Only the strongest survive this season
NHL PLAYOFFS: It won’t be an easy task for the Canucks to catch up to the clearly superior final four teams
Here’s something that will make the long weekend seem even longer, the musings and meditations on the world of sports.
The NHL’s regular season was all about parity. The playoffs? Pedigree.
After a reasonably intriguing opening round, we now find a final four that reflects the form chart. There were no significant upsets on the way to the conference finals. The four favourites have all arrived relatively unscathed.
If you go back to October, in fact, you’d find most prognosticators would have some combination of Anaheim, Chicago, New York and Tampa making it this far. And that’s for a very good reason. Those teams are better than the other 26. They’re more talented, deeper, more complete and better-coached. There is no great mystery in this.
Those four teams, moreover, aren’t going anywhere for the next three to four years, which makes the challenge before the Vancouver Canucks very clear. It’s not easy. It’s just very clear.
On a related subject, the Canucks front office is aware the team’s defence needs rebuilding. The problem is how?
In the salary-cap world, it’s virtually impossible to move money and, as much as the faithful want to believe otherwise, there just isn’t much of a market for Alex Burrows or Chris Higgins. The UFA market, meanwhile, offers the opportunity to over-pay for a Mike Green or Cody Franson who are decent players, just not for five or six million a year.
If Jim Benning wants to attack this problem, he’ll have to come out of his comfort zone and move some of the organization’s prized young assets. As mentioned, that’s the easy part. The hard part is making that deal.
Three of the teams still standing in the Stanley Cup tournament are built around speed and skill. The fourth, Anaheim, is the resident heavy team.
We’re now a month into the postseason and if recent history has taught us anything, it’s taught us size matters most in May and June. But at least we can all be happy for Ryan Kesler.
Hands up if you had the Houston Astros with the American’s League’s best record.
The Rory McIlroy-Tiger Woods thing gets more intriguing with each passing month. This weekend McIlroy coasted to a seven-shot victory at the Wells Fargo, breaking the tournament record by five shots in the process. It was his second win in three weeks and he has six top-10 finishes in his last eight PGA Tour starts with the U.S. and British Opens now looming on his schedule.
When he’s at the top of his game, McIlroy is the only the player who can be compared to Woods in his prime. The next question is, can he sustain it over a period of time?
Woods was the PGA’s player of the year from 1999 to 2003 and then again from 2005 to 2007. That’s where the bar is set for McIlroy. Greatness is not for cowards.
The good news for boxing is Kazakhstan’s Gennady Golovkin has emerged as the most exciting prize fighter in the world. The bad news is 99 per cent of sports fans couldn’t pick him out of a lineup with Bruce Jenner, Beyoncé and Warren Buffett.
Finally, if there is any lasting value to be derived from Deflategate — other than providing 24-hour, nonstop programming for the openmouth shows — it’s that the NFL might set a precedent by removing Roger Goodell from the appeals process.
In a development that could only happen in professional sports, Goodell will rule on the appeal of Tom Brady’s suspension, which means he’ll be ruling on, well, his own ruling.
This also places him in a vicious bind. If he opts to reduce Brady’s four-game suspension, he’s essentially diminishing his own authority. If he upholds the suspension, he’ll incur the wrath of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, his staunchest ally on the league’s board of governors.
To top it all off, the NFLPA wants to call Goodell as a witness, making him a witness to a case over which he’s presiding.
You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
There isn’t a sane person on the planet who can look at this case and conclude Goodell is an unbiased, objective adjudicator. The simple answer to all this is to appoint a three-person appeals tribunal made up of one representative appointed by the league, another by the PA and a third selected from a pool of arbitrators.
That, at least, is the simple solution and it makes sense on every level. On that basis, it has no chance.