Category: Sports

The Meatriarchy Guy, who’s Canadian (not that there’s anything wrong with that), has some ideas about how to improve hockey:

1 Eliminate the two line pass offside. This really is the only change you have to make.
2 On a penalty kill the short-handed team can no longer ice the puck.
3 A player has to serve the full two minute penalty even if his team is scored upon.
4 Move the nets back to their original location (they are talking about doing this)
5 Impose a weight tax on teams so that they pay extra if they draft big dumb slow players – the Leafs gave up a perfectly good defensemen Jason Smith and tried to turn oversized Chris McAllister into an NHL player. The only thing he had going for him was size – a trait that NHL GM’s are over enamored with and in the end he failed miserably. Bring in a weight tax.

Some good ideas, but let’s not forget the prospect of enlarging the ice surface.

Fast skaters and skill players can go around the hookers, and hockey team owners get to hold up their cities for even newer arenas. Win-win! Unless you’re a Canadian city and the Americans are about to get serious about the dollar’s exchange rate again, bit who cares about the Canadians, eh? What do they know about NHL hockey?

Does anyone know anyone who enjoyed the Super Bowl halftime show? I need to know, because Bob Rybarcyzk is looking for one single person who liked the show:

You find me a soul on this earth who will publicly admit to liking any part of that halftime show, and I will run through West County Mall wearing a tutu and asking passers-by to please call me Nancy.

Anything to get “Nancy” and her tutu off the streets of Casinoport, Missouri. “She” will catch cold in this harsh, pseudo-winter weather we’re having.

Heather and I went to see the St. Louis Blues lose to the Dallas Stars this evening, and during the course of the evening I came up with some terms that I think should make their way into common hockey parlance. So please update your hockey lexicons to include the following:

• It’s like football with polearms. Heather got four choice tickets from her employer, so we brought along a co-worker from España. I like to boil things down succinctly to apt metaphors which don’t require too much scrutiny. No, stop, don’t closely compare hockey to soccer wherein the players carry halberds and attempt to decapitate each other. The National Hockey League is trying to get away from that image.
• You know, every time someone shoots the puck between the goaltender’s legs, it’s going five-hole, or sometimes when a commentator has a flash of cross-sport brilliance, the puck goes through the wickets. I prefer the puppy’s gone home through the doggie door. How does that work for you?

Sports commentators, you don’t need to pay licensing fees for these terms. However, a mention of my name, Brian J. Noggle, would be nice, or a gift from my inexpensive Amazon wish list perhaps. Thank you, that is all.

When ESPN’s Jim Kelley would report:

1. The kids are all right
We tip our proverbial hat to the work of veterans like Mats Sundin in Toronto, Robert Lang in Washington, Joe Sakic in Colorado, Markus Naslund in Vancouver and Brett Hull in St. Louis.

Danny Flor, an esteemed former co-worker, would smile and thank his lucky stars that the Blues took all necessary steps to ensure the Golden Brett finished his career here.

As I was reading the Febuary 2004 issue of St. Louis Homes and Lifestyles on the cycle at the gym (and I must have picked it up on the cycle, because for what sort of Man reads such a fru-fru magazine–hey, look, the person who left it here has the same name and address as I), I came across the article entitled “Running for Daylight: A light-filled domicile is where Rams’ head coach Mike Martz and wife Julie touch down”. As you all know, I don’t care for the St. Louis Lambs–I mean, come on, any football team with less than fifty years’ tradition in their city is a bunch of tax-sucking mercs. However, I like to look at the pretty pictures of rich peoples’ homes had nothing better to do for 20 minutes of intense cardiovascular working. I mean, aside from looking at the scantily-clad, physically-fit women as they sweat, but once you’ve seen the best, everything else is just furniture.

The text, amid the pictures, included this cute little nugget written by Carla Patton (whose name I included so the next time she Googles herself, she’ll read my blog):

The Martzes arrived here with the Rams from L.A. in 1995; Mike was then the wide receivers coach. With the exception of a two-year stint in the northwest with the Washington Redskins, they have lived here ever since.

You remember those two years, don’t you, when the Redskins played the Seahawks sixteen times?

(Note to Carla: The Washington Redskins are the Washington D.C. Redskins.)

For those of you lamenting your workplace positions and the drudgery you face, bear in mind that somewhere in Michigan, Curtis Joseph didn’t play hockey, but he got paid $48,000 for his day’s nonlabor anyway.

Pleasant dreams.

Angie Everhart’s going to be the captain of one of the teams in the first annual Lingerie Bowl that will be played during the Superbowl.

Well, Would Kim Watch?

Vegas says 12 to 1 he will.

I quote from his column today:

Baseball just can’t match the intensity of football. When the Cards trot out Pedro Borbon in a tie game, you can turn off the tube and say to yourself that they’ll get ’em tomorrow, because even the Yankees lost 61 games this year.

