If you were to make a list of winners and losers under the new CBA, where would you put the Boston Bruins? Your gut reaction would be losers, and certainly Bruin fans fall into that category. After all they had to watch Joe Thornton, Boston's first overall pick in 1997 whose courage was questioned in the 2004 playoffs and who became an MVP candidate in a partial season in San Jose, go up against Sergei Samsonov, the seventh overall pick in that same 1997 draft who became one of the difference-makers in elevating Edmonton to the conference finals after being traded by the Bruins.
But what about Jeremy Jacobs, the notoriously greedy owner of the Bruins who specializes in gouging his customers when they are at his mercy, when they're hungry in stadiums, airports, theme parks, and the like? The owner who most visibly drove the lockout had a two-pronged plan in mind when he shut down the NHL for a whole season -- he wanted to be able to win a Stanley Cup without having to make any investment in players that would jeopardize the profits generated by his hockey and arena business.
You could definitely consider him a loser on one count -- money alone never bought a winner, as Ranger fans can well attest, and so his team crashed and burned for lack of hockey sense more than anything else (although the willingness of players like Thornton and Samsonov to put everything on the line to help maximize Jacobs's profits certainly was a contributing factor). But on another level, the one of tantamount importance to Jacobs, he came out a winner, a big winner, making profits hand over fist, spending even less on the product he was selling to his customers than ever.
The lion lays down with the mice: Eric Lindros once defined himself by his ability to dictate what terms he would play under, notes Steve Simmons at Slam! Sports. Now, the brittle aging superstar that never was will have to go begging for someone to hire him next season -- if he's able to play at all. So much for being a lion for a day -- a career is made up of more than just a day.
Whoever hires Ray Shero as GM I think is going to getting a prize. Boston is talking about it and so is Pittsburgh. I always felt that his father Fred got to the NHL a bit late and I wished he would have stuck it out longer with Rangers.
Jacobs and Wirtz are the dregs of NHL team owners. I don't know whether the story is true about Wirtz, but if it didn't happen, it might have. His executives presented him with a detailed five-year plan on what they intended to do to build a cup winner. At the end of the presentation Wirtz looked a them quizzically and said, "But we are not here to win a cup, we are here to make a profit."
Posted by: ivrydov | May 18, 2006 at 04:56 PM