Nazem Kadri is your saviour, Toronto

-Earlier this week, Toronto Maple Leafs blog Pension Plan Puppets went to town on potential first-round flop Nazem Kadri. The Puppets explain how poorly Kadri is playing compared to the average developmental curve of prospects and completely ignore the reasonable approach taken by the Toronto Sun.

Or something completely opposite of that.

Kadri scored twice and had an assist in the Leafs' 4-3 exhibition win against the Ottawa Seators last night. Kadri still probably won't make the team and may be better off playing a full season in the American League, but his three-point night set up for one of the stupider ledes of the preseason.

It most surely was a slump at the most inopportune time of his young career.

Oh, sure, that makes sense. God forbid Kadri ever goes a couple of games without a point in the preseason ever again.

-Meanwhile, in Calgary, Flames president Ken King has called out TSN panelist Michael Peca for calling out Flames designated problem contract Jay Bouwmeester.

The whole drama erupted Tuesday night when TSN panelist Michael Peca said he used to look forward to playing against Jay Bouwmeester, because he coughed the puck up so much.

Strong words, to be sure. And it didn't die there.

On Wednesday afternoon, in a radio interview with Rob Kerr and Dean Molberg on the Fan 960, Flames president Ken King lashed out at the audacity of Peca, a former player, saying such things.

“I think it was out of line,” King said in an interview with The Fan 960. “It was a guy talking about his peer. His colleague. Someone who he has played with.....To diss and take such a low-brow approach to laughing at or ridiculing one of the premier defencemen in the league, I just think is completely inappropriate.”

In fairness to Peca, King has probably never skated against Bouwmeester.

-In Montreal, Brian Gionta was named the 2nd ever American captain in Franchise history leading to more concerns that the captain of the Habs can't speak French. The only reasonable solution is to move to Tampa, commence covering the Lightning, drag Vinny Lecavalier down and force Steve Yzerman to trade him to Montreal.

Here's an old link on a Vincent Lecavalier to Montreal for Louis Leblanc RDS story.

This is a tall order for Gionta.

Who is this mysterious woman, and why is Henry Burris wearing a bra?

So... this is Calgary quarterback Henry Burris and a woman who is certainly not Mrs. Henry Burris.

"It was a birthday prank my friends ran on me," says Burris about the photos, which popped up online this week.

Burris was a little more exposed going 11 for 26 against the pitiful Lions this week. While I'm sure that there's nothing indecent going on here, it's the distraction the Stampeders need to get them back on the winning track, after losing their past two games.

Hey, at least it was Hank, and not 326-pound lineman Rob Lazeo, who may be a D-Cup.

On Pat Burns and the breaking of news stories in the online age

As we all know, Pat Burns died, and then didn't die last Friday in a classic instance of the media, both traditional and social, jumping the shark based on the word of former Toronto Maple Leafs stiff Cliff Fletcher.

Just before 11:30 AM Friday morning, two messages popped up Twitter exaggerating the condition of cancer-ridden former NHL coach Pat Burns. One was from @ctvottawa, the other from @FAN590. It was sad and depressing, for the 58-year old man who the Internet had once tried to get into the Hockey Hall of Fame at some point during his life, to see go too soon.

Oh, Carey...

If the preseason is a somewhat worthwhile indicator of the regular season, then Montreal General Manager Pierre Gauthier made out even worse than expected by choosing Carey Price over Jaroslav Halak this summer.

Carey Price, known for giving Pierre McGuire a telepathic handjob with this save in the 2008 preseason...



...made out not so good last night, allowing four goals on nine shots, being booed off the ice, and refusing to talk to the media afterwards.

Oh, Carey, at least you're in midseason form in one regard.

Toronto Star starts 'A Leafs Fan Blogs'

Rejoice, faire fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Toronto Star has heard your pain, and have given you an outlet to talk about the team online.

With 'The Spin' by Damien Cox and now our generically-named first-stop online ressource for cutting-edge Leafs opinions by a guy named Vinay Menon, the Toronto Star have managed to pull themselves out of what I call the 'Google Obscurity' and no longer just be for blue-collar lunchrooms across Southern Ontario.

Windsor Star predicts Toronto/Detroit in 2137 Stanley Cup Final

In today's Windsor Star, print media continued its slow demise announcing a Detroit/Toronto Stanley Cup Finals game in 2137, before repeating a news brief eight or nine times.

The joke here is that CBC won't exist the next time the Leafs make the finals, right?

'Into The Wind' - A modest review

Steve Nash and Ezra Holland's 30-for-30 documentary about Terry Fox, Into The Wind, begins with an old, grainy shot from 1980 of a baby-faced man with curly hair dipping a prosthetic right leg into the Atlantic Ocean.

When the trumpets sound and the judge looks back at my life, as a 22-year old, they'll see me in my couch and sweatpants on a Sunday night watching sports highlights. At 22, Port Coquitlam's Terry Fox, a cancer victim and an amputee, ran a marathon a day across the country, raising more than $1.7 million for cancer research before being forced to abandon his run more than halfway across the country.

Nash and Holland do a fantastic job of sorting through pictures, news footage, radio interviews, and Fox's own diary entries to chronicle the conception and denouement of the Marathon of Hope, an impossible, near superhuman, run across Canada with friend Doug Alward, later joined by brother Darrell Fox and Bill Vigars of the Canadian Cancer Society.

The 30-for-30 franchise is produced by ESPN, thus with a major American audience in mind. They won't see this documentary on their screens until next Tuesday. Nash does a terrific job at capturing just how vast and sparse Canada is, and how impressive Fox's unfinished accomplishment truly was. The narrative never explicitly lets the audience know that Fox didn't complete the journey and died just a month before his 23rd birthday, but anybody would be able to notice the tears in the eyes of Leslie Scrivener of the Toronto Star, and Alward and Vigars and realize how the story ends, as well as the absence of Fox interviews, instead with his diary entries read by narrator Taylor Kitsch.

"He's in Toronto, and he's going to make it to the coast," Betty Fox, Terry's mother, says at one point during a happy 1980 interview as the scene cut to a commercial. Nash is a tearjerking son of a bitch.

The film did everything it could do. It gave greater focus to the athletic accomplishment and resiliency of Fox over the cancer aspect of his story. ESPN is primarily a sports network, after all, and the Fox story from a pure athletic standpoint is amazing, and one that any American even, should surely appreciate. He ran 26 miles a day fighting unwanted publicity, conflicts with his teammates and false media reports as his celebrity faded towards the end of his run.

This documentary is not about who we lose to cancer, but rather about the potential that every human being has. Fox's tale is inspiring, and Nash is a terrific storyteller. Canadians tend to love seeing stories about Canada appear in American and world medias, and Into The Wind is an excellent film which will show the world a Canadian folk hero who has unfortunately been overlooked by the rest of the world.