesday afternoon, word came down from his 45th-floor offices at NHL headquarters.

The mayor sent word down to the street where a gathering of media members were waiting for the City of Edmonton contingent to emerge from the meeting.

“Gary Bettman has asked for a media blackout until the meetings Wednesday are complete,” the reporters were told by a media relations rep of the Avenue of Americas, not far from Radio City Music Hall where they stood.

The mayor took just over an hour to present background to Bettman, to bring him up to speed on the City of Edmonton side of proceedings.

But to call for a media blackout suggests that this isn’t another stage of the proceedings here but, quite likely, the final showdown.

GET 'ER DONE

If you know Bettman, who seldom commands people to come to his office, this has almost certainly become the time and place he intends to finally get it over and done one way or the other.

If you read between the lines, and indeed the actual words of both Mandel and Katz going into the meeting Wednesday, some form of compromise seems to be in the air.

Mandel, in an interview Monday, made some surprisingly strong statements.

“I wouldn’t be taking this trip if my expectations weren’t optimistic.

“Most people want to see this deal get done,” he said of the $450-million proposed downtown arena and entertainment district, which would totally transform the city.

“Not all. Some don’t. But I know without a doubt that if we get it done and look back five years from now and 10 years from now, nobody will be saying a negative word. And I know if we don’t get it done, and five and 10 years from now we don’t have a hockey team and we don’t have any improvements to our downtown and we look back, there will be a lot of people wondering how we could have done that to our city.

“I think everybody involved, including Daryl Katz and Gary Bettman, want the team to be successful and stay in Edmonton.”

That certainly sent a message that Mandel was coming here to get the framework to get a deal by the deadline.

While there’s still the missing $100 million from the province, that doesn’t seem to be what the parties are here to deal with so much as the city not getting off the pot and dealing with Northlands on the non-compete clause.

This is High Noon in a lot of directions when it comes to the future of the Oilers, but it will likely be long before noon Wednesday that the Northlands issue is put on the table to get dealt with.

There were indications that Katz might be bringing a compromise solution to the table which would allow the non-compete clause to be removed in exchange for the city restructuring another part of the deal.

By the time it was time to check that out, however, Bettman’s media blackout had kicked in.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Tom Thompson: Memories of Howe, Nieuwendyk and Gilmour

Tom Thompson, The Hockey News, 2011-10-12

At the recent Traverse City Prospects Tournament, I was shaking Mark Howe's hand and extending my congratulations to him on his well-deserved election to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Walking back to my hotel room that night, I realized my encounter with Howe had inspired personal memories within me concerning some members of this year's HHOF class.

Growing up in Winnipeg, I was fortunate to see Howe begin his professional career with the Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association. People who only saw Howe in the NHL think of him as an accomplished defenseman who became a first team all-star and led the league in plus-minus. In the WHA, however, Howe was one of the top left wingers in hockey. During Howe’s four years with the Aeros, they made three appearances in the final and won two Avco Cups.

Howe was one of the most beautiful, effortless skaters I have ever seen and he was also part of one of the greatest individual battles of my lifetime. During that era, the Winnipeg Jets boasted a line of Ulf Nilsson centering Bobby Hull and Anders Hedberg. At the time Hedberg was in his prime and one of the greatest skaters of any era. Most opposing left wingers had no chance of matching his tempo of play. But Howe did. Watching those two great, smart, fast and competitive wingers go head-to-head was a sight that remains in my mind's eye almost 40 years later.

The elections of Joe Nieuwendyk and Doug Gilmour have an even closer personal touch. I was with the Calgary Flames when these two players were cornerstones of the 1989 Stanley Cup championship. We also won two consecutive Presidents’ Trophies, missing the third by a single point.

My most compelling memory of Nieuwendyk and Gilmour is not confined to any particular game or championship. Rather, I remember their roles in the many highlight reel games of that era against the Edmonton Oilers – the ones that became immortalized as the "Battle of Alberta." I am glad I still have video of a number of those games. It was great hockey, as entertaining as any in my lifetime. There are now a total of 10 Hall of Famers from those two teams, with other worthy candidates still to be considered.

