Lord Stanley's Cup

The NHL hockey playoffs start tonight when the Tamba Bay Lightning travel up to the capital to meet the best team in the east and the Oilers from Edmonton (is there any oil in Edmonton?) travel to Motor City to play the best team in the league. I, of course, won't be watching any of this. However, those lucky Europeans with access to the North American Sports Network (NASN) will have a whole range of playoff hockey this week! Jeff was just complaining the other day about the difficulty watching sports in the Metro NY region...At least he has hockey to watch, I've been waiting for months (and shall be waiting for many more) for Free to get their act together and get the NASN onto my TV (it may be coming in August!). Of course I can't really complain too much, I did voluntarily expatriate myself, and with that I lose my hockey watching ability. Oh well.

League jackass and all-around scumbag, Pat Quinn was fired by the Leafs (isn't the plural form of "leaf" "leaves"?) yesterday. The respectibility of the entire NHL immediately went up by a couple points when Toronto made the announcement. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I'm not one for making blognostications (scroll down to the "BBB" section), but I'm going to make one here: "Real Definition" is going to become the next big term. With the proliferation of high-definition TV (HD) certain people have started to refer to regular programming as standard definition (SD) TV. Therefore, the logic goes that sooner or later someone is going to coin the term real-def (RD) to indicate the live viewing of something. "I caught U2 in RD last night at the Garden and man, I'm telling you, there's nothing like it" or "Yeah, I saw the game in HD last night in a bar; I really wanted to see it in RD but couldn't get out of the city in time to catch it."

Lastly, a little bit of home team cheering: Lindy Ruff for Coach of the Year!! Arguably this man has done the most with the least in the NHL this year. The Sabres are a bunch of 2nd and 3rd line players who managed to have the 3rd best record in the Eastern Conference and 5th in the League. They have one of the best away records, the number 3 powerplay and the number 2 penalty-kill in the League. This team owes it's [very] solid regular season finish to Lindy. Quick, name one star on the Sabres team this year. Name the leading scorer...Unless you follow hockey really close (or you're a Sabres fan) these questions will remain unanswered!
Even Karl agrees:

From: karl-2.wagner@_____.com
To: Kris Salo
Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 11:33 PM

Yeah, how about a little Ruff Love!!!