Sens at Land's End

Kudos to the Ottawa Sun for their Hartsburg headline this morning. Instead of going with the obvious play on Hart/heart, they came up with this beauty:

Well done! As you can see, I came up with my own non-heart-related pun for this post title. The Sun will never top that one!

The Sun also had a few soundbites from various Sens players about their new boss. They all sound very positive, not that any of them would ever actually come out and question this hiring in the media.

The Citizen, meanwhile, published a full transcript of the press conference which introduced Hartsburg. Due to my intense love of all things Spider-Man, the following bit from Hartsburg caught my eye:

It’s certainly an honour to be coaching in the National Hockey League again, but to me, it’s certainly a bigger honour to be coaching here in Ottawa, in the great city of Ottawa. With honour comes a great deal of responsibility and I’m really excited about that responsibility and I can’t wait to get started.

Hartsburg shall from now on be referred to by me as Coach Uncle Ben, and I fully expect him to have all the Sens in a Spidey-esque frame of mind — which involves a recognition that you can’t just go around using your incredible hockey skills to impress girls by scoring lots of goals and getting money to buy an expensive car; you have to stop the rubber too instead of letting it get past you because you missed the part where playing defence is your problem, and if you don’t then you’ll end up with more guilt than you can ever work off, even if you save the city two or three times — by mid-season.

After the press conference, Bryan Murray told the media that the team’s plans regarding Ray Emery haven’t changed:

“I don’t think our plan has changed on our situation with Ray and a couple of other people: We’re moving on,” said Murray. “We’ve got to clean the slate here. If, in fact, the issues were as big as they were last year and the problems were as big as they are, then it’s better to get a fresh start. If Ray moves on, he’ll have success elsewhere, but maybe for us a fresh start is most important.”

Tomorrow, June 15, is the first day of the buyout period for NHL contracts, so Emery could be gone very soon.