Howe, Nieuwendyk and Gilmour all played during unique periods in hockey history. The Howe-Hedberg battles of the 1970s took place during a transitional period – the formation of the WHA meant that teams had to scramble for talent, which opened the door for European players. Nieuwendyk and Gilmour played during a more stable era, with the Oilers and Flames dynasties dominating the league led by names such as Gretzky, Messier, McDonald, and MacInnis.

The elections of Nieuwendyk, Gilmour and Howe to the Hockey Hall of Fame serve as an incentive to maintain the future beauty of the game we love as we remember its heritage.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

FRASER: YOU BETTER HURRY UP AND TAKE THAT FACEOFF

Kerry Fraser, TSN.CA, 10/12/2011

Got a question on rule clarification, comments on rule enforcements or some memorable NHL stories? Kerry Fraser wants to answer your emails at cmonref@tsn.ca!

Hey Kerry,

During the Florida-Pittsburgh game on Tuesday night, I noticed in one faceoff that the linesman dropped the puck when there was no one in the circle for the Pens. Is this allowed?

Thanks,
Wes Krentz
Unity, Saskatchewan

—-

Wes: Not only was the correct faceoff procedure followed by linesman Steve Miller but a goal did result against the Penguins on the ensuing end to end rush.

A few years ago, in an effort to speed up the game the League instituted a "hurry up faceoff" procedure. Here is how the process works. Once the neutral zone referee completes the line change that each team is allowed to make (last change to home team) he will then lower his hand to indicate no further change. This triggers the linesman at the faceoff location to blow his whistle which is a signal to both teams that they have no more than five (5) seconds to line up for the ensuing faceoff. At the end of the five seconds, the lineman is instructed to conduct a proper faceoff.

The word "proper" means that both centres should be positioned for the faceoff with their sticks on the ice utilizing the correct on-ice markings and teams are in an on-side position with no encroachment. This is however, assuming that both opposing centres are in the immediate vicinity of the faceoff spot. The linesman can and will eject a center that does not comply, stands back and attempts to quarterback or if his team commits a violation for encroachment. The optimum word here is "immediate vicinity" of the faceoff spot.

The language of Rule 76 for faceoff Procedure clearly states that, "If a centre is not at the designated face-off area once the five (5) second time has elapsed, the linesman will drop the puck immediately." The rule further directs the linesman to drop the puck immediately if the centre is back from the face-off spot, is "quarterbacking" or refused to come into faceoff area when instructed to do so, or is just slow to arrive when the five seconds has elapsed.

In practical application of the faceoff procedure every linesman in the league will attempt to work with the centres wherever possible utilizing common sense. Should the centre be moving to the faceoff spot and in close proximity after the five seconds has elapsed the linesman will simply wave the slowpoke out of the circle for a replacement. If the defending team center was in violation of this rule to the extent we saw last night I have to believe that he would be ejected from the faceoff before the puck was dropped on the stick of the attacking center; although I have been on the ice when this happened. You should have seen the mad dash fire drill that resulted from that one!

Last night, Penguins centre Joe Vitale was excessively slow getting to the face-off location judging from the fact that he wasn't even in the wide camera frame of the television broadcast. Linesman Steve Miller was ready to conduct the face-off along with the entire Panther unit that hungered for the black disc.

The faceoff procedure was followed perfectly in this situation when Miller dropped the puck. So many nights I heard catcalls from the crowd when a frustrated fan would shout at a linesman, "Just DROP The Puck!"

Last night in Pittsburgh, Steve Miller complied with their ongoing request. You can bet the Penguins' centre ice men will be first to arrive on the scene in the future!

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Top shelf idea

Michael Grange, Sportsnet.ca, October 13, 2011

It is six ounces of Canadiana that has been there for every important moment in hockey history, from Wayne Gretzky’s 50th goal in those 39 games to Sidney Crosby’s gold-medal winner in Vancouver.

But the humble hockey puck is as devoid of pretense as a fourth-line winger or a seventh defenceman. They may be vessels for a sport’s collective history, but mostly are after-thoughts in equipment bags and sheds across the nation.

As long as someone has one when it’s time to play and no one gets it in the mush, they are rarely given a second thought.

