[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Indomitable

Am I supposed to dredge up all of the information for you or are you too lazy to look that up for yourself?

Sorry, I thought you only had one piece of information, and that is easily debunked.

Are we supposed to believe that Kucherov wasn't able to skate before the end of the season? Multiple reports showed him skating before the playoffs. Even having a normal jersey (ie not a non contact jersey) Are we really doing this again? All the data is there for you.

He played when he was cleared to play. You know perfectly well that skating, even practising in a regular jersey, does not mean you are immediately fit to play after a layoff of several months. Except when it's Tampa, and then suddenly it becomes the Bavarian Illuminati taking over the world.

Maybe? Maybe it's been deleted by now. Maybe not now, maybe you missed all of it and you can't find it in yourself to believe that they fudged their numbers.

So you're still banging on about one case.

Good for you. Except if you choose not to question the almost literal "impossible" (ie Kucherov being healthy for "just" the playoffs)

What's impossible about that? He returned to play almost exactly at the time his doctors predicted he would be ready.

then maybe you should question how Canadian you are.

Me? I live in Canada. I don't consider myself Canadian, because I am perfectly well aware that my country hates me and has no use for me. I just haven't got the means to go anywhere else.

Canadian's don't cheat in hockey.

Canadians invented cheating in hockey – probably the same day they invented the game itself.

We may cheat the game within the game (see Esposito Summit Series) but we do not cheat the system nor cheat within the system.

What self-righteous twaddle. Are you familiar with the story of how the NHL got started? It was an exercise in cheating. The entire reason why the NHL was founded was to freeze out one of the owners in the old National Hockey Association and steal his players without compensation. (The NHL was originally supposed to operate for only one year while the con was being played, but the old league was so bogged down with lawsuits that they decided to keep the new league going and ditch the old one.)

There are scores of cases where Canadians have cheated the NHL system. It's been going on for more than a century. But the particular kind of cheating you're all worked up about does not exist. If the salary cap was not an obstacle for teams trying to win the Stanley Cup, the Leafs, Habs, and Rangers would find a way to ice $150-million payrolls – because those three teams could do that every year and still make a profit.

The fact that teams take full advantage of the LTIR clause (and that the clause was poorly written in the first place) does not equate to circumventing the cap. They follow the rules as written. You just don't like it and think it's an evil Yankee conspiracy to steal ‘our’ Stanley Cup, and probably ‘our’ Great Lakes as well. It isn't. Deal with it.