Just away from WordPress, otherwise it’s the exact same blog, with the same foul language, sports metaphors and (hopefully, shortly after a couple of happy hockey posts this week) the same political and journalistic intrigue.

http://dirtygames.ca

Please adjust your browsing, blogrolls and bookmarks accordingly. And for those getting bored with all the hockey, one way or another, it ends this week.

Thank you for your attention.

Q: How difficult has it been for you to sit and watch rather than be playing

PAVEL DATSYUK: Oh, I tell you, just this is not fun to watch. I take in lots of beer.

Me too, Pav. And I don’t even have the luxury of imagining how different things would be if only I was on the ice.

Well, I suppose I do, but even in my over-active imagination, the most I could pull off would be to take a Donald Brashear swing at Evgeni Malkin’s head as he blazes past, then ankle-burn my way over to the penalty box.

And that wouldn’t help anyone.

Pavel Datsyuk in skates and a uniform, however, would look better than a Playboy centrefold right about now. It’s still somewhat unreal that the Wings managed to beat Chicago and take this lead on Pittsburgh without him. It’s pretty staggering, really.

Had you told me, before the playoffs, that Datsyuk would miss most of the conference finals, I wouldn’t even ask you if he was going to play in the Stanley Cup Final, because I would have just assumed we wouldn’t be there.

So … yeah. This is welcome news, and may even cut down on my beer consumption.

(The rest of the Datsyuk/Osgood interview is here.)

Lead, transitive verb: (1): to direct the operations, activity, or performance of <lead an orchestra> (2): to have charge of <lead a campaign> (3): to suggest to (a witness) the answer desired by asking leading questions b (1): to go at the head of <lead a parade> (2): to be first in or among <lead the league> (3): to have a margin over <led his opponent>.

Sidney Crosby — captain, prodigy, wunderkind, man-crush of several thousand otherwise heterosexual Pittsburghians — does not lead the Pittsburgh Penguins. If he did, they wouldn’t be in the Stanley Cup final. In fact, it would be unfair to criticize him for not leading, despite the ‘C’ on his sweater. So can we all stop pretending this series is some sort of referendum on his ability to “lead”? Because we won’t know the answer to that question for another ten years or so.

Crosby is 21, he’s the captain of his team and his team is in the Cup final and they’re in trouble. So the natural cliche is to ask if the young star can “lead” them from the depths of despair and to the promised land. Yeah, sure … an easy article to fill inches on an off-day, but…

Leadership doesn’t work like that. The two definitions above, in bold, are probably the ones that best apply how we use the verb in the cliche-ridden language of sports … but neither of them are something I would be comfortable applying to a extremely talented 21-year-old kid.

I know, because I’m Canadian, that to disparage a Canadian captain’s leadership ability on the ice is to emasculate him in the eyes of our collective tribe. Our leadership, after all, is what separates our boys from the Russians and Swedes, at least in the eyes of Don Cherry.

But I don’t care whether you’re a commie, a viking or a hoser from Kingston … you ain’t leading shit at 21 years old.

You can fit right into the fabric of the team. You can get along with everyone in the dressing room. You can use your otherworldly talent to take over games and tally impressive statistics. But you’re not leading by the actual definition of the word and the concept.

I mention this because Crosby is nominated for the Mark Messier leadership award:

Boston’s Zdeno Chara, Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby and Calgary’s Jarome Iginla are the three finalists for the 2008-09 Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award presented by Bridgestone, the National Hockey League announced today.

Mark Messier solicits suggestions from club and League personnel and NHL fans in compiling a list of potential candidates. However, the selection of the three finalists and the ultimate winner is Messier’s alone.

And good for him. Mark Messier needs to perpetuate the image that he was actually a wonderful leader instead of a great hockey player who’s teams missed the playoffs more than they made them. So he gives out an award every year. I can dig it — though I would point out that a real leader *cough*Yzerman*cough* would never stoop to such shameless self-doctoring of his Real Leader Of Men image.

