To Cave Or Not to Cave

Four days ago, Los Angeles Kings boss Tim Leiweke couldn't have been more clear on the club's intentions towards star defenceman Drew Doughty.

"If someone's whispering in Drew's ear that ownership is going to get impatient and blink, they're wrong," Leiweke.

Well, blink the Kings surely did on Thursday night, abandoning their hardline position after figuring out, quite correctly, that as long as NHL teams refuse to use the leverage they have in the current collective bargaining agreement, young players coming off their entry level contracts have their teams over a barrel.

The public utterances of GM Dean Lombardi in this case, that he wouldn't exceed Anze Kopitar's $6.8 million cap hit for Doughty, and that he would start docking the defenceman pay for missing training camp, were laughable. It was a negotiation, and one the Kings were bound to lose after a succession of teams, starting with Tampa Bay and Steve Stamkos, completely caved in to the demands of these talented young players this summer. it'll be hard for Lombardi to assume such a hard stance in the future, having given ground so easily on the Doughty deal.

Eight years is a long time to commit to Doughty, and the Kings own evidence of that, having traded for Mike Richards this summer and taken on the $51.6 million left on the contract he had signed with the Philadelphia Flyers. The good news is that apparently such contracts can be moved. The bad news is that signing such young players to these ridiculously long deals is a mug's game. it's about locking up an asset, or at most assigning a contractual value to an asset that can in time be moved to another team.

Still, Doughty has his $56 million and the Kings have their defenceman and a chance, they believe, to challenge for the first Stanley Cup in franchise history this season. 

"Let's go win some Cups," Leiweke told the Los Angeles Times. "We just spent more money this off-season than it cost to buy the team. We are committed."

According to the Times, AEG, which owns the Kings, spent $114.6 million this summer on Doughty, Richards and Simon Gagne after buying the Kings out of bankruptcy 16 years ago for $113.25 million.

Dollars aside, Doughty is a superb young defenceman, and the Kings are counting on him bouncing back to his form of two seasons ago when he took the league by storm and was a standout for Canada at the Vancouver Olympics.

In Doughty, Jack Johnson, Rob Scuderi and Willie Mitchell, the Kings believe they have a blueline corps to contend. Alec Martinez, Matt Greene and Davis Drewiske round out the group, which looks to have a nice balance of youth and experience. Doughty is the unquestioned kingpin, averaging 25 minutes per night. He missed six games due to injury last year and saw his points total drop by 19 over the previous year,  but he was still plus-13.

"I've been a Kings fan since I was a kid and I was never thinking about going elsewhere," Doughty told Helene Elliott of the Times. "I knew it was just a matter of time before it got done and I'm just really excited to be a part of that team for eight years. I hope we can win many Stanley Cups in that time and I'm going to do everything I can to help lead us to that."

Doughty's deal leaves Kyle Turris as the last remaining restricted free agent yet to be signed. Turris appears to be at a deadlock with Phoenix.

 

Baseball and Books and Movies and Reviews

 

So, Moneyball. The movie.

Loved the book. In fact, pretty much love all baseball books. Certainly more than watching the game, except for my annual summer trip to see A ball in various U.S. cities. But we digress.

So Michael Lewis' book was outstanding, but went to the film version today fully prepared to hate it. Generally speaking, movie versions of top-notch books don't succeed, at least not for me. Mostly, they just annoy.

Well, this one surely succeeded. It's different than the book but true to the spirit. Don't know Billy Beane, but the image I got from the book was precisely what a nicely-understanded Brad Pitt delivered. Jonah Hill always gives me the giggles just looking at him, but as Beane's right hand man he is perfect as the non-baseball traditionalists.

The scouting meetings were perfect, the collision between old-time baseball men and the new wave of thinkers. Philip Seymour Hoffman was, not surprisingly, just excellent as the stubborn manager Art Howe, and the way in which the story of Beane's relationship with his daughter, not a major part of the book, was comfortably woven into the fabric of the movie was pleasing.

And how about Chris Pratt, hilarious on NBC's Parks and Recreation, as Scott Hatteberg? Just perfect, and, like Pitt, nicely understated.

