Dodging, ducking, looking for cover

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/01/2017 (2651 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ondrej Pavelec is up. Nikolaj Ehlers is down. Jose Bautista and Matt Nichols are back — and the Canadian National Dodgeball Championships are ahead.

It was coming at us from every direction this week in the world of sports:

Pavelec, the Jets and their fans were all in vintage form Wednesday night in a 6-3 win over the Arizona Coyotes at the MTS Centre.

Pavelec — recalled from the minors on Tuesday — was both at his best (a ridiculous paddle save that the NHL twitter account instantly christened an early candidate for save of the year) and his worst (whiffing on a floater on the first shot he faced).

And in that sense, it was the same old Pavelec we’ve known for years in these parts.

Charting a Pavelec game looks like a cardiogram — nothing but peaks and valleys. And the problem is that unlike a heart chart, the best NHL goalies are all flat-liners — consistently steady from save to save, period to period and game to game.

Alas, that wasn’t Pavelec before, it isn’t Pavelec now and it won’t ever be Pavelec. And that makes him the perfect embodiment of the Jets roller-coaster season.

Nothing changed in that regard for the Jets Wednesday night. If you’re one of the ever faithful hoping that adding a wildly inconsistent goaltender to a wildly inconsistent team is suddenly going to make the team more consistent, well, you’re going to be really frustrated.

I’d argue the most entertaining show in town right now is found on game nights at the Twitter hashtag #NHLJets, where the mood in Jets Nation these days swings from manic depression to ecstasy and then right back again — in the space of a period — all of it sprinkled with a heavy dose of snark.

No one ever said it would be easy being a Jets fan. They were right.

 

 

I’ve got no problem with Paul Maurice showing up his players publicly. Indeed, there’s more than a few coddled millionaires in that $66-million Jets dressing room who would be well served at the moment with a public flogging.

But I’m just not sure I understand why Maurice chose Nikolaj Ehlers — among all the underperforming Jets right now — to single out Wednesday night, demoting the top line winger to the fourth line during the game and then making public his displeasure with Ehlers’ all-around play in comments afterward.

Look, no one is denying Ehlers isn’t playing at the same high level right now that he was previously. And it’s not a coincidence — and also not an excuse — that his play has declined ever since linemate Patrik Laine went down Jan. 7 with a concussion.

But in the bigger picture, Ehlers has been part of the solution for the Jets this season, not the problem.

And so from where I sit, it was a bit gutless of Maurice to call out the kid after a season in which the coach has been mostly silent about the erratic play of Dustin Byfuglien, who has been a liability on a lot more nights than Ehlers has been and yet continues to play a half-hour a night on the top pairing.

Hmmm.

 

 

The Blue Bombers did this week the only thing they could do — throw a suitcase of cash at QB Matt Nichols and then cross their fingers that he doesn’t regress in 2017 after what was a career season — by a mile — last year.

Nichols completed more passes for more yards as the Bombers starter in 2016 than he did the previous two seasons combined. And his touchdown to interception ratio — the gold standard of QB stats in my books — was 18:9, or 2:1, which is exactly where you’d want it to be for an elite CFL quarterback.

Those are all career bests for Nichols and he quite wisely cashed in, signing a three-year deal that will pay him about $400,000 next season.

And the Bombers? Well, they’re betting two things: that 2016 wasn’t a fluke and Nichols doesn’t turn back into the career backup he always used to be; and that Nichols stays healthy in 2017 and the club isn’t forced to rely on an unproven backup in Dominique Davis.

The Bombers are operating without a net on this Nichols deal. Having released Kevin Glenn so that they’d have enough money to sign Nichols, the Bombers are basically going all-in that Nichols can stay healthy and replicate his standard of play from last year.

That’s far from a sure thing, but I’m not sure what option they really had. The market for proven CFL quarterbacks is thin this winter, as evidenced by the Montreal Alouettes’ signing this week of Darian Durant, whose advanced age is surpassed only by his inability to stay healthy.

Cross your fingers, Bombers fans. Because that’s what your team is doing in 2017.

 

 

While Nichols was busy cashing in this week after a career season, Jose Bautista was slinking back to the Blue Jays after learning a hard lesson: no one is interested in signing a long-term deal with a whiny player on the wrong side of 35 who hit .236 in 2016 and was constantly injured.

Bautista and the Jays deserve each other.

The former hopelessly overplayed his hand last spring, announcing he was refusing to negotiate with the Jays after they balked at his ridiculous contract demands, a reported $150 million over five years.

And then the Jays found themselves with no better option this winter after they hopelessly misplayed their negotiations with Edwin Encarnacion, allowing the slugger they really wanted to re-sign to walk away and sign with Cleveland through sheer incompetence.

In the end, Bautista and the Jays settled on a limp noodle of a deal that will pay him about $18 million next season, with some options after that from which either side can walk away.

This deal can go one of two ways: either Bautista rises to the challenge and spends 2017 proving to everyone how wrong they were about his value; or Bautista becomes even whinier and more embittered than he already is and spends 2017 proving everyone right.

I’m betting on the latter scenario, but the man has proven me wrong before.

 

 

And, finally, I had a press release come across my desk this week announcing Winnipeg will host the Canadian National Dodgeball Championships in April 2018.

This was news to me on several levels, not the least of which were the revelations that a) grownups play dodgeball in real life and not just bad Ben Stiller movies; and b) you can actually win a Canadian championship at an activity for which I received a lifetime ban in Grade 2 from Sister Jacqueline after I drilled a classmate in the face and made her cry. And also bleed.

From the release: “This is a huge win for Winnipeg’s booming dodgeball community,” says event director Mat Klachefsky, “We have a lot of talented players that are eager to show Canada what they’re made of.”

According to the release, a Winnipeg dodgeball league that began in November 2015 with just eight teams now boasts 80 teams and 577 players playing weekly games.

Dodging, ducking and looking for cover — the head coaches and general managers in this town should put together a team.

 

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek