It's time for me to discuss the ugliness during last night's Academy Awards

I have needed almost a full day to gather my thoughts on what I saw unfold during the third hour of the broadcast of the 94^th Academy Awards, but it is time to ask questions about the unsettling sights I saw. What the absolute Hell was that Godfather tribute?

I was a bit weary when I first heard that the Oscars were going to do a tribute to The Godfather—last night was only the 49^th anniversary of the film’s Academy coronation (the film was released in 1972 and was celebrated in 1973), it’s not even close to among the most celebrated films in the history of the awards (it won three trophies, which doesn’t even put it among the 100 most celebrated films in Oscar history), and anything interesting that happens at the Oscars inevitably happens by accident. My expectations were low and somehow things went way worse than I expected.

The Godfather might be the single easiest film on the planet for which to find somebody to give a good Academy Awards tribute. It’s modern enough that it doesn’t seem like a history project to watch it and it is widely esteemed enough that the volunteers should be plentiful. Martin Scorsese, the director emeritus of the Academy Awards, surely would have shown up to pay tribute to his good friend Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus. Steven Spielberg, also a friend and contemporary of Coppola and probably 1A to Scorsese among the Academy, was already in the theater as a Best Director nominee, and surely Paul Thomas Anderson, also in-house as a director, would suffice. But instead, the Academy went off the board and brought out Sofia Coppola, Francis’s daughter and a respected director in her own right, to introduce a tribute to a film that she, as a baby, appeared in, well before her much-maligned appearance in the third chapter of the series.

Just kidding, they went with P. Diddy.

With all due respect to Monster’s Ball or Get Him to the Greek, this was certainly not the cinematic figure I would have expected. But I can also see some argument for a bit of an outsider. Like, think of the most completely random, non-film celebrity you can think of. How about Tom Brady? It would be extremely weird if Tom Brady introduced the Oscars’ Godfather tribute, but it would speak to the film’s wide appeal. But the big problem wasn’t that Diddy approached the tribute as an outsider—it is that his influence took over the tribute.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, rather than showing the countless classic lines of dialogue or the film’s breathtaking cinematography, the montage portrayed The Godfather as though it was Scarface, a film which is perfectly fun and watchable but is nobody’s idea of truly significant. It turned out not to be a tribute to a film celebrating its 50^th anniversary but rather a tribute to the trilogy as a whole, giving nearly equal weight to all three parts, baffling even for those of us who think The Godfather Part III is far better than its reputation. In theory, the montage’s soundtrack should have been simple—the film’s iconic score—but instead it was scored mostly by music from Kanye West and, of course, Diddy himself.

My wife, who has never seen The Godfather, turned to me during the tribute and remarked, “This movie doesn’t look very good.” And I can’t disagree with her on the merits of the tribute! You got a car explosion and some violence and some brooding shots of Vito and Michael Corleone, things which are certainly part of The Godfather but in no meaningful way convey what makes it great. How is there not even a glimpse of Vito and Michael speaking to each other? How are there more clips of Joe Mantegna speaking than Robert Duvall? Diddy prefaced the tribute by stating how much he loves The Godfather, but based on this montage (and yes, I am firmly aware that he probably had minimal input on the montage’s creation), I have no idea why he would.

Next, Diddy brought out Francis Ford Coppola, the director of all three films, Al Pacino, the star of two films and a prominent supporting actor in the other (and, really, the gravitational center of that film too), and Robert De Niro, who was the fourth credited actor in one of the films, and not even the one being theoretically commemorated. That De Niro was even in The Godfather Part II is basically a footnote to his career. It helps of course that De Niro is the most relevant of these three to modern movies and looks by far the most vibrant of the trio today, but this would be like doing a tribute to Back to the Future and bringing out Robert Zemeckis, Christopher Lloyd, and Elisabeth Shue.

The audience gave an extended standing ovation because, again, what person involved in making movies does not cherish The Godfather? Only Coppola spoke—given that he is an 82 year-old man who was never a performer even in his prime, it went about as well from a dynamism perspective as could be reasonably expected. But he had virtually nothing to say—he thanked Mario Puzo, the author of the novel The Godfather and co-writer of the film screenplays, and producer Robert Evans. The only time either Pacino (who, and I cannot stress this enough if you have not seen the films, far and away the most significant on-screen presence throughout the trilogy) or De Niro spoke was at the tail end, when De Niro repeated Coppola’s well-meaning but lethargic “Viva Ukraine” used to close out his speech.

The Godfather is both one of the greatest films ever made and a film that has been continuously embraced by dumb guys. It seems like every Trump administration lackey would cite The Godfather as his (always his, in this case) guiding template in life, despite the lessons of the films very much not being that you should like your life like Michael Corleone does. After this tribute, I understand why people who haven’t seen the movies think The Godfather is some meathead action movie rather than a beautifully made, poignant epic of mortality, guilt, and how the American dream and the American nightmare are so frequently one and the same.

The Godfather came out before I was born but it didn’t come out that long before I was born. I knew when I first watched it that it wasn’t a new movie but I also didn’t think of it as musty or stale. But some day, the film will exist entirely in the past—it’s pretty remarkable that so many prominent Godfather people such as Pacino, De Niro, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and James Caan are still with us, but this won’t always be the case. And it would be a shame of the legacy of one of the great American artworks was as the dumb gangster movie it never was.

The one where John tries to rationalize a Los Angeles Rams Super Bowl win

On February 13, if the often-though-not-always correct bookmakers in Las Vegas are correct, the Los Angeles Rams are going to win the Super Bowl and cause me to be in a terrible mood for days. I want to try to mitigate this as much as I possibly can.

Being a former St. Louis Rams fan is just an absolutely insane bummer, and it does not help that every team I want to be bad is now good. Hell, we were one first-half touchdown by Tyreek Hill, the guy who strangled his pregnant girlfriend and then broke the arm of his now-born child when he was three (I usually add “accused of” type caveats, but he straight up says it on audiotape), from the super racist team that has spent the last half-decade scavenging the wreckage of St. Louis football fandom (and largely succeeding) for new adherents that they themselves had a role in creating in making the Super Bowl. A Chiefs/Rams Super Bowl—Jesus absolute Christ.

The Rams have, instead, an extremely likable opponent in the Cincinnati Bengals. There are undeniably faults—Joe Mixon is indefensible, and while I give owner Mike Brown credit for voting against the Rams’ relocation, this doesn’t exactly make the notorious cheapskate who himself extorted Cincinnati into building him a stadium he named after his daddy a sympathetic figure more broadly. But there’s Joe Burrow, the quarterback who looks like a bully in an 80s teen comedy but instead is the protagonist of a beautiful story—the Ohio native who was squeezed out of fulfilling his childhood dream of playing at The Ohio State University and instead became a folk hero at LSU alongside Ja’Marr Chase, who is now his top receiver with the Bengals. With all of the attention in the world on Burrow, his social media presence has been aggressively combed and all anyone seems to have come up with is a bunch of innocuous tweets about the mid-2010s Cleveland Cavaliers and some shockingly progressive tweets about social and economic justice.

In a perverse way, that Joe Burrow has become maybe the most broadly beloved player in the NFL mostly over the course of a few weeks makes me less confident that the Bengals can pull this off. When the Rams played the still-Tom Brady-led New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in 2019, the fact that it was Brady and Bill Belichick, arguably the two greatest to ever do what they do, did give me a sense of relief, even if rooting for the Patriots was never exactly my favorite thing to do. But now I’m rooting for a second-year quarterback who is certainly good but I am absolutely not convinced is great to maintain St. Louis’s 1-0 lead in Super Bowls won vs. Super Bowls won by teams that abandoned it.

