By Brad Lee
If you're here reading a blog about the St. Louis Blues in the middle of May when the team's season ended the first week of April, you may have a hockey problem.* A really big problem.
*We won't mention what it means to be still writing rather regularly on said hockey blog. Having a blog and keeping it going implies a whole other level of crazy.
But if you're here, you might want to learn about a fairly new Web site that will keep you up at night looking at old players, stats and the like. It's called Hockey-Reference.com. And there's one little aspect that will keep you looking for names. It's called sponsorship.
The way the Web site makes money is to offer a sponsorship on every single page of the site. Every player, team, coach is available to be sponsored. Our Internet friend Greg Wyshynski over at Puck Daddy on Yahoo! had a contest going to create the funniest phrase to accompany his sponsorship for old buddy Chris Pronger's page. He hoped readers could do better than "A suspension waiting to happen..."
Here's where the headline of this post comes into play. Every single Blues player ever has a sponsorship space available. Some for $100 for one year, others for $40. And some for just $10. A faithful reader contacted us last week to tell us he bought the sponsorship for Erik Johnson's page. That reader is Alex Chidester. He told us he didn't have anything to promote and wanted to see Game Time get some attention. He came up with the line: "The future is now...hopefully." We couldn't have said it any snarkier. Thanks Alex.
And we won't turn down anyone else who chooses to pony up for a sponsorship and gives us some attention in the process. We'd love it and give you a mention here on the blog. Hell, we'd even take a joke on Jordin Tootoo's page.