The problem that some will have with the movie, of course, is the same problem they had with the book, and that's the belief that since Beane's Oakland A's never won a championship or were able to continue the success they had while they owned three top pitchers, that all the theories in Moneyball were bogus. That's not true; if there was an error in the theory, is was that it left no room for complementary philosophies and didn't account for the reality that the money disparity in baseball just isn't going to allow the small to challenge the large on a consistent basis.

Moreover, a big reason why the A's couldn't maintain their Moneyball success is that so many other teams took notice, at least to some degree, and started shopping for players with on-base percentage and the like, crowding the market.

Hard to say how Moneyball fits with the long list of top baseball movies, from Bull Durham to Field of Dreams to The Natural to Eight Men Out to whatever ones you like. It certainly can't match some of those movies for sheer baseball poetry. It does, however, walk an interesting tightrope between challenging baseball dogma while still maintaining the love-of-the-game fabric of many of the other movies.

 

 

The Muscle Game

Some hockey fans would suggest this is the least important positional battle of the Maple Leafs pre-season.

Other more truculent types would say it's not only important, but pivotal to the potential success of the team.

Me? Given a choice, I'd probably go without either Jay Rosehill or Colton Orr, and go with a more complete player. it's certainly debatable whether you need a tough guy. Detroit hasn't dressed an enforcer for a while, while Vancouver charged all the way to the Stanley Cup final last spring without a designated muscle man (sadly, the 'Nucks have apparently decided that tremendous success was not enough. They've added goon Todd Fedoruk and lead the NHL in fighting majors this fall).

But this is the Leafs we're talking about, and Brian Burke's Leafs. No chance he'll want this team to go without an enforcer. Nuclear deterrent, is what he likes to call it. The favourite example of the need for such a player you'll hear in Leaf circles is that Chris Neil of the Senators, a frequent opponent, is less likely to be uber-aggressive when there's a big pair of fists waiting for him (Again, I don't buy this stuff, but many do.)

So it's gotta be Orr or Rosehill, unless you'd advocate the inclusion of both in the Leaf lineup, as some would. Orr, 28, has the bigger contract, a $1 million hit for each of the next two seasons, while Rosehill, 26, will earn $600,000 this season and then hit restricted free agency next summer.

Both are players who have had to make the most of limited skills to work/fight there way to the NHL. Rosehill, however, is clearly the more effective of the two with his gloves on, while Orr is a feared heavyweight, more so than Rosehill, who's more of a gamer.

So let's play the game; if you have to pick one, which one do you pick?

I'd go with Rosehill. He skates much better and is a much more effective forechecker. On occasion, he can take the puck to the net, although he's not a threat to score.

Orr, by contract, might be the NHL's least talented player. A poor skater, his stick is where rushes go to die. When in New York, he was often used in a checking role, but that element of his game seems to have evaporated since he signed with the Leafs.

Finally, facts is facts; with Rosehill as essentially a regular, the Leafs were a better team a year ago than when Orr was in the lineup. Clearly, the impact of either on a hockey game is limited, but Rosehill's ability to add energy in the 5-7 minutes he was allotted was greater.

Again, the best Leaf fourth line, based on the bodies out for practice on Monday, would be something like Phillipe Dupuis between Mike Brown and Matt Frattin. But Burke believes in the need for muscle, and it's his team. 

 

 

 

 

 

Twin Cities

Winnipeg and Buffalo; sister cities in sporting renaissance.

That's sure how it feels these days as two North American towns on opposite sides of the border suddenly find themselves no longer solely the butt of jokes largely because their dormant pro sports teams have revitalized local spirits.

Or maybe that's just the outsider point of view. Maybe people in The Peg and Buffalo liked their towns just fine and don't need people who didn't know their business before starting to pat them on the back now.

Still, the past few months - weeks? - have certainly changed the way in which sports fans are looking at these cities. The word "envy" is even creeping into the conversation.

In Winnpeg, the NHL Jets are back, and with every ticket sold for the next five years, are the least of Gary Bettman's worries. Not as much, say, as the fact the co-owner of the New Jersey Devils is willing to pay $23 million just to get out from under his stake in the franchise.

The Blue Bombers, while losers in Toronto on the weekend, are still leading the league. Beyond that, however, is the real future, as the new University of Manitoba stadium will be the first brand new home for a CFL club in a long, long time. With that venue and the MTS Centre where the Jets play, the city may soon have the best football and hockey buildings in the country.