What to do if the Cincinnati Bengals win the Super Bowl is very simple—pound a few celebratory shots and/or beers, run around screaming along to “Song 2”, and sending derogatory taunting text messages to every single Green Bay Packers fan I know. That’s the fun part. But what if the Los Angeles Rams win the Super Bowl? How do I cope with that? Here are the things I will tell myself:

1.     This wasn’t going to happen in St. Louis: I’m old enough that I remember when the Arizona Cardinals won the first playoff game in franchise history—a 20-7 victory over the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC Wild Card Round in the 1998-99 season. I remember a local sense of melancholy, that this was something that should have happened in St. Louis but didn’t (this sense evaporated eight months later when the 1999 Rams took charge). That is probably true—there wasn’t really a material change in the operations of the St. Louis, Phoenix, or Arizona Cardinals. But had the hundreds of thousands of NFL franchise owners banded together and stopped the relocation of the St. Louis Rams, what is currently unfolding in Los Angeles never would have happened. Stan Kroenke bought the Rams with the express intent of relocating them—the Rams spent the first six years of his majority ownership treading water, openly cavorting with Los Angeles while employing Jeff Fisher to oversee the most aesthetically unpleasing football team possible. If Kroenke were unable to move the Rams, he probably would have sold them, and as awful of an owner as Stan Kroenke is from the perspective of St. Louis, every move he is making is built around bringing Los Angeles a championship right now. It’s not exactly a mystery as to why—he’s 74 years old and despite giving his son, former awful Mizzou basketball player Josh Kroenke, control of the Denver Nuggets in order to subvert the NFL’s ownership rules, he only cares about himself and doesn’t care what happens to the Rams franchise once he’s dead.

2.     Good for Aaron Donald: Aaron Donald was more of a regional curiosity when he played in St. Louis for two seasons—it was against league broadcast rules (citation needed) for ESPN to discuss the St. Louis Rams (even the relocations of literal NFL franchises are covered with all the fervor of a pretty bad Russell Westbrook shooting night). And now everybody accepts that Donald is awesome, which he was in 2014 and 2015 as well. I have no grudge against Aaron Donald. What am I supposed to do, ask a guy not to get paid to play in LA and instead stay loyal to a city he isn’t from which doesn’t have a team? Aaron Donald should get to body-slam Stan Kroenke off the stage if the Rams are handed the Lombardi Trophy. Maybe take a shot at Goodell while you’re up there too. Note: There are two other former St. Louis Rams still on the team—Rob Havenstein, who was only with the St. Louis team for one year and for whom I have no emotional attachment either way, and Johnny Hekker, the punter who seems like a cool guy but is a living reminder that for the last four years they were in St. Louis, the most marketed players on the Rams were the kicker and the punter.

3.     Matthew Stafford is cool, too: How is Joe Burrow in a Super Bowl and he’s arguably not even the guy whose bro/bully appearance is most incongruous with everything we actually know about him as a person? The Los Angeles Rams have a ton of irritating offensive players—Cam Akers was openly wishing concussions on opponents less than a month ago, Tyler Higbee straight up did hate crimes, and Cooper Kupp forced every NFL announcer at gunpoint to say both his first and last name any time he catches a ball. But Matthew Stafford spent a long time being jerked around by an incompetent Detroit Lions franchise (I mean, I don’t want to deny his complicity—nobody was forcing him to take the money) and now he gets to play for a team that cares. If this were a different team, I’d love it. Also, his wife called out fan apathy and that is insanely funny to me.

4.     The twelve Los Angeles Rams fans deserve happiness: When it comes down to it, if I am going to critique the relocation of the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles, I have to acknowledge those who were hurt by the original sin of the St. Louis Rams—their relocation from Los Angeles. The face of the relocation to St. Louis, Georgia Frontiere, inherited the team from her husband, who himself only acquired the team after a 1972 franchise trade with the then-Baltimore Colts, a thing that I still can’t wrap my head around. I can note that Rams attendance was rarely very good in Los Angeles and that Frontiere gave Los Angeles a more sincere chance to keep its team than Stan Kroenke gave St. Louis, and that’s all true, but I wouldn’t expect that to be much solace for Angelenos who lost their favorite team. There may not have been as many die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans as there were die-hards of some other teams, but that doesn’t mean there were zero. And while most of my experience with die-hard Los Angeles Rams fans came from those who spent decades trolling St. Louis Post-Dispatch comments sections and therefore my perception of them is a bunch of antisocial lunatics who celebrated the relocation of my favorite childhood sports team with fervor they would not experience again until November 8 of that same year, I know that this is a self-selecting group. In a perfect world, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and San Diego would all have NFL teams. And just as I compartmentalized Los Angeles’s absence from the NFL team list when the Rams were in St. Louis, I can’t really get mad at LA fans who do the same with St. Louis, so long as they aren’t aggressive jerks about it.

All right, there we go. And now I can take a deep breath and root for the Los Angeles Rams! Just kidding, I still hope they lose by triple digits and that Kroenke falls out of his luxury box.

We are all pawns in the NFL's game

In one of the most memorable scenes in the first season of The Wire, D’Angelo Barksdale, a lieutenant in his uncle’s drug-dealing operation, encounters two low-level gang youngsters, Wallace and Bodie, playing a game of checkers with chess pieces. Realizing that the two don’t know the rules of chess, D’Angelo explains the movements of kings, queens, and rooks, each serving as a metaphor for someone in their real-life organization. But the most essential lesson comes towards the end with an explanation of the pawn. While D’Angelo is acutely aware of the relative uselessness of the pawn, a high-population piece with a very limited set of potential movements, Bodie sees the pawns for what they can be, potential queens capable of any movements they so desire.

Within the series, each of these characters is, at some point or another, revealed to be the equivalent of a pawn within the Barksdale organization. No character makes it out alive—some make it a little further down the board than others, but none truly gains the power to which Bodie aspires. This is the way chess works—I have played thousands of games of chess in my life (I logged into my Chess.com stats page to confirm that this was the case and not an outlandish estimation) and in a game that starts with sixteen pawns, most of them don’t get out alive. In most games, none make it to the queen rank to which Bodie aspires, and even in a game with an unusually high level of promotion, it’s never more than two or three. Even those that do reach queen status are hardly immune from potential capture, and even those who survive still exist solely at the behest of the king. The mastermind behind the pieces wants to keep the queen alive only so long as it fulfills their ultimate purpose, which has nothing to do with the queen’s continued life.

The billionaires in charge of major American professional sports teams don’t wish you harm—this would require them to consider your state of being at all. Your ultimate purpose to them is as a vessel through which they can ultimately enrich themselves. In a game of chess, a player would gladly sacrifice their pawn to capture a non-pawn piece. There is an inexact but largely agreed-upon formula for approximating piece value—a pawn is worth one point, a bishop or knight is worth three points, a rook is worth five points, and a queen is worth nine points. If you are playing chess, you don’t want to lose a pawn, but it isn’t going to materially impact your chances of victory, even if you were to gain nothing in return.

When the St. Louis Rams relocated to Los Angeles, there were thousands upon thousands of NFL fans in a country known for, to quote John Steinbeck, its poor seeing themselves not as exploited but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires willing to justify the move. Regarding a team’s move as reasonable not only allows fans to justify their support of an organization which would rubber-stamp such a transaction, but to feel empowered that it was not their team that moved, a minor reward for their loyalty, a thing which is understood to be an undisputed social good. This process has played out in the years since in different cases—the NFL abandoned their fans in San Diego and Oakland for the glitzier, more affluent Los Angeles and Las Vegas markets. Fans in Major League Baseball have fantasized about relocating the Tampa Bay Rays or Oakland Athletics to their preferred tourist destinations while National Hockey League aficionados have wished the Arizona Coyotes to Houston or Québec, depending on their national loyalty.

