Hat Trick - 2/7/09

1) The way NHL hands down suspensions confounds me. One person gets a 1 game suspension for leaving the bench to join in on a fight, someone gets a 2 game suspension for fighting, someone gets a fine for hitting someone in the head with a stick, and yet someone else gets 6 games for saying some players are getting his sloppy seconds because they are dating his. Now, I am fairly new to really following hockey, so my memory is shaky as to who did what, with the exception of the last person, but I wanted to be consistent.

2) Both of my rooting interests in hockey, Columbus ("local") and Pittsburgh (first NHL time I discovered) are currently on the outside of the playoff picture, but not by much. I find the Pittsburgh situation confusing, in that they have the top two scorers in the NHL, but still have trouble scoring goals consistently. (For better coverage of Pittsburgh, go to Pensburgh.) With the March 4 trade deadline a few weeks away, I will be keeping track of who is buying, and who is selling.

3) The Las Vegas Wranglers, an AHL team, had quite possibly the greatest promotion ever on Wednesday night, Blagojevich night. In recognition of governor, everyone involved in the game wore prison uniforms. The home team had the black stripe jerseys, the away team wore solid orange jerseys, and the officials wore prison guard uniforms. This is probably my favorite quote about the story, taken from channel KTNV's website. "Over the years we've asked our players to not look so tough for a cause," Johnson said. "Once they had a lot of chirping from opposing players when we've dressed them in pink for cancer research. We owe them a game of looking a little more sketchy. G-Rod helps us with that." Below are pictures of the uniforms.

3-Pointer

1) I have two words of advice of UofL fans, don't panic. Sure UConn came in on Monday night and absolutely destroyed UofL in Freedom Hall. Sure, no one besides T-Will could do anything in that game, but remember, it was just one game. Bad nights happen. Now, if UofL loses at St. John's, at Notre Dame, and against DePaul, then you can start panicing.

2) On Wednesday, IU beat Iowa 68-60 to gain their first Big Ten win of the season (6-15, 1-8). To say that Tom Crean has had a rough first season at IU would be an understatement, but this has not been unexpected. When Crean came into the program during the offseason, he did quite a bit of house cleaning. After the Mike Davis firing, and the Kelvin Sampson debacle, the program was in an awful predicament. However, I do have confidence that Crean will be able to restore IU to the type of program it used to be, and more importantly, I believe that the President and AD at IU understand the problem, and will give Crean time to do the job.

3) On Wednesday, LeBron James had a triple-double (52 points, 11 assits, 10 rebounds) against the Knicks in Madison Square Garden, following up on Kobe's record setting 61 points earlier in the week. Well, correction, no he didn't. On Friday, NBA officials took away one of his rebounds, and said that it should have gone to Ben Wallace. Stupid staticticians and their stupid counting.