But when Arlen Harris misses yet another blitz pickup and Marc Bulger gets hit so hard you expect him to wind up looking like the cat at the end of an “Itchy & Scratchy” cartoon, you want to have your dog soil Arlen’s lawn, because you know every loss in football is huge.

He’s got a point there. I will wake up in the middle of the night and think about a Packers loss, whereas I don’t do the same for the Blues, and I am a much bigger hockey fan.

In John Buccigross’s column on hockey this week, Shjon Podein, the former Colorado Avalanche and St. Louis Blues winger, defines chutzpah as only a hockey player can:

“So, I’m in my rookie year in Edmonton and it’s my birthday. We had just come home from one of our infamous 15-20 day road trips and my family is there to celebrate. So, the family and I go out to have some dinner and drinks. We’re just relaxing when one of my brothers gives me a four-foot high, inflatable tyrannosaurus rex for a birthday present. My other brother gives me a sombrero.

We get back to the hotel and get mom back in her room. As we’re leaving mom’s room, my brothers jump me and rip my suit off in the hotel hallway, leaving me with just my boxers, a sombrero and my 4 foot high inflatable tyrannosaurus rex.

So I’m wandering the hallways of the hotel trying to find where my room is. We’d been on the road for 15-20 days, it’s late, and I can’t remember my room number. I stick my room key in a number of doors, hoping to find the right one. All of a sudden, I look up and there is one of Canada’s finest security guards.

I go, “Hey, what’s going on!”

The security guard says, ‘We’ve had a complaint that some guy is walking down the hall in his boxers, wearing a sombrero, with a bottle of Bud in one hand and an inflatable dinosaur in the other, making too much noise.’

I looked at him and said, “You’ve got the WRONG GUY, brotha.”

Last year’s rookie sensation Pierre-Marc Bouchard on how long to nap on game day (last item):

90 minutes.

It’s always game day here at the Noggle household.

In today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, columnist Dan O’Neill, who once deservedly got raked over the coals (deservedly so) for getting several St. Louis Blues players’ names wrong when he covered them (probably while intoxicated), pens a laundry list of hockey nicknames and calls it a column.

I have to admit, I’ve always thought most hockey nicknames were kinda boring. Jamal “Jammer” Mayers? Tyson “Nasher” Nash? Tony “Twister” Twist? Come on, where’s the creativity, the poetry?

So ever since I have been a Blues fan, I’ve applied my own nicknames to the players, from afar, of course, since some of those gentlemen are bigger than I am. So hear they are, for your enjoyment:

Aren’t those much cooler than what the hockey players themselves use? Perhaps the NHLPA can hire me as an official Alternate Collquial Designation Originator or something.

As St. Louis “Football” Fans know, the NFL no longer allows players to gather in the end zone like a string of can-can girls to taunt the opposing team with a revue designed to show their potence at scoring touchdowns.

However, that’s not the case for civil rights activists. This week here in St. Louis, a bunch of people gathered outside a bank where they successfully protested forty years ago. The celebration included picketing the bank for old time’s sake.

Of course, to the passersby, it looked like some group was picketing the bank for current grievances, not shouting the old-timers’ equivalent of boo-yeah for previous picketorial success. So anyone who remains influenced by a picket line — which is probably limited to members of the Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Sprinklerfitters union that promotes itself during Cardinals ballgames and to Dick Gephardt– probably wouldn’t go into the bank, which forty years ago capitulated to –I mean, negotiated a comprise with— the protesters. It looked like the bank had done something offensive, insensitive, or anti-proletariat now.

So let this be an object lesson to those who would alter their business practices to suit the agitators in the community. Even if you give up and give in or, infrequently, better your business at the behest of activists, you’re just setting yourself up for triumphant returns and celebrations in the future (if you’re lucky) or repeated shakedowns, I mean bilateral communication of community concerns if you’re not.

So Dominik Hasek, a goalie who bailed out on the NHL after winning the Stanley Cup last year, goes home and gets a little rough in a roller hockey game, sending a player to the hospital. Big hoary deal. Sure, he tried to fight Patrick Roy, but that’s goalie-on-goalie action.

Jean Sebastian-Giguere, my new hero until such time as he signs with the Red Wings, went after a Calgary forward. He’s got, um, pucks as big as manhole covers, I kid you not.

I guess Giguere’s not a Vezina winner, yet, but I kid you not he’s got a Conn Smythe trophy coming.

(Hasek link from Fark. All other research from my own memory supplemented by Google.)

(P.S. Sorry, folks, but it was only a matter of time until a hockey post broke through. I am still capturing developers at the coffeepot to tell them how I think the St. Louis Blues are going to do next year and what I think the Collective Bargaining Agreement ending after next year will mean for the NHL, so it’s only natural something like it would leak out in the blog.)

I quoth from the book of Albom:

Instead of going indoors in early May, you can mow the lawn and say, “I can’t believe the Wings lost like that.”

On an unrelated note, http://www.dfp.com is not the URL for the Detroit Free Press. Don’t try this one at work, folks.