Hawks Gameday: We Like To Be Here When We Can, The Same Play As 1988
The Hawks open the home campaign tonight with just about the most hanging curveball possible. Then some thoughts on the same old song and dance from Jerry Reinsdorf and on England hiring a member of The Hun to lead their national team.
Sector 1901 - Hawks Gameday: We Like To Be Here When We Can
San Jose Sharks Lineup
Eklund - Granlund - Toffoli
Kostin - Smith - Zetterlund
Goodrow - Wennberg - Kunin
Grundstrom - Sturm - Dellandria
Walman - Ceci
Ferraro - Rutta
Thrun - Benning
Blackwood
What You Need To Know: Good god look at that lineup! Let's try and keep this setup in mind when the Hawks hit the doldrums. It could be so much worse. Anywho...
We'll get to more of that in a sec, but first what's missing. When the schedule makers put this together they probably had a mischievous idea of pitting the last two #1 picks overall against each other in the Hawks home opener, those little scamps. But Macklin Celebrini, or Mackerel Celibacy or whatever fun spoof you've come up with, won't be attending the festivities, as he got hurt during his first game and is week-to-week. So it's just the rest of the Sharks which...yikes.
This isn't quite a Turkish League level of a remember-some-guys roster, but it's close. It's certainly full of guys who were once thought of as good except no one knew why and now that they're playing for this iteration of the Sharks it's confirmed that they weren't ever good. Remember when Wild fans wanted to tell you how under-the-radar Luke Kunin was? There was a reason for that. Mikael Granlund sent both Preds and Penguins fans into hysterics with how useless he was, and this was after he never quite got over in Minnesota. Cody Ceci? We don't have to go through that. Matt Benning couldn't even hack it in the defenseman rehabilitation center that Nashville usually is.
Columbus and Winnipeg were very convinced that Alex Wennberg was thisclose to putting it all together and being a difference-maker in the middle. The Rangers thought he would help get them over the edge last year in the playoffs. And now he's here, so it's pretty obvious he was thisclose to a handful of himself.
We're not going to even talk about Jan Rutta.
Like any shit team, there's a couple aged vets just hanging on for another paycheck. Tyler Toffoli and Barclay Goodrow fit that bill.
With Celebrini packed in gauze somewhere, the Sharks are focused on seeing what they have in former #7 overall pick William Eklund, and he had a pretty nice rookie season last year (45 points). Maybe there's some runway for rookie d-man Henry Thrun, who sounds like the most Harvard hockey player ever, and he is. Oh, and also...
Player To Watch - Will Smith
This season was supposed to be an out of town preview of the Sharks attempt to recreate McDavid-Draisaitl down the middle with Celebrini and Smith. And it will be that, it's just been paused for a minute. Smith is still here though, and he's pretty exciting. He utterly tore apart the NCAA in his one year with Boston College, with 71 points in 41 games. Which means when Celebrini returns they'll have the two centers from either side of Boston's college hockey rivalry. Smith also anchored the US WJC team with nine points in seven games last year as that squad simply waltzed to the gold medal. Serious pedigree for a guy who is sentenced to being the second center in San Jose, no?
Smith is out of the Jack Hughes school, an incredible puck-handler with shifty feet that gets him out of most tight spaces. He's bigger than Hughes at 6-0, and is not helpless away from the puck as Hughes was when his NHL career started. Smith is a plus playmaker but his goal-scoring will follow if it's not there already. Being able to just ink these two pivots into the first two center spots for the next decade has San Jose's rebuild already pointing up, even if this current team is going to look like a performance art interpretation of sadness performed by acting school dropouts.
Amongst Calderón's Chest Hair - No, The White Sox Aren't Moving
I forgot what I name the White Sox sections of this newsletter, or if I named them at all. We'll leave it like this for now because...well, I mean, come on.
I'm not sure how Jerry Reinsdorf got an actual baseball reporter like Britt Ghiroli to do his bidding, or at least pick up what he's laying down, but he did. If this had come from his usual stooge Boob Nightengale, we know it would have been complete horseshit.
