AGRI Biz

Most Montreal Canadien fans will be stunned and angry today when they realize that the goaltender who engineered two upsets over the highly favored Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins, Jaroslav Halak, has been traded to the St. Louis Blues for two unknown prospects, said to have lots of potential. After the playoffs were over and it was revealed that Montreal had some goaltending depth that could be traded, fans were expecting ...

Well Round 3 of the Stanley Cup playoffs is over and at least I got 50% of this round right, meaning I'm still at .500 for the whole playoff series.  The next series is make or break for me.  Hopefully there will be a better final than the two anti-climatic series we saw in this round. There were no players who were especially bad in the previous round so I'll skip ...

On the NHL expansion/relocation front, most of the news during the past year has been coming from Winnipeg and Quebec. Winnipeg's strategy has been to play up how bad the condition of certain American franchises are (most noticeably Phoenix) and hope that its two main investors, Mark Chipman and Dave Thomson, will be able to purchase a team in default of anyone else. That's led to wild speculation and self-delusion in ...

Way back in February of 2009, I wrote one of my first articles, entitled:  "Which Direction Should The NHL Go?"  In it, I listed five possible paths for future NHL development. 1.  Keep going in the same direction, with expansion to American cities that are unfamiliar with hockey, in hopes that this strategy will land the NHL a rich American television contract, and finally confirm their status as "big four" sport ...

If the Vancouver Canucks are really a Stanley Cup champion, they are now officially at the point where they'd better start showing it. After their Game 3 drubbing at the hands of the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday night to fall behind 2-1 in the Western Conference semifinal best-of-seven series, the Canucks have hit the crisis point, as all of the elements that showed themselves in last year's second round match ...

Now that the Stanley Cup playoffs are here, it is a good time to recall the greatest names from the past that are true sports legends. Canada has been blessed with having the greatest player of a generation almost consistently from the 1940s to the present day. Canada was also blessed with many great support players who aren't on this list, including Jean Beliveau, Doug Harvey, Phil Esposito, ...

An article in the Vancouver Sun, on April 14, stated that the defeated, would-be purchasers of the Phoenix Coyotes, Ice Edge Holdings, still wants to own an NHL team. Despite being used by the NHL to buy time to keep Jim Balsillie off the Board of Governors until Jerry Reinsdorf could re-enter the Phoenix picture, the Ice Edge boys still believe in the generous-hearted NHL to want another kick at the ...

It's finally officially over.  Jerry Reinsdorf wins.  Ice Edge loses. The NHL got what it wanted all along.  No Jim Balsillie-owned team.  No Hamilton team.  No team even partly owned by Canadians.  No games in Saskatoon.  A team in Phoenix. There was jubilant joy on the NHL website as Gary Bettman announced the Glendale Council decision on his way to Phoenix to see the Coyotes play Detroit. Bettman also modestly said that he ...

Well a year has passed since I was a soothsayer for the NHL playoffs and now I must put on my conical hat again and predict who will win each playoff series. I was 7-1 in the first round last year and then mediocre the rest of the way. This year will be tougher to predict because there are many new teams in the playoffs this time and it is uncertain how ...

In a year when the NHL was told that over one third of its revenue comes from Canada, the last day of the regular season told the story of the league in the United States. NBC, which holds the rights to broadcast the league nationally, chose to broadcast a meaningless game from noon to three o'clock featuring two teams that had already clinched their playoff positions, Washington and Boston. Aside from Alexander ...