But what if that black rubber bullet could help lift a nation from war-torn poverty? What if that frozen disc could help communities have access to fresh water and kids to proper schools?

Is hockey ready for a socially responsible puck?

George Roter thinks so. The chief executive officer and founder of Engineers Without Borders came up with a new concept for a Canadian icon, one which he believes will help develop a sustainable rubber industry in Liberia, the West African nation recovering from 14 years of civil war, while putting Canadian-manufactured pucks back in hockey bags across the nation.

"We think the sustainability of the materials inside the pucks and the social justice values they represent will bring some good karma," said Roter, who came up with the idea after hearing about fair trade chocolate and fair trade coffee and figuring there had to be a socially progressive product for those who drank their coffee at Tim’s and ate Mr. Big bars.

"I figured, why not a hockey puck?"

Investigating further he learned that a significant number of the frozen Canadian rubber that gets put top-shelf aren’t made of rubber or made in Canada. About half of game pucks and virtually the entire souvenir market – about 10-million pucks combined annually in North America – are manufactured in Eastern Europe and often made of synthetic rubber, an oil-based product.

He also learned that Liberia’s rubber industry had been decimated by years of conflict with the majority of its citizens getting along via subsistence farming, often earning as little as $1 a day.

Through other projects with EWB he knew that entire communities could be turned around through simple innovations and modest economic interventions.

By creating a demand for Liberian rubber – it’s tapped from trees the way we would harvest maple syrup – he was convinced he could establish the kind of social and commercial win-win EWB has at the heart of its mandate.

"A tapper can make $8-10 a day compared with maybe $2 farming," says Roter. "They can use that money to send their kids to school or a community can come together to invest in building a well as a source of clean water. It can give them a chance."

Roter and EWB have teamed with Public Inc., a Toronto-based marketing agency focused on socially beneficial causes to establish the pucks under the Rubr brand and hopefully create a market for Liberian-rubber pucks manufactured by Viceroy Rubber and Plastics Inc. in St. Catharines, Ont.

They are in talks with a major Canadian retailer to get them into the hands of the hockey playing public, but in the meantime have teamed with 64 CIS hockey-playing schools to have the pucks used in conference play beginning this weekend.

"Normally a puck is a puck is a puck," said Ward Dilse, executive director of the OUA. "But this is something different."

The hurdle may be cost.

Hockey pucks are a price-driven commodity. According to Todd Bruhn, president of Viceroy, retailers will typically tolerate a two or three-cent premium on a puck made in Canada compared with one imported from Eastern Europe.

Will retailers – and the hockey-puck buying public – get behind a puck that might be more expensive if it means having pucks made at home that help a war-torn nation find its feet?

If they do they’ll get a product that plays the same and looks the same but just might make a difference.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Rookie GM on hot seat in hockey mad Sault

Darren Yourk, Globe and Mail, Oct. 13, 2011

Kyle Dubas’s life story is worthy of a Bruce Springsteen tune: Kid grows up in a far-flung, blue-collar town learning the value of hard work from his steel-worker grandfather. Kid has hockey in his blood, but a series of concussions dashes his dream of playing professionally. Kid leaves for the big city to get a business degree and makes good before giving it all up to come home to resurrect the sacred local junior squad.

Dubas, 25, is the first-year general manager of the Ontario Hockey League’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. His hiring in April raised eyebrows in a community that takes its Hounds seriously.

“Every single topic with the team is hotly discussed, whether it’s who the backup goaltender is or why the eighth defenceman isn’t playing,” said Dubas, the second youngest GM in OHL history. “It doesn’t bother me, but I begin to worry when it starts to flow to the players because they are just kids. I look at it as my job to defend the guys.”

The pressure hardly took Dubas by surprise. Born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, his family’s past is intertwined with the franchise. His father is a former Greyhounds intern and his grandfather Walter coached the team from 1960-67, working at the Algoma Steel plant by day and stepping behind the bench at night.

Dubas’s parents divorced when he was eight, frequently leaving him in the care of his grandparents. If the Hounds were playing at home, Kyle and Walter were always in the same seats just inside the blueline. The old coach’s message to his grandson was simple: Winning teams never lose a battle.

