Yeah, I know I’m commenting on stuff from last week still. But, I mean, I just have this one and then one more about the Olympics and then I’m done with all that, so I’d appreciate it if we could just move along.
Anyways, in a shocking and unprecedented showing of provincial unity, Edmonton and Calgary banded together to earn the right to host the 2012 World Junior Hockey Championships.
And while the only potential hiccup in this plan (where to host the gold medal game) is already settled (Calgary, which makes perfect sense because they have the better arena), and the sting of that is offset for Edmontonians by giving them the Canada pool games, I still have two mini-beefs with this.
The first is that what happens if Edmonton has a new, 20 000-seat downtown arena by January ‘12? I know that’s kind of short to get it done (but not /that/ short), but there really should be a contingency in place should this happen (where the schedules essentially flip).
The second is that while giving the finals to the city with the biggest arena makes so much sense and I’m totally for it, they could have found a more amusing way to decide that. Keep in mind that it’s not like the schedules need to be set tomorrow for this thing, and that even if tickets don’t go on sale until summer ‘11, they’d still sell out in record time, and hotels would still get booked and all that stuff would be done with relative ease.
Anyways, with that in mind, I wish that they’d done something like “Best record in 2010/11 between the Oilers and Flames gets the final” or the same thing with the Hitmen and Oil Kings, or even some mutant hybrid of the two (”Best City Record”). Of course, there all other things you could do as well, like mae it cumulative instead of just for the one season or whatever.
Of course, I like novelty, so I like the idea of a novelty exhibition series between the Flames and Oilers, best-of-three, with the winner deciding who gets the medal round: one game in Edmonton, one in Calgary and one in Red Deer. Or, if the players won’t buy into that, what about a team skills competition to determine the winner? Or an oldtimers’ game between the Oilers legends and the Flames legends?
I think that last one is my favourite, especially with the added revenue a Battle of Alberta Classic would drag in, but mainly because it would give us another chance to see Dave Hunter on skates—that guy’s reached the point in his retirement where he looks like he ate post-retirement Grant Fuhr. The last time I saw he, he was playing in a charity ringette game at the U of A and basically trying to outfat everyone on the ice (which is a difficult task when Bob Stauffer is on your line) and grope presumably sexy coeds (the full facemasks made it hard to tell).
