The National Hockey League Eastern Conference Final begins tomorrow night between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers. This all-Pennsylvania playoff series has the Keystone State all geeked up, as fans from each city are plotting public-monument desecrations in the rival towns.

Top target in Philly: The statue of Rocky.

The attack may have already happened overnight - just as a similar outrage was apparently committed by Montreal Canadien fans during the previous hockey series.

The evidence: On the pavement in front of the bronze Italian Stallion lay a black No. 87 Sidney Crosby jersey around 9:30 this morning. The sleeves appeared to have been cut off, perhaps to facilitate draping it over Rocky.

In retaliation, Brotherly Lovers are putting the cross-state call out:

I am recruiting a Philly native and loyal Flyers fan that is living in Pittsburgh to place a Flyers jersey on a significant landmark in Pittsburgh (panther statue on Pitt campus, in front of Mellon Arena or anything you can think of) and send me a photo of it to submit to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

It’s all pretty childish, but hey, both cities are thirsting for a championship. Nice to see some passion for the postseason. And at this rate, I think Pennsylvania is giving Minnesota a run for its money for that “State of Hockey” moniker.

As the New York Rangers get set to embark upon Round Two of the NHL playoffs, I can’t think of any stranger soap opera material than news of Sean Avery seeking out, and landing, an internship at Vogue Magazine.

Avery, who makes $2 million a year with the Rangers and has cavorted with starlets since his days with the Los Angeles Kings, initiated the contact with Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

“He is ridiculously obsessed with fashion,” Avery’s publicist Nicole Chabot told ABCNews.com. “He loves it more than anything in the world. It’s something he has always wanted to do.”…

Though his assignments are “evolving,” Avery will go to Paris Fashion Week with international editor-at-large Hamish Bowles, according to Chabot.

Presumably that Paris trip is scheduled for after June; Rangers faithful would be less than pleased to lose Avery’s agitating skills in the midst of a Stanley Cup run.

I can only guess that this timing is designed to encourage mindgames among upcoming playoff opponents. No one wants to get pushed around by a budding fashion-mag internist…

Professional puckheads won’t have to go begging for National Hockey League broadcasts next season, as NBC has extended its broadcast agreement with the league through the 2008-09 season.

“There have been positive signs for the league, both on and off the ice,” Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, said in a statement. “Ratings were up this year; the Winter Classic in Buffalo was a huge success; advertising sales were healthy; and the product on the ice has never been better, led by young, marketable stars such as Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. We believe this is a sport that will continue to grow.”

Ratings for the regular-season Sunday games on NBC were up 11 percent from last year.

We’ve heard all this before — a one-year bump is nice, but doesn’t guarantee any long-term commitment. The key component is that NBC is getting the content for free — no rights means the NHL is simply getting some much-need exposure, and the network has no risk in either broadcasting or else bumping the random game.

Still, having a prime broadcast presence is still a status symbol that any claimant to major-league sports must have. It might not mean as much five years from now, but for now, it’s a requisite that the NHL is glad to have.

Yes, I have noticed that the 2008 National Hockey League playoffs commenced earlier this week. In fact, I’ve been putting myself into sensory overdrive by watching all the games thus far — including the ones being streamed on Yahoo! Sports, like tonight’s Pittsburgh-Ottawa Game 2 tilt.

But no, I haven’t blogged anything about the NHL postseason so far. That might change, but for now, I’d rather just take in the games and leave it at that. The last thing the world needs is another set of predictions and assessments over which team will hoist the Stanley Cup in June.

That said, I am enjoying watching my hometown Rangers taking the early lead in their series against the Devils, and I’m crossing my fingers for an upset advance into Round 2. Out West, I’m skeptical that the Sharks will finally go all the way to the Finals, despite their on-paper strength, simply because they manage to find a way to implode every year.

So far, so fun. Game on.

Here’s an interesting Chicago sports alliance: The MLB White Sox and NHL Blackhawks will be cross-promoting each other in their barns during 2008-2009, with offers including ticket sales and other baseball/hockey merchandising.

What makes this especially noteworthy is the speculation around Chicago hosting a future outdoor National Hockey League game, ala the 2008 Winter Classic in Buffalo. This development could be seen as the initial groundwork leading to U.S. Cellular Field (nee New Comiskey Park) being the site of an outdoor ‘Hawks game in a couple of years.

