termie

I don't understand why (competitive and economic) that NHL teams want to take a player they've drafted and have them leave early. It'd be different if the player is ready or almost ready to contribute to the parent club. It seems so often they convince a guy to leave early and then have him down in the minors a year or two before they even get a chance to play at the show. Wouldn't the players develop just as well with 5 days of week practice and games on the weekend? Generally you hear of the deal offered to the players and frankly they'd be nuts not to take the money when it's offered to them. The one that really puzzles me is NJ Devils paying Zach Parise a quite large signing bonus when they knew there was not going to be an NHL season last year.

Time will tell of course. I was traveling this last week so I didn't get to see the Mankato series. If memory serves though the first round of the WCHA's are not that well attended by students. Certainly this is a much more important weekend. Let's just say I hope I'm wrong and I hope you're right.

AVI is a non-compressed format. You should try a MPEG format or for space concerns I haven't found anything to beat an WMV. If your computer is running XP you can get Windows Movie Maker 2 for free from the Microsoft website. Open up the files in that and save them in WMV. (That's one of the ways to do it). MM2 allows you to save it in several sizes too. 640X480 or 320X240 would be of preference. 640x480 is a standard TV resolution.

Exactly whoever's at fault should issue an explanation and an apology.

Just suppose they rushed and put the low bid printer in charge of it. The guy at the printer happens to be not from here, maybe even a non-hockey playing country.

I disagree in part. I don't expect the students to show up in any great force. That will hurt the "crowd factor". The folks that "sit on their hands" are probably a bit older and a bit more able to pay for the tickets.

I would think that we at least should hear an explanation of why it happened. Let's remember it wasn't until Sunday night that the teams were finalized. The big question is who was responsible for the product. I see a few different possibilities. 1. Red Baron (schwans) 2. The WCHA 3. The Host School (if that's applicable) Whoever was responsible for the picture should have caught that. It's a snub; but minor. I doubt that it was Red Baron just because they probably "wrote a check" and that was the sum of their imput. (They do have a business to run. Due to the time frame it was probably printed locally. The background would have been ready to go before Monday. So it was grab the team pix and go. I did do a search on the WCHA site and they don't mention it at all. I don't feel that bad about it as they also mispelled Goophers.

Do you imagine that's because they want to increase TV ratings or is it because the Hockey lEast guys were whining too much. Or more likely some combination of the two.

Why would you bring in a guy with limited NCAA tournement success for the NCAA tournement show? At least they didn't make the show all about Brian Gionta like they did in 2000.