Pig Of The Hut
Day 0 Phenomenal Dr. Fate and Darkseid player
http://slapshot.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/leading-off-were-the-mayans-just-predicting-the-end-of-the-n-h-l/
Leading Off: Were the Mayans Just Predicting the End of the N.H.L.?
By LYNN ZINSER
According to the Mayan/Gary Bettman calendar, the world was supposed to end Friday. So, why play part of a season? Why pay players and arena workers? It’s the dullest part of the season. The apocalypse would come and the Columbus Blue Jackets could still be in view of a playoff spot. This would be an eternal stain on the N.H.L.’s reputation. And if all that money they saved was still regarded as currency in the Mayan/Bettman afterlife, they’d all be stinking rich and hailed as postapocalyptic geniuses. Right?
And maybe Plan B was, even if the world didn’t end, global warming would melt all the ice anyway, so why bother?
Either of these explanations make more sense than what has emanated from the brains of anyone involved in this. As the N.H.L. announced Thursday thatall games would be canceled through Jan. 14, certainly someone with a stake in this noticed it was greeted by a giant eye roll. We have been staging a semiboycott of N.H.L. lockout news in Leading Off because we’ve run out of synonyms for stupidity. Shutting down their league might have seemed like leverage against the players — the ones they had been busy throwing big contracts at, you may remember — until they realized how little of the potential ticket-buying audience cares that it is gone.
For now, they are living on this bizarre lifeline that they can still have a season because, as Nicholas Cotsonika writes on Yahoo.com, they aren’t actually at that brink yet, although they can see it from here. But consider the latest round of cancellations was greeted in Canada’s National Post by a much larger story on the Canadian junior national team and, geez, even Canada has moved on. Its prime minister, Stephen Harper, just talks around in circles on the subject, and President Obama’s latest comments were along the lines of “Call me when these brain surgeons figure it out.”
Yes, the whole thing is beyond absurd, as Allan Maki describes in The Globe and Mail. Sure, as Eric Duhatschek argues in The Globe and Mail, hockey fans will reflexively come back to root for their favorite teams no matter how much they hate the N.H.L., but does the league want to keep banking on that alone while it reminds everyone else how easy it is to forget that it once existed?
Somewhere even the Mayans are shaking their heads. Maybe their end of the world was mistranslated somewhere. Maybe it was just the end of hockey.
There were a few other stories on Friday that an apocalypse would have saved us from considering, led by the tale of an Olympic runner turned high-priced call girl and followed closely by the cringe-inducing idea that we’re in for another round of Nick Saban flirting with the N.F.L., according to Jason Cole of Yahoo.com. You could go from there to the signing saga of the basketball star Jabari Parker, which led to a giant oops on the part of one paper when he picked Duke instead of Michigan State. If you want an inside look at the recruiting of Parker, Jeff Benedict at SI.com has one for you, but if the hypocrisy of college sports makes you want to crawl back into bed, that might be a wise choice, too.
SI.com is also offering a jump on the year-end trend with its 112 moments of ’12 feature and, fittingly, one of them has to do with an absurd moment with an empty N.H.L. podium, which soon had its own Twitter page.
Tellingly, even the podium became bored with this lockout. It hasn’t sent a message on Twitter since Dec. 6. To that we say, we’re with you
.
Leading Off: Were the Mayans Just Predicting the End of the N.H.L.?
By LYNN ZINSER
Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
Gary Bettman speaking to the press on Dec. 5.
We have finally made sense of the N.H.L. lockout. After a season of staring at this sorry spectacle and concluding that N.H.L. owners are the adult equivalent of children who light things on fire just because they like to watch them burn, there is a glimmer of reason in all of this.According to the Mayan/Gary Bettman calendar, the world was supposed to end Friday. So, why play part of a season? Why pay players and arena workers? It’s the dullest part of the season. The apocalypse would come and the Columbus Blue Jackets could still be in view of a playoff spot. This would be an eternal stain on the N.H.L.’s reputation. And if all that money they saved was still regarded as currency in the Mayan/Bettman afterlife, they’d all be stinking rich and hailed as postapocalyptic geniuses. Right?
And maybe Plan B was, even if the world didn’t end, global warming would melt all the ice anyway, so why bother?
Either of these explanations make more sense than what has emanated from the brains of anyone involved in this. As the N.H.L. announced Thursday thatall games would be canceled through Jan. 14, certainly someone with a stake in this noticed it was greeted by a giant eye roll. We have been staging a semiboycott of N.H.L. lockout news in Leading Off because we’ve run out of synonyms for stupidity. Shutting down their league might have seemed like leverage against the players — the ones they had been busy throwing big contracts at, you may remember — until they realized how little of the potential ticket-buying audience cares that it is gone.
For now, they are living on this bizarre lifeline that they can still have a season because, as Nicholas Cotsonika writes on Yahoo.com, they aren’t actually at that brink yet, although they can see it from here. But consider the latest round of cancellations was greeted in Canada’s National Post by a much larger story on the Canadian junior national team and, geez, even Canada has moved on. Its prime minister, Stephen Harper, just talks around in circles on the subject, and President Obama’s latest comments were along the lines of “Call me when these brain surgeons figure it out.”
Yes, the whole thing is beyond absurd, as Allan Maki describes in The Globe and Mail. Sure, as Eric Duhatschek argues in The Globe and Mail, hockey fans will reflexively come back to root for their favorite teams no matter how much they hate the N.H.L., but does the league want to keep banking on that alone while it reminds everyone else how easy it is to forget that it once existed?
Somewhere even the Mayans are shaking their heads. Maybe their end of the world was mistranslated somewhere. Maybe it was just the end of hockey.
There were a few other stories on Friday that an apocalypse would have saved us from considering, led by the tale of an Olympic runner turned high-priced call girl and followed closely by the cringe-inducing idea that we’re in for another round of Nick Saban flirting with the N.F.L., according to Jason Cole of Yahoo.com. You could go from there to the signing saga of the basketball star Jabari Parker, which led to a giant oops on the part of one paper when he picked Duke instead of Michigan State. If you want an inside look at the recruiting of Parker, Jeff Benedict at SI.com has one for you, but if the hypocrisy of college sports makes you want to crawl back into bed, that might be a wise choice, too.
SI.com is also offering a jump on the year-end trend with its 112 moments of ’12 feature and, fittingly, one of them has to do with an absurd moment with an empty N.H.L. podium, which soon had its own Twitter page.
Tellingly, even the podium became bored with this lockout. It hasn’t sent a message on Twitter since Dec. 6. To that we say, we’re with you
.
what a boring winter without Hockey 
