Poppycock, thy name is Marty

I read this guys articles regularly as he is monikered as some sort of sports clairvoyant. A week ago, the crystal ball told us Cujo would be moving in 48 hours to either the Oilers or Canucks.... Guess what...

He also prophesized the coming of Tracy Ham to the Roughriders
:I hear the Saskatchewan Roughriders are set to hire former CFL quarterback Tracy Ham as offensive co-ordinator and maybe even sign Jeff Garcia as QB ...

Ummm, no.

One thing he does do however is illustrate my point about our Olympic hockey team to a T.

"You can’t win with Gretzky’s Rolodex
Players likely to be traded by the NHL’s March 9 deadline:
Forwards Keith Tkachuk, Ollie Jokinen and Mark Recchi of St. Louis, Florida and Pittsburgh, respectively, goaltenders Curtis Joseph and Dwayne Roloson of Phoenix and Minnesota, respectively, and defenceman Sergei Gonchar of Pittsburgh.

• Allow me one more rant about the Canadian men’s hockey team. During our national navel gaze over its failure to bring home an Olympic medal, did anyone ask this question: why did it take eight people to select Team Canada?

Wayne Gretzky, Kevin Lowe, Steve Tambellini, Bob Nicholson, Pat Quinn, Wayne Fleming, Jacques Martin and Ken Hitchcock — all recognized as good hockey minds — banded together to select a team that a couple of hockey fans could have selected over beers at their local Hooters.
There were 18 players back from Salt Lake City in 2002, and even though it was four years later, most of them had missed a complete season and few were among the leaders in NHL scoring.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen players, who had performed splendidly during the first 21/2 months of this NHL season were left off the team because, well, because why?

Eric Staal, Marc Savard, Patrick Marleau, Alex Tanguay, Sidney Crosby, Jason Spezza, Jonathan Cheechoo, Shawn Horcoff, Paul Kariya, Jason Arnott, Cory Stillman, Jarret Stoll, Brendan Shanahan and Dion Phaneuf have all had better seasons than Todd Bertuzzi, Vinny Lecavalier, Ryan Smyth, Jarome Iginla, Marty St. Louis, Shane Doan and Kris Draper.

Granted, every team needs checkers, but the Canadian team had four lines of checkers. This team was shut out three times and scored in only one of its final 12 periods.

Don’t blame the players. They played exactly the way they played all season. Not one player — with the possible exception of Joe Thornton who, of course, didn’t play on his regular line with Marleau and Cheechoo in Turin — did anything that we really didn’t expect."

Well, he got that one right... weeks after the fact.