Since relocating to Los Angeles, the Rams have been among the most successful teams in the National Football League. Since a 4-12 debut in 2016 under St. Louis Rams carryover head coach Jeff Fisher, hired in 2012 having already been informed that the team was planning to move to Los Angeles and presumably valued for his ability to drive fans away with the most aesthetically unappealing ultra-conservative style of play imaginable and his track record of shepherding teams to new cities, the Rams have averaged 11 wins over each of the last five seasons, more than all but two NFL teams (Kansas City Chiefs, New Orleans Saints). In stark contrast to their timid personnel decision-making in the six years of Stan Kroenke’s ownership of the team in St. Louis, most if not all of which were later confirmed to be spent biding his time before he could bolt to Los Angeles, the Rams have aggressively pursued splashy player acquisitions—three months after the move to Los Angeles, the Rams traded up to the #1 overall pick in the 2016 NFL Draft in order to select quarterback Jared Goff, whom they later packaged for another quarterback upgrade in Matthew Stafford, whom they have since surrounded with established stars such as Odell Beckham Jr. on the offensive side of the ball and Von Miller and Jalen Ramsey on defense.

And yet, by and large, Los Angeles doesn’t seem to care about the Rams. In a meaningful Week 18 game this season against the San Francisco 49ers, one with a division title and a home playoff game potentially hanging in the balance, SoFi Stadium, Stan Kroenke’s six-billion-dollar palace in the inner-ring suburb of Inglewood, was so loud that a quarterback was forced to resort to silent counts—that quarterback was Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, overwhelmed by the heavy and vocal concentration of fans in 49ers red. The home-field disadvantage was so pronounced that Stafford’s wife Kelly openly pleaded with fans not to sell their tickets for the next week’s playoff game against the Arizona Cardinals. For the Rams’ upcoming rematch at home against the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game, the team implemented a controversial restriction on sales from outside the Los Angeles region (which has since been rescinded), with Melissa Whitworth, wife of Rams offensive lineman Andrew Whitworth, offering to buy the tickets of any Rams fan who would otherwise sell them to 49ers fans.

It feels like overkill to express that this never would have happened in St. Louis. While many have claimed that Los Angeles is simply still trying to get its feet wet as a football market in just its sixth season with the NFL following a twenty-one-year absence of the sport’s premier league, St. Louis hosted two playoff games before raucous, partisan crowds in its fifth season as the home of the Rams, and in the four seasons prior to the team’s 1999-00 Super Bowl run, the Rams averaged just 5.5 wins per season. The St. Louis Rams sold out every home game they played from 1995, their first season, until Christmas Eve 2006, when the Rams, at 6-8, failed to sell out a game played on a de facto holiday (and still sold 62,324 tickets). While attendance dipped following the team’s acquisition by Kroenke, assumed immediately and prophetically by most fans, despite his Missouri roots, to be a ruthless capitalist with ulterior motives, and the team’s descent into the literal worst five-year stretch in NFL history, the franchise, as all NFL franchises are, remained wildly profitable. But ultimately, the question was not whether Los Angeles fans were going to be more rabid fans than St. Louis fans. The answer to that question was irrelevant.

Forbes estimated Stan Kroenke’s net worth in 2015 at $7.6 billion. It now estimates his net worth at $10.7 billion. It is not a mystery as to why his net value has skyrocketed even beyond the typical increases that occur with a large enough stockpile of assets—he is now the owner of one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world. The stadium, which will host this year’s Super Bowl, next year’s College Football Playoff National Championship, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2028 Summer Olympics, was the prize for Kroenke. He never needed the Los Angeles market in order to avoid taking a loss on the Rams—each team’s split of the league’s $9.8 billion in revenues is over $100 million higher than the league’s salary cap. But just because he didn’t need the money doesn’t mean he didn’t want it. St. Louis and its fans were his pawns.

But St. Louis was not exclusively a pawn of Stan Kroenke. It was a pawn of the entire league, a league which voted 30-2 in favor of relocating the team, citing the inability of the country’s 20^th largest market (by combined statistical area) to sustain a team in a league in which twelve of its franchises were in smaller markets, a claim met with virtually no non-local media scrutiny. St. Louis was a pawn of Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner whose outsized influence and vocal support of the Rams move made him league ownership’s biggest mouthpiece, as Stan Kroenke would rather do anything than speak publicly. St. Louis was, and remains, a pawn of Kansas City Chiefs chairman/public facing owner Clark Hunt, who voted for relocation and wasted no time turning around and claiming St. Louis as his own turf (the franchise’s value has nearly doubled since 2015, including a 22.5% increase in the one year after the Rams left St. Louis). The only teams which can claim some level of innocence in the exploitation of St. Louis as pawns in the NFL’s game are the Raiders, who deserve no credit for their vote as it was motivated by their own desire to abandon their loyal fan base in Oakland, which they did a few years later, and the Cincinnati Bengals, whose owner, Mike Brown, threatened to relocate the team not long after assuming control unless he received a publicly financed stadium, which he did. St. Louis may not be Brown’s pawn, but Cincinnati sure is.

Of the thirty relocation votes, none is more startling to the naked eye than that of the Green Bay Packers, who have voted for every franchise relocation since the AFL-NFL merger. Unlike the league’s other owners, most obviously Kroenke, Green Bay Packers ownership did not have an obvious financial motivation for the Rams relocation. Rather than a billionaire or a group of billionaires, the Green Bay Packers are owned by Green Bay Packers, Inc., a publicly-held nonprofit in which 361,300 people hold over five million shares of stock which does not yield dividends and cannot be sold for a profit. The ownership structure, unique among major American sports teams (and now illegal in the NFL), is frequently cited as a point of pride for the National Football League. It creates an ownership pool that, while hardly impoverished (it does, after all, require one to have $300 to spare on a financially worthless asset), is certainly less affluent per capita than the league’s other owners. And yet, with absolutely nothing financial to gain from it, the Packers have routinely signed off on team relocation.

It’s not as though shareholders of the Packers conducted votes on these relocations—it seems as though Packers team president Mark Murphy rubber-stamps them without much thought or input from the owners themselves. But by a country mile, no fan base has a stronger sense of entitlement to their right to an NFL team than the Packers, and the community ownership structure is a large part of why. A solid majority of “Well if St. Louis wanted an NFL team, they should have just supported them more” takes that I have heard in my life have come from fans of the Packers, a pro-billionaire stance seemingly incongruous with the state of Wisconsin’s socialist leanings and the dark-blue city in which the St. Louis-based Packers fans with whom I grew up originated. The ownership structure spawned a cottage industry of deeply insufferable statements from pro-Packers media, such as this embarrassing essay from SB Nation’s Green Bay Packers blog Acme Packing Co., in which the writer concludes that “Fans of the Oakland Raiders are probably wishing they had the opportunity to buy their own ‘worthless piece of paper’ right about now”, callously and myopically ignoring the fact that Oakland Raiders fans were never given the chance.

And yet Packers fans/owners aren’t all that much more powerful than the fans of any other team. In a world of meat-eaters, they are household pets—spared from the worst of fates but hardly regarded as equals by their ultimate masters. It may seem like an overstatement of the power of voters who don’t even get a say in what their so-called ownership peers get to do with their teams, but the Packers are essentially pawns promoted to the power of queens (or perhaps underpromoted to a knight, if you want to keep it to some semblance of scale). Sure, they are more powerful than an ordinary pawn, but ultimately, no matter who holds the power, it all acts in service of the king. And they, and you, will never get to be the king.

Why the 2014 movie Draft Day is about the JFK assassination

A complicated question about entertainment properties, particularly ones which include a bunch of famous people set in what is otherwise reality, is whether other entertainment properties including its stars exist. It is weird, for instance, that The Office’s Michael Scott was not one of those obnoxious dolts who constantly quoted Anchorman as a substitute for an actual sense of humor, but it also would have been way weirder if the guy who played Brick Tamland started quoting Brick Tamland lines. Does Anchorman exist in the Office Cinematic Universe? Maybe, but it’s just way less distracting to side-step the issue.