Anyway, examine those three nominees. Think hard about them. This is an exercise. I want you to picture them each, in their respective dressing rooms in between periods with their team down two goals; then, I want you to picture them each working with coache and teammates on a set play in a hasty huddle at the bench with 30 seconds left and the team down one; then I want you to picture them facing the media after an ugly loss, explaining why it happened and how the team can improve; and finally, I want you to picture them speaking to their teammates, one-on-one, about each player’s role on the team and how he can better handle the responsibilities of that position.

I’m not asking you to picture them all Mark-Messier-esque — with that carefully contrived fire in his eyes and that store-bought hateful stare drilling a hole through an opponent in the faceoff circle. That’s not leadership anyway,that’s competitiveness, and nobody would deny that Sidney Crosby has tonnes of that.

I’m asking you to picture the nominees performing the quiet, day-to-day responsibilities of someone who, in the words of those definitions above, “directs the operations, activity or performance of” and “has charge of” the hockey team.

That’s true leadership. It’s why good coaches are so very valuable and why the best captains aren’t the loudest or even the most outspoken, but are without fail the most determined, the most dedicated and the best communicators in the dressing room. They’re also often the ones who have the bright, shiny rings.

And I’m not intending for this post to be a slight on Sidney Crosby’s hockey skill, which is off-the-charts phenomenal. Nor is it intended to portray him as the petulant crybaby that some fans enjoy depicting. Though he should stop talking to the refs so much, if only so that they’ll take him more seriously when he does.

I like Sidney Crosby. I do. I’m just saying that, a 21-year-old in is position — no matter how talented and nice and fake-plastic-athlete he may be — is not the guy who will lead a hockey team to victory.

He might “lead” a victorious team in scoring. He might “lead” the parade if they somehow win. But the quiet, competent, level-headed leadership that authors true success in sports and everything else…. Dude. He’s 21. He’s not leading Bill Guerin and Sergei Gonchar anywhere. So stop talking about it.

I have no one to blame for this but myself. I wrote some time ago, no doubt giddy from a promising beginning to another post-season, that if the Red Wings found themselves in the Cup finals, I would incorporate the sonnet into the poetic playoff predictions.

Sonnets, it turns out, are fucking hard to write at 10 a.m. the morning of the first game when you’re slightly hungover and drinking black coffee because you ran out of cream and the convenience store down the block is closed.

Sonnets would probably be hard to write under any circumstance, but I am merely emphasizing my handicaps. I promised, however, and therefore must deliver. “Shall I compare thee to a hockey puck? Thou art less vulcanized, yet also softer.”

See? That sucked. This is going to be difficult.

Anyway, Our record thus far in the playoffs (I didn’t even make predictions for the last round, because it was far too obvious what was going to happen and I told everyone who would listen we’d get a rematch, so I get a 2-0 on that one) is a very exciting 11/14. We’ll ignore my Bruins-over-Canes in five outburst because I think that it’s been well documented that every single person alive who watches hockey also picked the Bruins, even the Hurricane fans.

But enough of that. It’s poetry time. We’ll do the sonnet, and the two easy ones, just for fun:

Stanley Cup finals

No. 2 Detroit Red Wings vs. No. 4 Pittsburgh Penguins

Through haunted streets, our footprints traced the path

Returning us to fights that we have fought

The days loom bloody, sure to end in wrath

As students display lessons dearly taught

Bruised bones, not broken, strain and ache to heal

Before the snarling beast awakes anew

Once joined, beyond a doubt, the battle’s real

Taxing tired bone and weary sinew

For heavy hangs the head that wears the crown,

But heavy, too, lie burdens on the young

A sea of promise deep enough to drown,

As bards replay songs they’ve already sung.

We tell this story though the ending’s known

The old king, laughing, stays upon the throne.

~~~~~~~

A boy named Sidney said he was a man

Except nobody could understand –

“It’s a beard,” he exclaimed,

“I’m just young, so it’s lame.”

then he covered his face with his hands.

