THINKS THE EAGLES STOLE ONE
I know I'm still catching up with things after being out of town, and this is old news here, but THE FLYERS SIGNED RAY EMERY??
That is apparently the case. I had to make sure, so I went over to the site of team spokesman Tim Panaccio and, yep, he had it, too. Said the "dust had settled after another sandstorm in Flyerdom," which threw me off a little. I mean, was it dust, or was it sand?
Either way, it was Ray Emery, the new goaltender, by way of Ottawa, by way of Russia, by way of Wackoville. With both Marty Biron and Antero Niittymaki becoming free agents on July 1, I guess the Flyers had to do something -- re-signing Biron would have been my preference -- and, oh yes, they did something.
It's awful to be accused of second-guessing a team, waiting for the outcome to decide if the organization was right or wrong in making a move. So, let's get the first guess out of the way now. This is going to be an utter disaster. Guys don't change at 26. If they miss practices, show up late all the time, get into automobile accidents, become a joke in their own locker rooms in one place, it's going to happen in the next place as well.
This is not Flyers Behavior. Whatever else this team is, the history here is it is as important to be a good teammate as it is to be a good hockey player. For GM Paul Holmgren, a man who tolerates no nonsense, to take this chance is utterly out of character.
And, by the way, it is missing the most vital point about the Flyers. The goaltending wasn't the problem. The problem was that the core of young players on the team who think they can ramp up their intensity and level of play when it is neeeded. Everything's just fine. We're just fine. Don't worry about us. So they blow playoff home-ice advantage on the final day of the season -- at home, to the Rangers -- and then dead-ass through the opening game of the playoffs against the Penguins. Just fine. No problem. The Flyers gave up 18 goals in six games against Pittsburgh. Big deal.
But the goaltending is always the easy answer. Coaches love to make that the answer, because then it's not their fault. It isn't the scheme or the motivation or the execution. It's that lump between the pipes there. Just didn't rise to the occasion. In this case, that's crap. Biron was plenty good enough.
And his replacement is a guy who was late for practice because he was signing autographs at the scene of one of his many fender benders? The dude ate a cockroach off the floor on a bet. Cockroach.
It would be fair to say the players are unconvinced about the signing.
"We all know about Ray. I'm ready to leave that behind and move forward," Kimmo Timonen said.
"We need to give him a chance before we judge him," Danny Briere said.
And then we're going to hate him wicked. At least that's the prediction here. Emery went to Russia to play for a season while he cooled off after his nuclear meltdown in Ottawa. Walked out on the Moscow club in February because he thought they were screwing him on the exchange rate on his salary. Reportedly got into a shoving match with a trainer who was trying to make him wear a hat. Didn't say what kind of hat.
(Since this comes down to Emery and Biron, parenthetically, here's that fight between the two of them, back when Biron was with Buffalo and Emery made it to the game on time.)
OK, I think that's all, at least until the act really gets going and the Wachovia Center fans are booing and throwing things after Emery gives up a soft goal and stomps around, pointing his stick at the defensemen.
This will not end well. And, for God's sake, don't try to make him wear a hat.
All right, it's not really a contest. There aren't any prizes. We're in bankruptcy here, for God's sake. You think we're awash in prizes?
How about a free subscription? Fine. You got a computer, you already got a free subscription. Clever how we worked that out, wasn't it? Doesn't cost you a dime.
Not that it keeps us from poking good-natured fun at other businesses that are struggling a little bit. Like the Sixers, who keep going to the mailbox in the morning looking for those season-ticket renewals, opening it, looking in, closing it, coming back in five minutes, still nothing.
Sports teams are smarter than newspapers. They charge money for tickets -- similar to a subscription -- but when they let you see the content for free (or as free as those cable TV crooks allow), they get money from the cable crooks. We should look into that. If you get your internet from Verizon or AT&T or AOL or Father Comcast or whomever, those guys should give us money if they want their users to see newspaper content. Otherwise, they get GinzuKnives.com and SaveTheMacaroons.com and that's it. Take a memo on that. Get back to me.
The Sixers should have all this stuff really figured out. Comcast owns the team. Comcast owns the building. Comcast owns the cable company. They let Mr. Minority Owner Snider make some decisions while the Roberts family is buying and selling continents, but in that really big building they just built near City Hall, there really isn't a lot of talk about whether Kareem Rush was used properly last season. But even they know it ain't going well.