Ultimately, my perception of this is that Anchorman and Steve Carell (and also guest actors like Will Ferrell and David Koechner) do exist in the Office universe and that Michael Scott and Deangelo Vickers and Todd Packer also exist and that bearing a resemblance to these actors simply isn’t that big of a life event. I’ve known people in my everyday life who looked like a famous person, but that does not dictate their entire lives. I make a rare exception to this rule for Draft Day.

I enjoy the movie Draft Day for what it is—a star vehicle sports movie with moderate amounts of humor and drama and a plot so incoherent and idiotic that, to enjoy it, you have to either ignore it or embrace it. For those unfamiliar with its plot, Kevin Costner, the greatest sports movie star of all-time, stars as the general manager of the Cleveland Browns who, over the course of the single-day-set film, functionally gains a top-ten first-round draft pick and a punt returner good enough to merit interest but not good enough to not be considered a throw-in in exchange for three second-round picks. The plot strikes a balance that confused football fans and novices with equal fervor but it does lead to Kevin Costner getting a bunch of latter-day Jimmy Stewart mini-monologues, which is the whole point of this stupid movie.

Draft Day works hard in many ways to be hyper-realistic—real-life draft analysts such as Rich Eisen, Chris Berman, and Mel Kiper Jr. portray themselves, as does NFL commissioner Roger Goodell—despite the fact that the motivations of the teams depicted are largely nonsensical—while the sheer actuarial results show the trades as mostly believable, the notion that the Cleveland Browns making a surprise selection at #1 would compel other (albeit, largely bad) NFL teams to become scared of drafting the falling star is ridiculous. But most of the team casting works—the Jacksonville Jaguars, for instance, have a panicky doofus calling the shots. The St. Louis Rams, drafting #2 overall, eschew a quarterback for an SEC offensive tackle (a thing which actually happened, to fairly disastrous results, in the actual 2014 NFL Draft).

But there is one fairly distracting exception to this—in the Draft Day universe, the #1 overall pick, presumed to have been earned rather than acquired, belongs at the beginning of the day to the Seattle Seahawks. In real life, the Seahawks did not have the #1 overall pick of the 2014 Draft—they were Super Bowl champions. They very much did not need fictional University of Wisconsin Heisman winner Bo Callahan to be their franchise quarterback, as a different Badgers alum, Russell Wilson, had just led them to their first title. It would be unfair to critique Draft Day for casting the single worst team they could to have the #1 overall pick—they didn’t know Seattle would win the Super Bowl two months before the movie came out. But in 2012, the season before the movie started filming, Seattle went 11-5 and won a playoff game with a rookie quarterback, again, out of the same school as the film’s Golden Boy quarterback. Surely, the movie could have found a more convincing patsy. More on patsies later.

One of the major plot points in Draft Day centers around Costner (calling characters by their names seems deeply unproductive when basically every major character is played by a famous person) feeling uneasy about drafting Bo Callahan (who I will call by name because I figure most people reading this won’t remember the name of the guy who got replaced by a CGI Armie Hammer as the other Winklevoss twin in The Social Network) and continuing to fixate on a The Ohio State linebacker played by Chadwick Boseman, despite obvious red flags such as his being projected as a mid-first round pick at best, his tweeting out disparaging remarks about him earlier that day, and clearly being played by a 37 year-old man. Costner has a conversation with Jennifer Garner, the team’s salary cap analyst/his pregnant girlfriend (the fact that he should be incredibly fired for sleeping with his employee never comes up), in which he references, basically with no further purpose, Joe Montana’s drive to win the Super Bowl in 1989. The best I can guess is that Callahan comes across as an off-putting creep that nobody seems to like and that Costner enjoys that Montana, in a high-pressure situation, pointed out to his teammates that John Candy was in the stands as a way of relaxing them.

John Candy, pointedly referred to by Costner as “the actor John Candy”, was primarily known as a comedian from SCTV and low-to-middlebrow comedies in the 1980s and early 1990s before his premature death in 1994 at the age of 43. But he did make one very rare appearance in a dramatic film in 1991’s critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated courtroom epic JFK, portraying extremely New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews Jr. In his lone scene, the heavily accented Candy meets with the film’s star, Kevin Costner. In a vacuum, I don’t mind that Kevin Costner, as a character, referenced a real-life person that we know the actor knows—if anything, it allows me to reminisce about a movie that I think is a lot better than Draft Day. But what I would like to suggest is that, although it is never explicitly stated, Draft Day takes place in a world in which the film JFK was never made.

For the (mostly) men involved in its creation, JFK didn’t matter that much in terms of their career arcs. The cast is littered with established stars and its director/writer, Oliver Stone, already had two Best Director Oscars on his mantle. But, even beyond the Seinfeld homages and concepts of mysteries wrapped inside enigmas, JFK did have a tangible real-world impact. Upon release, the film, despite its politics being largely ahistorical nonsense, invited a new generation of skepticism about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, even if the focus of the film is on probably the least credible theory ever put forward. And perhaps more significantly, it sanctifies John F. Kennedy, despite his being a mostly unseen character in the film itself (the Zapruder film, shown in detail in JFK, had rarely been viewed publicly prior to the movie). It turns Kennedy into a one-man army who could have personally destroyed the military-industrial complex (and thus spared Stone from serving in Vietnam). It turns Jim Garrison, whose half-baked assassination theories seem to have been deeply rooted in homophobia, into a hero. Despite Stone’s politics being considerably further to the left (back and to the left, as it were) than those of the Democratic Party, his hero protagonist is a conventional Southern Democrat. While further scrutiny of JFK, a film I greatly enjoy but whose historical worth is minimal, has exposed its flaws over the last three decades, Garrison was a paragon for good in the public eye in 1992, the year in which Bill Clinton was elected president, as a Southern Democrat with a discernible accent and a penchant for folksy likability. While the 1992 presidential election is viewed today as a relative blowout, this was not seen as the case in late 1991, with a re-election of George Bush perceived as likely.

Does Bush get re-elected if not for JFK, a film enamored with Southern Democrats and disdainful of the intelligence community, from which Bush’s political career originated? I mean, probably not still, but does Draft Day suppose otherwise? It’s not as though the film explicitly mentions any presidents, nor should a movie about the NFL do so, but it does give us a glimpse into an alternate universe in which the Seattle Seahawks are the worst team in the NFL. So something changed.

The stadium now known as Lumen Field is widely perceived as having one of the strongest home-field advantages in the NFL for the Seahawks, but this stadium has only existed since 2002, and prior to the construction of the architecturally unique venue, Seattle was not especially ballyhooed for their fan support. They were largely an afterthought during their time playing at the Kingdome, which they shared with the Seattle Mariners. And in the mid-1990s, the long-term future of both franchises was an open question. The Seahawks threatened, as did basically every NFL team seeking free money in the 1990s, to relocate to the then-vacated football market of Los Angeles, and extorted nine figures in public money for a stadium. And although the lines blurred considerably in the ensuing decades, George Bush was an old-school lower-case-c conservative politician who disdained spending almost as much as he disdained the taxes which paid for it. Public stadium funding during the Reagan years was minimal (though largely as a function of most teams having relatively new stadiums), but perhaps a continuation of this austerity mindset with regards to sports stadiums—to be clear, one of the few areas in which I would wholeheartedly agree with the traditional conservative mindset—would keep Lumen Field from being built.

