2008/09 NHL Thread

OK, this is funny.

Bob Cole was recently on The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos. Here's the lead-in to the show (they usually have something quirky and/or self deprecating at the beginning).

http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/videos.html?id=952272963

 

sorry if this is a DB. Pretty cool story....

In the middle of a grueling six game road trip where a very young hockey team is away from home, the third game of the trip ends late on a cold Canadian Saturday night. This is the only break on the trip and the three days between games allow them the only break to get back home in their own beds for a couple of days before going back on the road. A scheduled commercial flight waits for them at Toronto's International Airport for the short flight home; they could be home by midnight. This plane departs on schedule, but without a single member of the hockey team. Back in the locker room a vote is taken after the game was complete, and a unanimous decision is made by this young team to skip this flight and stay one more day. They make arrangements to check back in the hotel and on a frozen Sunday morning charter two buses that have no heat and begin a journey two hours straight north into a sparsely inhabited Canada , but where hockey is its passion. They arrive at their destination to the surprise of the teams general manager who is there attending his fathers wake.

After a few emotional hours, this team boards the buses and heads back for a two-hour trip back to Toronto. On the way they ask the drivers to stop in a tiny Canadian town because they are hungry. To the shock of the patrons and workers at this small hockey town McDonald's, a professional team walks out of two rickety buses and into the restaurant, which just happens to have pictures of two members of this team on its wall. The patrons know every single one of these players by sight being Fanatic fans of hockey in these parts. One can only imagine their amazement of the locals seeing and the entire professional hockey team sit down and have a meal in their tiny little town in the middle of a hockey season. After a while they board the buses and catch their same flight 24 hours later, giving one day to their general manager.

Have I made this up, is this an excerpt from some fictional book? No.

This a true story of the Blackhawks last Saturday night and they decided to attend Dale Tallon's fathers funeral. It's amazing that such a good story can be found nowhere on the internet, and not even mentioned in the Chicago papers. Had one of the Blackhawks got into a fight and punched some drunken loser in a Toronto bar it would be plastered all over papers and the television. This being said, its hard to imagine any professional football, basketball or baseball team doing this, but the members of the Blackhawks claim any "hockey" team would have done this. This is one reason I continue to be a big hockey fan, and another reason I am excited about this Chicago team. I thought I would share as this story appears to have gone unnoticed

 

Good for the Hawks, even if the story comes off as a little too old-school Canada for me.

I live in Toronto and there are few areas two hours from here that are sparsely inhabited. And I would doubt they would travel on a rickety bus. I deal with the bus company that carries the NHL teams from the airport (or the Leafs to Buffalo) and there is nothing rickety - or cheap - about their buses.

I can definitely see them piling off the bus into McDonald's. That part never changes, no matter what the level.

 

Here's a story from the Ottawa Citizen. Probably a little more accurate but still, this is one heck of a story. Also explains why David Bolland was in the Goose after the game on Saturday night.

http://www.faceoff.com/hockey/columnists/bios/story.html?id=6aaec4aa-c335-462b-b9b2-79b5fc8e6d93&add_feed_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.canada.com%2Ftopics%2Fsports%2Fhockey%2Ffaceoff%2Fwarren.atom%3Fviewer%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.faceoff.com%2Fhockey%2Fcolumnists%2Fbios%2Fstory.html".

The funeral was in Gravenhurst which is hardly in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah, and as Huggy said, I doubt they went up in a school bus.

But this part of the story is a little surreal:

It was also a tad weird for young Blackhawks stars Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. As they walked into the otherwise empty McDonald's, they saw posters of their faces plastered on the wall. Toews and Kane are featured in the restaurant chain's promotion featuring trading cards of NHL stars.

"There were hockey cards, myself and Toews up there (on the wall), so we were thinking about signing them," said Kane. "I don't think we ended up signing them, but the whole thing was pretty funny

 

Geez ... and here I thought only American hockey people had class.

 

You mean like Nagano?

 

1 incident! And I know Keith....he was probably pissed they ran out of Bud Light.

 

I knew Ashy would be back.

 

It's like he heard his name being called or something ...

 

It's the SportsJournalists.com tribal drums.

 

On NHL Live, Bill Clement just said that Craig MacTavish is "the most underrated coach in the NHL."

Somewhere, Beef is punching a wall and doesn't know why.

 

did you guys say something?