Vancouver's had a heckuva run as Canada's leading sports city, and the Grey Cup is still coming up in November.

But Winnipeg's gotta like what the next few years hold.

For Buffalo, the last decade has been awfully tough in a sporting sense, and even when the city made the ambitious step to hold the world junior championships last summer, it was treated by some as merely a convenient opportunity to lampoon the city for its municipal shortcomings. 

Like Winnipeg, Buffalo knows what it feels like to lose a pro sports team outright, having seen the NBA Braves leave for California in 1978. There have been times, however, during the past few years when one was left to wonder whether the city would be left without any teams at all. The Sabres had their owner go to jail and then went bankrupt, while the Bills were not only dreadful on the field, they entered into a game-sharing arrangement with Toronto, opening up more speculation as to what might happen to the franchise when Ralph Wilson was no longer around to own it.

For the Sabres, everything changed last winter when Terry Pegula bought the club, which is suddenly one of the NHL's big spenders and has local fans jazzed about the future rather than resigned to holding cautious hope. We'll see how Christian Erhoff and Ville Leino pan out, but the Sabres were sure aggressive in the off-season, even in making the kind of financial deal with young blueliner Tyler Myers that would have been unthinkable just a year ago.

And how 'bout them Bills? A spectacular 3-0 after Sunday's stunning win over New England, and suddenly a team to watch in the NFL, comeback artists of the first degree.

The future is still unclear, and the 92-year-old Wilson watched the game from the Detroit area, too weak, according to reports, to attend the contest. At some point, the team will come up for auction, and the bidding will be intriguing.

For now, it's Buffalo's team with a little bit of Toronto mixed in, and the Oct. 30 game at the Rogers Centre between the Bills and Washington Redskins sure doesn't look like the dog it did not so long ago. Could even end up being a hot ticket, and thus complicate the scenario going forward, with next year the final season of the five-year Bills in Toronto Series deal.

The two cities, Winnipeg and Buffalo, have little in common, really, save the fact that people love to talk up their negative characteristics and identify them as places they'd never want to live.

So maybe it's time for the citizens in both towns to feel a little, well, smug. Why not? For the first time in a while, sporting momentum is on their side, and while that's not necessarily as useful as a reduced unemployment rate or crucial civic improvements, it's not half-bad, either.

 

 

 

 

Different, But Not Necessarily Tougher

Fancier and more sophisticated, sure.

But the beginning of a tough new era in NHL justice? Not so fast.

For starters, let's be clear; Brendan Shanahan did not hand out five- and 10-game suspensions on Wednesday to Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond and Jody Shelley, respectively, for their blatant and dangerous hitting-from-behind infractions.

Letourneau-Leblond's was for one plus a few exhibition games in which he doesn't get paid and may not have played. Shelley's was for five plus the exhibitions, and he won't lose a minute's sleep for missing those.

Now you tell me; given that Shelley was twice suspended last year, both for two games, and has been a multiple offender over the course of his 18-goal NHL career, one which has shown him to be the absolute definition of a hockey goon, will missing the first five games of the season really change his behaviour?

Not a chance.

Will it make a single other player in the league take notice? Not a chance. Ditto for Letourneau-Leblond's one-gamer plus the games that don't matter, another slap on the wrist for another player whose only role in the sport is to accumulate fighting majors and penalty minutes.

What was new and different was the manner in which Shanahan, the NHL's new minister of justice, delivered his verdicts on the two enforcers. Instead of a conference call or individual chats with reporters, he posted his decisions and the reasoning for them on NHL.com, a good way to drive traffic to the NHL's web site and a novel way to articulate his decisions.

In both cases, the fouls were obvious and barely debatable, even by the most ardent Calgary or Philadelphia fans, and even by critics concerned about the "pansification" of the sport or worried about taking hitting out of the game. This was low hanging fruit, and if Shanahan's predecessor, Colin Campbell, wouldn't have given suspensions quite as severe, it wouldn't have been much less.

Folks, if this was a league that was really worried about brain injuries and really wanted to take hitting from behind out of the sport, the suspensions would have been much longer. Morever, at a time when the role of fighting and of enforcers is under more scrutiny than ever after a terrible summer, it does make you shake your head that once more, it's the "policemen" committing the crimes.

