The winners are clear. It’s likely a loss for those athletes in other collegiate sports whose programs were kept alive by the flood of money from football and basketball. That especially means women’s programs which cannot support themselves in their current iteration based on TV ratings and attendance.

One would like to take the league and their snoozing media at their word that they will do better in covering these abuse stories in the past. Sadly, there is little reason to believe this contrition after so many false starts in the past.

Fans looking at the 2019 Raptors NBA title over wounded Golden State— Toronto had its main weapons playing—will no doubt find an echo in this year’s postseason as the stars on the favoured teams are decimated by injury. Add in Covid-19 absences. The postseason feels like Saving Private Ryan as wounded players are cut down.

Those who even whispered at any connection between Christian Eriksen’s collapse and a possible vaccine were immediately buried beneath an avalanche of sputtering outrage from vaccine boosters. Depending on who is talking the vaccines are impeccable, a gift from God arrived to end the pandemic. And deniers were lower than single-cell creatures. This comes from the high priests of healthcare whose prescription to stop the virus the past 15 months has been a medieval mix of masks/ lockdowns/ social distancing/ wait for a miracle.

The PGA Tour is no doubt under great pressure from its sponsors and political allies to keep promoting Casedemic deception. The message of change on PCR testing in America and Canada has to come from where it started: with the public and private ®Health experts who’ve dissembled and deceived since early 2020 to deflect their mistakes and shift blame to the naughty public.

The vagaries of tanking for success were never more evident the past week as the poster children for draft manipulation, the Edmonton Oilers, were waxed in four straight games by a decidedly unglamorous Winnipeg Jets club in the first round of the 20212 playoffs. While Toronto blew a 3-1 lead to the Habs.

In the days before the media surrendered its integrity in favour of blaming Trump, Doug Ford and Jason Kenney, government exaggerating death tolls would constitute a major scandal worthy of leading every newscast. But these are different days. Different indeed.

It’s clear a segment if the population will never recover from the spectre of the virus, the uncertainty of its arrival, the ability to fight it off with immune systems or even vaccines. The Church Ladies of infection still hold high court with their disaster scenarios and their public shaming of the infidels who believed all along that you weren’t going to get sick standing on a beach for strolling through a park.

The testing numbers we see today reflect conditions four-five weeks ago. Yet Health® experts and their media slappies want you to believe you can rectify the past by locking down golf courses a third or fourth time. That shutting down the Men’s League on Wednesday will alleviate the pressure on ICUs. Or keep schools open.

What do the NFL and NHL share? A hard salary cap. The pressure of staying under a strict budget has changed the way teams build champions. In today’s win-now culture, the pressure of managing a salary cap means that you must play your prospects and draftees on entry-level contracts before they get to the big bucks.

Why the push? Simple. The product is now global, not national or regional. Fans around the world, who support the sport with TV, digitalis and logo revenues, only want to see the star teams and star players. Teams are brands, and their merchandise is sold across the world. The Super League was going to be Broadway and everyone else regional theatre.

Lockdowns have had little, if any, positive effect so far on the virus in North America. But like baseball hitters determined to hit into the shift, the Health Experts® are going to keep employing the lockdown. Hey, who are you going to believe? People hitting .200 on all the major calls of the pandemic or your lying eyes?

Despite MLB’s pretension to a national platform it has become a regional sport, defined by strong rivalries but absent any compelling national voice. While there are wonderful players like Mike Trout and Mookie Betts, none have a national profile à la LeBron or Tom Brady. Its population base is greying at a rapid clip. In the wake of the All Star farce, something has to change.

To say that spring of 2021 is tainted is an understatement. Just as our appreciation of the spring sports rituals has been blunted by the virus, there is another nagging issue with many of our favourite pastimes. As we wrote last October as the Dodgers polished off the World Series, subtlety seems to have been lost in baseball. (And no, we don’t mean MLB interfering in Georgia state politics.)

No one in corporate America or sport notices the contradictions so long as you wear the right sweater or play for the right team in DC. What was once America is becoming East Germany. Just ask the athletes who competed against the GDR’s engineered athletes how that felt.

Luckily for the prime minister few in corporate media want to bring his WE duplicity to light. Funneling money to the Trudeau family (paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the WE organization for speeches between 2016 and 2020) while claiming no complicity is just the price of doing business in Wokeistan. Starving the CFL? Sometimes you’ve got to break a few eggs to make a progressive omelette.

When the transgender rights issue inserted itself in public debate, liberals reflexively shrugged their shoulders and said, “live and let live”. If they want to wear a dress or chemically/ surgically change their physical appearance, that’s their business. That included letting trans people participate in competitive sports in their new identity. The flaw in this genial acceptance became obvious in about 30 seconds.

Walter Gretzky, who passed away this past week at the age of 82, was a visionary in the training of Canadian hockey players, both men and women. He was also an avatar for the future of training the next Wane Gretzky. (Or someone of a slightly lower pedigree.) One of these accomplishments was highly beneficial to the sport The other, inadvertently, has made it more difficult for kids of modest means to achieve a career in hockey.

Play by play on radio is an art form. So is good penmanship. But it doesn’t mean it has a great future. Neither does waiting another year till the prime minister lets people travel and work and go to school. So Jays fans will likely have to grin and bear it as their TV crew tries to satisfy the unsatisfiable.

Dryden’s solution is a reluctant one. “The clever cat-and-mouse game between goalies and shooters has run its constructive course. The goalies, by winning, have changed the game.” So the net must be made bigger. “Maybe only six inches or a foot wider, maybe only six inches higher. And only for those in junior and college leagues and above.”