While Soldier Field might seem like the most iconic choice for an ice-over, I said before that a baseball-stadium option might have more of an inside track in Chi-town:

[Blackhawks president John] McDonough, of course, just landed in Blackhawkland after a lengthy executive career with the Chicago Cubs. So I guess it’s natural that he’d tap the two area baseball stadiums as first choice, because they and their overseers are known quanitities to McDonough.

Networking overrides all. The other advantage is the avoidance of potential conflicts with any Bears playoff dates.

Does this mean Chicago will get its Winter Classic (rightly renamed “Windy City Classic”) in the 2008-09 NHL season? I doubt it. The New York option, with the opportunity to stage an outdoor game in Yankee Stadium just before its demolition, is too sweet for the league to pass up. But I’m sure something could be set up for the ‘Hawks to take their turn in 2009-2010.

I’ll say this for the National Hockey League in this cap-strapped era: It’s damned efficient when it comes to trading players.

The league trading deadline came and went today at 3PM, and the teams exploded for 25 transactions. That’s more action than the rest of the year combined (even counting waiver-wire pickups that included notables like Ilya Bryzgalov, Sergei Samsonov, and Mark Recchi). As someone who enjoys trade news, I’ve resented the dampening effect the salary cap has had on trades for the past couple of years. So it seems Deadline Day is all I’ve got left.

As for today’s specifics, the biggest stories obviously were Brad Richards landing in Dallas, with Tampa Bay getting back a long-needed potential starting goalie in Mike Smith; and the Penguins surprising everyone by landing Marian Hossa.

Wild day. I almost wish I had taken the day off for it.

Funny thing about Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Dan Boyle and the freshly-inked contract that keeps him off the trade and free agent market:

TSN has learned that the deal will pay Boyle $6.66 million per year for six years [for a total of $40 million].

Sure, business is business, but that 6-6-6 per year is unusually satanic.

What’s more, the incoming new owner of the Lightning happens to be one Oren Koules, Hollywood producer best known for the Saw horror-flick franchise. It’s been acknowledged that Koules has been given the greenlight to make personnel decisions ahead of officially closing on the sale, so Boyle’s contract doubtless had his final approval.

So, did Koules engineer that mark-of-the-beast dollar figure, as some sort of subtle movie-marketing tie-in? Will every Lightning contract during the Koules era have some nefarious subtext attached to it?

I’m happy for Boyle’s bank account, but scared for his soul.

The rampant parity on display this National Hockey League season is prompting more and more complaints about the so-called “loser point”, aka the conditional third point that each team is guaranteed when regulation time ends with the score tied. The perception is that this point-padding is responsible for an unnatural tightness in the NHL standings, even though some theoretical number-crunching shows that that isn’t the case.

That third point does serve a purpose: It discourages teams from playing clock-killing prevent defenses during the overtime period. That’s pretty much was what was happening before the three-point structure was instituted. Teams preferred to withdraw into a defensive shell, ride out the five minutes, and come away with the one-point tie. That led to some of the most purposeless hockey you’d ever see. The guaranteed point, on the other hand, makes it less risky for teams to open up offensively and go for the two-point win, because there’s nothing to lose and only something to gain.

That’s how OT works in hockey. Offensive chances simply don’t manifest themselves enough to do it any other way, unless you want to go back to ties.

On the other hand, the shootout is a different story. There’s no possibility of defensive sandbagging — it’s a simple offensive contest. No matter how many rounds it goes, it still comes down to a shooter getting one past the goalie. No nuances.

That’s why I think the “loser point” should be eliminated once an NHL game goes into shootout. In my mind, it loses its purpose once overtime ends: It no longer serves as incentive to ensure fast-paced gameplay, and it certainly doesn’t have an impact on how teams approach the shootout. If anything, it creates added urgency for the shootout, which would make it even more popular than it already is.

So it would go like this: Regulation win would result in two points for the winner and zero points for the loser. Overtime win would result in two points for the winner and one point for the loser. Shootout win would result in two points for the winner and zero points for the loser.

I can’t see a downside to this structure. I suppose that if a team has a particularly strong shootout record, it may try to run out the OT with puck possession. But that would just give the opposing team that much more incentive to settle it in overtime. And regardless, if that strategy results in a shootout resolution, all the better.

