Follow @james_tanner123 Plus minus is the only stat that matters!
PLUS: Summer was fun, who can complain? No one made me go to a single beach, so certainly not me. But hockey starts in two weeks and if you think you're happy about that, try coming up with hockey related thing to write about every day all summer long!
PLUS: A lot of people ripped the Flames for their trade of Dougie Hamilton this summer, but now that they've signed both the main pieces they got back, I think the trade looks very good for them.
They could have had three more years of Hamilton at which point they'd be looking at paying an exorbitant price for the final couple of year of his prime and then a bunch of years in which he was declining.
Instead they now get twelve years of Elias Lindholm and Noah Hanifin. The contracts will take Hanifin to 27 and Linholm to 29.
There is a slight gamble that neither player lives up to their potential, which is fine because there are no guarantees. But if either of these - especially Hanifin - takes a step forward and becomes a star player, this will be genius.
MINUS: Five more years of Milan Lucic at $6 million per. Lucic hasn't cracked 100 PIM since 2011 and hasn't scored 30 goals, which he only ever did once, since 2010.
MINUS: NHL Twitter. It's like highschool if the cool kids were nerds and the nerds were cool kids. Either way it's just as stupid.
MINUS: I don't see Darnell Nurse accepting a contract for $3,978,834.
PLUS: In my quest to acquire, listen to and own every great record ever recorded, I finally bought the Meat Puppets 1982 classic II. Considering it has three songs famous for Nirvana's Unplugged record, which I pretty much listened to every single day between 1994 and whenever I grew up, it's hard to believe I didn't already have it.
Anyways, you can see why they covered so many of their songs, the Meat Puppets deserved the notoriety. This is an amazing mix of country and punk and weird vocals. If you don't have it, get it.
MINUS: Baseball. The Jays were garbage and I was out of the running in my pool since May. I ended up watching less baseball games than I ever had - I don't think I saw more than a few innings all year. Also, baseball has too many home runs and strikeouts. They gotta fix that.
PLUS: I wrote a book (a comic) and I published it myself. This gave me a feeling of great personal success and I even sold four copies. Unfortunately the content is extremely graphic - but also hopefully hilarious - so I had to publish under a different name, which really cuts into sales. I mean, who says's "James Tanner" is even my real name, but it is the name by which I my writing is known, but if I ever want to run for office or write for Rolling Stone it's probably best to publish the book under a fake name. Either way, I just wanted to brag for a bit here because it is a great accomplishment.
The cool thing is that I know who bought two of the copies, but two of the copies are just from randos!
PLUS Read the Bone Collector and the Killing Floor recently. Both are extremely dumb fun.
PLUS: Took my kids for lazer tag. What have I been missing? If you've never lazer tagged, you gotta do it.
PLUS: Six pack, five games on NHL Centre Ice and DFS. Can't wait. I am going to invest in a service and track by progress all season long. Should be fun.
PLUS: Infinity War, the second time. This movie is something else. Thanos might be the greatest villain ever. I mean, is he really just a good guy who is insane? I can't wait for part two.
PLUS: This will be the first years, I think ever, but maybe not, where the Oilers, Coyotes and Leafs are all good.
Thanks for reading, enjoy the rest of your summer.