But I'm still pretty confident in saying that this is also, at the very least, mostly horseshit. It would be utterly asinine to sell the White Sox before any new stadium plan is either in motion, or has been completely stonewalled with no hope. Reinsdorf has only made something of a half-hearted effort so far at convincing local and state reps to pay for his new playground in the South Loop. Fuck, even the Bears with Doofus-in-Chief Kevin Warren have hardly given up, and they're going to go before the state legislature during a veto session and beyond in which everyone says they're totally boned.
This is Jerry Reinsdorf, one of the most stubborn men to ever walk our streets. This is a guy who torpedoed two World Series contenders of his own to first cancel the World Series altogether to get a CBA he approved of (which he didn't even get) and then the second so he could hire his drunk, past-it buddy to drive (metaphorically and possibly literally) the team into the ground on a day-to-day basis. Do we really think he's going to give up on his stadium after just setting up some plastic fencing and a fake home plate?
When stadium deals get torpedoed for good it's with much more noise. How much did you hear about Oakland here in the Midwest before they finally decided to fake a move to Vegas which isn't actually going to happen?
I am not here to doubt Ghiroli's reporting. She is one of the best at what she does and she's getting it from somewhere. But this smacks of someone on the inside getting this out there to frighten the townspeople that if Jerry doesn't get what he wants he'll pawn the Sox off on someone with no connection to the city and they'll take it to Nashville, so you'd better pony up! And considering Dave Stewart's executive career, Sox fans wouldn't be losing anything more than if Jerry was taking his punk ass to Nashville.
Before the idea of the Sox leaving town is anything more than distant fantasy, there's going to be a lot more rigamarole about the stadium and threatening Governor Big Boy and our drowning mayor. Sure, it might be another chance for Brandon Johnson to fuck up--sadly he doesn't seem to miss any these days--but Pritzker isn't going to fall for this shit.
We're a very long way from the Predators having a neighbor, is what I'm saying.
The Kickmen - Tuchey To the Rescue
While I'm enjoying watching the usual crew in Ol' Blimey curse their existence that their national team had to turn to a (gasp) German to lead them to the glory they can't seem to find, I also have to admit I think it's a pretty shrewd move by the English FA.
Gareth Southgate, at the last Euros anyway, didn't appear to be able to make the hard decision, and wanted to please everyone. And he didn't have the tactical chops to make it all work, if there were any to be found. Phil Foden, Jude Bellingham, Harry Kane don't all fit into the same starting lineup. They all want to be in the same space. He didn't want to listen to people (rightly) tell him to play Trent Alexander-Arnold, but he didn't want to sacrifice what he thought was better defensive solidity (it wasn't), so he stuffed TAA into a #8 role that would never work. The only way Trent in midfield works is part of a double pivot with forwards who want to run in behind. But Southgate also didn't instruct Bukayo Saka or Foden to run in behind, or to say on the wings. He just let them do whatever they want, and it was mostly a mess. He let everyone do what they want, which is why England's performance was grotesque most of the time, even if they did miracle their ass to the final.
Thomas Tuchel has no compunction about telling a team exactly what he wants. He won't give a fuck what the press is saying, or what the players are leaking to the press. He doesn't have to. He'll only be in the job for 18-20 months until the next World Cup is over. There's nothing to threaten him with. He's also got far more tactical nous than Southgate.
Tuchel's biggest problem is that he drives everyone nuts two to three years after taking the job, but that's not a problem with a national team. One, he'll only see the players for a handful of times per year. Everyone gets a break from each other regularly. Two, there aren't any transfers to argue about with the board in international football. Three, it's just a short timeframe until the next big tournament. He may still drive everyone nuts, but it'll be much easier for everyone to hang on until July of 2026.
If Tuchel wants Foden to play a certain way and in a certain spot, he will. Or he'll sit him. If he needs Bellingham deeper, that will happen. If Harry Kane is past it come June 2026 (and he probably will be), Tuchel can make that choice too.
That doesn't mean It's Coming Home. A 48-team World Cup with an additional knockout round means there's more landmines for any team to trip on, especially experts at tripping like England. But it won't be because the team doesn't fit together and the manager was too afraid to make the hard choices.