~~~~~~~

Two huge stars face off

against a whole galaxy

I know how this ends

~~~~~~~

The prediction: Red Wings in seven.

I know what you may be thinking but — despite the title in the header of this blog — this is not a website dedicated to the Chicago Blackhawks Game 4 performance.

In fact, one of the reasons we named the blog ‘Dirty Games’ is so that we could call that sort of cheap, thuggish and staggeringly impotent behaviour exactly what it is: An ugly, failed ploy from an increasingly desperate and outmatched hockey team.

We usually pride ourselves on being something of a thinking person’s sports blogger. When the topic turns to athletics, we try to provide the context, the overarching themes and the literary metaphors to lift the discussion from sports bullshit to somewhat more legitimate grounds. It rarely works, but we try to do it anyway, because there’s not enough of that kind of sports writing — or at least there’s not enough of that kind that’s any good — floating around the internet.

Today though? Fuck it. The Blackhawks deserved to get the shit pummeled out of them yesterday, if only to restore karmic balance to the universe. And one of the other reasons we started this blog is so that we could swear with motherfucking impunity.

The Hawks didn’t show up for the game and got their asses handed to them. You cannot ever bring less than your absolute best game against the Red Wings in the playoffs and expect to have a chance. It’s pretty much a given by now.

But the best part of this entire series has been the coaching matchup and the postgame press conferences. If the games themselves have been — in a metaphor the entire hockey world has slept with like a security blanket through the entire series — Big Brother vs. Little Brother, then the coaching matchup has been teacher vs. student. Or maybe principle vs. student. Or principle vs. special-needs-short-bus-riding student. It’s honestly not even that close.

The point is that Joel Queneville has been outclassed, out-thought, outmaneuvered and made to look like an increasingly frustrated and whiny little bitch. Basically, it’s May, so he’s doing what he does. But the meltdowns, as well as Mike Babcock’s explanations of what’s really going on, have added some much-needed drama to a series that has pretty much lacked it on the ice.

Here’s Babcock, explaining why Kronwall didn’t deserve a penalty, and why Quenneville is lying and he isn’t:

I guess to me, you hit the guy in the head, you hang out your elbow, hit the guy in the head, you’re headhunting for him, like when he’s… But that to me is not what I saw there.

So, now, good thing about it is you’re asking a biased guy. I heard Joel Quenneville talk about it. What he does is he comes in, whether he believes it or not, he tells you what he’s got to tell you. I actually believe what I’m telling you. It’s the facts.

I mean, I went over it a hundred times. Before I came in here, I wanted to see did he leave his feet. Kroner, what he does, usually he’s got so much pop in him, he explodes through the guy. At the end of the check when he’s done, he’s off the ice.

That wasn’t the case here at all in the situation. Anyway, enough of that. What else?

It’s fairly obvious that the Red Wings are more talented than the Hawks, but if you switch the coaches in this series, the Hawks would be at least tied and probably up 3-1 right now.

Consider: The Blackhawks had what one could call — without any sort of hyperbole — the best pre-game situation they could hope for:yesterday. Nicklas Lidstrom, the six-time Norris winner and best defenceman in the last 30 years? Out. Pavel Datsyuk, Hart trophy nominee, the team’s leading scorer and reigning defensive forward of the year? Out. Kris Draper? A heart-and-soul component of four cup-winners, a former Selke winner and the best faceoff man in the NHL? Out.

Add to that the motivation the Hawks could utilize to avenge the evil Niklas Kronwall for his “gutless” hit on their treasured teammate, Martin Havlat. Add to that the Willis Reed-esque motivation of Havlat demanding to play despite still being a little bit woozy. Add to that a raucous home crowd and the momentum of a miraculous overtime victory in the previous game.

I mean — what the hell else do you want? Aside from politely asking Johan Franzen if he would mind not playing the role of Force of Nature tonight, and him agreeing for reasons known only to The Franzen … you couldn’t ask for more.

And then you go out and get smoked 6-1?! With all those factors in your favour?! And you have nothing to say after the game but some reprehensible bullshit about “the worst call in the history of sports”?!

