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Of note: if JF Jacques starts the season with eight pointless games, he becomes the record holder for longest forward career with one point. One point in his first five games or worse and he achieves the record for longest forward career with two points.

What’s this? Why it’s a story from Dan Barnes about how Jacques has been pencilled in on the first line. I lived in Ontario for much of Quinn’s reign and there was a sort of constant story about how the Leafs needed a first line winger to play with Sundin. I think, at this point, it’s fair to start wondering whether Quinn just likes to have a guy on the first line who probably doesn’t belong there. The outlook for this season continues to be murky.

From Principe:

It was an unseasonably warm day on Wednesday in Edmonton as the temperature hit 34 degrees. That might have caused the problem but the cure for what ailed him was immediate treatment when he left the game.

“I just went in after the second and they hooked me up to an IV and I felt much better. I’m not worried about it because it has happened before.”

Khabibulin did say it occurred once or twice in last year’s run to the conference finals on the part of his old team, the Chicago Blackhawks.

Pat Quinn adds the following:

The issue that Khabibulin has with retaining fluids was news to Pat Quinn.

“We didn’t realize that he’s had this problem before,” said the head coach. “Sometimes the mental pace of the game along with physical pace can catch up to someone.”

Of course the Oilers didn’t know this. “Health issues” are not at all something you’d check out before committing $15MM over four years to someone.

CBC’s asked me to participate in a discussion about how things look for the 2009-10 Oilers. Past attempts to expose my particular brand disgruntlement about the Oilers to a broader audience have gone poorly (see my blog at The Score); tune in for the train wreck or, you know, if you have a question you’d care to pose so as not to have a train wreck, do that instead.

Update: I think that well. My favourite bit:

[Comment From Timmy]
Hi my name is Timmy and I am 5 years old. Me and my daddy love the Oilers and we want them to win the Stanley Cup!

Timmy has excellent spelling and grammar for a five year old.

[Comment From Mike W]As an Oilers fan, Timmy may have a lifetime of pain ahead of him…

Tyler Dellow: Thank God you’ve got 75 years to go or so Timmy. You just might see it.

Looking around to see what’s shaking with old friend Raffi Torres, I came across this fascinating little anecdote:

[Delaney] Collins has seven goals and 30 assists for Canada. She was an alternate defenceman on the 2006 Olympic team and feels it was the eight weeks she was out with that torn muscle that cost her a spot on the team.

She received sage advice from Canadian teammate Jennifer Botterill, who suffered her own major concussion in 2004. During a summer scrimmage against pro men’s players, she collided with Raffi Torres, who currently plays for the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets.

Botterill, from Winnipeg, spoke about her experience at a concussion seminar in London, Ont., earlier this year.

“It can be a very frustrating injury because you have to show a lot of patience,” Botterill explained. “It’s unlike other injuries where you can do active recovery and things to help. With your brain, you just have to let it rest.

I did not know that Jennifer Botterill belonged on the list with Ladislav Smid, Milan Michalek and Jeremy Williams.

Raffi, for those who are curious, apparently looks like he’ll be playing on the Jackets’ “checking” line, with Sammy Pahlsson and a player to be named later. He fit in nicely with Stoll and Pisani during the Stanley Cup run; I’d expect him to prove to be a useful piece of the puzzle for the Jackets during the coming season, although looking over the numbers, I see that he doesn’t exactly have a lengthy track record of doing well against elite competition. He might be an odd fit with Pahlsson, whose line will presumably see the toughest.

The federal government is advertising this Home Renovation Tax Credit that’s available to people who own homes. I’m not at that stage of my life yet - I got dishes as a thirtieth birthday present from someone and it was an entirely sensible gift - but there’s a bit about the advertising that kills me. Here’s a screen capture, taken from the website - if your computer screen is the same size as mine, this is what you’ll see (I tried popping out the ad to watch it full screen but that feature doesn’t seem to work):

You might notice some white fuzziness against the white snow background there. If you’re curious, what it says is: “The Home Renovation Tax Credit is subject to Parliamentary approval.” Or, put another way, “This doesn’t exist yet. There’s no guarantee that it ever will.” The Tories are apparently spending $34MM advertising this tax credit that isn’t even a law yet. If the government had fallen last week, it might never have become law.

