Another tough loss for the Skins. The decisive factor was not forcing Favre into any mistakes. The guy is the all-time leader in INTs, and we couldn't even get him to toss one pass off of Rodger's stone hands. In a year when even going to the Meadowlands next week is winnable, we can safely say that the door to the playoffs is not shut, but it is barely cracked. Shanahan in his press conference even alluded to the rebuilding mentality in his Monday press conference. When asked why James Davis got so may carries when Keiland Williams has been playing well the past few weeks, his reasoning was that he wanted to "get some looks" at the guy. Not "he put us in position to win" or Williams' "cardio-vascular was struggling," but for looks. As in, we are trying to decide who to keep around next year.
Rebuilding is fine, the Skins haven't had a rebuilding year year since Snyder took over. Lets just call it what it is, and not try to push up sales in a stadium that everyone with a brain knows hasn't been sold out in years. Even I started to get my hopes up and led to my head almost exploding after the St. Louis game. I think we are in a position to do rebuild with our coaching staff, who needs to be around here for another five years. Mike Shanahan has been great, and will end up netting us 3 or 4 more wins than last year with a brutal schedule. You can't tell me that the Cowboys would not be in playoff contention if Shanahan had been coaching them this season. The 3-4 isn't built overnight, and while it is discouraging to not produce turnovers against Favre as well as letting a backup RB run right over us after we took out another team's star again is frustrating, but I'll take it. The only real discouraging part of Sunday's game was Kyle Shanahan. In the first drive of the game the offense looked the best it had all year, driving 88 yards down the field and looking like it was going to dominate the game. The key reason for this was they were consistently running a two tight end formation with Cooley and Davis. Then we never saw them on the field together for the rest of the game. I am no expert, but did K. Shanahan run out of plays from that formation, and why have we not been using that formation all year like I have repeatedly asked? I guess we will just have to wait and see. I know we have rattled off 5 straight wins to get to the playoffs before, but that was under drastically different circumstances.
So lets switch over to the early NHL season for a brief moment. Surely we won't pick up where we left off, with the xenophobic NHL and its constituents bashing the Russian-led Caps team? After all, the Canadians finally have a player they can tout on par with OV in Stamkos, so their fear of an all-encompassing Russian encroachment on the real talent in the NHL must have subsided right? Enter Mike Milbury, yes the same guy who referred to the Russian team as Eurotrash, the same guy who has continually tried to compare Crosby to OV despite what people who know hockey think, the guy with a clear chip on his shoulder for the team that he like to call the "Crapitals." This guy is a proven idiot. If you aren't a huge hockey fan, you should know that he single-handedly destroyed the entire New York Islander's franchise by trading away guys like Chara, Kasparaitas, Luongo, Jokinen, and Spezza, and in turn signing guys like Alexei Yashin and skipping over guys like Heatley and Gaborik in the draft. He is the hockey equivalent of Matt Millen, but instead of putting together a hall of fame career while playing, he is best known for beating up a fan with a shoe.
So naturally this guy has something stupid to add over the incident over a week ago where OV and Semin may or may not have been laughing when having a post-game conversation with the Devil's Kovalchuk. I paid about as much attention to this story as I did the Haynesworth conditioning drama earlier in the Skins year. Its a stupid story trumpeted by the media that is increasingly unable to do the very basics of their job. (Why was Japer's Rink the only place to hear that there were any rumblings over the Fleischmann-Hannan trade.?) But Milburey's comments are just insulting. Anyone that has bothered to watch OV over the course of his career knows that he makes everyone around him better. Japer's Rink again puts up a great statistical defense for that fact so I won't have to. Furthermore, if Sid is so great no matter who is around him then why do the Pens look for new wingers every year for Crosby, but Boudreau can run different lines with OV every night and the Caps are still the top team in the league? Lets get real.
Milbury compares OV to Ochocinco. If anything Crosby is a little closer to the guy due to their obsessions with their numbers. Chad legally changed his name to correspond with his number, while Sid wears 87 because he was born on 8/7/87. Both of their driver licenses mention their numbers, isn't that sweet? In my last post I talked about the bogus concept of racial coding. Milbury doesn't believe in it either, he prefers to go straight into sharing his racist views. We already have the "Eurotrash" comment and as he goes on to compare Crosby to Manning or Brady, and OV to Chad Ochocinco, you can clearly see the disparity that he is trying to make. OV, much like Ochocinco is different, either in color or nationality, than all of the other more "mainstream" and "more marketable" stars that happen to be white or Canadian, as opposed to black or Russian. The only reason Milbury is still employed is because his bigoted, xenophobic views are embraced by a NHL that is imbedded in a Canadian culture that has had not one, but two teams named the Swastikas as I showed in an earlier post.
The continuous comparisons of OV to Crosby make my blood boil. The whole argument of who has won a Cup is faulty, based on the fact that neither guy has won a Cup yet; Crosby was given one. (If you are new to this blog, go back about a year to see the numerous ways it was given to the Pens.) So to base who is better off of a faux Cup is simply circular logic. As if taking away from OV to give to Crosby wasn't enough, they pile on in other ways as well. After several bad calls against OV, the league went on a deliberate tear to besmirch OV as a dirty player, while those of us in DC have known who the dirty "superstar" really is. The problem is the entire NHL is entrenched in circular logic, where you can't take action against a player's cheap shots if you don't start by calling at least one of them. From starting a tug-of-war match with an unprepared player off the faceoff earlier in the year so Pens fans can cite the kid as "tough," to repeated cross-checks, to previous slew-footing, to being caught on tape literally punching Valabak in the groin from behind, Crosby has been a cheap-shot crybaby from day one. (The punch to the groin is the most infuriatiing, Crosby did not even get a fighting major for those low blows.) He continued to cheap-shot without repercussions last night, slew-footing Callahan of the Rangers last night. Sure a penalty was called; on Callahan for interference. Slew-foots are usually given a five minute major and an automatic suspension to prevent the usual injuries that occur because of them; namely concussions and cracked tailbones. But not for the Canadian savior, if he does it you need to move out of his way.
These are the types of calls that have gone against the Caps since this nobody 87 has entered the league and played against us. The streak of penalties going against the Caps in the Pens series still stands at 15 straight games. Crosby is the guy who needs to be suspended, but never is because he has "no history" of playing dirty. He has never been called for any of these cheap shots, so how about we start calling penalties on the Canadian darling every once in a while. For the racist xenophobes like Milbury, they now have Stamkos to trumpet as the Canadian savior to the Russian Satan that is OV. Leave Crosby to rot on the pile of above-average players who play dirty with Sean Avery and Matt Barnaby, and stop comparing the low-life to OV. If you let OV play just the way he has on the ice, without any ref and league interference, he has always done just fine. I could care less who he is friends with off the ice, as long as they are more reputable than low-lifes like Milbury and Crosby.
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