Just a thought running through my head after Belleville's OT win over Kitchener in the final round-robin game last night.....I can't ever recall a closer Memorial Cup than this one has been so far.
Six round-robin games played so far, with three of them going to overtime and two others decided by one goal. (Spokane's win over Gatineau was technically a two-goal win but since one was an empty-netter, you could call it a one-goal game).
The only "blowout" game was Belleville's 6-3 win over Gatineau. Usually at the Memorial Cup we see more scoring variance than this. I think that shows how very closely matched all four teams are this year....Gatineau may have been a (small) cut below the other three teams, but any of the other three teams could be the best one there. With an extra bounce here or there, it could very easily be Belleville or Kitchener sitting at 3-0 with the bye to the final instead of Spokane.
In other WHL news, the Portland mess got a little bit messier with the news that former Hawks coach Mike Williamson is now suing the team for $80,000 he says they owe him in salary for this past season. He claims he reached an agreement with the team last June to coach them again this season, but after the team fired him in July they did not pay him last year. I'm no lawyer but this one seems pretty straightforward: if Williamson had a legal contract with the team to coach them last year and the team fired him, they still owe him the money. If he did not have a legal contract, they don't owe him anything. Either way though, it's more bad publicity for a team that has generated entirely too much of that lately. It also seems to me to be incredibly bad business to sign a coach and then fire him two weeks later - all during the offseason! But then, the business IQ of the team's owners is pretty much the issue everyone (including the league) is trying to determine these days.....
No comments:
Post a Comment