What a weekend in sports. It began with a farcical fight and ended with a farcical Grey Cup.
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The Winnipeg Blue Bombers are headed to the Choker’s Hall of Fame after three straight losses (the most recent to a backup quarterback) and Jake Paul, with any luck, will fade like your old jeans after making a bundle of dough fighting an old man.
In between, the Canadiens played one of their strongest games of the season, a 5-1 victory over the admittedly weary Columbus Blue Jackets in which almost everyone played a part, including the temporarily benched Juraj Slafkovsky.
That made it two out of three wins for the week, including a stirring afternoon win in Buffalo by a 7-5 score. The were also shut out by the suffocating Wild (are we sure Jacques Lemaire isn’t back coaching in Minnesota?), but they scored 12 goals in the other two games.
Don’t look now but the defence is meshing, coach Martin St. Louis is getting tougher, the goaltending has stabilized when Samuel Montembeault is in net and captain Nick Suzuki is producing at a point-a-game pace.
Oh, and there’s 20-year-old Lane Hutson popping up all over the place, showing that he can indeed perform in the NHL.
Best of all, there was a strong statement from GM Kent Hughes that Canadiens management is determined to stay the course with the rebuild, despite noisy yowls from the perpetual malcontents every time this very young club loses a game.
So what if the Canadiens emerge from this season with a top five lottery pick? They still need a centre-ice scoring machine and they weren’t going to win the Stanley Cup this season anyway, right?
A rebuild is never a linear progression. There are fits and starts, hills and valleys and lateral arabesques. The point is to have a plan and stick to it, not to throw it out the window the first time you hit a speed bump. That, boys and girls, is the one sure road to permanent mediocrity.
And down goes Nurse: The Ryan Reaves hit on Darnell Nurse had it all. Journeyman thug vs. an upper echelon defenceman. Serial offender driving straight up to the head. Nurse down for the count and out who knows how long.
Every time there’s an ugly hit like the one Reaves laid on Nurse, the same issue is raised: Why not suspend the offender until his victim is able to play? As Luke Fox pointed out on Sportsnet, Tanner Jeannot returned to the ice after a three-game suspension and scored a goal for the L.A. Kings while Canucks star Brock Boeser was still out following Jeannot’s dangerous head shot.
If Nurse can’t play until January, shouldn’t Reaves be suspended at least as long? If you put aside all the “he shoulda kept his head up” bull that accompanies such a hit, suspending a player until his victim can play makes superficial sense but it’s unworkable.
With suspensions having little to no effect on clowns like Reaves, it’s obvious they need to be stepped up dramatically. Reaves didn’t even get an in-person hearing from the NHL’s Department of Player Safety, which would have made it possible to suspend him for 10 games.
When are suspensions long enough? When they deter goons like Reaves. Right now, they aren’t even close.
And the record will belong to: With a hat trick Sunday against the Knights, Alex Ovechkin is homing in on Wayne Gretzky’s career NHL goal-scoring record and with 29 goals to go, he’s likely to break it this season.
Ironically, Gretzky worships Donald Trump while Ovechkin reveres Trump’s boss — Vladimir Putin. Seems appropriate.
Putting the “oops” in Big O: The Tampa Bay Rays, driven out of their home in St. Petersburg by the damage done to Tropicana Field by the ravages of Hurricane Milton, will play their home games next season at the Yankees spring training ballpark nearby.
The Rays wanted to stay close to home, but any possibility they might have been tempted by the significantly larger Olympic Stadium vanished when Emperor Lego decreed that the Big O will be undergoing renovations to install a new roof, at a cost to the beleaguered taxpayers of $870 million.
Meanwhile, plans for a new Rays ballpark in St. Petersburg have hit some choppy waters with newly elected county commissioners opposing the project, reopening the possibility that the Tampa franchise may have to relocate permanently — if Montreal could show off its potential.
Heroes: Shea Weber, Nick Suzuki, Jake Evans, Cole Caufield, Samuel Montembeault, Arber Xhekaj, Mike Matheson, Nick Arbuckle, Marta, Ivanie Blondin, Deanna Stellato-Dudek, Maxime Deschamps, Junior Hoilett, Josh Allen, Kent Hughes &&&& last but not least, Martin St. Louis.
Zeros: Ryan Reaves, Tanner Jeannot, the Department of Player Safety, John Herdman, Bev Priestman, Zach Collaros, Max Domi, Wayne Gretzky, Aaron Rodgers, Jake Paul, Mike Tyson, LaMelo Ball, Rodrigo Bentancur, Bud Selig Jr., Claude Brochu, David Samson &&&& last but not least, Jeffrey Loria.
Now and forever.
A bit of housekeeping: I am migrating from Twitter to Bluesky. I will post links to the column on Twitter for now but otherwise I can be found here instead.