Off to Vegas Again...

It's been a big week for me. New car, new job, and now, much like injured training camp invitee Kyle McLaren, I will not be around for Rangers training camp, either. While he will be failing physicals, I'll be in lovely Las Vegas for the 2nd year in a row. Got a great deal too. Last year, we paid $120/night for the MGM Grand. This year, we got a nicer hotel for $90/night. Last year, if we wanted the hotel I'm staying at this year, it would've been $180/night. Thank you, Internet.

Here's what I'm hoping for to happen while I'm gone...

- Dany Heatley to finally be traded - and not to the Rangers, unless it's for Wade Redden, which I think we all know the odds of that happening are less than 1%.
- The Rangers roster to be finalized. Probably not going to happen, but we should have a good picture of it by Friday.
- Blair Betts to have a job in the NHL. Has no GM watched him the past 3 years to see how good he is on faceoffs and on the penalty kill?
- This Phoenix Coyotes situation to be resolved. My ideal resolution: Have them play this year in the same spot since it's too late to move an entire franchise, but have them play next year in Hamilton, Ontario. Sure, it would kill their attendance this year, but, be honest, who is going to see a bad hockey team play in the desert, anyway?
- Brandon Dubinsky to be signed - and not for $2M. Remember how often he didn't score last year? I'm sure he'll have a good year, he'll be a heart and soul player, and he'll grow leaps and bounds, but he still has trouble scoring, he isn't a first-line center, and since the Rangers are tight on Cap room as is, giving him a lot of money would make things very rough come trade deadline day.
- One of the two discount hockey jersey sites I visit gets a Marian Gaborik jersey in so I can buy a new one for under $50.
- My SUV to arrive. (Probably won't for another month though.)
- Bryan to text me updates if any of the above happen.

Have a good week. See you Saturday.

Why Stay?...

For the past few months, I have been mulling around a question in my head...

Why Stay?

Why would the NHL even want to stay in Phoenix? The team averages under 15,000 fans per game, yet Gary Bettman keeps saying how committed the NHL is to hockey in Phoenix. In Hamilton, Ontario, 12,000 signed up for season tickets a few years ago without even having a team. They didn't just put their name on a list, they gave Jim Balsillie a deposit for them, hoping he would bring them a team.

But this isn't about Hamilton. You could easily replace Hamilton with Seattle, Toronto, Winnipeg, Kansas City, Quebec City, or (my personal choice) Las Vegas.

Why stay in Phoenix? The team is a drag to the owners of the teams who actually make money because of revenue sharing. It is an embarrassment to the league to have a team file bankruptcy.

Are the 14,632 fans they averaged last year really that important to the rest of the league? (By the way, their attendance is dwindling, the year before they averaged 14,820.)

Other cities are begging for teams. Balsillie is intent on moving them to Hamilton, which has been hockey-ready for years. Seattle just lost its basketball team, its football team is garbage, and its baseball team lost over 100 games last year. Las Vegas has said it wants a team, regardless of league. Same for Kansas City, who offered up their Sprint Center for free. Winnipeg wants their team back; Quebec is such a good market that it houses entire leagues in the city. A 2nd team in Toronto would do so good that the Maple Leafs actually had to nix the idea out of greed, not necessity.

Is Gary Bettman really that stubborn to admit his decision to grant a franchise to Phoenix was a mistake? I've made mistakes, and I admit them. Mine don't cost people millions of dollars.

Hockey in Arizona is a joke. For that matter, hockey in Miami and Atlanta is ridiculous also, but that's for another day.

Is it about expanding the game within the U.S.A.? There are better ways to do that then with a 25% empty building, and the four letters for that are E, S, P, and N.

There are probably 13,000 people who would actually care if a young-and-coming team left the desert. A ton more would care if Canada got another team.

Come on, Gary. Admit your mistake. Eat your crow. Stop backing the Coyotes. Sometimes, you have to kill your weakest link. Or at least move them to a place where people want them.

I Love America...

We're still here. Well, atleast I am. I can't say for sure as I haven't heard from Bryan in about two weeks. That's not a surprise seeing as the Gay Porn Stars Convention is in town and Bryan has a binder full of nude photos to get signed.

I'm waiting to do a post because I don't know where a notebook is that I need for data. To be honest, I haven't even looked for it. When I do though, oh, there will be a post.

