Oilers Close Out Rexall Place, Flint Firebirds Owner Gets Wrecked And Jonathan Drouin Returns To Tampa
A decent amount of things happened in the hockey world over the past 24 hours. And listen, I’m a realist. I understand that hockey is still a niche sport and that people would get pissed if I started to flood the super page with hockey blog after hockey blog. So we’ll just take a moment here to go through some of the biggest things that went down yesterday and this morning here as your nice little one-stop shop for puck talk. We’ll start off in Edmonton where after 42 seasons, the Oilers are saying goodbye to Rexall place. First off, this rendition of O Canada will give anybody chills. I don’t care if you’re Canadian, American or from a different universe like Nate. It was beautiful.
Hey, these guys are all pretty good .
It sucks to see what the Edmonton Oilers have become over the past decade. The team won 5 Stanley Cups from ’84 to ’90. Wayne Gretzky, Jari Kurri, Mark Messier, Paul Coffey, Grant Fuhr, the list goes on. Rexall Place was home to the greatest hockey player to ever lace them up for 9 seasons. Now it goes out after hosting a joke of a franchise for the past 9 but at least the last two Oilers to leave the ice were a couple of studs.
It’ll be interesting to see what the Oilers do this summer. Chances are they will deal away at least of of Jordan Eberle, Nail Yakupov and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, wouldn’t be surprised to see them get rid of 2 of those guys. They’ll have a top 3 pick in the draft again this year and move in to a fancy new stadium next season. It would be great to see these fuckheads finally figure out how to run a hockey team again because I think we can agree that the world is better when the Oilers aren’t complete trash. Now let’s move from the NHL to the OHL real quick.
Your Day Make Suck But At Least You’re Not Rolf Nilsen
I’ve already blogged about the disaster in Flint with the Firebirds a couple of times. You can read up on it here and here. Long story short, the Flint Firebirds owner was actively firing coaches and trading away players to make sure that his son was getting playing time. First off, his son doesn’t belong in the OHL to begin with. Second off, you can’t do that. So the OHL suspended Rolf Nilsen a couple of months ago and just handed down his punishment yesterday. If you’re feeling down about yourself at all right now, this should make you feel a little better.
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First of all, this is what that jackass gets for not naming the team the Tropics. He had a literal gold mine right at his finger tips with that one and he couldn’t have fucked it up any harder. Anyways… a five year suspension from the OHL and a $250,000 fine. All for being a fucking idiot and fulfilling the stereotypical Hockey Dad role. In the words of the late great David Portnoy, “what an idiot. What a fucking idiot”. Hopefully now the OHL will learn the lesson that maybe you shouldn’t green light the sale of a team to a guy who just wants to give his son a team to play on for Christmas. And now last but not least, we make our way back to the NHL and head on down to Tampa.
We’re now almost 3 months removed from the beginning of this entire Jonathan Drouin saga. Like the situation with the Firebirds, you can read my previous shitty blogs on Drouin here and here. So yeah, it was back in January that Tampa Bay Lightning forward Jonathan Drouin was demoted to the AHL, requested a trade out of Tampa, refused to play for Syracuse, walked out on the team, went back home to Montreal, wasn’t traded at the Deadline, returned to Syracuse and then this morning, he was recalled by the Lightning. A nice little full circle here as the Lighting have their hands tied with the injury to Steven Stamkos. A couple of important things to point out here. 1) As long as Drouin is on the Lightning’s roster for their last two games of the season, this will credit him for an accrued year against his contract. Meaning that he will be eligible for UFA status in 2021 instead of 2022. I highly doubt the Lightning intend to hold on to the kid for that long but you never know (also that’s more or less just important for Drouin himself and not as much for the Lightning).
But with Stamkos out of the lineup, Jonathan Drouin will be given every opportunity to prove that he belongs in the NHL now playing under Jon Cooper. As of now it looks like it will be the Detroit Red Wings going up against Tampa in the first round of the playoffs. Drouin is speedy enough that he can get behind those Red Wings defenders and could have himself a series. I’d pay more to watch this movie than anything about John Scott.