CrashingTheGoalie

by Ron Spence

The off-season couldn’t have ended any other way.

There was a guy named Mike Danton who used to be Mike Jefferson who was released from prison. At the parole hearing, he claimed that he hadn’t been trying to kill his svengali hockey coach David Frost, but rather his father. 

His father then said that he was going to sue….

MIKE DANTON

courtesy of vnexpress.net

As the former St. Louis Blue was leaving prison, NHL owner William “Boots” Del Biaggio 111 started serving eight years.

Boots had pleaded guilty to a felony charge of forging financial documents to obtain $110 million in loans from several banks and two NHL owners. He then used the money to buy an interest in the NHL’s Nashville Predators and to pay personal expenses that included $4 million in gambling debts.

The other NHL’s owners spent a good part of the summer preventing Jim Balsillie from buying the Phoenix Coyotes and moving them to Hamilton, Ontario. 

WILLIAM “BOOTS” DEL BIAGGIO 111

courtesy of assets.bizjournals.com

The players were also fighting to keep someone  out – it was their Executive Director Paul Kelly, and he was punted in the middle of the night in Chicago.

The Chicago Blackhawks’ Patrick Kane also got into trouble in the middle of the night – in Buffalo. He was charged with attacking a geriatric cab driver who couldn’t give him change.

Dany Heatley wanted change as well – but it wasn’t currency. Rather, it was a change of location. Heatley was tired of Ottawa and demanded to be traded elsewhere – but not to Edmonton. 

This past post-season had started with a kafufle 

Sidney Crosby, who had taken pain killers during Game Seven of the Stanley Cup finals, had lingered too long in front of tv cameras and hadn’t hurried over to shake hands with the Detroit vanquished. 

This caused an uproar amongst some Detroit players, and the hockey summer of 2009 officially started not with a bang, but a whimper.

It would become the summer of our discontent.