The problem is that you can't fool the people. (Well, perhaps the word forever needs to be appended to the end of that sentence). And you can't fool them in a recession, for sure. The Sixers have won one playoff series since the 2001 Finals. They have gone through six coaches in that time and just hired a seventh. People aren't that interested in a team that has no chance to win a championship -- even if the team plays hard and overachieves. People want stars. They want real excitement. They want to believe they are seeing something special before the lay out 75 bucks to endure ear-splitting music and tiresome one-on-one basketball. That's what the Cavs are selling in Cleveland, nothing of particular substance. But it is selling.
Next season, the Sixers will be selling the magical motion system of Mr. Eddie Jordan, who is a pretty good coach and a believer in the Princeton half-court offense. It will be an improvement for the Sixers, who didn't appear to have a half-court offense previously, and, if things go right, the team will play hard and overachieve and maybe people will start to drift back.
That hasn't happened yet, though -- open mailbox, peer in, close, repeat -- so the team is going to hold what it is calling a "brand re-launch" next Tuesday. The franchise has been here since 1963, so maybe it's time for a "brand re-launch," which is marketing talk for, "We need people to think we're different, because what we were before we couldn't sell with ice cream on top." The idea is there will be a lot of sparklers and confetti and drum-beating and, suddenly, You've Got Mail!
And you know what a new marketing campaign means, right? Yes, new slogan. That's the ticket. A new slogan. Those are always great. We have those here at the newspaper, too. I think our current one is, "Get a Computer. We Can't Stop You." My favorite from the past was, "The Inquirer. The Most Important 15 Minutes of Your Day." We probably paid a lot to have someone think up that one.
The Sixers' brain trust might be puzzling over the new slogan right now, or they farmed it out to some promotional consulting crooks or ad agency. It's got to be snappy. Has to scream new day to anyone who hears it. Must put them in a trance and make them write a check.
Hmmm. What can it be?
Sixers: We Give Teams Motion Sickness
No, that's awful. God, that's like one of our slogans.
Sixers: Legal Motion
Sixers: Sammy Looks Good On The Bench, Huh?
Sixers: Try To Keep Up
Sixers: Who In Hell Can Jason Kapono Guard?
Sixers: Jordan Rules (For Now)
Got nothing. Got a good one for the Sixers? Comment away. We'll select the best and make sure the Sixers get it before next Tuesday. A re-launch is a terrible thing to waste.
That's what the Eagles said on Friday after giving Donovan McNabb approximately a $6 million bump in pay over the next two seasons, taking his potential earnings through 2010 from the nice neighborhood of $19 million to the incrementally nicer neighborhood of about $25 million.
Hey, it's their money and they can spend it as they please, even if the raise comes after a brief offseason spell during which the front office grumbled in the background and talked tough about holding the line on players with multiple seasons remaining on their contracts.
Quarterbacks are different, though, and Donovan is different even by quarterback standards. He's a little goofy, talks in circles, pouts on occasion, all of that, but he still represents the shortest distance at his position for the Eagles to reach a Super Bowl. Coming off a season in which he remained healthy and just missed the first 4,000-yard season of his career -- would have had it except for that 30 minutes of rest in Baltimore -- they had no intention of replacing him. And, in order to make things smoother, they had to give some money so it could appear he won the battle of wills. Who says he can't win the big one?
So, McNabb gets to save face, the Eagles get a happy quarterback and there's not much to see here. Some players have leverage, some don't, and you can ask Sheldon Brown about that if you like.
But, returning to the original question, did McNabb "earn" the raise. The organization said on Friday that over the course of his contract McNabb's earnings, compared to other QBs, has slipped from the top of the list to somewhere around 10th on the list. The raise put him back among the top three or four best-paid quarterbacks in the league.
Last season, McNabb's passer rating was tied for 14th in the NFL. His completion percentage was 18th. His TD percentage was 12th. The average gain on his passes ranked 19th. He threw 11 interceptions, and it has been seven seasons since he threw more than that.
He did operate without a reliable running game for much of the season, and with an offensive line that held together but just barely. Given the number of balls he threw -- a career-high 571 -- his interception percentage was still good. He got the team to the NFC championship game, won it once, but couldn't win it again after the defense gave the game away. Pretty good effort.
But was it the performance of one of the best three or four quarterbacks in the league? The Eagles either think so, or have to say they think so as a price of doing business. It's their money, but it would be nice if you could trust their explanation for why they spent it.
Go away for one lousy week and all hell breaks loose without Post Patterns to keep things orderly around here.