These bans look tough on the surface. But in his rulings, Shanahan didn't come anywhere close to the standard set by Mike Murphy, standing in for Campbell during the Stanley Cup final, when he suspended Vancouver's Aaron Rome for the reminder of the series after his vicious head shot on Nathan Horton of the Bruins in Game 3.

So maybe tougher than Campbell, but not as tough as Murphy. Really, what Shanahan's first suspensions suggest is that it's going to be another season of one suspension after another because there is no real resolve within the Bettman adminstration to commit to a disciplinary system that has deterrence as the central principle.

Give Shelley 20 games and Letourneau-Leblond 10 games, and those bans would resonate across the league in such a way as to essentially take hitting from behind out of the game.

These suspensions? Meh. Nothing we haven't seen before, nothing out of the ordinary. We won't even notice that either player is missing.

Shanahan is, however, to be commended for the way in which he communicated the decisions. Campbell did a terrific job given the parameters under which he worked. People kept wanting him to make decisions he wasn't authorized to make by the league's board of governors. He was so often criticized as though he acted alone when every decision he made included at the very least the league's hockey operations staff and often members of the NHL executive, including Gary Bettman himself. His failing was often an inability to communicate his most controversial decisions to the public. Probably the greatest example was the dirty Matt Cooke hit on Marc Savard. Campbell stuck to his guns, saying that since there was nothing in the rule book that covered the hit he couldn't very well make one up, but he was unable to deliver that message in a way that cooled the controversy.

By comparison, Wednesday's NHL.com video explanations seemed methodical and detailed. That approach is useful, but it won't make a great deal of difference when higher profile players are involved or when the fouls committed aren't quite so obvious as these. You think a video chat would have cooled the over-the-top reaction to the decision not to suspend Zdeno Chara for riding Max Pacioretty into the ill-positioned stanchion in Montreal?

There's also the question raised on my Twitter account today as to whether video explanations will be forthcoming when no suspension is handed out, as in the Chara-Pacioretty incident. In rhw past, general practice has been that the league essentially says nothing when the player is not forced to sit out games.

So give Shanahan "A" for style, "C" for substance. Tougher decisions lie ahead, and unless he's prepared to ramp up the length of future bans, he'd better be prepared to spend a lot of time in front of the video camera this season.

 

 

 

In With The Big Boys Now

The elation is over. The huge task ahead now looms.

Just three days after finally getting back into the Davis Cup World Group by beating Israel in Ramat Hasharon on Sunday, Canada learned today the next step will be much more difficult.

Perhaps impossible.

Canada, now No. 14 in the world, has drawn the powerful French for the next round, and about the only good element to today's news out of Bangkok is that the tie will take place on Canadian soil.

After that, it's all uphill.

France is a nine-time Davis Cup champion, most recently in 2001, and was a finalist last year but lost to Novak Djokovic and Serbia. They are the fourth-ranked tennis nation in the world, having lost to the even more powerful Spanish last weekend in Cordoba, and can boast of a depth of talent that Canada can only imagine having.

Canada has one player in the top 100 in the world right now in Milos Raonic (No. 30), although Vasek Pospisil, the hero of the victory over the Israelis, is at No. 127 and rising. France, by comparison, boasts of nine top 100 players, including four - Gael Monfils, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Gilles Simon and Richard Gasquet - in the top 20.

If there's good news for Canada, its that all those players can't play, so it becomes like a short series in baseball; you just need one workhorse capable of doing all the heavy lifting to get through. The French are so good that Tsonga, victorious over Roger Federer twice this year, didn't even play singles against Spain. Instead, Simon and Gasquet did that, and not successfully.

Canada's only chance will be if both Raonic and Pospisil are healthy, and if Daniel Nestor can coax another year of elite doubles out of his 39-year-old body. If Raonic and Pospisil can both win one singles rubber, the doubles will decide it.

The intriguing question now becomes the venue. Tennis Canada gets to choose, and while Calgary has been used in the past, this might be an opportunity to go to a much bigger venue and generate a higher profile for the competition.