“No grit, no glory,” Dubas said. “My grandpa told me that the minute you start listening to the press and the fans is your first step toward sitting with the press and the fans.”

His first job with the team was taking care of sticks and water bottles as a dressing-room attendant when he was 11. Concussions ended Dubas’s playing days when he was 14, but didn’t curb his passion for the game. He took a job as a hockey operations assistant with the Hounds, exposing him to player development and the logistics of running a junior franchise. He moved to St. Catharines, Ont., in 2003 to enroll in Brock University’s sports management program, balancing a full-time course load with scouting junior B and midget games for the Greyhounds.

After graduating with honours, Dubas set his sights on the agent business, landing a job with Uptown Sports Management, an agency in Burlington, Ont., representing OHL, minor pro and NHL players.

“It’s a cutthroat, dirty business,” he said. “I was 20 years old trying to recruit players, and other agents were telling guys, ‘You can’t let him represent you. He’s 20. He’ll screw up the pivotal moments in your career.’ ”

Dubas was representing players such as Kyle Clifford (Los Angeles Kings) and Andrew Desjardins (San Jose Sharks) and helping Uptown establish offices in Calgary and Stockholm when the GM opportunity arrived. The Greyhounds’ owners, having watched the team miss the playoffs four out of eight years, decided it was time for a change.

Lou Lukenda, the Greyhounds’ majority shareholder and president, said the original plan called for the team to hire a veteran hockey man until Dubas walked in for his interview armed with a 95-page blueprint on the future of the team.

“He came well prepared and has some excellent ideas,” Lukenda said. “We thought his experience as an agent could help us and we liked the idea that he wanted a team that would be good every year, as opposed to the idea of building a team to try and go all the way for one year, only to pay the consequences for the next three or four.”

Lukenda said four other quality candidates interviewed, but the board was unanimous in wanting Dubas.

He went to work trying to change the environment surrounding the franchise, interacting heavily with fans via Twitter and dubbing the 2011-12 season “The Rising,” borrowing the title from the 2002 Springsteen album. He said his goal is to build a constant pipeline of talent through the draft and get everyone –fans, players, coaches and front-office staff – pulling in the same direction to put the Greyhounds on an equal footing with traditional Western Conference powers such as London, Windsor and Kitchener.

“We’re not going to beat those teams on revenues and budgets, so we need to beat them on the culture of our team,” Dubas said. “When a player comes to our team, he needs to know we’re going to get the most out of him in the classroom, in the community and on the ice.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Hall of Famer Messier to run NYC Marathon

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Hockey Hall of Famer Mark Messier plans to run next month's New York City Marathon.

The six-time Stanley Cup champion will take on the 42.2 kilometres Nov. 6 in the city where he captained the Rangers to their first title in 54 years.

Two of his teammates from that 1994 squad, Adam Graves and Mike Richter, have run the marathon in recent years.

Messier was looking for a challenge after turning 50 in January and to raise awareness and money for two charities: the New York Police & Fire Widow's and Children's Benefit Fund and Tomorrows Children's Fund, which helps kids with cancer and serious blood disorders.

He doesn't have a trainer, doing extensive research on the science of running and building his own training plan, with a lot of trial and error thrown in. Messier runs by himself on the roads of Greenwich, Conn., with no headphones.

"It's been an incredible form of meditation, actually, for me, a great way to contemplate and jump inside your own head and think," he said Thursday at a ceremony at the Empire State Building. "That's been very gratifying for me. In a way it's been a 10-month prayer for these charities."

Messier has been training intensely for the last seven months, recently completing his longest planned training run of 33 kilometres.

"I felt like I could never take another step the rest of my life," he said, adding that he was pleased with how quickly he recovered. "My feet were sore, killing me. Every bone in my body ached."

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Before I made it: Tyler Ennis

Tyler Ennis With Kevin Kennedy, The Hockey News, 2011-10-15

I played my first hockey game in a house league in Edmonton. I can still remember my first goal, not because it was good, but because it was on my own net.

My dad got me into hockey at first and he put me on skates early, around three years old, and I just loved it. I grew up with Jared Spurgeon who is now a defenseman with the Minnesota Wild and both our dads coached us throughout minor hockey We were both little guys and it’s pretty cool that we both made it.

