Commentary: The Good, The Great & The Ugly
(Listen daily for the RP Commentary on All New Hits 98 & LTD Radio)
It’s Tuesday and time for the Good, the Great & the Ugly! Where to begin?
First the good: For a lot junior hockey fans, once their team bows out, they check out. Not me. The WHL playoffs – the road to the Memorial Cup – have been fun to watch and the Prince Albert Raiders have advancd to the league championship against the Everett Silvertips. These two markets couldn’t be any different; one is an iconic junior hockey town known as the Gateway to the North while the other is a suburb of Seattle and still regarded as a “new” team by Dub standards.
Let the best team win, but I’ll be cheering for the Raiders, the first team I was ever the voice of.
Next the great: Gotta say it’s the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I predicted a Carolina/Winnipeg Stanley Cup Final and while the Jets let us down on that one (missing the playoffs), the Hurricanes may make half that prediction come true. They’re 6-0 in the playoffs after a 3-2 OT win over Philadelphia on Monday, giving them a 2-0 series lead over the Flyers.
Meanwhile the Vegas Golden Knights are just picking up steam. I stayed up to watch the VGK dominate the Anaheim Ducks in Game 1 of that second round series last night. It feels like the Knights are going to have an easier time with the Ducks than they did with the Mammoth and are on a collision course with Colorado for the Western Conference Final. One thing they don’t say about hockey is “the first round is the easiest to win”. Sometimes that’s true in football.
And finally the ugly: Oh boy. How about the latest in Leafland? Our old pal Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun absolutely eviscorated new GM John Chayka at his introductory news conference, saying hockey people are calling him a “con artist” and a “salesman”.
To be honest, I’d heard the same thing but didn’t have the guts to say it. And it feels like Toronto’s up a creek without a paddle and this new guy hasn’t even GM’ed a day.
Simmons is the Last of the Mohicans, keeping teams honest and accountable.
We’ll miss him when guys like that are all gone.
That’s today’s Rod Pedersen Commentary.
(Sign Up For the Rod Squad Newsletter for insider columns, Hot Takes, contests & more!)