Meanwhile, Mike Babcock calmly gets his team ready to play, missing Hall-of-Famers or not. They play a balanced game, avoiding dumb penalties and emotional bullshit, and dismantle their opponent. And all Babcock says is that “I thought guys were gonna step up.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but everything about the Blackhawks’ effort in this game was moronic, pointless and self-defeating. They couldn’t even manage to extract proper thuggish revenge, if that sort of juvenile achievement was indeed their goal.

Mike Babcock finished the game looking like the same kind of classy coach he always does. He should have worn the fedora he sported at the Winter Classic, just to remind everyone how much of a pimp he can be.

Quenneville, meanwhile, looked like a harried father — a man who agreed to take his own kids, as well as the neighbours’, to the zoo, only to realize, with a dozen brats running wild everywhere and other patrons giving him increasingly dirty looks, that he’d bitten off far more than he could chew. He had, quite simply, no control of the situation. For a professional coach, that’s a pretty damning indictment.

Yep. Teacher vs. Retarded Student, indeed. It’’s called being out-fucking-coached.

Athletes are taught, from a very young age, that they shouldn’t “play tight”.

Playing tight, a whole whack of Junior, Pee-Wee, Amateur and Professional coaches will tell you, leads to nothing but losses. If you are too terrified of making a mistake to relax and play your game, the theory goes, you’ll be too tense to play effectively.

You’ll squeeze your stick too hard and miss easy scoring chances. Your vision that allows you to sense your teammate behind you and drop a pass right to his stick, will betray you and you’ll find yourself paralyzed with the puck, afraid to make the drop pass because it might be intercepted.

You must “play loose” if you’re going to succeed, is the popular wisdom.

Unless you are trying to beat the Detroit Red Wings. Then you’d better play tight. Like, squeeze-the-stick-until-it-breaks tight.

Because while the popular wisdom might dictate that playing loose will allow you the mental time and space to make enough plays that the occasional error is forgivable … when you face a team that can take nearly every single mistake you make and capitalize, that wisdom should go out the window.

The Chicago Blackhawks biggest strength in the 2009 playoffs has been their ability to play loose. To fall behind and come back and make charges and give up goals and then find a scrappy, endearing, oh-just-look-at-those-young-pups way to earn them back.

Now, in this series, it’s their biggest weakness. Against Vancouver or Calgary, a cute little cross-ice pass at the blueline might work; and if it doesn’t work maybe you get the puck back; and if you don’t get the puck back, it probably gets cleared to centre ice or your own end and you go and retrieve it and try again.

This is what happens when you try that against the Red Wings. You lose quickly, and the goal comes with a combination of creativity, ruthless efficiency and execution that the assembly lines of Detroit can only dream about.

If this was perhaps the first time in this series the Blackhawks had made a careless, “loose” mistake that came back to immediately bite them in the ass, maybe it would be okay for them to write it off and continue to, as their coach will no doubt do in the next 48 hours , state that “we just have to keep playing our game”.

But they cannot continue to play their game and have a hope in hell of victory in this series. Their game is the kind of game that involves give and take and the free-flowing type of offence that results in chances as well as turnovers and odd-man rushes. If they play their game, this series will not see a sixth game. I don’t write that as a Red Wings fan, but as an observer in general.

Their opponents are too quick to turn Blackhawks’ weaknesses into Wings’ strengths. The Red Wings are clinical and they thrive on errors made against them. They surely don’t mind if the Hawks continue to generate chances with their styles, so long as they also continue to make mistakes.

If I was Joel Quennville, I’d have an awesome moustache and a looming vacation tell my team to try, just once, playing tight. Grip the sticks hard. Dump it in and chase it. Make a simple pass, even if it takes longer to get the puck to the net that way. Hang back on defence until you’re sure it’s safe. Play safe.

Yeah, yeah. Safe is death, is the conventional wisdom. You can’t play tight. You don’t abandon the style that got you this far. You dance with da gurl what brung you. I get it.

But look, the Red Wings can play your game, and play it better than you can. They can take every inch you give them and turn it into a mile.  And now, they know it. If you don’t think they’re going to be swooping like Hawks (see how good they are at playing your game? They stole the name!) to scoop every messy turnover and shove it down your throats … then as a team, the Hawks are either too young, too stupid or too arrogant to have any chance of coming back from a 2-0 series hole.

