Sporting Madness

Much has been made [ David Shoalts , The Globe and Mail ] of this afternoon's upcoming Game I tilt between Alexander Ovechkin 's Washington Capitals and Sidney Crosby 's Pittsburgh Penguins as a ready-made marketer's dream for the NHL. Hopes are high, and many seem to feel that this kind of matchup between two of the league's brightest stars could be a breakthrough moment for hockey in the U.S. There are some aspects that favour that idea, as both stars toil in reasonably large media markets where there isn't much else going on at the moment; both cities have atrocious baseball teams and Washington's NBA team didn't make the playoffs, while Pittsburgh lacks an NBA team completely and Pennsylvania's lone NBA team was just eliminated [ Howard Beck , The New York Times ]. If this series is going to draw in the viewers, though, it will have to start with a strong first game. Fortunately for the NHL, they've been able to get this game off of the obs...

(Photo from (gasp) AveryNation . Makes me question who I hate more, Crosby or Avery. I think Avery wins by a nose, due to the Vogue internship and the whole Elisha Cuthbert thing, but Crosby's pretty close). I don't want to make it seem like I'm always ragging on the Globe and Mail's William Houston, but his column today annoyed the hell out of me. Here's the highlights (lowlights?). "Let's see. He's the youngest player to be appointed as the captain of an NHL team. This is his first Stanley Cup final. Hard to tell, but he may still be hurting from an ankle injury that sidelined him for 29 games in the regular season. On Wednesday, Sidney Crosby scored two of the Pittsburgh Penguins' three goals and logged almost 20 minutes of ice time to lead the Penguins back into their series against the Detroit Red Wings. It was a terrific performance. But guess who received the attention during the Hockey Night in Canada postgame coverage? Gary Roberts. The s...

Just a quick note about the hockey playoffs: I've entered a team in the globesports.com challenge, which works on a pretty simple basis: pick one player from each list (i.e. a list of #1 forwards, #2 forwards, #1 defencemen, etc) until you have six forwards, four defencemen and two teams' goalie tandems. You get one point for each assist and two for each goal any of your players score, plus two points for each win your goaltenders put up and an extra point for each shutout. You can also completely retool your roster after the first and second rounds. Thus, I wasn't too concerned about picking teams that could go deep into the playoffs: I was more interested in finding the most offensive player available at each slot, and particularly those playing against teams with weaker defence and goaltending. My players and their performances to date are listed below. So far, I've accumulated 15 points from the first two nights, good enough to put me into a tie for eighth (however...