Perhaps this means relocation, as the Mariners threatened and the Seattle SuperSonics did, though Draft Day suggests otherwise. Perhaps, it suggests, Seattle was unable to become a semi-dynasty as it did in the 2010s explicitly because they were still playing in the relatively cavernous Kingdome. This is certainly the sort of thing the NFL wants its fans to believe—if you want to be happy in sports, you need to give them hundreds of millions of dollars. Draft Day never references Seattle’s stadium—the only semi-nod was a visible “12” flag, but given that the franchise retired the number in 1984, a flag being utilized in their old stadium is hardly a reach. It’s certainly a cheaper bit of fan service than actually building a first-class facility for your team yourself.

Little is known about Draft Day’s Bo Callahan aside from that he won a Heisman Trophy at Wisconsin, but we do know one detail that goes remarkably unmentioned otherwise via W. Earl Brown, the Browns director of security who for some reason is also tasked with major scouting tasks in his best movie in which the two main characters discuss Joe Montana since There’s Something About Mary—he mentions that Callahan was from Washington (he references him being the finest thrower in Washington and Wisconsin). At this point, Seattle has already traded the pick that would be used on Callahan—this is clearly not a reference to that. In a film where the Cleveland Browns, whose former iteration’s relocation to Baltimore is reference, are obsessed with hometown fan favorites, ultimately drafting a linebacker from their state’s flagship university and a running back whose Hall of Famer father played for the Browns within the film’s fictionalized universe, Callahan’s Washington roots are never discussed by the Seahawks. Perhaps they realize this doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, or perhaps this is yet another piece of evidence that the football culture in the state of Washington has decayed.

In Draft Day, commissioner Roger Goodell is cheered by fans. This is only possible in a propaganda piece. The NFL wanted to send a message. And that message is that if your market does not pony up for more playgrounds for his teams, you will face the consequences.

Taylor Swift's Punk Phase

On Wednesday night, after idly flipping to Fox’s “The Masked Singer” thanks to a complete void of worthwhile television, I was caught off guard when one of the singers was revealed to be John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon, most famous as lead singer of the extraordinarily influential punk rock band The Sex Pistols. On Thursday, I found myself listening to their iconic debut album Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols on repeat throughout the day. And on Friday, I listened to its spiritual successor, Taylor Swift’s re-recording of her 2012 album Red. Now hear me out.

Nevermind the Bollocks is easily one of my five favorite albums ever released. The first time I listened to it, I regarded it as a scholarly project, along the lines of listening to Robert Johnson’s 1930s blues recordings to try to pick up on why Eric Clapton and Keith Richards were so into them—I didn’t think I would actually enjoy it. But it blew me away, and part of why it blew me away was because of what the album wasn’t. The Sex Pistols, a band that almost everybody knows of but are far less famous for their actual music, are perceived as an extremely raw band, but their lone studio album itself is produced in a way more reminiscent of a Guns N’ Roses album than a live recording—the guitars and loud and layered, the drums are heavy, and the bass is downright competent (given that Sid Vicious, who does not appear on the album, was a famously terrible musician and is arguably the most well-known member of the band, this was a tad surprising). But the vocals were what truly drew me in. Johnny Rotten is nobody’s definition of a great or even a good or even a competent singer (that Ken Jeong guessed that a masked Rotten was The Who vocalist Roger Daltrey should, frankly, invite a lawsuit from Daltrey), but he sang with such an energy and ferocity that it helped me discover what I truly enjoy in vocal performance. For some people, the guy who did this was Bob Dylan—for me, it was John Lydon.

Is Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols the greatest punk album? Is it a punk album at all? How do you define punk rock? The three most definitive bands labeled “punk” from its earliest days (not counting the great late-1960s Detroit rock bands like the MC5 and the Stooges, to whom the label was retrospectively assigned) are the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Clash, and the factors which link the three bands are fairly loose. If you took the politics of the Clash, the style of the Sex Pistols, and the song length of the Ramones, you’d have a fairly good idea of what the genre is seen to be from the outside, but their disparate styles create a complicated definition of the genre.

In the 1970s, the Sex Pistols were viewed as a dangerous and revolutionary group, but sonically, it is hard to imagine a band more within the established form of rock and roll. Structurally, they were mostly a louder version of 1950s rock and roll—there is a reason their cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”, aside from Johnny Rotten’s carnival-barker vocal delivery, is so faithful to the original. And for as much attention as the Sex Pistols got for their anti-monarchist views, their primary form of rebellion was against progressive rock. While the Sex Pistols were loud in their hatred of the Beatles, it is fair to assume their primary grievances were with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and not, say, their cover of “Roll Over Beethoven”.

The Clash are a particularly unusual case because, aside from their debut album, their musical style was rarely even in the same neighborhood as the Sex Pistols. Fundamentally, Joe Strummer was a much deeper thinker than John Lydon, a fact which simultaneously made his politics (and by extension his lyrics) far more sophisticated and his music far less passionate. I don’t think any of this makes Lydon a dumb guy, but rather a man motivated by different things than Strummer. Joe Strummer was a committed socialist with a deep musical appreciation who wanted to articulate his leftism with a rich variety of worldly music influences. Johnny Rotten, particularly in his non-Lydon days, was a broke kid from London who wanted to yell about the things that made him mad. The part of me that tries to sound fancy in blogs reveres Strummer; the part of me with a crippling Twitter addiction reveres Rotten. I love them both so much.

The expressly political songs on Nevermind the Bollocks are a mixed bag in terms of lyrical effectiveness, largely because the man who wrote the lyrics doesn’t seem to really know whether or not he even believes in them, even if he goes all the way in when it comes to performing them. “Anarchy in the UK” calls for its title sentiment, but Lydon has dismissed literal anarchy as a political concept. “God Save the Queen” has almost nothing to do with Queen Elizabeth II but a more general disaffection with the upper-class of 1970s England (the same can be said of “Holidays in the Sun”). “Bodies” is an aggressively anti-abortion song, but Lydon has expressed relatively pro-choice political views, which suggests, unsurprisingly, that he was mostly just a troll.

But for my money, the most “punk rock” in the casual sense of the term song on Nevermind the Bollocks is “Submission”. The song is not the least bit political, but the backstory of the song reflects the Sex Pistols’ irreverence—their manager, Malcolm McLaren, wanted the band to write a song called “Submission”, thinking a song about bondage. The band hated the idea and hated even more being told what to do, so the band wrote a childish song called “Submission” about being on a mission on a submarine, opening with the hilariously dopey line, “I’m on a submarine mission for you, baby!” It’s a mid-tempo song whose primary musical hook is the layered, yelled vocals of the chorus. And it inexplicably is one of my favorite songs on the album. Great art can come out of spite.

Taylor Swift has built much of her career on the back of spite. While her reputation as “only writing songs about boys she broke up with” is an unfair and largely sexist trope (though now that Olivia Rodrigo exists, maybe we can much more fairly transfer that to her), she has turned grudges into art regularly. Whether it is “Picture to Burn” (rage), “Mean” (passive-aggressive), or “Look What You Made Me Do” (empowered/famously not about a man but there really aren’t as many examples as you think), Taylor Swift rarely ventures into political themes in her music, but she is very aware of her own feelings.

Biographically, Taylor Swift is much closer to Joe Strummer than John Lydon. Strummer, despite his image, was the son of a diplomat and a nurse and his upbringing, which included ample world travel and private schooling, could not be described as anything lower than middle class. Swift, the daughter of finance employees, received intense parental support, including a teenage relocation from Pennsylvania to Tennessee to further her burgeoning attempt at a musical career. Musically, she isn’t especially close to either, though I guess I’d say she’s closer to Strummer since he has some songs without yelling in them. Spiritually, Taylor Swift is turning into John Lydon. And I love it.

Following the Sex Pistols’ 1978 implosion, the man then known as Johnny Rotten had plenty of options musically—while his band never made a significant dent on popular music in the United States during their existence, they were legitimate hitmakers in the United Kingdom. Would spending a decade making Sex Pistols-esque ragged hard rock as a solo artist or with a new band have been the “punk rock” move? It certainly would have been the move that led to music that most sounded like what had been defined as punk rock, but in a “punk rock equals subversion” way, going against expectations was the move, and the experimental, avant-garde Public Image Ltd was the way he went. I don’t listen to PiL nearly as much as I listen to the Sex Pistols, but the man now known as John Lydon made his own choice, and how can you not respect that?

