The Big Monday Thing - Scorchie Award Previews, Baby
floob is back. sorry everyone, floob is back
So I thought with a week’s slate of games cancelled, I would be free to take a week off and rest on the laurels of the mighty Big Monday Thing. “Surely he will not be posting the Big Monday Thing this week, there is no hockey to recap, and he works so hard as it is,” you, the loyal Scorchstack subscriber surely mused to yourself over your evening brandy. You and I both thought you would be correct.
But then Mike came in and effortlessly produced the best edition a Monday has ever seen, and now all of a sudden I have to “put in effort” again, as I have “something to prove”, and if I don’t they “might take away my Christmas bonus”.
What does any of that even mean, anyway?
The Week of: December 20th-26th (can we get a W in the chat for Winter Solstice?)
Results From Past Week: /pppptttthhbbbppbbbbbbbbpppppthhh
Scorchstack was supposed to hold its Annual General Meeting at the Saddledome on the 23rd whilst your Calgary Flames hosted the upstart Seattle Kraken.
This did not happen. All things did not happen.
Flames Overall Record: 15-7-6, 36 pts
Standings: 3rd place in the Pacific Division, 6th in the Western Conference. Somehow not playing any games for a second week in a row allowed the team to move up one spot in the conference than they finished in last week.
That’s Sutter hockey!
Soundtrack: Crustified Christmas - R.A. The Rugged Man and Mac Lethal
This is the track I would have selected had I written anything in this space last week, but I didn’t. So now we’re doing it a week later. I’m sure thematically you won’t notice a difference.
What We Liked:
Okay, maybe now more than ever it’s a great time to highlight the positives. Here they are:
After what felt like our own version of Shaun of the Dead, where every member of the Flames seemed to eventually succumb to the virus over time, we seem to finally be over the plateau. With Dan Vladař exiting COVID protocol, anyone who found their way into an extended protocol vacation is now out of it, and nobody new has entered in quite some time now. That’s great news. The Flames appear to be over the hump, give or take one injured Tyler Pitlick.
(for now)
The team has had a chance to rest, recuperate, and now hit the ice again with enough time to shake off the rust and get their legs underneath them again. After their first extended losing streak of the season, if there was ever a time to be forced out of action due to /gestures at everything, maybe this was it.
The team got to roll over a little bit of pocket change back into their cap savings. Never a bad thing.
Matthew Tkachuk never got covid!
(so far)
What We Would Prefer Not To See:
The only hockey I watch anymore is the Calgary Flames and the Spengler Cup. This fucking sucks.
Also, while not Flames related, I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the women’s U-18 hockey championships were cancelled by the IIHF this week, as well as any other January tournament. That’s probably not a bad thing, but it makes the decision to allow the men’s World Junior tournament to play out unabated in December an odd choice, and it just goes to show the disparity that still exists between the men’s and women’s games in Canada and across the globe.
It’s no secret that the men’s game garners far more in resources than the women’s game, and the difference in coverage - if what the women get is something you can even call coverage - is pretty stark.
This may seem elementary to you, but it’s not. You have to remember that no one ever cared about the World Juniors until a national broadcasting partner needed something to do over Christmas, and now it’s a multimillion-dollar prize for anyone who can get their hands on it. There’s no reason the women’s game shouldn’t get a similar fate. It’s not hard to get people to care when you can manufacture an avalanche of support for it the way they did on the men’s side.
Everyone’s just looking for an equal share here, it’s about time it actually happened.
Enemy of the Week:
This is going to be controversial, but for this week’s dastardly villain, I am picking the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Nothing was a stick in the craw of Calgary Flames hockey more than this meek little global pandemic you may or may not have heard of before. Let’s hope they nip this thing in the bud before it becomes something of a catastrophe across every facet of society.
What Comes Next:
There appears to be some hockey o’er the horizon! The Flames have some postponed games to make up, but the NHL returns to regular scheduling as of tomorrow, which means the scheduled tilt in Seattle on the 30th is back on. The action comes in pretty quick succession after such a prolonged break, as the team plays on New Year’s Eve back home against the Jets, and travel to Chicago to kick off 2022 with a contest against the Hawks on the 2nd. Life happens fast.
Scorchie Awards Preview of the Week:
The final page falling off the Gregorian Calendar can only mean one thing: Scorchie Award season!
We’ll be announcing the winners of our second annual gala this week, and the public could not be more excited for it:
Last year’s inaugural award show was a runaway success, with tens of people checking in to see who would win coveted awards like the Dustin Wolf Award, the Delete Your Account Award, and the Mark Jankowski Memorial Trophy. This time around, we say hello to some new prizes, retire a couple that do not stand the test of time, and hand out some of your old favourites to worthy recipients.
We’ll be live from the red carpet all morning, before heading inside for a raucous party on a Wednesday afternoon.
Unrelated Fact:
Capitalism, to some small extent, has taken a hit from the lingering results of the pandemic, and while not enough to truly knock its gargantuan thumb away from pressing down on us literally all the time, there have been a few shifts in attitude we’ve been forced to adopt that, I believe, over time, maybe, probably not but we’ll see, might have a minor, minor shift towards the slight benefit of the world’s workforce, so long as you don’t look at Amazon and most other companies.
That all being said, it’s almost 2022 and I still can’t get a PS5, so some people are going to have to die.
See You Next Week:
I’m sure we haven’t heard the end of this saga yet, but for this brief time let us here at the Scorchstack sing a full-throated Rest In Piss to the Flames arena project. Billionaires can fend for themselves. If Mayor Jyoti Gondek needs some extra encouragement fending off the wolves that are the CSEC, we’ve got her back in this regard. We’re going to get flamethrowers. I know where to find them.