Ray Shero Does Not Play Footsie: Pens Offer to Jagr Withdrawn

Today at noon, Penguins GM Ray Shero withdrew his offer to Czech sniper and former Penguins great, Jaromir Jagr.

I am on record wanting Jagr to come back. I think he can still be a productive player and I stand by that. My mistake was thinking that he had matured some in last decade. I guess not.

Meet the new Jagr. Same as the old Jagr.



Wednesday was supposed to be decision day. Then Thursday was decision day. Then this morning was decision day, or at least decision morning, because I'm pretty sure that when Ray Shero wasn't busy working out a two-year deal with Tyler Kennedy (huge, by the way), he had his eye on the clock thinking, if I don't hear from that guy by noon, it's over. You gotta draw a line in the sand somewhere, don't you? He can't keep waiting on the capricious winger to make up his mind. He's working under a snug salary cap and the Penguins (assuming Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby are healthy) are poised to make a run at the Cup as constituted without Jaromir.

I guess Jagr is still the guy we knew before, the player we had a love-hate relationship with -- supremely talented, capable of wondrous things on the ice, but just as capable of throwing fits of pique and drifting into deep existential chasms.

It's too bad for everybody. Jagr could have contributed here, if nothing else on the power play. From his perspective, I think this could have been a good fit for him. It's a team that doesn't need him to lead --  they're full up on leaders in the Consol Center home club dressing room. All he would have to have done in Pittsburgh is shown up and fired wristers on net on the power play, which seems like a pretty good gig go me.

But he couldn't meet a simple deadline. He couldn't make a simple phone call. I'm not sure if he intended to play headgames with the Pens or if he's just really unsure himself. Is he in one of those eastern European funks he's prone to? Is he still just really immature? Who the hell ever knows what goes on in the head of Jaromir Jagr? I think half the time, he doesn't even know himself.

But I can tell you this, there's no room on a roster put together by Ray Shero for a guy who doesn't want to be here, whose number one priority isn't bringing the Stanley Cup back to Mario's pool.

No hard feelings, but somebody else can baby-sit the guy.

UPDATE:  10 minutes after posting, this came across the wires:  Philadelphia Flyers sign Jaromir Jagr. This is the contractual agreement of taking a dump in Mario's pool.

Ooooooooh, this is going to make Pens-Flyers games even more fun. Is it hockey season yet?

UPDATE TWO: Saddest Day Ever: Max Talbot Signs with Flyers

Goodbye Max. Sniff. Sniff.

We had a good run, didn't we Max? Two Stanley Cup Finals appearances. Your heroics in 2009 (some of which you can see above.) You were a mensh, a fun guy, a penalty killer extraordinaire. But now you wear the Flyers orange. I'm filing for divorce today. You should get the papers shortly.

Thanks for all the fun times. You will be missed.

The Return of the Jagr-Bomb?

Don't look now, but the Jaromir Jagr hockey sweepstakes are on.

Hey wait. What year is this? Did I wake up in 1990 again?

Damn. I hate when that happens.

Nope, it is 2011. I checked.

And it looks like, after three years playing for the Avangard Omsk of the Kontinental Hockey League, Jagr wants to come back to the NHL. Currently, the Pittsburgh Penguins are in pursuit, as are the Detroit Red Wings and the Philadelphia Flyers (although, with all the craziness in Philadelphia, I'm not sure they can get it together to properly woo the scoring Czech.)


The Penguins pursuit of Jagr is intriguing to say the least, opening up a whole can of worms with so many questions:

Do the Pittsburgh fans want him back? Or would they hold a grudge over the way he sulked in his last season here?

Does Jagr have enough in the tank to be worthwhile?

How would he impact team chemistry?

Will he grow back his mega-mullet if we ask nicely? [Really, this 'do has to go into the Hall of Fame of Mullets-- this thing is to mullets what Louis Armstrong is to jazz.]

Yeah, he's ten years older than he was when the Pens shipped him off to DC in a preemptive salary dump [the Capitals promptly signed him to a new contract, a (then) ridiculous seven year $77 million dollar deal that the Pens could never have afforded.] It was just a bottom line thing, and I expect, had they been able to keep the greatest player in franchise history not named Mario Lemieux, they would have. The guy had 52 goals in his last year in Pittsburgh -- he was a production machine and the only the player not named Mario Lemieux to score 1,000 points in a Pens sweater.

He's an older guy now, no longer the cornerstone of a franchise or a 50 goal scorer, but I think he can still supply about 25 goals per season. Consider, the only Penguin to score more than 25 goals last season was Sid, and he was out for the last three months. Even with all the injuries, the Penguins were right on the heels of the Flyers in the regular season standings and Jagr dropping 25 goals and about 50 or 60 points would go a long way towards surpassing them.

As to the fans, if Jagr can be as effective as I think he can be, all will be forgiven, and quickly. In fact, the first time he nets a goal from an impossible angle, the first time he bulls through a defender at the blue line, the lovefest will be on in full force. In fact, the revisionist history figures to be spectacular, with every fan from Freeport to Monessen claiming that they always loved Jaromir Jagr, even through that last season when he moped and whined like a cranky little kid who had too much funnel cake at the school picnic at Kennywood. (In truth, he was annoying back then, perhaps a touch immature, but nobody ever doubted his talent or his value to the team on the ice.)

Jagr is now 39 years old and who knows if he could be a first line guy all the time. Probably not. And I don't see him breaking any scoring records, but wouldn't it be nice to deploy him on Sid's line from time to time? Disco Dan Bylsma loves to shift his lines in the middle of games and he often sends Crosby out there with Evgeni Malkin at the start of a period or in the waning moments. He could, from time to time, send Jagr out there with Crosby, too. Heck, with Crosby and Malkin together.