As bad as spending $34MM advertising this is (that would cover something like 1/3 of the annual cost of my Stanley Cup Action Plan, which will be revealed in due course), as questionable as the whole thing seems to me generally, the fact that they’re selling it with small print, which seems to me to be precisely the sort of thing the government shouldn’t do when it’s communicating with you really does seem like the worst part of all. Governments are not profit making entities (particularly not Conservative ones in Canada) - why would they be encouraging people to take advantage of something and then providing small print warnings that the thing they want people to take advantage of might not come to pass?

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Looking for an interesting measure of how dysfunctional Oilers management is? If Jordan Eberle plays ten or more games with the Oilers this year, they haven’t learned anything from the fact that they’re about to be paying Gagner $3MM+.

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Six years, four teams and one celebrity girlfriend later, the longest holdout in NHL history has drawn to a close. Mike Comrie and Kevin Lowe both did interviews after the signing talking about letting bygones be bygones. I thought Comrie did a better job of selling his love for Big Brother - Lowe still seems to be struggling with thoughts that maybe the war with Eurasia isn’t going so well.

Bizarre psycho-dramas aside though, it’s an interesting move and one that I sort of grudgingly support. The fact of the matter is, for $1.25MM, the guy costs basically next to nothing. If he did nothing more than sit across from Robert Nilsson and some of the other youngsters as a gruesome warning of what the future might hold although, in truth, Nilsson would probably be lucky to end up having Comrie’s career.

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At the 2:10 mark.

So, if you’re scoring as home, as late as June 20, 2009, the Oilers didn’t know what Brule is publicly saying now. I’m pretty sure that their confusion ran deeper into the summer but looking for posts in the OilersNation archives is impossible, so I’ll pass but one wonders whether any decisions were made on the understanding that Brule could be sent down. It’s a small thing, but it’s relatively easy to figure out, and if they really didn’t understand this and he really is waiver eligible (I’m still holding out hope that there’s some sort of confusion somewhere, because it makes them look so bad)…well, as I said the other day - maybe the losses should be pinned to a certain degree on managerial incompetence.

Update: Jason Gregor reports that the Oilers have conceded that Brule needs to clear waivers.

I was talking to a friend last night who was trying to convince me that yoga is a better workout for weight loss purposes than something like cycling. I had serious doubts and had her bargained down to something like “Yoga results in a lengthening of muscles resulting in a leaner appearance” which still seems crazy to me but was an improvement. Then I see this in the newspaper:

…the Habs should be able to add some muscle to the lineup with a healthier, lighter version of Georges Laraque, who reported Saturday that the back issues that limited him to 33 games last year were a thing of the past.

A summer of daily yoga sessions and a switch to a vegan diet helped him shed 20 pounds to get down to 245, which he feels will help his back remain pain-free throughout the season.

I miss Georges and the goofy annual training camp stories about how he’s going to score twenty goals or something like that. This year, he’s apparently not going to talk to the media as much. Definitely in my top three or four players to come out of the late 90’s Oilers.

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I’ve got a ton of different posts in the hopper that I’m going to try to pump out in the next few days. This one came about because of Pat LaForge’s comments in the Journal the other day, whining that the Oilers lost a bunch of money last year. There are a million things wrong with his complaints but one of the major factors is that the Oilers do a pretty terrible job as far as spending their money on players goes.

There was a fellow by the name of Doug Pappas who wrote for Baseball Prospectus before he passed away in 2004. He came up with a measure that he called Marginal Payroll/Marginal Wins that he used to measure how efficiently a front office spent its payroll. You should read the entire piece but the key is this:

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Lisa: Remember, it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Homer (internal monologue): What does that mean? Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid.
Homer: Takes one to know one.
Homer (internal monologue): Swish!

Brian Burke is talking some more about RFA offer sheets in light of rumours that he’s interested in Phil Kessel. Clearly, he overplayed his hand in 2006, trying to spin his outrage at having lost Dustin Penner to an offer sheet into some sort of principled position. Publicly, he had two objections to the whole thing: (a) the fact that Kevin Lowe didn’t kiss his ring before making the offer sheet and (b) the argument that Kevin Lowe somehow destroyed the idea of the second contract, where GM’s had the chance to get players signed cheaply who didn’t have an arbitration rights.

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