And now, speaking as a homer once again, I have one thing to add: Please continue to play loose, Blackhawks, and please continue to give the puck to Pavel Datsyuk, because he really needs the help right now and one of those gifts is bound to open the floodgates.

This post should absolutely be a scathing indictment of the media’s swine flu coverage. It could also easily be a heart-wrenching opus about how Manny Ramirez testing positive for steroids crushed whatever was left of a little boy’s love for baseball. Poking fun at Jack Layton’s Star Trek outfit or writing an incredibly offensive parody of Sarah Palin’s upcoming memoirs would also be completely in keeping with the spirit of this blog.

Darren Helm, doing what he does.

But I won’t do it. Because it’s still hockey season, dammit. And I still can’t imagine writing about anything but the Wings. And mostly, just one player.

Beginning with baseball, I’ve been a sports fan since I was about 7, be it the Expos and (for a reason I simply can’t remember, because he hit .172) Casey Candaele, Tony Fernandez (like Casey Candaele, with hustle and skill!) and the Blue Jays, Pinball and the Toronto Argonauts and, of course, the motherfucking Red Wings.

(A True Tangentially-Related Story: If Nikolai Borshevsky doesn’t eliminate the Red Wings in disgusting fashion in 1993, and Chris Osgood doesn’t misplay the puck and give the 1994 series to the San Jose Sharks, and then break down in tears afterwards, I would probably never have become a Wings fan, and my life would be poorer for it. I started cheering for them because they were awesome and I was a little kiddie bandwagon jumper just beginning to discover hockey,and Sergei Fedorov was the best damn player ever in NHL 93 and 94. Then they got their ass kicked twice in humiliating fashion. But by then I loved Stevie Y too much, and it would have been absolutely faithless to abandon them then, when they were getting the hell kicked out of them and people were crying for Yzerman to be traded. I loved them because I watched them fail first. If Borchevsky doesn’t score that goal … 12-year-old me might have ended up a Maple Leafs fan. And I can’t imagine what might have happened to me after that without wanting to drink my face off.)

Anyway. That’s not the point. The point is I’ve always been a sports fan to some degree, an it only got worse when I was introduced to hockey. And usually, on every team, there’s a guy who is the favourite player, and the guy who is your favourite player.

Sometimes they’re in harmony. Yzerman’s an obvious example. More often they’re not. Like now, when the favourite player on the Wings is Nicklas Lidstrom, or Pavel Datsyuk, or Henrik Zetterberg, Marian Hossa or Johan Franzen.

But my favourite Wing? I think, in some weird way, it’s fast becoming Darren Helm.

Helm just won the Wings that series with the Ducks. Sure, Franzen was a beast and Ozzie was clutch and if he was allowed to touch the stuff, every Wings fan in Detroit would be buying Daniel Cleary all he could drink … but without Darren-motherfucking-Helm, it never reaches the point where Cleary can poke at that puck and then (hopefully) spit on his hand and shake Chris Pronger’s.

When this team of wily veterans, superstars and rising stars looked to be out of gas; when they were shying away from contact, taking retarded penalties, coughing up the puck and doing all sorts of dumb things that basically said ‘You want to beat us? Do it.’ …

Smushed.

Darren Helm was not playing that way. I don’t think he could do anything that way.

I don’t think he could stumble down the stairs in the morning and lazily make himself a cup of coffee with his eyes half closed. I think there’s a good chance he’d jump down the last half-flight of stairs, bodycheck the damn fridge open and shove the damn grounds into the filter so hard it rips the first three times he tries.

I would absolutely pay $4.99 to NHL Centre Ice for a game-long isolation cam focused on him, just so I could see if there’s ever a moment he’s on the ice when he isn’t skating faster than every other person on it.

We’re always told to seize the damn day, and so few of us ever do. Well, Darren Helm seizes every single fucking second. It’s incredibly inspiring to watch. And it sends a real message.

Not to the other team. To his own. You cannot watch him go over the boards, spend a full minute slamming himself into anything that moves at full speed and pursuing the puck until he’s ready to drop dead and not want to do the same.

If you watched Game 6, Helm’s line was the only line that brought energy with every single shift. Not only that, but whichever line Babcock threw out there after they left the ice inevitably had a better shift than the one on the ice before them.