We've all been clamoring for a proper scoring winger since Sir Sidney arrived. Every year, somebody tries to step into that role -- Mark Recchi, Gary Roberts, Ryan Malone, Marian Hossa, Billy Guerin, Chris Kunitz. Hossa's long gone and way too expensive for the Penguins anyway. As much as I love Guerin, he's also long gone. I'm a Kunitz fan, but there's no question that Jagr is a better pure scorer.

Those are all compelling reasons to try to work a deal, but the single most compelling reason that I'm hoping Mario and Ray Shero work some magic and get Jagr back in a Penguins sweater is that it would get their anemic power play healthy in a hurry. They were embarrassing through the season -- even with Sid and Geno were healthy. Without those two in the playoffs, I don't even like to think about it:  seven games, 35 power play opportunities, one goal. Ya think they could have used Jagr against the Tampa Bay Lightning?

Jagr may be old, and this may be his last hurrah, but he's a sniper and he still has one of the filthiest wristers on the planet.

In short, please come back, Jaromir, and bring those nasty shots with you. The mullet is negotiable.

[Pics from: New York Times, penguinslegends.blogspot.com]

Top 10 Sporting Events to Take Us Beyond the Rapture

Well it appears the Rapture is indeed upon us. Maybe you call it the end of the world? Semantics, my friends. Semantics. But it seems to me, that if God is calling all the chickens home to roost, she might be in the mood to grant some wishes? I don't know, but I think God understands balance -- hellfire and damnation should be balanced out with some thoughtful presents. Dig?

So what I'm saying is, if the supreme being wants to give me a gift, he can permit me to witness, first hand, some of the great sporting moments in history. I'm almost ashamed to say that I've actually thought about this over the years, but if there were ten sports events I could attend in person, if money and the shackles of a little thing I like to call time and space were not objects, which is to say, if I could travel through time, what sports events would I want to see, live and in person? This list turns out to be kinda baseball heavy. Who knew?


1. 1933 Pittsburgh Crawfords. If I could, there's nowhere I'd rather be than at Greenlee Field (RIP), in Pittsburgh's Hill District, watching Satchel Paige pitch to Josh Gibson, with Cool Papa Bell, Jimmy Crutchfield, and Judy Johnson in the field. This team might be the greatest ever to step on a baseball diamond, so this is a no brainer for me to slot in the No. 1 spot. (Also, Scott Stimkus of Outsider Baseball, tells me he'll have a book out in the fall devoted to the Crawfords. As the book gets closer to publication, I'll provide more details.)


2. 1980 Olympics. USA v. USSR. Yeah, I got to watch this on television, and sure, I'd miss the "Do you believe in miracles?!" call, but tell me you wouldn't give your left arm to have been there?


3. 1936 Olympics. Which some people refer to as Hitler's Olympics, but I like to think of as the Jesse Owens games. Not just for the sport, but for the significance of the games. Also, just to see Jesse run.


4. 1957 Wimbledon Tennis Championships. This was the year that Althea Gibson won her first Wimbledon championship. She won again the next year, in a more exciting match, but I'd want to be there for the first -- the first time an African-American won the world's greatest tennis tournament. I am of the firm belief that Gibson is very under-appreciated.


5. Joe Louis Wins Heavyweight Boxing Title. A couple of reasons, one of which is the chance to get to see James Braddock fight. Braddock was such a great, hard-working champ, that to his dying day, Louis always referred to Braddock as "champ." But mostly, to see Joe Louis, whose importance Langston Hughes described like this:

Each time Joe Louis won a fight in those depression years, even before he became champion, thousands of colored Americans on relief or W.P.A., and poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe's one-man triumphs. No one else in the United States has ever had such an effect on Negro emotions – or on mine. I marched and cheered and yelled and cried, too.

6. 1958 NFL Championship Game. Heck, had I been alive and in New York, this would have been possible -- the NFL Championship game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts held at Yankee Stadium wasn't even sold out. You believe that? To bear witness to John Unitas carrying his team, taking the game to the next level, becoming the great, Johnny U., while hitting Raymond Berry with clutch passes, then waving off the field goal unit to call a blast to the Horse to win the game? There's a reason they call it the Greatest Game Ever Played (tm).


7. 1956 World Series. Game 5. Don Larsen's Perfect Game. I'm far from a Yankees fan, but a perfect game? In the Series? Against the Brooklyn Dodgers? I'm in. So, you know, if you talk to your god, just put in a good word for me.



8. 1972 AFC Division Game. The Immaculate Reception. If you are young and you don't understand the source of the animus between the Oakland Raiders and the Pittsburgh Steelers, look no further than this game. This game, ironically, was another one that was not sold out. You believe that crap? Just about every Pittsburgher over the age of 55 or so will tell you that he was at the game, but if that were true, Three Rivers would have been sold out five times over. But to be one of the lucky few actually in attendance at a true turning point, an historic moment, perhaps, the most important moment in NFL history? Of course, I might feel differently were I born a Raiders fan.


9. Mario Scores Five Different Ways -- December 31, 1988. Pittsburgh Penguins 8, New Jersey Devils 6. The film quality of the goals in this clip is terrible, but my god, what would it have been like to actually be there, instead of at some lame-o New Year's Party. Hindsight is a bitch. A royal one.


10. 1960 World Series. Game 7. First off, I never had the chance to go to Forbes Field, a fact that has greatly aggrieved me over the years. Second, c'mon -- Greatest Home Run in the history of Major League Baseball? Stuff it, New Yorkers. Bobby Thompson's home run merely clinched the pennant. Maz's dinger was a walk off home run in Game 7 of the Series. It just doesn't get any better than that, people.