The Dead Zone

This is a pretty maddening time here at The Hockey Stop. There's not much really going on outside of a few ancillary pre-arbitration signings and the never-ending speculation on whether Teemu Selanne and Peter Forsberg will return to soome NHL team before training camp begins in five weeks. It's far too early to indulge in team previews, but too distant from the free-agent frenzy to determine who might have a leg up coming into this season.

I'm wrestling with pouring some more good hockey-related stuff into other websites, and the decision on how much to do and what kind for each. One will be purely fun with some long-time hockey-mad compadres, and the other will be my main source of "recognition" for which I've written since March. If I write for both, I might have to fold up this here oasis of sanity because I'd be stretching myself too thin, or at least turn this into a cut-and-paste enterprise for the stuff I'd do for the other two web sites. There are no guarantees for both, and maybe the best scenario that comes from all this potentiality is that I can always come back here and write the same pure stuff with a variety of topics, tone and depth like I've done since last September.

The only thing I can think to say now is, I hope there aren't too many hundreds of people who pre-ordered the new Flyers jersey. There are a precious few markets in the NHL where fans will line up with credit cards in hand, en masse, to purchase a product sight-unseen with the potential to be a crime against league fashion. It's yet another in a series of crushing vise grips the organization has on the psyche of the Philly hockey fan - that the promise of a season far from the bottom of the league causes the faithful to desire a $150 sweater that hasn't seen the light of day.

The franchise got lucky in the first wave of third jerseys that all they had to do was make black a primary color. With these new Reebok-inspired slender-cut jerseys with the emphasis on length and not width, and the existing orange-black-silver-white third unis floating around, I can't see much good coming from the new design. The last major change in color and design of the logo came in 1981, and from a marketing standpoint, it may be the right time to do some tweaks to something other than hue or piping. I'm not holding my breath, though. I'd rather they be a better team in older ware than a slick new failure.