I'm going to Atlantic City this weekend to recoup my losses in Las Vegas, so be prepared for a doozy of a data-crunching, prediction-killing post Sunday night.

My Ranger tickets arrived today. When you get an 11-game package, you get rubber bands around a stack of purple, boring tickets. If you get a half-season plan like I did, then you get two bound ticket books, one holding all the tickets for Seat 6, the other will all the tickets from Seat 7. Every ticket has a different picture as well. It's actually very cool except that one has a fat guy (not me) showing his crappy Rangers tattoo (not mine).

And while it's a far cry from having Marc Staal or Petr Prucha deliver tickets, the FedEx guy was a welcomed sight.

Back to the Real World...

I'm back from Las Vegas, and I'm in the black. Or in the red. Whichever one means I lost money. Little to nothing from my wish list of Things to Happen While I Was Away happened, except that the Islanders made a personnel move by hiring Scott Gordon. However, Mats Sundin, Brendan Shanahan, Teemu Selanne, and Joe Sakic are all still unemployed, not to mention hovering around age 40.

Did Glen Sather do anything whilst I was away? With limited cap

space and way too many forwards, he appears to be fishing down in South Carolina on Mark Messier's boat.

While I was gone, ESPN added the Jets to their upper-echelon of sports teams receiving non-stop coverage, joining the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Patriots. For this week, Michael Phelps will also be in on the action - and deservingly so. He won a race by .01 of a second. That's a fingernail of a difference. That means he grew out his fingernails last week while the person he lost to had an ill-advised nail-biting session the day before the event, probably brought on by the stress of having to face Michael Phelps in an Olympic race.

I guess the big news that I missed while I was gone was Mike and the Mad Dog breaking up. This impacts Ranger and Islander fans in no way at all. I believe hockey got a total of 3 minutes a week on their show, while 3 out of every 5 minutes were dedicated to Alex Rodriguez. Now, I did like them, but I just never listened to them once I got XM Radio, complete with its own hockey channel, Home Ice 204. I think they did know their hockey well, but their audience always wanted to talk about ignorant morons like Stephon Marbury, Michael Strahan, and Archie Manning. (For the record, Marbury is one of the dumbest human beings ever born. In a Georgia Tech press conference declaring his intent to join the NBA, he was verbally-illiterate, meaning he couldn't even speak he was so stupid. Watch this please, and if you get bored of his linguistic fouls, fast forward to 57 seconds in.) Whenever they interviewed a hockey person, they knew their stuff, but it was very rare that they would have a Ted Nolan, Brian Leetch, or Neil Smith on the show.

I thought I had more to say, to be honest. Now that my Vegas vacation is over (I couldn't capitalize the word "vacation" because Chevy Chase wasn't on my trip with me), I have little to look forward to until training camp. Man, August really is a slow hockey month.

I hate summer. Give me winter any day.

View of my hotel, the MGM Grand, from the bridge

connected to New York, New York. MGM Grand will be holding a pre-season game in September, Avs vs. Kings.

My Last Post...

This will be my last post for about a week on this blog. Tomorrow, I catch my pre-8 a.m. flight to Las Vegas.

Sorry to usurp Bryan's Gretzky DVD post (found below) but here is my wishlist for when I get back on Thursday:

- for Brett Favre to no longer be on the back page of the newspaper

- for hockey to become larger in popularity than basketball

Since neither of those will happen in the next 6 months, here is my back-up plan...

- for Mats Sundin to finally sign somewhere, so the hockey media can concentrate elsewhere

- for the Islanders to have signed a new coach, hopefully someone like Scott Gordon (as I write this, it's been reported that John Tortorella will no longer be considered)

- for Michael Phelps to be en route to 8 gold medals

- for the Rangers to have a definitive answer on Brendan Shanahan (I love Shanny, but I'm hoping the Rangers lean away from him this year)

- for the Rangers to clear up some roster space, maybe trading a middling player or two for a draft pick or a 7th defenseman (hey Dan Fritsche; how are you, Tomas Pock?)

- for enough season ticket holders to not renew their package at the Garden so I can move up (contrary to me telling everyone I wouldn't be renewing my package, I will be... just call me "Brett Kerry Edwards Sundin")

- for $5,000 extra cash in my pocket from playing craps and/or poker

- for Bryan to text me if anything huge, NHL-wise, goes down... unlikely!