Follow @james_tanner123 Since +/- is the NHL's worst stat, I thought it would make sense to appropriate it and make it useful as we review the best and worst of the past week in the NHL.
MINUS: Summer. Here's an unpopular opinion: summer sucks. I hate the heat, the fact that 99% of people do not wear size-appropriate clothing, sweating, working in the heat etc. etc. etc.
And the beach? My wife is always like "Hey, let's take the kids to the beach." And I'm like "Well, let's go, nobody is going to get an ear infection or step on a discarded needle if we stay home!"
Yeah, the beach is the worst. It's worse than that horrible movie called the Beach; I would rather listen to someone tell me why I clearly know nothing about hockey just because they disagree with me, for five hours, rather than spend one minute at a beach.
The beach is to life what Pitbull is to music.
And I didn't even mention the two worst things about the summer:The kids are home from school and there is no hockey.
PLUS: There's a month and a week until it's not weird to write a daily hockey blog anymore.
My patience grows thin. I want Johnny Cueto and Senior Papplebon added to this team immediately.
I don't care about the future and I don't care about sustainability. Maybe no one else has noticed, but the Jays are the only team to not be in the Playoffs since they won the World Series in 1993. I would easily trade one great season for several subpar ones.
I say just call up Cinci and Philly and say "Take what you want, we want a World Series."
MINUS:I went to two record stores on Friday, the day the new Jason Isbell record came out. But because of the stupid internet, no one buys records anymore and so these two failing chain stores (who should be treating me like a VIP because who else is buying records these days? I'm the only one I know in real life, anyways) did not even have the new record by a pretty popular and highly influential artist.
The girl at the counter asked me if I would like them to order it for me. What? I could just order it myself, cheaper, and have it delivered to my house and not have to drive back to the mall. Which, by the way, the older I get the weirder it seems to go to malls. They're like the beach in so many ways.
PLUS: Anyone who goes out there and speaks against whatever it is the majority of people think. We live in a world were even the slightest outside-the-box-thinking, or the most innocuous of deviations from the group-think are met with merciless ridicule.
It's great that the internet lets people have a voice, but from what I can see, the people who mostly elect to use this voice are much like the kid who's bullied in highschool and goes on to become a certain kind of cop.
I have thick skin and can handle the abuse, but more and more I see people just writing to placate the majority, rather than challenge it, which has been the artist's duty since the beginning of time.
Newspapers do it because it's the only way they think they can stay relevant against new media. Bloggers do it to increase their readership and make their life easier. Whenever a celebrity or athlete speaks, most of them just give the most boring, cliched answers or else they get ripped apart by the internet.
I think it's really funny that people always accuse me of having an opinion just to get hits, but honestly, they don't realize that the best way to build a readership is just to tell people what they want to hear - you can only shock people once or twice.
The voice of the internet is supposed to allow us to cut through the BS but all it actually does is make things more homogeneous.
It's important to remember: the majority is almost always wrong and all you have to do is look at a list of the most popular books, movies and records of all-time to know this.
All this extends far beyond just writers and the internet, I mean, it's a sad comment on the state of the world when it seems most people have been raised, or conditioned or even educated to believe that anyone who thinks differently from them is an idiot or that they should only interact or watch/read/whatever things that tell them what they already know/believe/want to hear.
PLUS: Today I shall watch Ant Man and Inherent Vice and maybe even the new Terminator, and I'm going to eat like crap and it's going to be super fun.
MINUS:The lack of recent hockey news. We need a big-ass trade to get us through the rest of the summer.
PLUS: I am thinking a line of Dulair-Strome-Domi might be one of the most exciting lines to watch in the entire NHL. IF the Coyotes could shelter that behind a Boedker-Hanzal-Reider and a Downie-Vermette-Doan line, it'd be fun to watch and give the Coytoes the kind of firepower they'd need to make their team good.
This is a team that can ice a very good bottom-six, a great second line, an above average goalie, and a defense anchored by one of, if not the very best defenseman in the NHL.
If they can have a few of their kids come in and provide the offense needed to score more than one goal per game, they might actually be a surprisingly difficult team to play against.
Thanks for reading.