Grantland: What Went Wrong for Brian Burke?

Let’s start with the easy part: Brian Burke failed in Toronto.

There’s really no way to spin it otherwise. Some people will try, because that’s how these things always work, but it’s futile. Brian Burke failed.

He came to the Maple Leafs in 2008 when it seemed that the franchise had hit rock bottom, and, as general manager, he never made it significantly better. He missed the NHL playoffs all four years. He took over a team coming off an 83-point season that everyone agreed was a disaster and managed to top that total only once. He compiled a .490 winning percentage, which, in a league that gives out points for losing, is indisputably awful.

All of that might have been acceptable if Burke, who was fired Wednesday, could point to an organization stocked with can’t-miss prospects. But the Leafs don’t even have that. The farm system is in better shape than it was when he inherited it, because it would've been nearly impossible for it not to be. But not by much, and with the (optimistically) possible exception of defenseman Morgan Rielly, it’s lacking the sort of top-tier young talent that almost all of today’s winning NHL teams are built around.

No playoffs. No blue chips. No progress. And, increasingly, no hope. That’s failure, any way you cut it.

So that’s the easy part. Now the harder question: Why? Why did someone who seemed like such a perfect fit for the job fail so spectacularly?

>> Read the full post at Grantland

Gary Bettman, Donald Fehr and the NHL Lockout's Guilty Conscience

Hey, did you hear that the NHL lockout ended? It totally did! In fact, after four months of hearing about how far apart the two teams were, on Saturday night the deal actually came together kind of quickly.

Almost… too quickly.

Call me crazy, but doesn’t it seem like something must have been going on in the background during all of this that lead to the sudden ending. In fact, I can almost picture it now…

Follow @blogesalming or Dave Nonis will take your job.

Full lyrics after the jump.

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Surprises in the new NHL CBA deal

Sci fi nerds had always known that good things would
happen if Gollum ever teamed up with Han Salo.

The NHL and NHLPA finally reached an agreement over the weekend, and the resulting new CBA doesn't sound like it will contain anything unexpected. In fact, it's pretty much the deal everyone had been predicting for months.

Or maybe not. DGB spies got their hands on the entire top secret document, and it turns out that it actually contains a few surprises. Here are some of the more interesting details that haven't made their way into public reports yet.

• There's a strict confidentiality clause in which both sides agree to never publicly acknowledge that nobody ever actually understood what "make whole" was supposed to mean.
  
  
• The deal sets aside a significant sum of money to donate to charitable organizations helping those most desperately in need of urgent assistance: reporters who are slightly tired and cold.
  
  
• The two sides agree to pay for all travel expenses when federal mediator Scot Beckenbaugh eventually returns to fight crime on his home planet.
  
  
• In a message aimed at all the league and team employees who took pay cuts or were laid off entirely, the document includes a photo of Jeremy Jacobs shrugging his shoulders while sitting on a giant pile of money.
  
  
• For reasons nobody seems to be clear on, half the document is made up of knitting patterns for Steve Fehr's sweater collection.
  

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New at Grantland: The 10 Types of Horrible People We Met During the NHL Lockout

The NHL lockout is finally, mercifully over. And the agreement couldn’t have come soon enough for the league, given that losing another full season would have inevitably resulted in a sharply reduced fan base along with drastic drops in attendance, merchandise sales, and TV ratings.

Oh, not because of the decreased enthusiasm from fans worn out by the third lockout in a generation. The NHL’s problem would have actually been much simpler than that: If this lockout had dragged on even a few days longer, NHL fans were all going to murder each other. Whether it’s the guy on the next bar stool, your favorite blogger, the coworker one cubicle down, or just some random guy on Twitter, virtually everyone in the hockey world has been completely insufferable for months.

>> Read the full post at Grantland.com

2012 - The NHL year in review

After overtime was prevented by a clutch save,
furious NHL officials insisted that the next
Classic include a team that never makes any.

A new year has arrived, which means that it's time to take one last look back at the one that just passed.

Unfortunately for hockey fans, most of the action in 2012 took place over the first few months thanks to a lockout that made meaningful news hard to come by later in the year. Then again, after 12 months marked by disputes over long-term contracts, maybe it's only fitting that an NHL Year in Review column would end up being heavily front-loaded.

January 2 - The Winter Classic ends with a dramatic game-ending penalty shot save by Henrik Lundqvist that experts describe as a Hollywood-style ending, if Hollywood movie stars were better looking.

January 23 - Tim Thomas attempts to send a political message by refusing to join his teammates in a meeting with President Barack Obama, making him the year's second most famous Massachusetts-based conservative to fail to get anywhere near the White House.

January 26 - The NHL all-star draft wraps up much quicker than usual when team captain Zdeno Chara uses the first overall pick to choose "Every single one of you, does anyone have a problem with that?"

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