France would obviously be a welcome gate attraction in Montreal. The Air Canada Centre is going to be used for the Raonic-Pete Sampras exhibition match in November. Then there is Vancouver's Rogers Arena, which happens to have open dates for Feb. 10-12, which is when the tie against France would take place.

Vancouver also might make sense given that the men's tour will have just completed the Australian Open in Melbourne on Jan. 29, cutting down on travel. That was a scenario that worked back in 1992 when Canada hosted Sweden at Vancouver's Agradome, the year Nestor upset Stefan Edberg.

Calgary, of course, offers altitude, which might given an advantage to Canada if the Davis Cup team was able to train there for a period of time.

All this said, it might also make the most sense not to get too ambitious, but play in one of the many junior-sized arenas across the country. A small but boisterous crowd would be infinitely preferable to a half-empty arena with little atmosphere.

If Canada is to have any chance against the French, there will have to be an effort to create at least a semi-hostile environment. The Canadians surely now this after their weekend in Israeli in front of crowds that were often nasty and rude, although Pospisil, in particular, was able to play through the noise.

 

 

 

 

 

Raonic Pulls Out of Davis Cup

RAMAT HASHARON, Israel--It always was a rushed comeback.

So perhaps the stunning decision of Milos Raonic and his advisors that he wasn't fit enough to compete in the critical reverse singles match this morning against Israel's Dudi Sela was simply an acknowledgement that he returned from hip surgery too fast.

Raonic said today he did not, however, re-injure his surgically repaired hip, although he has also withdrawn from a tournament in Metz, France next week.

"Absolutely not," he said. "The hip is completely fine. It's more like everything else has taken a toll on me."

Raonic said today the impact of his 3 1/2 hour match with Amir Weintraub on Friday and the food poisoning he suffered last week have left him feeling under the weather.

"Right now I'm feeling dizziness, almost like a migraine," he said. "I feel unco-ordinated.

"It's like all these little problems now seem so big. I get a little sick, and it seems to make such a big difference. I'm feeling a little slow out there, and suddenly it feels like I can't think the game as I play."

Instead of Raonic against Sela, Canada will put 23-year-old Peter Polansky of North York up against the Israeli in what looms as a gigantic mismatch given Sela's Davis Cup experience and Polansky's lack of both that experience and much playing activity this season.

"Peter is a better choice than me," said Raonic, Canada's ace. "It was a hard decision to make, but you've got to do what's best for the team. Peter has been patiently waiting on the sidelines, and he's eager to play. Definitely, he can close out the tie."

If Polansky can upset Sela, Canada will win the tie against Israel and the fifth rubber, Vasek Pospisil against Weintraub, won't be played. If Sela wins, it will be up to Pospisil to defeat Weintraub and get Canada into the 16-nation World Group for the first time since 2004.

"It's a pretty big match for me," said Polansky before taking the court to practice with Tennis Canada coach Frederic Neimeyer. "I'm excited to be out there."

Polansky, now ranked No. 573 in the world, hasn't played on the ATP tour since losing in the first round at Wimbledon in June. It's a far cry from this time last year when Polansky beat Jurgen Melzer at the Rogers Cup, upset Juan Monaco in the first round at the U.S. Open and was considered a key component in Canada's Davis Cup hopes. But a groin injury suffered at this year's French Open has hampered Polansky from competing very much at all.

Polansky did play four matches at a satellite event in Toronto last week.

"I still feel (the groin injury), but I'm almost 100 per cent," he said. "It's more afterwards."

If Polansky can't actually defeat Sela in the brutal heat, it would at least be very helpful for Pospisil if he can extend the match long enough so that the second match doesn't begin until the sun starts to go down and Canada Stadium court is covered in shade. Israeli observers, meanwhile, were also suggesting Sela is suffering with a injury of his own, a right hamstring problem, worsened by his five-set battle with Pospisil on Friday.

Just over two hours before Raonic's scheduled match against Sela this morning, Canadian captain Martin Laurendeau informed officials that Raonic would not play.

"He's just not quite capable of being out there," said Laurendeau. "Peter is ready to play. Our whole week of training has included this scenario.

"Peter is going in fresh. But keep in mind he's not at the top of his game. He can do it. He can play at this level."

