I Love The Smell Of Hypocricy In The Morning

The title of this article says it all: Minnesota Wild owner on crying poverty then spending $196 million on Zach Parise, Ryan Suter

Let's review:

In April, [Wild owner Leipold] told the Star Tribune that his team wasn't turning a profit, and put the onus on player salaries:

"We're not making money, and that's one reason we need to fix our system. We need to fix how much we're spending right now. [The Wild's] revenues are fine. We're down a little bit in attendance, but we're up in sponsorships, we're up in TV revenue. And so the revenue that we're generating is not the issue as much as our expenses. And [the Wild's] biggest expense by far is player salaries."

Three months later, Leipold authorized his general manager to sign Zach Parise and Ryan Suter to contracts totaling $196 million — including $50 million in signing bonuses in the first three years of the contracts.

Everyone keeping up now?

This is why there has to be brakes on the insanity that is player contracts.  The players themselves, while not totally blameless, are certainly not the prime reason for the hole that the Wild are carefully digging themselves.  And while I'm not opposed to Leipold being creative with his future as an owner, he's taking an awfully dangerous risk with the franchise, one that could hamstring it for the next ten years or more.  And that's likely into the reign of the next owner, after Leipold goes bust or decides hemoraging money isn't such a good idea after all.

Early, Brutal Days

Yeah, it's early days yet. But so far the signs are not good.

I watched Tuesday's tilt against the Dearly Departed Dany and co, and Ottawa seemed to dominate long periods of play in the Minnesota end. The shot clock reflected this.

I'm still not convinced about the shot clock being a measure of a player's, or a team's, output. Tuesday demonstrated why -- Ottawa could run long periods of time in the Minnesota end, cranking in shot after blocked shot after shot, and all for nothing. Then the team would blink, and the puck would be in the back of the Ottawa net.

The fact that Ottawa hung on keeping the pressure applied until Minnesota started to make a few goal-surrendering-mistakes (or Ottawa kept cranking up the ugly scrambles) is a credit to them, they didn't get discouraged and they kept going.

Offense-wise there was plenty to like, defensively not so much.

And Mr. Gonchar, could you dial the give-a-fuck-meter up a notch or two? Because that was brutal at times.

And then there was the Avalanche on Thursday.

I didn't watch, and by the sounds of things, nobody showed up to play. But the shot clock was being run up quickly by Colorado: at one point it was 3-1 or 4-1 and Anderson's save percentage was still higher than the Minnesota goalie's, even though he'd surrendered way more goals. That tells you something, even if I'm not sure exactly what.

Same old same old.

So I expect that this is going to be the rhythm of the year: blowouts mixed with the occasional close-lost game and a very light sprinkling of victory.

And lots of games where the shot clock is cranked up, but nothing comes of it, and because none of these kids can play defense, blink-and-your-done type goals given up.

We knew it was going to be brutal... but really.