Stackhouse’s 10 Weekend Thoughts

1 – CFL SALARY CAP – The CFL salary cap has increased by 10% for the upcoming season but like just about all news in the CFL, it doesn’t come without some controversy, confusion, and further affirmation this is a minor league. Things are going so well that team payrolls are allowed to jump from the expected $5.65-million figure to $6.06-million. However, the cap really doesn’t mean much when you can go to the ceiling and then funnel a bunch more into the ‘marketing’ fund to help pay your quarterback. It also doesn’t help when you don’t enforce your free agency timeframe and teams/players end up agreeing to contracts before the signing period begins and, therefore, operating under the perception of what the cap will be and not what it actually is.  Attendance is down in just about every market yet revenue is way up and the league has decided because of this they need a new Commissioner.  Not much of this makes sense but it wouldn’t be the CFL if it did. As long as nobody is lying, it reinforces my suggestion that bums in the seats don’t matter one iota when it comes to making money in pro sports.

2 – NHL SALARY CAP IMPLICATIONS FOR CANADA – The National Hockey League is set to increase its salary cap, sharply, over the next three years and in the event the Canadian dollar doesn’t rebound it’s going to decimate so-called small markets like Winnipeg and Ottawa, in particular, and probably Calgary and Edmonton as well unless we are the 51st state by then. At $113.5-million US, the figure translates to $160-million Cdn. Economics can be hard for some of you (especially liberals) so I will try to spell it out so that you can understand:  teams in Canada collect revenue in Canadian money but they pay out expenses in US funds so the conversion is significant. At the moment, the low-end cost of a luxury suite in Winnipeg is $5000 per game.  That converts to about $3490 US. By contrast, the Colorado Avalanche charges $5000 US. In Ottawa, suites start at $4062Cdn or $2830US. It’s not enough and with economic times being what they are in this country because nobody here seems to care if they have money or not; it’s not hard to envision a time within the next five years where Canadian teams are leaving unless there is no such thing as Canada. In Pittsburgh, luxury suites are as low as $6000 and in Seattle you can’t get one for under $10,000. In an established market like Boston, the price is $12,600 US ($18,000Cdn). They’ll have to be a lot more in places like Winnipeg and Ottawa and I guess we will see if Canadians can continue to afford them.

3 – WINNIPEG NO TRADE LIST – A recent survey of NHL players revealed Winnipeg to be the one city where players are most likely to list as their top no-trade location if given an option. Meanwhile, the Jets are on top of the entire league with 82 points as we hit the 4 Nations Cup break. It just goes to show how much the player demographic has changed over the years. Players would rather lose than go to Winnipeg. I get that Winnipeg has a bad reputation on a few fronts, but it’s no more cold than Edmonton or Minneapolis nor is it any more violent and unsafe than just about everywhere else.  I mean you hear horror stories about Detroit and Chicago when it comes to street gangs and murders. Yet Winnipeg has the worst perception. If I was a player and was offered this question, I’d answer Seattle hands down.

4 – NHL VIDEO REVIEWS – As I watched the Boston-Vegas game on Saturday afternoon I saw two goals scored, one by Boston and one by Vegas that went to video review.  Both were called back, including one scored by Vegas forward Mark Stone (who fans tell me isn’t a dirty player) for throwing an elbow to Jeremy Swayman’s head. I don’t understand how these video challenges work. You are taking an opinion infraction and then kicking it upstairs for another opinion. I thought video reviews were for correcting calls whereby interpretations aren’t needed (offside, did the puck go over the line, etc). Goaltender interference is a call that is always a matter of opinion. But, also, if it’s goaltender interference isn’t that a penalty? Apparently not.  They just wipe out the goal because it’s goaltender interference which isn’t bad enough to be a penalty but bad enough to call off a goal. Makes no sense to me. And, if you can review goaltender interference, why can’t you review other potential penalties where a goal was scored during the play but maybe something was done that prevented a player from preventing it? In a lot of respects, the NHL isn’t any better than the CFL but they seem to get away with it more than the CFL as far as criticism is concerned.