I remember being really active as a kid. I played tons of sports, but always came back to hockey. My dad made me a nice little hockey station in the basement and we played hockey all the time, sometimes on the street, sometimes in the basement. I also played a lot of basketball and golf as a kid.

It’s kind of weird, but my favourite time of the year to play hockey was the summer. When I was in novice I played on Team Brick and I remember we played in the big tournament against guys like Kyle Turris, Luke Schenn and P.K. Subban. We didn’t win, but it was a lot of fun. Only Jared and I made it to the NHL from that team, but there were definitely a lot of great players. I remember looking at team photos of the past Brick squads and each team had a couple guys who made it to the NHL so I figured I had a shot as well. To be honest, it actually wasn’t until peewee that I had any real success. That year we won everything – the league, the provincials – it was awesome.

I played junior close to home in Medicine Hat and I got a chance to play in the Memorial Cup and the world juniors where we won the gold medal. The next big day was the draft and I remember I wasn’t sure if I was going to be drafted in the first round and didn’t know if I was going to go to the draft. I was with my agent and my family and they convinced me to go and said it would a fun experience either way.

Buffalo called me at 26 and the feeling was unbelievable. I was very proud and happy to be able to celebrate with my parents. My brother was vacationing in Thailand at the time and I remember that he texted me about it that night. Everyone was just really proud.

On the day I got called up to the NHL team for the first time, I remember I was at the morning skate in Portland because we had a game that night. My coach called me into his office after the skate and told me I might be going up to Buffalo because a player had gotten hurt and was getting checked out. He just told me to keep my phone on and on the way home he called me and said, “Ya you’re going up for sure.” I quickly grabbed my stuff and ripped on to the plane, barely making it on time and I arrived in Buffalo just before the pre-game skate.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get any friends or family there on such short notice, but they were all watching at home and got everybody together. It was so cool and I even scored in my first game!

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

New age of NHL reason sought

ERIC FRANCIS, QMI Agency, Oct 15 2011

Edmonton Oilers forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins in game action during the 2011-2012 NHL season at Rexall Place in Edmonton, AB on Sunday October 8, 2011 (PERRY NELSON/QMI Agency)

Hockey Canada President Bob Nicholson has submitted a nine-page document to the NHL outlining his belief the league’s entry draft should move from age 18 to 19.

“I wanted to do it because I thought it was the best thing for Hockey Canada and the overall structure,” said Nicholson, who hopes the study will be part of the upcoming CBA discussions.

“For the most part, 18- and 19-year-old players are not close to being ready for the NHL. If the draft goes back a year, it slows down the process at every level. Right now, everyone is on a treadmill to get there.”

Nicholson studied all Canadian players drafted the last six years and found 56% of all Canadians drafted in the 2005 draft haven’t played a single NHL game. All told, 88% of Canadians drafted at age 18 don’t play in the NHL before age 20 and only 6% play in the NHL the year they’re drafted.

Officials from the Canadian Hockey League and the NCAA would applaud a 19-year-old draft, as top players would stick around longer in their respective junior or collegiate programs while continuing to mature physically and as players.

Europeans would love it, too, as they could keep their players home longer.

Most importantly, NHL teams would cherish the ability to draft more accurately by allowing players another year of development before investing heavily in their selected players. The NHL currently sees less than 50% of all players drafted make the league.

Nicholson has reached out to the NHLPA, which has yet to respond and refused comment Saturday until those two meet. Suffice it to say, unions aren’t generally in the business of accepting terms they see as restricting players’ ability to earn a living.

Predictably, player agents hate the idea. As one agent pointed out, “so, a kid can get married, drink in most provinces or join the army, but he can’t play in the NHL even if he’s good enough? That makes no sense.”

That’s why Nicholson concedes if the structure is changed, there should continue to be exceptions for exceptional players, meaning perhaps the top ten picks or entire first round would allow NHL teams to select 18-year-olds.

Nicholson has urged other federations to do similar studie,s as the issue is now certain to be brought up as part of Collective Bargaining Agreement discussions as it was last time around.