Raonic, dubbed the Maple Leaf Missile, struggled with the heat in a loss to Weintraub on Friday night and woke up sore on Saturday.

He told Laurendeau later in the day that he wouldn't be able to play on Sunday. Raonic said he actually withdrew from the Metz tournament last Thursday and now plans to return to Barcelona for training, then make his return to the tour at an event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia later this month.

"I understand I'm not going to peak for the first few tournaments," he said.

Raonic underwent right hip surgery in early July after falling during a second round match at Wimbledon several weeks earlier. While many players stay out as long as 4-5 months after that type of surgery, Raonic was back hitting balls by mid-August and even contemplated trying to enter the U.S. Open later in the month.

Instead, he waited to return in this Davis Cup tie only to play one match. 

 

 

On Either Side of Manhattan

This would be the best news New York Islander fans - however many of them are left - could hope for.

Whether it's actually the right decision for the franchise, however, will be intriguing to watch.

The instability of the Isles is nothing new, particularly after another summer and another failed arena initiative, and neither is the importance of signing youngster John Tavares, the team's franchise player, any kind of news flash.

Rather than wait until after this season when Tavares completes his three-year entry level contract and then try to do a Steven Stamkos-like negotiation, however, the Isles are apparently trying to set yet another new trend (remember the Rick DiPietro contract) and extend Tavares now. Newsday is reporting that Isles GM Garth Snow and Tavares' agent, Pat Brisson, are trying to get a new five- or six-year deal done before the season.

"It's not something I want hanging over the season and affecting the team," Tavares told Newsday on Tuesday. "I know I'm going to be here for a long time and I'd like to get it done."

On the surface, this is good news all around, right? Well, maybe.

It depends what the money is. But the same problem applies to Tavares as with other young players looking for lucrative new deals like Drew Doughty, Luke Schenn, Kyle Turris, Zach Bogosian and Tavares' Islander teammate, Josh Bailey; just how good are these guys really?

Tavares, the first pick in '09, had 54 points in his first NHL season and 67 points in his second. That's progress, and that's good. He's growing.

But how do you measure that growth and apply it to a long-term contract? Is it $4 million a year? $5 million? Or does his value to the organization exceed that and go to $6 million or beyond?

"Once this [contract] is done, it'll finally show people that this is where I want to be," Tavares told Newsday. "At the end of the day, until it's signed, some people will think there's a possibility I don't want to be here. I don't quite understand it; I never have."

The Kings, of course, are having a difficult time coming to terms with Doughty, and it would be intriguing if the Isles were to sign Tavares first. To do so, Snow and owner Charles Wang have to determine the value of their young star.

It would have been tough enough to answer that question after three seasons. But apparently the Isles want to try and answer it after two, and this is a franchise with a record of making hasty, expensive contractual committments (Alexei Yashin) that it lives to regret.

It shows the Isles are at least trying to be proactive. But whether its smart business is more difficult to ascertain.

On the other side of Manhattan, the potential bankruptcy of the Devils would be of some concern to the Bettman administration, and in theory could leave only the Rangers as a stable New York-area franchise.

The New York Post reported on Monday that the Devils could be headed to bankruptcy after a Sept. 1st loan payment was missed, an event linked to the ongoing attempts of minority owners to sell 47 per cent of the team. Devils ownership responded with a strongly worded statement on Tuesday denying that bankruptcy could be in the future.

This is a franchise, of course, that has long battled attendance problems despite winning multiple Stanley Cups. The Devils missed the playoffs last year despite having the expensive Ilya Kovalchuk around all season, and have a new head coach in Peter DeBoer in place as they try to get back in the mix this fall.

The Rangers, with Brad Richards in the fold, are the strongest of the three New York teams and the most stable. The isles have all kinds of franchise problems, but at least the have a ton of young hockey talent, including Tavares. The Devils? They're sort of in the middle, and the future of the team's ownership will go a long way to determining whether the club has any chance of returning to greatness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Fair Shot

Sometime this week Leaf camp will start. It just feels like it's already been going on for weeks.

For restless fans hoping that an 85-point season last year will grow into something more substantial this fall, that's good. For anyone who can't imagine anything more pointless than pre-camp workouts and rookie tournaments - isn't the point to see how they perform against hardened pros, not each other? - there's already a sense of can't-we-get-the-bloody-season-started frustration.