5 – MORE JUNIOR ‘A’ PLAYER MOVEMENT – Usually after January 10th, you see no player movement at all in junior hockey but the times are a’ changing very quickly and the Yorkton Terriers are the latest SJHL team to see their playoff fortunes take a hit as leading scorer Keenan Ingram left for the BCHL and another top line forward, Dustin Renas, also walked out last week and headed for the BCHL. There is no real recourse for the Terriers as they are handcuffed to follow Hockey Canada rules so it’s not like they can just go and cherry pick someone off another roster somewhere.  What’s puzzling to me is that the BCHL gets to do their own thing without having to worry about Hockey Canada and yet none of their players, coaches, or staff are banned from Hockey Canada sanctioned leagues. If a player goes to the BCHL and then changes his mind and wants to return to the SJHL he can do so despite taking part in unsanctioned hockey. Weyburn, for instance, turned their entire year around by welcoming back a pair of players from the BCHL. The same holds true for the coaches, managers, trainers, and scouts who face no disciplinary action for being in an unsanctioned league should they want to return to the MJHL, SJHL, or AJHL. If it’s going to continue to be the way that it is, the SJHL (and other Junior A leagues) needs to seriously look at going back to having import rules and either drop the 20-year-old rule completely or allow for many more of them to play than they do currently, which is eight.  I’d like to see it increase to twelve since it’s now impossible to build or construct teams beyond a one-year window. But, even these rules wouldn’t prevent Yorkton from losing Renas, who’s from Saskatoon, or Melville losing Caden Drury like they did in December (he’s from Carrot River). But, it would slow it down. A quick count in the MJHL, AJHL, and BCHL shows 40 players with Saskatchewan birth certificates in those leagues.  Even if ¾ of them aren’t impact players, it still makes sense to me to roster those guys on the bottom end of the roster as opposed to using Americans and players from other provinces. The other thing that has long puzzled me is why do leagues like the MJHL and SJHL bend over backwards to accommodate the NCAA scouts when you have scouts talking to players after games and telling them point blank to head to another league if they want to put the finishing touches on the potential of landing a scholarship.

6 – UFC 312 – Dricus DuPlessis defended his UFC Middleweight title with a unanimous decision over Sean Strickland last night at UFC312. It’s the second time DuPlessis has beaten Strickland so we probably aren’t going to hear from Strickland again anytime soon.  UFC313 features Light Heavyweight Champion Alex Pereira against Russian and top contender Magomed Ankalaev. I wonder if DuPlessis will consider moving up a weight class (he looked pretty big last night) to battle Pereira in the near future. Overall, DuPlessis has won his last nine fights. Earlier in the card, heavyweight Tallison Teixeira is starting to make a name for himself. He delivered a devastating forearm right between the eyes of Justin Tafa thirty seconds into the fight to win his eighth straight, seven of which have ended with first round knockouts.  

7 – UMPIRE FIRED – Another week, another sports gambling story. Major League Baseball has upheld the termination of umpire ‘Perfect’ Pat Hoberg, who was found to have been sharing an account with someone who placed 141 individual bets on baseball over a two-year span between 2021 and 2023. Nineteen of those bets were placed from electronic devices not belonging to Hoberg but were made from inside Hoberg’s home.  Overall, the account wagered over $700,000 and lost about $75,000. Now, Hoberg (who ranked as one of the top strike callers in the game) has also lost his job. Meanwhile, Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter was sentenced to five years in jail this week for stealing $17-million from the baseball star. It’s presumed most or all of that money went to pay off gambling debts.

8 – DONCIC TRADE – Much has been made about the lopsided and nonsensical Luka Doncic trade this week.  On Jason Whitlock’s podcast there was a discussion that would seem to make a lot of sense to me but there is no way to prove what the intent truly is. The speculation on Whitlock’s podcast is that the new owners of the Dallas Mavericks want to build a mega casino attached to a new arena for the Mavericks to play out of but Texas isn’t a gambling friendly state. To try and leverage the state, the owners need to threaten that the Mavericks will relocate to Vegas; however that threat is empty when you factor in the size of the market plus the fact the Mavericks are a healthy franchise. If the new owners can rip the team apart, make the fans mad, and sink them to the bottom of the standings, they’d have more leverage to threaten a move. The Doncic trade would be the first step in this process. I guess we will see come 2027 (next time they get to make their casino pitch to the politicians) just where the Mavericks are in the standings and fan support.  The player the Mavs got for Doncic, Anthony Davis, made his debut on Saturday night and left with an injury.

9 – NO MORE TRANS ATHLETES IN THE US – Heads are exploding in Canada after Donald Trump signed an Executive Order to ban trans-women from competing in women’s sports. What people in Canada fail to realize is that just because things are going back to normal in the US, doesn’t mean we will do that here. It’s still okay for a man who claims to be a woman to punch the daylights out of a real woman in competitive boxing, for example, and there’s no evidence to suggest that’s changing anytime soon and the mere suggestion of such by a Canadian Conservative politician is akin to digging a political grave. We’ve always been very slow to respond to changes that resemble normalcy and we are, by nature, a far more liberal country anyway. My Conservative friends are starting to learn this as polls show the big lead the Cons once had is evaporating. My guess is that lead will be totally gone in eight months and the Liberals will win again. The left almost always never loses in Canada.

10 – ANTHEMS – The Canadian anthem is cheered during NHL games in the US, while the American anthem is booed in Canada. Our true colors are being revealed.  You can try to justify and spin this however you want to make yourself feel like a good person if you are on the side of booing the American anthem but there is no defense of it. I will use myself as an example. My national pride has been, pretty much, destroyed over the last ten years but I’d never boo the anthem as a form of protest. Call me old school but if the anthems of the countries of teams participating in the sporting event I’m watching are going to be played, I am going to show respect by standing at attention for it. End of story. 

(Mike Stackhouse is a freelance writer/broadcaster)