KINCH'S CORNER
Brought to you by Lasse Kinch
Date: 07/4-02
The Madness!
The TWHL2 FA draft was held in Ping Tung city, home of the TWMHL2 winners Ping Tung Passports and the TWHL headquarters. If you thought that last years draft was long, well then you know nothing. Last nights draft, no let me correct that, yesterdays draft , took almost a full day to complete. This had some interesting effects on some of the participants, more about that later. Now lets take a look at what really happend yesterday.
I think most of you remember how surprised we all were when Taipei GM David Easton decided to match a $10 M bid on defenseman Rickard Persson. That led to that Taipei couldn't afford to re-sign Alexei Zhamnov and Patrick Desroschers. I for one had expected something similar this year but it never happend. It was however a player from Taipei that got signed first. GM Easton Matched a $7 M bid on Ville Nieminen.
The bid on Nieminen opened door for other teams to step in to sign Swedish star Peter Forsberg. Cairo, lead by new PR director Hulk Hogan, signed Forsberg. Cairo is according to me one of the drafts biggest winners. In the second round they managed to sign Vezina winner Chris Osgood. Now thats almost robbery.
So what about Magnus Arvedsson, Rob Brind'Amour and Saku Koivu some might wonder. Well they all got re-signed by their respective teams. This was expected. The Stockholm Ratz were in a similar position as the Typhoons. The Franchise had 8 of their core players available. As it turned out they lost Mark Eaton to Santiago, who went after a defenseman after having failed to steal Nieminen. Josh Green was the other player that the Ratz lost. Green's new team is the Havana Harlots.
Montreal got their hands on centerman Chris Drury who played on the Berlin team last seaoson. Montreal now can ice three outstanding centermen. Wayne Gretzky, Alexei Zhamnov and Drury. That's not to shabby if you ask me. Montreal is the only team in the Ali division that in the leagues two seasons never have appeared in post season play. I think that might change this season.
It was now, about halfway through the first round that the every thing went pitch black. Unfortenatly this wasn't the only power failure yeasterday. After about three power failures the league office decided that the draft would be relocated to an old barn outside town. Apparently the barn had previously been used to store fish in because the smell was not of this world I tell you.
This years finalists, the Vancouver Greenpeace took some what of a beating yesterday. Looking at the bids that were made on the Vancouver players in is quite clear that everyone knew that Vancouver had plans to re-sign Conn Smythe winner Scott Niedermayer. That cost the Greenpeace dearly. Both powerforward John LeClair and sniper Sergei Krivokrasov were signed by other teams.
The regning champs the Singapore Dipsomaniacs were very defensive. They re-sigend three of their FA's but lost Jamie Lundmark to Lee division rivals Hong Kong.
Brian Boucher, Roman Cechmanek, Chris Osgood and Olaf Kolzig all changed clubs yesterday. This is some of the leagues finest goalies and the signing teams should all be happy over their new signings.
The draft seemed to go on forever but after almost 7 hours it appeared to be over. By now, most teams had already gone home to prepare for next weekends entry draft. There were only a few GM's there to the end.
When I left only the Rio GM and the London GM were still there. Apparently they had some issues to sort out. I was just about to get into the cab when I realized that I had forgotten my "1001 ways to insult Marty McSortly" book at my seat. When I got back into the barn I saw something strange. Up on the podium were the two Gm's slapping each other over the mouths with a trout!?! Apparently they had found a trout in some old crate inside the barn. I have now idea as to what that was about but I hope it was just a temporary episode of insanity caused by the very traumatic draft.