Damien Cox Makes Up Storyline, You Don't Care Because It's Hockey.

I thought I was done for a little bit, what with the Stanley Cup Finals here and bad hockey writers packing it up and giving up on their teams for a few months. I was pretty happy with that, even setting an eight pound weight loss goal on Wii Fit. (Side note - Who would have thought I would be obese? The Sports Blogosphere would be shocked.)

Then I went looking for tripe and found Damien Cox and some ESPN shenanigans.

There is a sense that an enormous opportunity is at hand for the National Hockey League with this year's Stanley Cup finals.

Is there? It's a fairly marketable series, with the evil that the Red Wings represent across the country up against a kid that kind of resembles Luke Skywalker in appearance. But it's the NHL, and if they're good at one thing, it's taking a great chance to take the sport where it has never been, loading a ton of pure, unadulterated shit on top of it, and then next thing you know it's the first league to cancel a season.

But I guess that opportunity is based in reality. Surely there must be something you can make up about the Finals to make people watch!

Now, with the Penguins about to face the Detroit Red Wings in a glitzy 2008 Stanley Cup finals filled with marquee names and intriguing story lines, Crosby, as the league's top individual marketing tool, is being asked to deliver a virtuoso performance that will somehow vault the NHL into a new level of success and profitability.

What story lines? Why do there always have to be story lines? It's sports, not pro wrestling. If the game isn't intriguing enough because of the sport, watch a scripted show with a storyline written by professional writers. Not good enough? Go see a movie. If you're dumb enough to tune in just to see if Pittsburgh can rise triumphantly over the title of Worst Smelling U.S. City and win another championship, don't watch my sport. I would rather have your dumb ass support the WNBA. But let's make a story line!

Some even suggest that having Crosby in the Cup finals could give the NHL the same enormous boost in popularity the NBA received way back in 1984, when Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers and Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics met in that league's championship series.

The comparison is, at best, raw.

Who. The. Fuck. Can anybody who took the time to read to this point of my little hockey article honestly tell me that they have heard a single thing about this Stanley Cup Final comparing to an epic NBA match up? Fuck, even I've heard about it and I don't really ever watch basketball. And wouldn't this require there to be a lone superstar on the other team for Crosby to match up against instead of a Red Army?

Google, help me out here. Somebody has to have written an article or blog post or farted and it kind of sounded like, "Guys, this Stanley Cup Finals series is going to be like when Bird went up against Magic in '84! It will be so awesome that the NHL will achieve unrivaled popularity in the nation because two cities with populations under a million are playing each other, and everyone will be watching Versus!"

I just typed penguins red wings larry bird into the toolbar... and nothing. Not a fucking thing. Well, maybe there is. I don't have a paid subscription to Sports Business Daily so I can't tell if that's where Cox got his far fetched comparison from. So the next 23 paragraphs are spent analyzing this story that he seemingly made up. Looks like Damien Cox went to the Jayson Blair school of journalism.

And with this, I ride off into the sunset that is the Stanley Cup. I might poke around a bit around the start of free agency, but I sound like more of an idiot when writing about sports that aren't hockey. You're welcome.