NHL Preview: St. Louis Blues

We are just one day away from the start of the 2006-07 NHL season and I've got six teams left to preview. Luckily, I've already gotten around to all the teams playing tomorrow, so I will be well within my rights to hold off on some previews until then. Technical issues not withstanding. Hopefully, my computer will cooperate long enough to let me get through them all. For the moment, let's check out the St. Louis Blues.

"I hate to see that evening sun go down,
'Cause my lovin' baby done left this town."

The opening lines of W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" would probably be an apt description of the feelings most hockey fans have towards the team of the same name. (Unless they aren't Blues fans, in which case they probably don't care, but the sentence sounds more poetic as is so I'm putting this part of it in parentheses after the fact.) This once proud great consistently mediocre franchise was easily the worst team in the NHL last season and things aren't getting a whole lot better in 2006.

Brett Hull, Adam Oates, Curtis Joseph, Brendan Shanahan, Al MacInnis, Chris Pronger, Pavol Demitra, Pierre Turgeon, Roman Turek and Doug Weight. What do those names have in common? They've all gone on to accomplish big things wearing a sweater that didn't feature an unfortunate pairing of blue and red. You may recognize Pronger and Weight as two of the players who participated in the '06 Stanley Cup Finals (for the Oilers and Hurricanes, respectively). Brett Hull is most famous for the Goal That Never Was (not sure what I'm talking about. Go to Buffalo sometime. On the way back from Toronto I stopped at a rest stop outside Buffalo and there was still a newspaper clipping on the wall with a picture of Hull's skate in the crease. Six years after the fact.)

Don't let the quarter-century of playoff appearances fool you, this is a team that was mired in a two decade cycle of mediocrity, constantly falling in the first or second round of the playoffs. Even when they finished the year with the best record in the NHL in 2000 they managed to lose in the first round. Which is how they ended up where they are today.

Where is that, you ask? Rock bottom. After spending almost their entire history as a middling-to-above-average team, the bottom finally fell out after the 04-05 Lockout. The Blues finished the season with a league-worst record of 21-46-15. This year doesn't look too much better in terms of wins and losses, but the outlook isn't nearly as bleak. Goaltender turned broadcaster turned General Manager John Davidson acquired Bill Guerin and Manny Legace during the summer. Both of them, as well as prodigal son Doug Weight, are beyond their prime and won't contribute as much as they once would have, but they should provide vital veteran leadership for a young, rebuilding team. Think of the 2006-07 Blues as this year's version of the 2005-06 Washington Capitals, only without Alex Ovechkin. Or anything else to make watching their games a worthwhile endeavor.

To keep track of all the suffering of the coming year, check out Back In Blue. Or, if you happen to be an avid Blues fan looking to break through to the blogosphere, Blues Line might be the place to go.

Why Hockey is Better: Part 23

Erik Johnson, the first overall pick in this year's NHL draft, has opted to go to college rather than sign with the St. Louis Blues.

There. Now that I've gotten rid of most of you by leading with a sentence about hockey, I can talk about how this relates to the NBA and the NFL. Back in April, I ranted a little bit about one of Dan Wetzel's columns on Yahoo! Sports, in which he decried the NBA's and NFL's age limits for being inherently unfair. I proposed an easy solution, that being letting young guys declare themselves eligible for the draft without losing their amateur status until they sign an actual contract with a pro team. As you can see, this is already the case in hockey, where the Blues will retain Johnson's rights even while he plays "amateur" hockey at the University of Minnesota. If I'm not mistaken, the same sort of thing happens in baseball as well.

The irony of the situation, of course, is that both MLB and the NHL have well-established, legitimate minor league systems set up to develop young players who aren't quite ready for the big time. Whereas, in the case of the NFL and NBA, college athletics basically are their minor leagues. (Yes, I know about the NBADL. No, I don't consider it a legitimate minor league, but at least they're trying a little.) Imagine if, back in 2001, the Washington Wizards could have allowed Kwame Brown to play at Florida without losing their exclusive rights to him, rather than sticking him on the bench at the age of 19. How different would his career have looked?

One of the strongest arguments for an age limit is that the bevy of players leaving college early or, in basketball's case, skipping college altogether, is hurting the quality of play in the college ranks. Kind of a selfish argument from college sports fans, but there's no arguing against it. This year's NCAA Tournament was certainly entertaining to watch, but I doubt you would find many people who would argue it was high-quality basketball. Especially compared to years past. Allowing drafted players to continue in the NCAA would not only solve this problem, it would actually increase interest in the college game. It gives NBA fans who might not watch a mid-season college game a reason to be interested. If you're a 76ers fan, and your team drafts a guy in the first round and now he's playing for the University of Texas, you are much more likely to turn on a Longhorns game. (This also, unfortunately, poses the unique challenge of what to do if your team picks a guy who then goes to play for Duke.) Personally, I virtually never watch college football, but if there was a player on the field who was a Redskins draftee, I would certainly turn on a game, if only to check him out and see how he's coming along.

The thing I don't understand is: Why the different rules for different sports? If a hockey player can get drafted by an NHL team and still play in college, why is the same not true of football and basketball? Doesn't the NCAA make the rules for all college sports, and, as such, shouldn't it be consistent across all of them? Am I just missing something that is completely obvious? If not, why hasn't anyone else thought of this?