The hope in all this is teams will have a better success rate than the clip that saw just 25% of all Canadian players drafted six years ago play at least 50 games.

“Whatever we do with the draft, we’d do in consultation with the union,” NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said.

“There’s nothing we can do unilaterally.”

The draft allowed 18 year olds in the 1970s following several legal challenges, but Daly says legal precedent has since been set to ensure a 19-year-old draft would be acceptable legally as long as the union and league agreed to it in their CBA.

Just how important a 19-year-old draft is to the owners remains to be seen, as it is far from being one of the most pressing issues in the upcoming CBA negotiations.

Nicholson cites the 2003 Draft class to highlight just how much young talent can benefit from an extra year in junior. Dion Phaneuf, Jeff Carter, Mike Richards, Brent Seabrook, Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, Brendan Coburn, Eric Staal, Jay Bouwmeester and Marc-Andre Fleury all had to spend an extra year in junior because of the 2004/05 lockout and have thrived in the NHL ever since.

Coincidence?

Most in the hockey world don’t think so, especially Nicholson.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Sleeping giant pries open Canucks' eyes

MATTHEW SEKERES, Globe and Mail, Oct. 14, 2011

On Sunday, Vancouver scientist Pat Byrne will head to Rogers Arena, home of the Canucks, and begin setting the NHL team's travel plan for the remainder of the season.

By that time he will know the score of a Rugby World Cup semi-final match between New Zealand's All Blacks and Australia's Wallabies. Byrne doesn't really follow rugby, but both sides are clients.

So is a premier NFL team that Byrne won't name because the organization demands that their relationship remain confidential. All he will say is that the franchise is a recent Super Bowl winner.

From hockey to rugby to football, the 58-year-old from Langley, B.C., is becoming a player in the world of big-league sports as franchises look for every edge to help their competitiveness. More and more, teams are calling on Byrne, the so-called “sleep doctor” for the Vancouver Canucks.

He says that sports account for just 15 to 20 per cent of his business, but the co-founder and vice-president of business development for Fatigue Science, a Hawaii-based firm that helps businesses assess and mitigate fatigue-related risk, believes that an avalanche of interest is coming.

“Industry understands the link between sleep and accident risk, but sports people confuse how they feel with how they actually perform,” Byrne said.

“Athletes who say they feel fine have terrible reaction time because there is chronic sleep restriction. They get used to [poor sleep].

“So full credit to [Canucks general manager] Mike Gillis when he came in because he realized that they had a problem with travel,” Byrne added. “It was very exciting for me because if you are a scientist, you want to tackle your hardest problem first, and the Canucks were the hardest problem because of their location. If you could solve their travel and sleep and fatigue problems, then you could fix anybody's problem.”

Byrne, who holds degrees in biology, chemistry and a master's in biochemistry from Western Washington University, began working with the Canucks four years ago when he was granted a 30-minute audience by Gillis. He walked into a Rogers Arena conference room and saw every relevant member of the Canucks' staff, including head coach Alain Vigneault, team doctors, trainers, etc. Ninety minutes later, Gillis turned to him and said: “When can you start?”

Byrne's work culminated last year when Vancouver posted the NHL's best road record, 27-10-4, which was nothing short of remarkable given that the city is the most northwest outpost in the league and that the team bears a heavier travel burden than its competitors.

Byrne's annual project begins in earnest after the first road trip of the season. The Canucks complete a four-game road swing Saturday in Edmonton, at which point the players will return home and turn in their ReadiBands.

The computerized bracelets monitor the players' sleep patterns, so Byrne gets a handle on who sleeps well on the road, who sleeps on the plane, who takes an afternoon nap, and how often they awake. From there, he aggregates the data, seizes up the road schedule, and gives the Canucks a travel plan through the use of a software program that turns sleep data into performance data.

Byrne bought the technology from the U.S. military and owns a third of the company. His investors include Brett Conrad and Darrell Kopke of lululemon.

Mostly, Fatigue Science works with industry, such as mining companies and airlines, where sleep deprivation is more a life-and-death question than an issue of wins and losses. But as the Canucks story has spread, and as more athletes Down Under, specifically the Australian Institute of Sport, have come on board, Byrne has been receiving more interest from sports organizations.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

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