Even this solution won’t satiate everyone, particularly purists. But it seems like the fairest way to minimize what’s perceived as point-padding.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: Well, I thought of a downside. If a team is determined to come away with one point, all it has to do is pull its goalie at some point in the OT, letting the other team win. That avoids the risk of going into the shootout, where the risk is greater because a team could end up with nothing.

So I guess the only true way to get rid of the “loser point” is to eliminate the overtime period altogether, and go straight to a winner-take-all shootout after a tied regulation. I doubt the NHL is ready for that complete break with tradition just yet, though.

Greg Wyshynski holds special affection for the distinctive TV commercial toy pitches of his youth:

As a child of the ’80s, the art of the goofy action figure commercial has always fascinated me. Somehow, two little kids holding up He-Man figures, talking to their father on an exercise bike while a bombastic theme song pounded in the background was the pinnacle of marketing genius back in the day. Hell, just seeing it again made me want to run out to Toys ‘R Us and purchase Man-E-Faces.

Which is why this modern-day application of that advertising style for the Los Angeles Kings’ upcoming player figurine giveaway nights resonates so deeply, for Greg and probably other twenty- and thirtysomethings:

I dunno. Even though the kitschy angle is obviously the aim, to me it comes off as overly cheesy. I think they were trying too hard. And I’m not at all convinced that the players were properly into it.

Or maybe I’m holding the NHL club’s production values to too high a standard. I can’t help it — for I’ve seen the light when it comes to this strain of advertising, in the form of this Biblical epic selling the Jesus Christ Action Figure:

I wonder how Jesus Christ Action Figure Night would play in National Hockey League arenas around North America. Maybe if He were wearing full goalie gear — y’know, “Jesus Saves”?

Goaltenders enjoy the spotlight that comes with being the focal point of the on-ice action. So maybe it’s natural that they’re the ones spearheading the long-expected migration of advertisements onto major-league player uniforms, in the form of the Goaltender’s Club, a proposal to sell corporate logos on the jerseys of the NHL’s 60 goalies.

A copy of the goaltender’s club proposal, obtained by the [Toronto] Star, shows corporate presence on a jersey could range from subtle to more invasive.

One proposal shows Roloson’s blue and orange team jersey with a small Rexall logo above the Oilers symbol. The drugstore chain’s symbol could also be “sublimated (dyed right into the fabric) on a portion of the sleeve.” A second proposal depicts Brodeur’s Red Devils jersey. The team’s NJ on the chest is positioned above a large tag for the bank UBS and adjacent to an RBC logo. Bank Morgan Stanley’s symbol could be featured on the goalie’s sleeves and shoulders.

A third proposal shows Detroit goalie Hasek’s red jersey, again with the Red Wings’ logo front and centre above the larger symbol of insurance company AIG. The company’s logo could also be displayed on the sleeves and on the bottom of the jersey’s back. The presentation also suggests goalies be allowed to choose the jersey’s colour and depicts Hasek’s in black, blue, green and white styles.

The differentiation of the goaltender’s uni colors is the biggest problem I have with this concept. I know it mirrors European soccer goalies’ looks, and that’s why I hate it: Goalies on the grass look like clowns half the time, donned in a shiny outfit that makes him stand out from his teammates to the point of distraction. It’s an unnecessary visual divider for the spectator. I don’t care how explicit it might otherwise be to tell which goalie is with which team — breaking that uniform pattern breaks the uniformity. That’s why they’re uniforms, remember?

Actually, the biggest problem I have with this scheme is that it’s based upon the idea that NHL clubs are hemorrhaging cash, thereby justifying the monetization of another aspect of the game. Any declaration of poverty among the major-pro franchises is met by extreme skepticism by me, because it’s a refrain that’s been repeated for decades, despite rising franchise values and ever-sweeter arena/commercial real estate deals. In short, I don’t buy the justification.

But does any of that matter? There’s money to be made, and players’ jerseys are the vacuum waiting to be filled.

My sense is that the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL are all waiting one another out. The first one to blink — be it hockey or one of the other major team sports — will be the green light for the others to follow suit. Until then, the idea seems too minor league for North American sports mores to accept all at once.

