Bradley Leigh Lee and I have a bit of a ritual. In this ritual, we call each other during work hours, and while I drive around in my car trying to get skin cancer on the left side of my face like every other sales guy in the history of sales guys since the dawn of the automobile and he tries to whisper from the time he leaves his cubicle until the moment he gets into the stairwell when he can finally speak aloud, we go over ideas we have for the paper and the website.
(Usually, he tells me that the second sentence of everything I write is an unbelievable run-on and needs to be edited. Not the first; always the second sentence. I call bullshit on that.)
During the season, we have lots to talk about. There's Blues news every day. There are nearly daily sitings of players around town that people are emailing us about (Blam! Gawker.com for the team, bitches!). We have games three or four times a week to write about on the site and (more time-consumingly) in the paper for the home games. We run our cellie minutes through the roof on ridiculous topics like how much space in the paper we should give to a graphic of just how drunk a certain editor got at the last home game (answer: half of one page.), whether or not we should just let one of our kids draw the cartoon for an issue (answer: yes.) or whether we should print the rumor we heard about the rookie defenseman and his run-in with the Town & Country cops (answer: yes, but as part of a joke so no one can tell if it's true or not - thank you, First Amendment.).
But the off-season? Well, as the kids are fond of saying... fuck.
And we've tried. We've been to all of the other SBN hockey sites looking for inspiration. We've gone off-reservation and checked out non-SBN team-based hockey sites (shhh, but there are some good ones out there that have avoided succumbing to the collossus that is the Death Star of Sports Blogging and Wannabe Serious Media(TM) ... in fact, ah... nevermind.) and honestly we haven't gotten that motivated to steal riff off of their ideas.
We take our role here (too) seriously. We want to have new content up for our loyal readers every day. Several times a day. During the season we were cracking out seven or eight new web stories a day, plus whatever we did for the game day papers. And none of it felt forced. It felt like a runaway train that we were doing everything we could just to keep it on the tracks. We couldn't control the speed and it took everything we had just to make the turns and keep it from running off the rails.
We'd love to have more content up for you every day, but.... Seriously, do you give two shits about an off-season review of every fucking player on the team?
Ug.
It's shit like that that causes the internet fruit-fly mentality. Skim it, post a snarky comment, on to the next site. You already know that Brad Boyes is the least exciting potential 45-goal scorer in the history of hockey. And that, yes, he'll miss probably 10 goals a year because he shot high/wide trying to pick a corner. You know that yes, once again we have a goaltending tandem comprised of two over-achieving backup goalies. And yes, that's the recipe for disaster... or just a first-round flame out. You know that Carlo Colaiacovo just had his break-out season and will have to somehow better it if he wants to stay in St. Louis after next year. And he will, just in time to leave St. Louis and become injury-prone again.
And frankly, we're kinda done sucking the dicks of Berglund/Oshie/Perron for now. Trust us, we'll nuzzle up again once the season starts and they resume their assault on the Blues' record books, fans' lists of Best Blues Ever!(R) and our own Top 11 Reasons To Believe This Team Will Shock The World.
But that's all for later. For now, I'm feeling a little antsy and angry and pissy. I'm feeling like the NHL Network isn't enough in August and like manufacturing bullshit stories for this site is dishonesty. I'm feeling like doing like the overlords ask and trying to garner Google hits with bullshit faux-meaningful headlines is garbage. Instead, let's take the good advice and distort it. Let's go multi-media with a podcast and fuck it up by just recording ourselves getting drunk. The first rule of Game Time is, of course, no one talks about Game Time.
I'm feeling like... like... like starting a riot in the prison, even though I know that it's like poking a bear with a stick. It'll probably end up killing me.
But it still beats the shit out of watching baseball.
So, fuck. You wanna know the type of shit that we would be writing about if we were going to insult you with bullshit manufactured articles or if we were back on blogspot and writing crazy-assed half-assed pieces of shit?
Welcome to the trash heap.
The Blues have a shitload of shitty goalies now. It's like The Partridge Family except we can't figure out who is Mr. Kincaid.
The NHL is such a fickle bitch. You gotta have a great goalie to win a Cup. Either that or you gotta have Chris Osgood and have already sold your soul to the Devil. But here's the fucking rub: no one ever knows who is going to turn into a good goalie and who is going to turn into shit in net. Martin Brodeur was drafted 20th overall. Patrick Roy was picked in the third round. Dominik Hasek was a 10th rounder.