Maybe they’re inspired by his play; maybe he makes them slightly embarrassed at their own occasionally weak level of competition, but this team desperately needed someone who was hungry. And intense. And determined to win, whatever the cost. And it ain’t Marian Hossa, it’s Darren fucking Helm.

He won’t stop. He won’t give up. He won’t even stop moving his damn feet. And I am absolutely convinced that, if faced with some sort of obstacle in everyday life — anything from a bouncer at a club, to an epic wall of gridlocked traffic or just locking himself out of his house by accident — Darren Helm’s first reaction would be to bodycheck the bouncer, the nearest car and the door to his own home respectively.

They showed a shot of Babcock yapping in Daren’s ear during one of the games this series, and all  I could see was a thought bubble over Helm’s shoulder that would have said — in the same way you imagine it when you wake up in the morning and your dog is standing at the door, scratching and wagging his tail — “Lemme out, coach! Lemme out, coach! Lemme out, coach! Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!”

I grinned just thinking about it. But the Ducks definitely did not. Chris Pronger, when he finally sleeps, is going to have nightmares. And I’m not talking the oh-no-I’m-back-in-Edmonton nightmares. I’m talking about nightmares in which he is doing something he regularly does — like golfing in May, or washing his ugliest car or tripping old ladies as they walk past him in the shopping mall — and then this little red ball of fury just attacks him out of nowhere. And then does it again and again and won’t go away.

Then, Chris Pronger will wake up screaming, an ugly sweaty mess. And the screaming and the sweat? That’ll be all because of Darren Helm.

The ugly he was, of course, born with.

Anyway, if I’m buying a Red Wings Jersey this year, I’m probably buying a Helm jersey, because without him, the Anaheim Ducks are your Western Conference finalists.

And in the end, I can’t pay the kid a higher compliment than this:

If you want a lesson on how to live your life with no regrets, watch Darren Helm play hockey.

That breakaway goal? Just icing on the cake. But it was some well-fucking-deserved icing.

One of the easiest things to do in life is to say ‘fuck it’ and walk away. Things ain’t happening. You get the short end of the stick. You keep shooting and nothing goes in. It goes in and then it doesn’t count. You show up on time and the bus breaks down. Do a good job and get a pink slip. Sometimes a middle finger and a retreat seems like the obvious move.

It’s easy. It’s an appropriate response, even. Sure some people would be disappointed, but they wouldn’t really blame you. And even if they do, you’ve got plenty of reasons why you did it. A lot of them are perfectly understandable.

Things don’t break our way, so we walk away. A lot of us do it, in small and in what we think are meaningless ways, all the time.  Hell, sometimes, it takes a concerted effort not to fold your tent. So it’s inspiring when a bunch of guys shut their mouths in the face of less-than-perfect circumstances and go to fucking work.

The way the Wings chased Jonas Hiller from the nets, played their own brand of hockey and refused to give a single inch after being outplayed, outmuscled and outreffereed in Game 4 is the stuff, plain and simple, of men who understand what it is to look in the eye of something ugly, nasty and possibly futile and say, ‘Yeah, I’m down for whatever.’

This series might not end with a Detroit victory. It might, and then it might end next round. This is one of the more phenomenal collections of talent I’ve seen in 15 years of watching professional sports, but they ain’t guaranteed shit except a sixth game in Anaheim. And that doesn’t matter.

They’re demonstrating that they won’t lose. They’ll have to be well and truly beaten. Isn’t that all we can ask of the teams that we cheer for?

For all the bullshit involved with being a sports fan … for all the idiocy and stigmas and targeted marketing and network television ratings and steroids and arenas that have different names than they used to … at least we get those occasional moments when you understand why you bother.

When the collection of millionaires that have you really have no business being emotionally invested in can demonstrate what it means to stare down failure and refuse to even think about taking the easy way out … well, I don’t feel so bad for dropping $15 on a hat and sacrificing a some Saturday nights.

I can't take credit for this. Thank fark.com.

I wrote a piece after the Cup win last year about how this team meant more to me than the others, because they’re the ones I watched from the very beginning. It’s rarely more true than when the line that leads them to victory is Hossa-Franzen-Valtteri Filppula, while Lidstrom and Chris-fucking-Chelios patrol the blueline. It’s a strange thing to watch the past, present and future come together like that.