Will this season be different? With the Blue Jays having failed yet again to be a post-season club, and with the Argos nightmarishly bad and slippling off the radar screen, and with Raptors quite likely poised to be .500 this season because the NBA won't play at all, it is indeed up to the local shinny lads to demonstrate that the words "Toronto" and "playoffs" haven't become mutually exclusive.

For Ron Wilson to keep his job, that probably has to happen. After three seasons, the rubber surely will meet the road this season, and if it doesn't work out for the ascerbic Wilson, the last thing he'll be able to claim is that he wasn't given a fair shot.

No, he doesn't have the coach-for-life status of Barry Trotz. In fact, he doesn't have a contract beyond this season at the moment, status which some would argue compromises his ability to issue orders before work even begins. But while you may or may not like the job Brian Burke has done as GM, you have to acknowledge he has done everything possible to give Wilson a chance to succeed.

Burke has turned over the roster. He has brought in proven veterans, and he has brought in kids, both forwards and defencemen. He has addressed the goaltending, although it's worth pointing out the solution, James Reimer, was a JFJ draft pick who only got a chance because the hockey club was absolutely desperate.

Burke has changed the training staff, and this summer, he altered Wilson's coaching group, bringing in Greg Cronin and Scott Gordon to change things up, moving out Tim Hunter and Keith Acton. At the same time, different management people have been added over the years, giving Wilson different voices to work with.

There is nothing this coach could have asked for other than all-star players, and while Buffalo hopes overpaying Ville Leino will make him an all-star and the Rangers fervently believe Brad Richards was worth the millions, the reality is Burke's emphasis on trying to bring in talented youngsters - Dion Phaneuf, Phil Kessel, Keith Aulie, etc. - is a strategy more likely to pay long-term dividends.

Do the Leafs have enough talent to win? We can debate that, and quite probably it comes down to whether Reimer can be over an entire season what he was last winter. But we do know that clubs have made it to the Stanley Cup dance with less, and there are no excuses left for Wilson if he can't get this team into the playoffs.

Pro sports aren't fair. Hockey sure isn't. But this coach has been given a fair shot, and by a GM who didn't hire him. That's unusual in and of itself. 

 

The Second Half

This is the big turn for the CFL, the same post-Labour Day demarcation point between the first half of the season, when the league really has lots of room to get attention, to the second half, which coincides with the commencement of the NFL season and the beginning of NHL training camps.

We've learned much about the eight CFL clubs, but nothing has been decided. Nobody's totally out of it, nobody's home and cooled out. The challenge is that with weak showings so far this season by the clubs in the two biggest markets, Toronto and Vancouver, and with the Jets back in Winnipeg to challenge the Blue Bombers for headlines and coverage, the CFL won't have an easy time keeping eyeballs focussed on it heading towards the Grey Cup in B.C. in November.

The NFL opener last night between the Packers and Saints was a shoot-out thriller, and even the fact that it seemed for some number of weeks that there might not be an NFL season because of labour problems has created more than the usual excitement for that league this fall.

So lots of challenges for the CFL, but that's nothing new, is it? And somehow the CFL always muddles through.

The games have been good but the overall competition great, with Edmonton and Calgary clawing it out atop the west and a good fight brewing between Winnipeg, Hamilton and Montreal for top spot in the east.

So this week's games, the back end to the quartet of matches last week, offer a compelling beginning to the the second half.

The Stamps and Esks go at it again, as do Saskatchewan and the "Peg after the Riders, having already fired their head coach this season after consecutive appearances in the Grey Cup game, beat the first-place Bombers a week ago.

The Tiger-Cats and Als, less than a week after the Cats embarrassed Montreal on Labour Day, should be a doozy. And in Vancouver we'll get our first look at Steve Jyles as the new quarterback saviour of the sad sack Argonauts after all the commotion this week that accompanied the release of No. 1 signal caller Cleo Lemon.

Was Jyles, who had good numbers with 19 touchdowns against only nine interceptions last year in Winnipeg, just a good stats QB on a bad team, or were those numbers evidence of a young passer now poised to become a bona fide starter in the league?

The second Braley Bowl in two weeks will supply some early answers.