Follow @james_tanner123 I may have mentioned earlier that I am on a two week vacation. For me, I don't like to travel (also I don't have any damn money) so I like to just stay home watch movies, hang with the kids, get fat, play MLB 15 and sing songs.
Good times.
But today is what I call peak vacation day. Sleep in. Reap paper/listen to tunes. Go for lunch. Eat a pita with roast beef and tziki sauce. Hit the record store etc.
And now I am back home drinking coffee (one milk, no sugar) drinking my third favorite juice (apple) and enjoying the new Drake record.
After two false (but fruitful) trips to the record store to get it, only to learn that it was a stupid internet only release (what the hell is that about anyways?) I finally tracked it down.
And it is spectacular.
People think Drake is like a male Katy Perry Mall Pop Paul Blart of rap type guy. But he's a great artist and in my opinion putting out music on par with Kanye and the Radioheads.
Public Service AnnouncementFrequent your local records store and buy some new records. MP3s and phone music are the worst. Amazon isn't much better. I don't wanna imagine a world with no real record stores.
I'm the worst though. I sometimes get lazy and order discs off Amazon even though I know it's wrong. Just yesterday, I was ordering my wife a birthday present and ended up impulse-buying the new Blur album - which I am very excited about. I thought I was pre-ordering it and imagine my surprise when I saw it in the record store today.
Now I have betrayed my local retailer and I have to wait to next week for it to come in the mail before I can hear it.
Anyways, this should probably be about hockey, but there isn't any hockey until tonight. Game seven will be great, of course. Hoping for a Detroit victory.
The Coyotes? Nothing doing there. No Coyotes news that I know of.
But I do have one thing: Accountability.
I have seen countless tweets and discussion-boared mentions of accountability so far this off- season. There needs to be accountability, apparently, in every NHL city except Ottawa (happy just to have made it) Toronto (everyone accountable has disappeared like it's chapter three of a Robert Ludlum novel) the Islanders (on a nice upward trajectory) and the teams still in the Playoffs.
Accountability must be seen. Either in the form of real and total accountability (Toronto) or in token change-for-the-sake-of-looking-like-we're-doing-something accountability.
The fans must have their blood.
But then, conversely, look how many teams are searching for new coaches and GMs already, and it's only the end of April.
To a tee, every single one of these fan-bases demand a hire with experience.
Todd McLellan was a moron who had to be fired in San Jose. But to every team without a coach, he's nearly a dream choice.
Peter Chiarelli is either a genius savior or a Seguin trading Judas, depending on how you pronounce the word "car/cahhhhhh."
It makes no sense.
The way the NHL just recycles its coaches and GMs is ridiculous. There's just too much money involved in most cases to risk going with a complete unknown.
And the only way that is remotely acceptable is if it is a complete unknown former Hall of Fame player with no GM/Presedenting experience.
Demanding accountability in your current GM/coach and experience in your new GM/Coach means you're stuck forever in a circle of recycled ideas and people, and that is half the reason (I'm willing to bet) that the NHL is such a conservative, risk-adverse entity as a whole.
The insane thing is that while demanding to fire people who fail, you're just giving away what they learned from that experience.
For every Dave Nonis (who, let's face it, is just incompetent at running hockey teams) there is a Dallas Eakins who is only going to learn and get better.
I would submit that in almost all cases, the team would be better off not showing any accountability most of the time and instead let management teams have enough time to fix their mistakes and learn from them.
All in all, I think this really shows that NHL fans (who are just a microcosm of all people) love to get new things, even if they're not better; new = fun, if you will.
Secondly, the need for accountability is nothing more than a form of non-dangerous blood-lust. It's just exhilarating and exciting to see someone publicly fired because it's a target for an entire fan-base to aim their anger and blame. For whoever isn't fired, it's a convenient lightning rod that keeps everyone else safe.
In the end, I think most teams would be so much better off not firing their GMs and Coaches so often. I argue that continuity, learning from mistakes, building on what you have is more valuable than that easy but quickly lost (and probably fake) feeling of renewal that comes with a firing and a new hire.
That's it. Thanks for reading.
Here's the best song I heard in a while. Reminds me of a David Lindley song, if you know who that is.
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