Dave’s Dis N’ Dat On A Friday! Starting With Blades Staying Put!

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Here are some random thoughts from the week that was in the world of sports..

We’ll start off with the Saskatoon Blades who announced a new radio partnership with the Saskatoon Media group this morning. That means that the Blades radio home will remain on 92-9 The Bull with Les Lazaruk calling the play through the 2017-2018 season.

More from the WHL, and at the news conference to announce the sale of the Regina Pats did outgoing owner Russ Parker take a shot at the Blades? He said, ““The things in Saskatoon haven’t gone as well as the governors were led to believe.” Now there was no clarification as to whether or not he was referring to the teams on ice or off ice performance. It would be very interesting to hear what he actually meant by the comment.

Staying with hockey and there seems to be outrage around the NHL over the 7-game suspension handed to Matt Cooke. The Minnesota Wild forward is a repeat offender of many vicious hits and his latest on young defenceman Tyson Barrie of the Colorado Avalanche. The knee in question may very well be career altering for the d-man. I’ll say that I agree that the suspension was too lenient but I will caution to act as judge and jury as we were not privy to Cooke’s side of the story, which may have been an interesting argument to hear.

More hockey and Hockey Night In Canada host Ron MacLean came under fire this week when he stated that a French-Canadian referee should not have been assigned to work game four of the Montreal-Tampa Bay series after another Quebec born official made a controversial call in game two. Unfortunately the focus of his comments was that he said French which always stirs up a hornets nest in our country. What he should have said was regionally neutral. I do not buy into any conspiracy theory nor do I think any hockey official has any bias at any time. However, the optics didn’t look good and the NHL should know better than to put their officials in that position.

One last hockey thought and so you want the American Hockey League to come to Saskatoon? Are you ready to pay for it? To leave Abbotsford, the money losing , top affiliate of the Calgary Flames, Heat will be paid $5.5-million from the city of Abbotsford. Total cost to the tax payers for having the privilege of a pro hockey team will be close to $12-million, which doesn’t include the infrastructure for the rink!

In football the Saskatchewan Roughriders were fined almost $18,000 for exceeding the CFL salary cap by the same amount. First of I would like to show my admiration for General Manager Brendan Taman taking responsibility for going over the cap. Additionally, I think he truly felt some remorse for exceeding the league’s $4.4-million cap. However, I had an outstanding conversation with a high ranking football operations official and I asked him if the football ops department would be upset with team’s focusing on players achieving individual goals for personal financial gains in the form of bonuses. He simply put if that’s what you are worried about in terms of staying under the cap you have some big problems. Of course, those incentives in part were responsible for the Riders going over the cap.

Staying with the news of the cap overage and the Edmonton Sun’s Terry Jones had the best comment that I read on twitter, “Punishment for going over salary cap in CFL should be a schedule full of Thursday night games. With 8 p.m. starts. And opening week bye.” He of course is referring to the Edmonton Eskimos schedule of years past.

One more from the CFL and for those fans that are calling for the players to get revenue sharing included in a new collective bargaining agreement I say be careful what you ask for. The players are seemingly asking for a share of the league’s revenue BEFORE expenses. This would be huge for the Saskatchewan Roughriders as it is very evident that through ticket and merchandise sales they are league leaders in revenue, therefore, any sharing would definitely sting them the most. So be careful what you ask for!

To baseball and what was Michael Pineda thinking. The kid was caught using pine tar on the mound for a second time this season. This time he puts it on his neck! Like come on, I know you are getting shelled but that is ridiculous! It does, however, point to the stress that players are under to perform and maybe even sheds light on the psyche of athletes that cave into using performance enhancing drugs.

Lastly, is the baseball season over in Toronto? It definitely could be. After a hot and cold start the Jays have had a pair of season defining games the last two nights. Wednesday night the Jays blew a 6 run lead to fellow A-L East foes, Baltimore. Then last night, leading 3-2 after six innings the Jays went on to blow a quality start from a young pitcher and found themselves dropping another game to the O’s. Contenders don’t do that and it’s time to figure out what ails the club, perhaps sta

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