In April, Taylor Swift released her pseudo-new album Fearless (Taylor’s Version). Like the original Fearless which catapulted Swift from country to pop superstardom, the album was met with critical acclaim. The album, mostly a re-recording of her original album along with some bonus tracks, did not exactly break new ground, though her matured voice did receive some praise supplemental from the original. But the main thing worthy of praise, as well as the thing about today’s release of Red (Taylor’s Version) even more worthy of praise than her ten-minute version of “All Too Well”, is itself extratextual. It is the most punk-rock-as-subversive move of her career.

Because the music business is nothing if not a shallow and vampiric industry, Big Machine Records released Taylor Swift’s first six albums under a contract signed with a then-minor desperate for a big break, but refused to negotiate with Swift when she offered more than fair value for the rights to the master copies to the recordings. Industry creep Scooter Braun instead bought up the rights for $300 million. Taylor Swift could have sued, but instead took on a more self-empowering route—she announced she was going to re-record the albums herself. Since she is still the songwriter or co-songwriter on every song on all six albums, she can license the new recordings and keep Braun from pocketing any of the money.

Ultimately, this is a fight between two insanely rich people, but similar fights exist all the time in sports. And just as I gravitate towards players, the doers, over owners, the financiers, I am inclined to support Taylor Swift’s quest to rankle the system. What Big Machine Records and Scooter Braun did was completely legal, but that does not make it ethical. A legal fight almost certainly would not have worked out for Taylor Swift but relying on the will of the people did.

The music of Red (Taylor’s Version) is still pop-country, music that was written by a singer-songwriter but otherwise has most of the DNA of a musical industrial complex. But despite the shine of it, the re-recordings were built up through an aggressively do-it-yourself aesthetic. Punks in 1970s London decided that they could make their own clothes and bang around on instruments, making noise despite a lack of formal training or talent, and Taylor Swift, refined and pristine as her music is, parlayed that aesthetic on the grandest scale.

The Seattle Kraken Expansion Draft—Ranking the picks from worst to best

 

Tonight, a major league sports team was born via the expansion draft in the National Hockey League’s thirty-second franchise, the Seattle Kraken. Having spent countless hours dissecting this draft, today was like Christmas for me.

Overall, I think the Kraken did a good job. There is a widely held belief that the Kraken can’t hold a candle to the 2017 Vegas Golden Knights’ draft, but the Golden Knights were also not widely believed to have had a particularly good draft in the moment. A huge amount of their roster-building came not via the draft itself but via trades made adjacent to it. And NHL teams learned their lessons. Teams aren’t stupid enough to give away one-third of a conference champion’s top line so that the team will draft another third of it. I am quite certain that if this were the 2017 draft, the Colorado Avalanche would not have traded Ryan Graves for a package that, while not as good as Graves himself, is substantially more valuable than the value of simply losing Graves to Seattle.

Seattle opted to stay closer to the salary floor, which I think is a good idea because while the Kraken could have created a more talented roster, there is a reason the high-end talent was exposed in the first place. As such, the Kraken do not have a single terrible contract on their books, and while they may have an overpay or two, these are players who will be extraordinarily significant for their team. Overall, I’d give Ron Francis and company an A-minus.

Here is how I rank the picks.

30. Adam Larsson, Edmonton Oilers—Larsson is a perfectly fine defenseman who gets a bad rap because he was on the wrong end of one of the most lopsided trades in recent NHL memory—the one-for-one deal which sent future league MVP Taylor Hall to New Jersey. But this pick is nonsensical primarily for a simple reason—he’s a pending free agent. And while a week of exclusive negotiating rights with a pending free agent isn’t nothing, I believe these picks should be made only if nobody who is any good is available to draft. But Edmonton did have some intriguing players exposed—Devin Shore, a dirt-cheap two-way forward capable of playing at all three forward positions, would have been my choice. There were the likes of Tyler Benson and William Lagesson, unfulfilled prospects but effectively lottery tickets. Even if Seattle converts this pick into signing Adam Larsson, as by all accounts they are likely to do, Larsson isn’t likely to be some incredible bargain for the Kraken. I hate this pick.

29. Chris Driedger, Florida Panthers—I really like Chris Driedger, a likely pivotal part of Seattle’s goaltending rotation and a man who frequently outplayed Florida’s highly paid starter, Sergei Bobrovsky, over the last two seasons. But Driedger is a free agent—granted, one more likely to have a competitive market than Larsson. I’m disappointed Florida didn’t take a chance on Frank Vatrano, who has developed into a solid NHL scorer and at a reasonable $2.5 million price tag, or any of a host of young players—among Florida goalies alone, I’d have preferred pending RFA Sam Montembeault for the team control perspective.

28. Gavin Bayreuther, Columbus Blue Jackets—Truthfully, I prefer this pick to the hotly rumored Max Domi, who I think is quite a bit overpaid. But a 27 year-old pending UFA with just 28 games played in his career does not exactly demand exclusive negotiating rights. This would be a more roastable pick if Columbus’s expansion lists weren’t so dire (I ended up going with Dean Kukan for mine, a player I admittedly don’t think much of), but even hoping to turn Kole Sherwood into something would have been a preferable option to Bayreuther.

27. Brandon Tanev, Pittsburgh Penguins—At least Tanev isn’t a UFA, but given his contract situation, Seattle might prefer that. Not that $3.5 million for each of the next four years is exactly an albatross, but Tanev is a forward who has never reached 15 goals nor 30 points in a season. His production is not where a player with his salary should be, and while Seattle is limited by the rules of the draft in terms of number of non-contracted players (RFAs and pending UFAs) they may select, I would have gladly taken one of those spots up for Zach Aston-Reese, a younger and considerably cheaper option who could have been an intriguing third line-ish forward.

26. Jamie Oleksiak, Dallas Stars—Here is the pending UFA I hate the least. The gigantic defenseman is a solid player, but most importantly, once Dallas convinced Ben Bishop to waive his no-move clause and thus taking Anton Khudobin off the board for the Kraken, the Stars had one of the worst collections of unprotected players in the league. I would have taken Tanner Kero, but life is too short to be too outraged about not taking a near-29 year-old forward with 13 NHL points since the last expansion draft.

25. Kurtis MacDermid, Los Angeles Kings—He’s a fine enough player—a cheap defenseman who can play on either side of the blue line. But the Kings had one of my favorite forwards available in Andreas Athanasiou, a former 30-goal scorer who is still putting up decent production and made just $1.2 million last season and remains in restricted free agency. But I’m probably higher on Athanasiou than most of his non-relatives. MacDermid isn’t bad at all.

24. John Quenneville, Chicago Blackhawks—Because he’s cousins with (I thought until very recently that he was the son of) former Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville, John got a lot more attention than his meager production suggested. And he’s a pending UFA. But while I don’t think Quenneville is a great pick, the Blackhawks did not provide much help to the Kraken. I’m only ranking Quenneville this far from the basement because they wisely avoided selecting the overpaid Calvin De Haan or Nikita Zadorov. I would’ve probably taken a goalie—my preference would have been Malcolm Subban, for his second expansion team dalliance—but the Kraken at least avoided the potential landmines.

23. Tyler Pitlick, Arizona Coyotes—Pitlick has only reached double-digit goals once and twenty points twice. Is the nearly thirty year-old winger worth $1.75 million? I don’t think so, but I’m willing to listen. For months, it seemed like Adin Hill (who was eventually traded to San Jose) would be the pick here, but I still think Seattle should’ve gone with Christian Fischer, who is younger, cheaper, and has already had higher highs in the NHL despite being just twenty-four.