Kudos to the Ducks — excepting Chris Pronger, of course — for being a more than worthy opponent. When Perry scored and then Bobby Ryan ran over Hossa, you guys must have thought you’d finally beaten these foreigners down. I can’t engage in vicious trash talk (aside from pointing out that Chris Pronger looks like a severely retarded kid who grew up down the street from me) but I will say this:

These Red Wings are NOT the San Jose Sharks, motherfuckers. Do not get that twisted for one damn second.

There are plenty of arguments one could make both for and against government offering a bailout to newspapers.

And the arguments, at least in America, would probably fall on deaf ears, as the White House seems to have already made up its mind:

With the Boston Globe just the latest big-city newspaper teetering on the edge of shutdown, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs brushed aside a question about whether the federal government will consider stepping in to help save newspapers, as it has with so many other industries.

“I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it,” Gibbs told reporters.

Well … what, in all honesty, government could do about it is the same damn thing government has done for every other failing industry — throw buckets of cash at the problem.

I acknowledge that, as CNN goes on to paraphrase Gibbs, there would certainly be hurdles and questions involved in bailing out an industry that (at least theoretically) lists “examination and criticism of government” as one of its top priorities.

However, I would imagine there are ways around that problem. In the grand scheme of things, withholding bailout money from a traditional industry because part of their job involves interacting with government and reporting about it to the people smacks of either pettiness … or resignation. Or, of course, pragmatic politics.

While President Obama’s superhero shine may have dimmed somewhat in the eyes of leftists as he has moved towards the centre since his inauguration, most of us would still have a tough time believing that he’d be unable to find some cash to keep newspapers afloat while still managing to allow them to report independently about his administration.

If it was a priority to keep newspapers afloat, believe me, they’d find a way.

But in brushing off the question, Gibbs goes for the quick shot, implying that there are issues of coverage and objectivity in play:

“You guys didn’t think $100 million meant a lot a few weeks ago,” Gibbs said. “But looking at some of the balance sheets, $100 million seems to mean a lot.” Ouch.

That’s nothing more than a glib way — and kind of funny — way to duck a real explanation. And I would speculate that the reason for the dodge is because, if the White House has considered a bailout for newspapers at all in the middle of all of this, it’s been flatly rejected because there’s no point in throwing good money after bad.

So long as network television news, CNN and their cable news buddies, mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek and newsradio from all sides of the political spectrum are going strong … why would the White House step into save newspapers, really?

There are the altruistic motives, sure, about the fourth estate and all that … but really? Aside from journalists themselves and their ever-shrinking cadre of True Believers, who cares about that?

In the minds of many more people, tossing $100 million at the quickly fossilizing newspaper industry would be tantamount to propping up the failed status quo in order to keep the market from evolving into its next iteration — and that would be a fairly un-capitalist stance for a White House already hearing the ceaseless yap of retarded talk radio DJs with a special case of “Socialist!” Tourette’s.

Add to that the Republican-manufactured image of an election given to Obama by the mainstream media — we all remember how “in the tank” became part of the political lexicon for those six months, right? — and you’re just poking the Right with a stick a few short weeks after the saner elements of the party finally began to climb on board.

A government bailout for American newspapers can’t happen right now. Not only is it probably a waste of money, but the political optics are terrible and the industry as we know it is well past the point where a $100-million injection could really “save” anything.

I wrote a post the other day that drew a little bit of attention to our little corner of the internet. Who would have thought that unleashing amusing insults about another hockey team and finding great YouTube clips of players you really like would receive more attention than an earnest discussion about the future of the newspaper industry?

Oh … everyone would. Right.