I’m resigning myself to the expectation that it’s a question of when, not if. I’d be really pleased if the NHL, being my favorite sport, not be the one to cross the line first. But I’m sure that, say, 10 years from now, it’ll all be academic.

One of the added benefits of watching NHL games via Yahoo! Sports webcasts is that I sometimes get peeks at Canadian TV commercials. Always fun to see the pitches made north of the border.

Like this one for McDonald’s in Canada, featuring miniature goaltending hotshot JC Petit:

The mighty-mite netminder’s trash-talking is, of course, the best part. “Nice try, No-goal-ov!” is a keeper.

I say Petit be recruited as hockey’s new game ambassador. He beats out Peter Puck any day.

The Blackhawks may be the next National Hockey League team to host an outdoor game, and that’s just one of the ideas in store for an iced-over Soldier Field:

[Park District Supt. Timothy] Mitchell said the district would like the hockey plan to include a college contest and a way to allow people to use the rink for pleasure skating in a week-long event.

“We think there would be a great interest in citizens skating inside Soldier Field between the colonnades,” said Mitchell.

A practical Windy City winter wonderland. Hopefully the Bears will cooperate by tanking their season and avoiding the NFL playoffs.

Interesting reaction from the Blackhawks’ new brass:

But Blackhawks president John McDonough said discussions about Soldier Field have “been informal on a what-if basis,” adding, “I have friends at all of the venues: Wrigley, U.S. Cellular. I think they’d all like to take a run at it.”

McDonough, of course, just landed in Blackhawkland after a lengthy executive career with the Chicago Cubs. So I guess it’s natural that he’d tap the two area baseball stadiums as first choice, because they and their overseers are known quanitities to McDonough.

Today marks the 15th anniversary of Gary Bettman’s tenure as National Hockey League commissioner.

Let me take this opportunity to isolate a prime example of the idiotic knee-jerk thinking that dominates such sports-journalism retrospectives:

Revenues and franchise values have also markedly grown, BUT so have player salaries. (emphasis mine)

“But”? That simple qualifier speaks volumes. It’s not “and so have player salaries”, which would cast the increase as a supporting effect of the league’s strength. Instead, it’s the accusatory “but”, implying that well-paid talent is a negative thing. Despite commonly-accepted perceptions, it’s wrongheaded thinking. Fact is, when both sides are making more money, that means the business is in great shape.

With that out of the way…

It’s been a 15-year wild ride: Expansion, relocations, and arena deals have changed the league’s landscape, while lockouts and disciplinary actions have contributed to uneasy labor relations. Plenty of assessments will be offered over the next few days, most of them negative — no surprise, as the chief steward of any sport is a naturally disproportionate target. Personally, I rate Bettman’s reign as neutral-to-slightly-positive. I’m fully supportive of the efforts to widen the scope of the game, and that wasn’t going to happen by keeping the 1993 status quo: Preventing weak-sister franchises from relocating and avoiding a presence in the fast-growing U.S. southeast and west regions. Counterbalancing that is his culpability for the lockout season and shoddy player treatment overall, even though that’s a function of his following orders from the owners (like every other sports commish does). And of course, marketing efforts — including the dearth of big-money national TV exposure — have been mostly as inept as they were pre-Bettman, when the NHL had presidents instead of commissioners.

All that’s fairly apparent, at least to me. I’m not your average fan, of course — I’m more astute, frankly. And I watch NHL games practically every night, to the exclusion of most other television offerings; so by that measure, I give the current state of the league a thumbs-up.

Bettman himself has a few more years left on his gig. As long as the revenues keep streaming under his watch, the owners will keep him around. On balance, that’s a positive thing.

Worth noting: Versus and the National Hockey League will remain hitched in the near future, as the fledgling cable sports network has extended its telecast agreement with the hockey folks through the 2010-11 season, at around $75 million per year.

And there’s no shortage of nice things being said:

During the 2006-7 season, Versus’s N.H.L. rating stayed flat at a 0.2, but because of the overall growth of subscribers, viewership rose 31 percent to 212,366.

[Versus president Gavin] Harvey said the deal was turning a profit.

“Without the N.H.L., we’d be in a more difficult pickle,” he said.