22. Morgan Geekie, Carolina Hurricanes—Credit to the Kraken for not doing the silly “draft Dougie Hamilton for the negotiating rights” gambit that many suggested—Carolina has far too many good options to throw a pick away on that. And Geekie is young and a well-regarded prospect. But Jake Bean would’ve been my pick in a heartbeat. A 13^th overall pick just five years ago, Bean has been limited in his opportunities to play given Carolina’s robust defense core, and the 23 year-old could’ve grown into something special as a bottom-pairing lefty defenseman alongside Seattle’s veteran presence in the position.

21. Joey Daccord, Ottawa Senators—His numbers have been rough in the NHL, but the 24 year-old goalie is cheap and it’s not like Ottawa is overflowing with players that a team would want. I had them taking Anton Forsberg, who is older but probably a little better, but I totally understand, given that neither goalie would play much, wanting to go with the higher upside player.

20. Haydn Fleury, Anaheim Ducks—I was intrigued by Kevin Shattenkirk, notably older and more expensive but certainly more productive, but I can’t argue too vociferously against the former seventh overall pick. Fleury has been a bit underwhelming in the NHL, but he is still just twenty-five years old, and it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t have upside. And with just a $1.3 million salary in 2020-21, it’s not as though the team is digging itself into a hole.

19. Carsen Twarnyski, Philadelphia Flyers—The Flyers were one of the more intriguing teams in this draft because they exposed a trio of accomplished but highly paid players—James Van Riemsdyk, Jakub Voracek, and the guy I would’ve taken, Shayne Gostisbehere. But it is clear that Seattle is going low-risk, and as such, a 23 year-old who makes the league minimum but has one career NHL point is ideologically consistent. A pick like this belongs firmly in the middle of any ranking—we know exactly what they are doing. It just isn’t very fun.

18. Jordan Eberle, New York Islanders—Is Eberle overpaid? Maybe a little--$5.5 million isn’t exactly cheap. But while Eberle has dropped off in production a little bit from his Edmonton Oilers days, and it’s not like the 31 year-old is exactly likely to take a step forward, a guy who has never scored fewer than 16 goals in an NHL season should be a welcome addition to the top six for an expansion team. Even if he’s a little overpaid, this won’t be as big of a blow for a team that probably shouldn’t be pressing against the salary cap over the remaining three years of his contract. I would’ve taken Andy Greene, who is ancient but still productive and very inexpensive, but this is admittedly a far more fun pick.

17. Alexander True, San Jose Sharks—This is a team so bereft of young talent that they voluntarily protected Brent Burns. In the end, Seattle did the right thing, selecting the large twenty-four year-old forward who makes peanuts and will not demand big minutes while the Kraken are still trying to figure out how good True actually is. Plus, he played junior hockey in Seattle, which is a thing that apparently matters. Ryan Donato, who is better but more expensive, was really the only other option.

16. Kole Lind, Vancouver Canucks—He’s 22, cheap, Canucks people seem to be high on Lind’s AHL production, and while I might’ve taken a shot on Jake Virtanen to have a bounce-back season, Kole Lind is the low risk option, and God knows Ron Francis is avoiding risks whenever possible. It’s fine. (Why yes, my middle section is going to include some brief summations. These are the least interesting picks. You can scan along if you want, it’s fine)

15. Nathan Bastian, New Jersey Devils—A decent prospect at 23, Bastian is a relatively strong choice given the mediocrity of his organization. And not that I expected the Seattle Kraken to jump in on P.K. Subban or anything unless the Devils compensated them heavily to do so, but I am still tempted to give Seattle some bonus points for not doing something crazy. I liked Scott Wedgewood, but this was my backup pick.

14. Mark Giordano, Calgary Flames—Here we go. The Calgary Flames lose their captain and a former Norris Trophy winner, and the Kraken presumably have their first captain. At $6.75 million, Giordano is certainly not cheap, but I would argue that he is not overpaid given that the 37 year-old has remained a very good, if no longer elite, defenseman. The drawback is that the Kraken probably don’t need a Mark Giordano for his remaining season under contract, but the positive is that if the Kraken aren’t very good, Giordano could be a very intriguing trade candidate and could easily bring back more value than the typical expansion pick is worth. It was going to either be Giordano or Oliver Kylington, and Calgary went with the far splashier route.

13. Will Borgen, Buffalo Sabres—I don’t know if Will Borgen is any good. But he’s a very low-risk pick from the worst team in the NHL, and despite the likely event that Will Borgen never does anything of consequence for the Seattle Kraken, this is still the right, if extremely dull, pick.

12. Joonas Donskoi, Colorado Avalanche—Unfortunately for the Kraken, the Avalanche did a great job of preparing for this draft, shipping off Ryan Graves and convincing Erik Johnson to waive his no-move clause so that this team’s core could be preserved. But they are still a loaded team and thus the Avalanche were bound to lose a good player, and Donskoi qualifies. At $3.9 million for each of the next two seasons, he should be a top-six forward for the Kraken—in each of the last four seasons, Donskoi has scored at least 14 goals and no fewer than 31 points. I might’ve gone with a cheaper player, such as defenseman Jacob MacDonald, but I can’t argue too much against Donskoi, a player with far more value to the Kraken than to the Avalanche.

11. Dennis Cholowski, Detroit Red Wings—I truly can’t believe Seattle got a player this solid from Detroit. A first-round pick in 2016, Cholowski has garnered second-pairing minutes for the Red Wings, and while his plus/minus stats aren’t great, this is practically a job requirement for Detroit. Cholowski is probably more of a bottom pairing or even a healthy scratch for Seattle, but for a league minimum guy from one of the league’s worst teams, that’s a pretty solid return.

10. Yanni Gourde, Tampa Bay Lightning—Consider Tampa Bay protected four defensemen, and thus could only protect four forwards, there was no shortage of options, and Gourde is the best of the bunch. Gourde will instantly be the #1 center for the Kraken, and there are a number of existing NHL teams whose top center isn’t as good as Gourde, who scored 17 goals and 36 points in 56 games for the Stanley Cup champion Lightning last season. My only real gripe here is that Seattle “only” got Gourde—while he’s a better player than Tyler Johnson, the Kraken could’ve convinced Tampa Bay to throw them a pick or two and come out even better (or perhaps even threaten to take Pat Maroon and thus deprive Tampa Bay of desperately-needed salary relief).

9. Jared McCann, Toronto Maple Leafs—Because the Maple Leafs obsessed with protecting defensemen, they left some strong forwards available. It really came down to draft McCann, Alex Kerfoot, or go cheap, but the Kraken correctly picked this as a point to draft a player with an actual salary. At just under $3 million last season, McCann is a bargain of a center with a goal scoring touch. Along with Gourde, on paper, the Kraken have stronger centers than the Vegas Golden Knights had following their expansion draft, and if one becomes their William Karlsson, it wouldn’t be too shocking.

8. Calle Jarnkrok, Nashville Predators—A veteran who was a contributor to Nashville’s run to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2017, Jarnkrok is a roughly half a point-per-game scorer who provides solid depth scoring. He is only under contract for one more season, but at just $2 million, Jarnkrok could be a great trade chip at the 2022 trade deadline.

7. Cale Fleury, Montreal Canadiens—In keeping with the rule of thumb “always draft guys named Fleury in the expansion draft”, the Kraken snatched Haydn’s younger brother, and while Cale didn’t produce a ton in his 41 NHL games, he’s cheap and only 22 and maybe will benefit from playing with his brother. But most importantly, Seattle resisted what would have been a potentially fatal mistake by not drafting Carey Price. The constant “he could be their Marc-Andre Fleury” takes didn’t scare the front office (note: Vegas didn’t select Fleury with a great amount of joy—Pittsburgh paid them to take him) and they deserve credit for their selective boringness.

