Odds and ends and a kitten

I caught a wild kitten last week.  The folks at the animal shelter said he is just a couple weeks too old to be tamed.  I said what the heck, the Sharks are locked out, the Bulls are on the road, I’ll give it a try anyway.  As I sat there with the three pound feline cornered, petting his back gently, trying to make purring sounds, I wondered if I could find a parallel between this process and the NHL CBA negotiations.  I got stuck on who is the tiny cat and who is the busy-body human.

Of course, neither side qualifies as a completely helpless, fearful little thing.  And both sides understand what they need the other for.  The kitten doesn’t understand that making friends with people can double his life span and reduce stress dramatically.  It is a poor comparison.  Still, I will be keeping track of our relative progress, and I suspect my negotiations will end before the NHL’s, even with the multi-year head start they have on me.  Really, this is all stuff they should have been thinking about ever since the last time they did this.  I concluded that the CBA negotiations are less like a rapprochement and more like two lions fighting over a kill.   They are not concerned with making friends.  Ironically, they aren’t even that hungry.

The SF Bulls hit the road: Game 3 tonight

Things are heating up.  In Northern California, we can expect it to get really warm in the next few days, the Bulls won a game and something seems to be breaking loose in the NHL CBA talks.  This tweet sums that last part up for me:

@TheFourthPeriod: Being told there’s plenty of good traction tonight over CBA. Still a lot of work to be done, but this could move relatively quickly.

We’ll see about that.  In the mean time…

The San Francisco Bulls play the Ontario Reign at 7pm tonight.  It’s the team’s third game ever, and their first road game.  Ontario’s NHL affiliate is the Los Angeles Kings.  Ontario led the division at the end of last season but the playoffs weren’t kind to them.  Glancing over their roster I noticed a familiar name: Dan DaSilva, previously of the Worcester Sharks.

The Rookie Team: the San Francisco Bulls

A little over year ago, news emerged that the San Francisco Bulls, a new ECHL team, would be taking up residence at The Cow Palace.  How time flies.  San Francisco’s new hockey team has now held a dozen practices. They play their first regular season game tomorrow.

I asked Head Coach Pat Curcio if that seemed rushed:

“It didn’t, until last Friday. When I looked at our lineup … we have 13 rookies … and we were playing a team with 12 veterans in their lineup. That was a little bit overwhelming… but the guys worked through it. Tomorrow night… Bakersfield’s got at least a dozen guys that played there last year.”

ECHL Rules limit the number of veterans on a team. But that doesn’t mean ECHL teams are all made up of players in their first professional season. Obviously some, like Bakersfield and Colorado, do have many players that fall in between rookie status and the veteran cut off.