Televised images showed Lemieux overflowing with pride and excitement as the Canadiens crowd welcomed his entrance onto the ice surface at the Bell Centre. It was a great moment for a son of Quebec to feel the love of the Habs fans. Little did anyone know how soon they would lose him. And was Lemieux hiding a dark secret?

Sports and politics go together like a fish and a bicycle. But that doesn’t stop those in public office from trying to bend sports to their bidding. The popularity of sports in America makes it a lucrative target for radicals who want change “by any means necessary.” Now a top Democrat wants to reverse integration in sports.

That scoring in the NHL is reduced to such a tiny target by a goalie’s ears reflects the radical shift in skills for goalies. With the tumult of crashing players around the net goalies have gone from the smallest player  to the tallest, able to cover virtually all the shooting target. And strong enough not to get jostled out of place. 

Turner created both America’s Team and a private cable network apart from the Tiffany bunch up in NYC/ DC. Speeding up the distribution of news and sports to provide an alternative from Atlanta Turner pressured the cozy world of Walter Cronkite reality. He also cast a long shadow on the film business and the cause of the environment.

Justin Trudeau was the hero of Canada’s failing media. So he bribed them. You can see why Rogers and Bell, the two behemoths in the cramped Canadian media world, would tell their friends in Ottawa that what’s good for the goose is good in Gander. And North Bay. And Wetaskiwin. Or where ever else they send their signals. Their estimated remaining 10,000 employees need love too.

Even the most dim Canadians must now recognize that Canada’s is at the forefront of this faux-climate movement, only because the rest of the world has walked away from bankruptcy-by-climate. But the urge  for a Boy Scout Leadership badge is strong in the land of Elbows Up, and thus they keep plugging away, spending your money on their compulsion. Sad for them and their elite pals, no one buys the grift anymore.

Name/ Image/ Likeness has scrambled all boats in the sports industry. That includes the NHL, where the combination of NIL and the end of restrictions on players with CHL experience getting scholarships has been lifted. Now top prospects of college age can play in the CHL a couple of years and then flip to the NCAA for grooming, higher profile and money. All power to players.

For an innocent “interview” opportunity Vrabel/ Russini certainly drew the interest of Mike Vrabel’s owner Robert Kraft, who had his own little crisis in 2019 over his preference for happy-endings massage with immigrant Asian women in Florida. According to In Touch , Kraft “had his honchos pressure The Post before they published and tried to kill the story,”

When all is said and done— and when the legendary Scott Oake signs off from HNiC— the season will probably be known for two bigger stories than just another Stanley Cup. Foremost was the underdog U.S. men’s team getting the game of a lifetime from goalie Connor Hellybuyck as they won the Olympic gold in February. And the prurient porn of Heated Rivalry.

In Vancouver Mike Gills was an iconoclast first, last and in-between. He gave Vancouver the greatest team it had ever had. In his 2021 proposal Gillis described his model franchise as “best-in-class, championship organization on and off the ice.” We are guessing that sounds just about right for Leafs Nation. We’ll know by the draft if that’s the Leafs’ formula, too.

Baseball is on a hot streak making the game better. The pitch clock, Shohei Ohtani, the ghost runner in extra innings, the expansion of the base sizes themselves, legalized betting and now ABS. Plus, they have had some terrific World Series recently. 

Baseball is on a hot streak making the game better. The pitch clock, Shohei Otahni, the ghost runner in extra innings, the expansion of the base sizes themselves, legalized betting and now ABS. Plus, they have had some terrific World Series recently. Venezuela’s win in the World Baseball Classic final was the most-watched game in WBC history. And Toronto’s drive to within one win of the World Series set Canadian records for ratings and streaming, too. It’s moved The Athletic to ask, “Has MLB overtaken the NBA as America’s No. 2 league?”

If you’re looking for a symbol of all that’s gone wrong in Elbows Up since the turn of the calendar look no further than Toronto’s captain and occasional superstar Auston Matthews, the American captain in the Olympics. Canadians— Leafs fans in particular— don’t need to be reminded what happened next. The image of a transcendent Matthews with the gold medal around his neck, after the OT golden goal from Jack Hughes, was extra galling for Toronto fans— who then heard Matthews’ teammates extoll his leadership in the Olympics.

Fighting the new way of watching was a losing proposition. The leagues the networks covered saw an obscene amount of profit from pairing with the corporations that ran gambling. Needing money to pay the sky-rocketing price of superstar talent they saw arms-length gambling as a solution. Don’t take money from betting, Take it from there people who run betting. 

If you’re waiting for the giant media pushback against entitled women hockey players  on SNL you’ll be waiting a long, long time. Somehow the targeted players on the men’s gold medal team bit their lower lip, took one for the nation on live from New York TV. And the frantic sports media corps could find nothing for which to blame Donald Trump.

Now Trump gets to host the victorious USA hockey gold medalists at the White House or— he’s sending a plane!—Tuesday’s State of the Union. He’s bringing in the women’s gold medal winners, too. While Carney nurses what could have been for Elbows Up. But hey, let’s go to Mexico. We hear it’s beautiful this time of year. If you don’t don’t mind the narco state drug wars.

Had it been like the 2010 Vancouver Olympics where Canada was running the medal table the entire stone touching episode might have been brushed off. Pun intended. But the first week of the Cortina/ Milan Games was a death valley for Canada’s medal hopes. Until Mikäel Kingsbury finally notched a gold in moguls on Sunday Canada had just eight medals, none of them gold. This was not what Elbows Up had been expecting.

Like the torn ACL that caused Lindsay Vonn to crash in Sunday’s downhill, the Cortina/ Milano Games are limping around in a politically charged atmosphere. Having been shut out on pithy quotes about Donald Trump at the Australian Open Tennis tournament, the world’s progressive sports media are fishing for gotcha’ quotes from athletes. And they’ve hooked a few.

If you need to ask what “stuff” happened this time last year you need to get a life. Stuff means the Four Nations tournament held last February Canada persevered over its goaltending and more to beat the USA for the title, one invented by the NHL to fill the All Star gap. If that formula sounds like a recipe for half-hearted effort you’d be wrong.  The first USA/ Canada showdown in the round robin is probably one of the Top 10 most memorable men’s games. Ever.

Remember that, until the Super Bowl era, the big American sports events were boxing matches, the Triple Crown, the World Series and college bowl games. (In Canada it was the Grey Cup, the Stanley Cup and the Brier.) Most, if not all, have been pushed aside by the NFL marketing colossus. Why could the same not happen to the NFL ?

The latest argument for salary caps is the World Series winning L.A. Dodgers—who’ve won three of the five World Series in which they’ve appeared since 2017— signing prime free agent slugger Kyle Tucker to a four-year, $240 million contract. (He’s reported to have turned down an even larger 10-year $300 million offer from Toronto). Added to the Dodgers already formidable lineup it seems unfair to baseball fans who still think fair is a concept in sports.