Since the Comcast-owned Versus acquired the rights to the N.H.L. — after ESPN vowed to drastically reduce its rights payment to the league — the network has grown by about 10 million subscribers to 74 million, more than 22 million fewer than ESPN or ESPN2. It has also increased its subscriber fee to about 26 cents a month, from less than 20 cents.

It doesn’t hurt that Comcast also owns the Philadelphia Flyers, and thus has a vested interest in providing the league national exposure. Besides, despite all the running-down, there’s still a bigger chasm between the bush-league sports and the NHL; at the end of the day, it’s one of the Big Four sports, albeit the weak sister of the bunch (the way it’s been since the 1970s, really).

I’ll take all the TV time for hockey I can get. If Versus’ continued slow-but-steady growth represents a tandem trend with the NHL, all the better. It does verify a certain vague positivity in hockey’s perception ever since the NHL Winter Classic garnered modestly good reviews.

Of late, there seems to be a marked uptick in media complaints about the standings system used in the National Hockey League. I guess it’s because parity holds sway on the eve of the All-Star break, meaning most teams are crowing about being .500 in terms of points, even though that’s thanks to a surplus of one-point decisions.

And even though those one-pointers are no longer considered ties, I like the way Washington City Paper sums up its whine in the headline “No More Kissing Your Sister”.

Mainly because that time-honored folksy descriptor for the less-than-satisfying feeling from tying a college football game reminds me of Lee Corso’s expansion on the subject:

“Let me tell you something — if a tie is like kissing your sister, then a loss is like kissing your brother!”

So maybe the NHL should adopt that as the official league response to all those complainers…

They have near-identical stats to match their near-identical genes, but twin-brother NHL-ers Daniel Sedin and Henrik Sedin will be split up during All-Star weekend, as only Henrik was named to the Western Conference roster to represent their Vancouver Canucks squad.

I do like this proposed trickery for preventing a case of separation anxiety for the Swedish forwards:

$5 says they both go and pretend to be just one guy and no one notices.

I’d have no complaints if the Sedins somehow decided to attempt this. It’s only an All-Star Game, for Christ’s sake — no sanctity to violate.

I’m not sure if there’d be precedent. I do recall a story from twin football players Tiki and Ronde Barber about how they would, while playing their college ball at the University of Virginia, sometimes switch jerseys during practice to try to trick teammates and coaches. It wouldn’t work — Ronde would sit in on the offensive unit’s meetings and get outed within seconds, and Tiki would give himself away similarly in the defensive classroom.

Carolina Hurricanes radio announcer Chuck Kaiton has established a reputation for zealously learning and using the correct pronunciation of non-English player names in the National Hockey League.

That typically means going to the source and asking the player how he prefers to hear his name uttered. Therefore, it’s not Sergei SAM-so-nov, it’s sam-SO-nov.

This reminds me of an offhand joke from an ESPN SportsCenter announcer, back when Eric Desjardins was traded from Montreal to Philadelphia in 1995. The quip was that, by moving from a Francophone city to an American one, he went from being “Eric de-zhar-DAN” to “Eric de-JAR-dins”…

Having an unconventionally-spelled name myself was probably a contributing factor for why I gravitated toward NHL fandom, in that it gave me a way to identify/relate with players in that sport. Although the caveat is that I prefer having a name that most people don’t even bother to attempt to pronounce, given the incongruous letter combination, as opposed to a name that looks phonetically “correct” but isn’t.

When ProTrade launched its fantasy-sports stock exchange game more than two years ago, I figured it would ramp up in popularity fast enough so that it would eventually include gameplay for all four major team sports.

So I was surprised to learn that it has yet to add National Hockey League players.

From what I can tell, ProTrade hasn’t added hockey because the guys running it can’t dope out the statistical measures for on-ice performance. Without looking too deeply at the particulars, I’d think that, if fantasy sports can handle hockey — basically by providing a mix of scoring, plus-minus, penalty minutes and other indicators — I can’t see why ProTrade should consider this such a challenge. Stats are stats — those who indulge will know that to look for, just like any other fantasy league.

I do think the NHL itself should be more proactive with ProTrade. Fantasy sports are one more avenue for selling hockey to more general sports fans, as fantasy fanatics often are in search of ever more varieties of distraction. If the league doesn’t see the value, maybe the Players Association should pursue it, since it’s really the player metrics that matter here. There’s precedence for either approach, as Major League Baseball and the NFL Players Association have bother established affiliations with ProTrade.

