All things Canadian.....

Ted Saskin's talk with TSN was full of fantastic quotes:

"we think a much more sensible approach is the approach baseball adopted where revenue sharing which is most needed in hockey, becomes a more paramount concern and how you structure that."

Baseball - the league most fans would use a model of what not to do.

"The economics in Edmonton are frankly excellent."

An Oiler fan on the TSN site responds "Where's Weight, Guerin, Cujo, Marchant, Carter, Niniimaa, among many others. I lived for 12 years in Edmonton and now I'm the biggest Oiler fan in Calgary - this idiot can't tell me my team has a chance when everytime they make the playoffs they play someone with 3x their payroll."

"Well I mean stats can be manipulated in any given way, and I can come up with a whole bunch of stats like I just did and say one hundred percent of the situations you have twelve teams that have competed for those four final spots, you can't have a better record than that in any sport I think what you have to do at the end of the day, is step back and say, do teams in hockey have a reasonable chance of competing to get into the playoffs, and then once in the playoffs, of competing for the Stanley Cup. And I think we have great competitive balance."

His stat is that the last 12 conference finals (4 per year over last three years) had 12 different teams. True, but look at the bigger picture. The last 40 conference finals (last 10 years) had only 21 different teams.
And, beyond stats, because there isn't a balance of skill, you create a situation where teams have to create defensive systems and the officials have to let it go in order for that competitive balance to exist. Baseball teams can't develop those rule bending systems but hockey can so we get a degraded product to watch.

I miss my NHL. The Sens were supposed to play the Habs tomorrow and then the Leafs on Saturday.