When the staff and I returned -- leaving out the lesser details about that nasty hound dog from U.S. Customs at Philly Int'l that had an issue with one small item in one small piece of luggage -- it seems that it was a busy week here.
In no particular order, we learned that: the Sixers got a shooting guard, the Flyers got a goaltender, Donovan McNabb was paid $6 million for being benched in that second half in Baltimore, Brad Lidge went on the disabled list, and the entire field of journalism (such as it is) was rendered asunder by John Gonzalez and some fantasy league geek in Peoria.
Not wanting to waste a minute before diving back into the fray, Post Patterns went to the Phillies game in Citi Field on Thursday and found the entire baseball press corps (such as they are) still in lather-and-repeat mode about Gonzo's Inquirer column in which he downplayed internet rumors of PED use by Raul Ibanez by writing a big story about it.
I like John, I like Ibanez, I like the baseball writers and I had a fine time in Peoria once when the Sixers played an exhibition game there because they thought Hersey Hawkins would be a big draw at his former college arena. (Harold Katz had a lot of ideas like that, but that's a story for another day.)
But everyone is very upset about the whole thing, except perhaps the fantasy league guy who ended up on "Outside The Lines," when he'd never even been outside of Iowa before. (It's entirely possible I have the guy's location wrong, by the way. I know he's from the midwest, though. But, hey, it's a blog post. I'm just kind of winging it here.)
Ibanez was the most upset, and understandably so, taking his word for the fact that his prodigious production this season has been the result of innate talent and hard work. Gonzo was upset, too, although he got some ESPN face time as well -- which must have done wonders for their ratings.
As for the core issue, no one knows for sure, of course, but we live in an innocent-until-proven society, Ibanez has never tested positive for any prohibited substance, and there is some history to what he is doing. That was laid out nicely in respected KC writer Joe Posnanski's blog, although Joe did admit that when Ibanez played for the Royals he and Ibanez used to exchange gifts for their children, so on the impartiality scale of 1-to-10, Joe probably isn't a 10.
The journalism issue is knottier. If something is "out there," buzzing around the internet, even if it is posted by someone with no professional standards binding him or her, with no actual reportorial knowledge of a situation and just kind of wondering out loud, is it fair game for the mainstream media to seize upon it as, well, information?
Unfortunately, the answer is: It depends. That's the fuzzy world in which we live at the moment and it should also be noted that the mainstream media -- where the streams are ebbing rapidly and drying up in spots -- isn't the bellweather of propriety it once was, either.
So, who to trust? Again: It depends. But we do live in a place where the distribution of ideas, opinions and information is not overtly controlled by the government. (The hound dog in the airport notwithstanding.) We make great fun of places that operate in that manner. Our system, despite its byproducts, is preferable. Raul Ibanez might not think so at the moment, but he works in a profession that has been tainted by his fellow professionals and comes along at a time when people are going to wonder the kind of stuff that the guy in Peoria wondered about. There are going to be things in blogs that are wrong and regrettable -- like the previous sentence, for instance, which ended in a preposition -- or this one, which is running on and on without any reasonable hope of a satisfactory termination. Whew.
It's a new era, and some of the rules are still being figured out. (Preposition, again.) Twenty years ago there were no blogs. Now everyone has one. Murphy, the ball writer from the Daily News, yelled across the press box Thursday night, "Hey, I'm ripping your boy in my blog." I like Murphy, although he's not nearly as good a basketball player as he believes, and he has a right to criticize Gonzo in his blog. I'm in a glass house on that one since I took a little shot at Les Bowen a while back after he took a little shot at me. We got over it and have gone back to talking about Darden Smith and Joe Ely again, instead of what weasels we are. (I gotta stop that.)
Anyway, it's great to be back. Glad I didn't miss anything important.
I know it's very sad, but even Post Patterns has to take a little break now and then. The entire staff walked out last week in protest of that item about Donovan and there's no one here to answer the Post Patterns phone or, more importantly, make the Post Patterns coffee.
And, unfortunately, it's hard to get good help these days and the process may take a while. I think it will take exactly a week, in fact, during which time Post Patterns will search the streams and brooks of our fair land, sleeping under the stars, contracting horribly disfiguring skin rashes.
Until then, not saying nothing. If it works for the QB, it works for Post Patterns. Why talk if you can't win no matter what you say? Well, there's the small matter of being a leader and being the public face for a franchise that has made you ungodly wealthy. But those are thoughts for another time.
See you in a week, but watch your back. Post Patterns can't cast accurately.