I already knew how good a game the Pittsburgh Penguins’ 2-1 shootout win over the Buffalo Sabres in the NHL Winter Classic outdoor game was, because I watched it. The image of snowflakes falling on the rink couldn’t have been more fitting for this special spectacle.

But that doesn’t mean squat. I watch hockey practically every night. What matters is if anyone else watched the NBC nationally-televised game, after a moderate amount of hype over retrofitting Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson stadium from football to hockey, and with competing college football games on.

Happily enough, the gimmick worked: NBC got a 2.6 national rating, the best numbers for a nationally-televised NHL game in ten years.

That’s not to say that a 2.6 is great:

The numbers would have been better if it did not go up against a close Capital One Bowl between Florida and Michigan, the latter a hockey hotbed. That game did a 9.9 overnight nationally and a 4.5 in New York.

So in the larger scheme of things, the ratings were good when compared to the typically puny viewing audience hockey draws on network TV. Baby steps, basically.

Nothing talks like money, and this kind of exposure will prompt the league to push more bowl games — at least one annually, and perhaps two. I can see this easily get done to death: Columbus versus Pittsburgh at Ohio State’s football stadium, Devils versus Rangers in Giants Stadium (with the Devils as home team, since it’s back in their old Meadowlands stomping grounds), Chicago versus Detroit in Soldier Field, etc. All would be thrilling — but not in rapid-fire succession. Let’s hope there’s some restraint.

Until the novelty of playing hockey in a football bowl wears out, it appears the National Hockey League and its teams will have some economic impact numbers to throw around when pitching future Winter Classics:

With four days to go before the puck drops on the outdoor hockey rink in Ralph Wilson Stadium, the Buffalo Convention & Visitors Bureau estimates the New Year’s Day event will generate more than $5 million in direct revenues.

“Our projections tend to be conservative, but based on local hotel reservations, this is going to be a very significant event for Buffalo-area hotels and restaurants,” said the CVB’s Doug Sitler.

If those estimates hold, the Jan. 1 NHL event will top the $4.2 million in spending tied to the multiday slate of NCAA basketball tournament games played in HSBC Arena last March.

Five million bucks is not super-huge when it comes to dedicated major-league sporting events. In comparison, the last Super Bowl was hyped to have generated $298 million for South Florida; even if, as contended, that figure is somewhat inflated, it still points to an entirely different magnitude of dollar volume.

But then, no one is touting the Winter Classic as Super Bowl-caliber. It’s a regular-season game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Buffalo Sabres that otherwise wouldn’t be worthy of special notice. The venue and date makes it special, and so it’s attracting more visitors and discretionary spending to the Buffalo area. That’s all it needs to do to help the league get exposure.

As long as the NHL restricts these bowl games to once per year, they’ll achieve their purpose, and everyone will be happy.

The Sabres and Penguins have yet to lace ‘em up for the first NHL Winter Classic on New Year’s Day at Buffalo’s Ralph Wilson Stadium, and already the Flyers are claiming dibs for round two. Philadelphia brass is trying to engineer their own outdoor NHL game for next year, a matchup with their cross-state rivals from Pittsburgh at Penn State’s 107,282-capacity Beaver Stadium.

Flyers coach John Stevens, whose wife, Stacy, graduated from Penn State with a degree in Communications, said he’s been to several Nittany Lions football games and thinks staging an outdoor game there is brilliant.

“The atmosphere up there is unbelievable,” Stevens said. “It’s a great town and it’s kind of the halfway mark between here and Pittsburgh. It would be an ideal situation. I’m sure you’d be able to encompass fans from both teams.”

It doesn’t appear that anyone’s checked with the university just yet, and some segments of the student body seem less than enthused. Still, a spectacle is a spectacle, and the Keystone State is already fertile hockey territory, with three AHL teams (Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Hershey, and Philly) and an OHL squad in Erie to go with the two National Hockey League franchises.

One per year is reasonable enough for these outdoor events, gimmicky as they seem. Any more than that and it becomes old hat real quick. Personally, I’m waiting for the proposed Rangers-Islanders tilt in a frozen-over Yankees Stadium infield to make this annual rotation one of these years.