Regardless, we got about 50 comments on that piece about the Wings and Ducks, though if you discount the ones without any semblance of coherence, insight or even sentence structure the number probably goes down a bit. Such is the nature of the Internet, and of course it’s well known that most Ducks fans cannot even speak, let alone type, in proper English.

Okay. Stop. See that? That was a good-natured joke. I know lots of Ducks fans who can read and write and speak. Okay, actually, I don’t know any Ducks fans, but I’m sure the vast majority of the ones that do exist are literate.

But we digress. That’s only tangentially related to the point I want to make today. And that point is this:

A lot of people are retarded. I already knew this, but reading random comments from Ducks fans has driven the point home. I’m not from Detroit and neither are all (perhaps even the majority of) Red Wings fans. Neither (for the most part) are the players, the coaches, the management and anyone employed by the organization above the level of, say, the valet or the beer-and-popcorn-guy.

I am well aware that Detroit, as a city, is not doing very well right now. Here in some parts of Southern Ontario (where I do actually live) we have a substantial part of our workforce employed by the automakers as well, and they are also struggling. So I definitely understand the tragedy of the situation, though our economy is more diverse and we certainly aren’t in the same dire perdicament.

But … all that, as sad as it is, has fuck all to do with anything about hockey, aside from who can afford to buy the tickets to the games.

You could demolish everything in the city of Detroit except for Joe Louis Arena and make homeless every man, woman and child … and Pavel Datsyuk could still deke the shit out of Ryan Getzlaf with his eyes closed and one of his beautiful Russian hands tied behind his back.

So comments like these, and there are hundreds of them out there every time someone talks about the Red Wings …

-u gona watch us win in ur stupid bankrupt fuckyng detroit…

-This from some buffon from shit hole detroit. Ducks in 5. Will give you one win at home to keep the natives from rioting and burning down what’s left of your shithole city.

… accomplish nothing but to make you look like a fool. The Internet is free for the perusal of fools, haters and idiots alike, but you guys really shouldn’t make it so easy to spot you.

Anyway, the only reason that I wrote these 500 words, and made a point already obvious to anyone with a brain, is to ask you guys who do engage in this kind of trash talk … why?

Theoretically at least, you guys are all American. The economic situation in Detroit hurts industry in the country as a whole. Bashing the city has no impact whatsoever on its very talented hockey team composed largely of Canadians and Europeans, and all you’re doing is rubbing the fear and uncertainty of a nasty recession into the faces of a city that is on the front lines of it.

I realize, intellectually, that sport goes back to the whole my-clan-is-superior-to-your-clan thing, and that we’ve sublimated the desire for full clan-on-clan warfare into the spectacle that is modern professional sports. And I’m grateful for that, both because I love sports and because I dropped out of karate too early to learn to be an effective warrior.

But still … taking on the city to spite the fans of a particular team makes little to no sense, especially when the two cities are located in the same country. How hard is that to understand?

If you want to bash the shit out of the Wings, or any other team, have at it. I realize there’s not a hell of a lot of stuff you can say about a franchise that’s been at the top of the pile for close to 20 years now … but you can still make fun of Chris Chelios with a well-placed diaper joke, or claim that Osgood’s a terrible goalie playing behind a dominant team, or even misguidedly call them they “Yankees of hockey”.

I promise you that last one would provoke me enough that you would get a lengthy screed in response.

But bashing the City of Detroit? You’re just being petty jerks and saying hurtful things to people who have nothing to do with the conflict you’re purportedly discussing. It’s dumb and should be beneath any fan with neurons still firing.

For instance, I would never say that someone from Anaheim is so stupid they can barely comprehend basic spoken instructions; so ugly and stench-ridden that waitresses cringe when duty compels them to get within four feet of them; so mean-spirited and hateful that nearly everyone acknowledges mention of their name with an ‘Oh … that asshole’ and so completely rejected and dismissed by society as a whole that they have to resort to skull-numbingly stupid invective and violent cries for attention just to feel as though they’re a part of the human race.

Of course I wouldn’t, because that doesn’t describe a random person from Anaheim.

That right there describes Chris Pronger.