Grabbing a goalie who can be a cornerstone is an inexact science. Brian Finley was drafted 6th overall. The Isles traded away Roberto Luongo in order to draft Rick DiPietro. The Rangers drafted a guy 10th overall who failed so badly that he attempted a comeback as some sort of Walrus-Boy with two blockers and no glove hand.
And the Blues' goalies? We were on our way for this article. David Cassidy, the good-looking one with the talent who would throw it away just before he hits it big? Ben Bishop, for shizz. This town can't wait to love that home-grown fucker. Danny Bonaduce? Gotta think it's Chris Mason. He seems so tough but seems like he's about to crack the fuck up in a majorly public way. But Susan Day? Come on, that's just not fair.
And two (TWO!) drummers? Fuck that. And Shirley Jones and Kincaid? Please. This isn't an article, it's an abortion in a shitty hippie bus.
Lines! Here's our guess on the lines that the Blues will throw out to start the season!
Look, if we were going to do some gay shit like this we'd just join a bathhouse or hockeysfuture.com's message boards. Either that or we'd just call it 'ghey' and pretend that we weren't being homophobic. And then we'd get a fantasy team and pretend like our successes with that fake shit means that we could GM a real team.
And then we'd get all ghey with our gay friends and their fake hockey teams would kick the shit out of our fake teams and they'd tell us to suck their fake dicks and we'd call them a bunch of gheys.
The Rise of the Sugar Gliders. Guaranteed to become the vanity pet of the next half-decade, we'd like to get onboard right now as "The Guy Who Brings His Sugar Glider To Home Games."
We'd even get him a little mini jersey, too. It couldn't be any more schticky than the Towel Bitch and his mind-numbingly stupid 'Look At Me!' display every game. Hell, that guy makes us root for shutouts against the Blues. At least our Sugar Glider would wear Bobby Plager's jersey and might actually do something exciting during a game.
Apparently they can fly around your shitty apartment. And they like old radiohead.
Or maybe they suck as pets.
Oh here's an idea! Let's talk about how our supposedly genius ownership and management group has gone completely fucking wacko and destroyed our young team in a little over, oh, 12 days.
Sorry, but the boys over at Second City Hockey have this topic all to themselves. The Blues have arguably one of the best ownership groups in the history of the franchise calling the shots right now. They also happen to have one of the best-respected management groups in all of the NHL right now. And who gets all the press? The Chicago Blackhawks and their owners/management.
Right up until a few weeks ago.
Honestly, I'm glad that we don't have this shit to write about. I'm glad we didn't give a 12-year contract to a guy who needed shoulder surgery and that they didn't also break CBA rules during the negotiations of said stoopid contract by discussing when said broken-shouldered non-Cup winning (two years in a row) might retire, thus making said stoopid contract even dumber.
I'm glad that our owners didn't also decide to let our general manager not send out RFA contract qualifiers on time so that the supposed 'team-building genius' could then be run out of office on a rail only to then be brought back to the organization under a different title.
Wow. Just when we thought the Blues/Blackhawks rivalry was about to get good, the Hawks have conjured up the late-90's version of their hapless franchise and fucked themselves.
Congrats, Dollar Bill Wirtz, you're about a million times more tenacious than any of us expected. The Curse of the Billy Goat has got nothing on the Curse of Dollar Bill.
And while all of that means plenty to write about and plenty of outraged posters from silly Google News hits, we're happy to not have that garbage to cover.
More multimedia multitasking and assorted nonsensia.
OK, fine, we're on Twitter. We have a fan-made Facebook appreciation page. we have this monstrosity of a website. But there's more out there for us to annoy you with and assault your senses. Twitter, for one, has been underutilized to the point where we actually thought we should have a 'Twitter Guy' to handle that for us. We considered a podcast until we heard what some of those actually sound like.
And then we realized that we can barely keep this site moving with content during the summer and that we'd never have time for a podcast during the fall/winter/spring. In fact, we literally had the discussion that a podcast hosted by this site only makes sense if we're drinking during its creation.
Which actually sounds fun, but probably translates into one of the unfunniest, incomprehensiblest podcasts in the history of drunken, incomprehensible podcasts. Of which there are many. Oh my gawd...
And that, somehow, leads us back to the start again.
In the end, all of us who work hard on this site want nothing more than to entertain, inspire, crack up or motivate you, our loyal readers. If that means that we pass on putting up bullshit for the sake of just having bullshit up, we hope you understand.
Or, of course, letting us get away with putting up a bullshit post about how we won't post bullshit.