6. Vince Dunn, St. Louis Blues—The Blues dangled Vladimir Tarasenko, but Seattle wisely opted for Vince Dunn, a still-young offensive defenseman who will surely get middle-pairing minutes behind Mark Giordano. Because the Blues tend to obsess with protecting their biggest names rather than their best values, there were plenty of lower-tier and intriguing options such as Niko Mikkola or Jake Walman, the higher-end Dunn was the smart, higher-upside pick.

5. Carson Soucy, Minnesota Wild—Minnesota moved Heaven, Earth, and Ryan Suter to protect Matt Dumba, who for a while looked like an automatic Kraken pick, but Seattle did still take a really good defenseman in Carson Soucy. Not Dumba-level, but Soucy has been a plus-minus monster (it’s a dumb stat but most of these guys very much are not) and had a career-best season in 2020-21. Minnesota didn’t have a realistic choice but to leave Soucy exposed, and it was very much to Seattle’s benefit.

4. Colin Blackwell, New York Rangers—The undersized center isn’t as exciting as some of the other names in this expansion draft, but he checks just about every box one can fathom for the Seattle Kraken. He’s cheap, with a league minimum salary for next season. He’s under contract, which is a consideration when it comes to expansion drafting—Seattle was required to take 20 such players, and UFAs don’t count to the total. And he’s coming off a breakthrough season with the Rangers, with 12 goals in 47 games. He is a high-upside player and comes with no downsides. An excellent pick.

3. Vitek Vanecek, Washington Capitals—Under the right circumstances, I could talk myself into Conor Sheary for the Kraken, but contextually, Vitek Vanecek makes a ton of sense. A late bloomer who debuted last season in the NHL at 25, Vanecek was rock-solid in goal for Washington, with a 2.69 GAA and .908 save percentage on his way to 21 wins in 36 starts. He could be an aberration, but he could also be a low-cost member of an intriguing goaltender tandem with Chris Driedger.

2. Mason Appleton, Winnipeg Jets—The Jets were not a great team, so I don’t really understand how they could possibly fit Mason Appleton into a protection list. At $900,000, the 25 year-old forward had a breakthrough 2020-21, with 12 goals and 25 points. And he’s named Appleton and he’s going to be playing in the state of Washington! George Lucas clearly invented this transaction.

1. Jérémy Lauzon, Boston Bruins—I love this pick. Love it, love it, love it. He’s a young defenseman on the rise, he’s cheap but still qualifies as having an NHL contract, and the advanced analytics are high on his defensive acumen. Lauzon is the exact kind of depth players that allows great NHL teams to compete for titles by being solid contributors at such a low price. And while the Kraken won’t be that, this is a good start.

If Vladimir Tarasenko can garner Jake DeBrusk or Trent Frederic and a first, the Blues should do that yesterday

Vladimir Tarasenko ranks fifth in St. Louis Blues history in goals, tenth in points, and ninth in Point Shares (a non-positionally specific statistic; among forwards, he ranks fourth, behind Brett Hull, Bernie Federko, and Pavol Demitra). In his prime, one of the richer eras in St. Louis Blues history, he was nearly a point-per-game player who perennially led the Blues in goals, including in 2018-19, when the Blues lifted their first Stanley Cup. He is a candidate for having his number retired by the franchise and is certainly among the franchise’s greatest contributors.

At 29, Vladimir Tarasenko is not quite old by hockey standards, but he is at the age when players, particularly players who rely heavily on speed, tend to decline. This is exacerbated by injuries—over the last two seasons, Tarasenko has played in just 42 games between the regular season and postseason. Since suffering a shoulder injury on October 24, 2019, Tarasenko has played in just 32 games, and while 6 goals and 16 points isn’t terrible, it is certainly a far cry from his pre-injury production.

It would be naïve not to at least consider the possibility that Tarasenko is damaged goods at this point. Perhaps this is not a Cam Neely situation, where devastating injuries force a superstar right winger out of the NHL at 30, but fearing a Dany Heatley situation—where his career continues on but he is merely a depth forward rather than the goal-scoring superstar of his younger years—is reasonable. He does still occasionally show flashes of greatness—Tarasenko did, after all, score two goals in what may end up being his final game in a St. Louis Blues sweater—so I’m not unreservedly giving up on the guy, but I’m also not willing to say that he is going to snap back into his old self at the drop of a hat.

We don’t know what the future holds for Vladimir Tarasenko in terms of production, but we do know that, at $7.5 million for the next two seasons, he is, along with Ryan O’Reilly (who had more points-per-game in 2020-21 than in any other season of his career), the highest paid player on the Blues. This isn’t baseball, where we can chalk up his high salary to the old “it’s not my money” principle—while I’m happy that money will go to Tarasenko rather than to decent-by-billionaire-standards-but-still-plenty-wealthy-so-let’s-not-valorize-the-guy-too-much owner Tom Stillman, the existence of a fairly rigid salary cap means that Vladimir Tarasenko’s $7.5 million also represents an opportunity cost. If the Blues didn’t have to pay his salary, that money would instead go to somebody else.

The hot rumor, which initially seemed like a pipe dream but would actually be perfectly manageable under the salary cap with Tarasenko off the books, is that the Blues are going to pursue Ryan O’Reilly’s old Colorado Avalanche teammate Gabriel Landeskog. Over their careers, Vladimir Tarasenko has been a superior player to Gabriel Landeskog—they have the same number of career goals, but Tarasenko has done so in 156 fewer games (the result of injuries and the fact that, despite being a year older than Landeskog, he debuted in the NHL a year later), and Tarasenko has edges in points per game and total career point shares. But in terms of recent track record, it’s no contest. The former (I guess still technically current?) Avalanche captain has outscored Tarasenko in each of the last three seasons, including Tarasenko’s healthy 2018-19, and totaled 20 goals and 52 points in 54 games last year. He was a crucial piece of arguably hockey’s best line, along with Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen (I’d probably go with the Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron, and David Pastrnak line, but it’s a worthy #2), and his projected salary going forward isn’t far off of what Tarasenko is currently making.

Of course, for this to happen, the Blues would need to part ways with Vladimir Tarasenko, who has a no-trade clause but who has reportedly asked for a trade (as an aside, I am perfectly okay with him doing so and consider there to be a major difference between “player asks for a trade” and “player demands a trade and acts like a malcontent until he gets his way”—this is why I find Anthony Davis of the Los Angeles Lakers fine and James Harden of the Brooklyn Nets obnoxious). The reports of his discontent in St. Louis had the initial effect of exciting me that the Blues would do something I have already lobbied for them to do—leave Tarasenko exposed in next week’s Expansion Draft. While Tarasenko does have a no-trade clause, this differs from a no-move clause, which would require the Blues to protect Tarasenko from being selected by the Seattle Kraken. While this is occasionally framed as “the Blues would lose Tarasenko for nothing”, that’s not really the case, as Seattle is going to have to draft a Blues player regardless. In reality, the Blues would be losing Tarasenko in lieu of losing Oskar Sundqvist or Ivan Barbashev or Vince Dunn or some league-minimum depth guy—maybe that still doesn’t sound like a good deal to you, but it isn’t nothing.

But if what Jeremy Rutherford suggested on 101 ESPN yesterday is true, that the Boston Bruins might be willing to part with one of two young depth forwards—Jake DeBrusk or Trent Frederic—and their first-round pick (#21) in next weekend’s NHL Entry Draft, then that changes everything. The Blues should make that trade immediately.

Jake DeBrusk is an intriguing player. He has had a rough couple seasons, but in 2018-19, he was a 27-goal scorer for the Bruins, and at 24, he is a player who is in theory just entering his prime. At $3.675 million, DeBrusk makes less than half of what Tarasenko makes, and while that number may prove to be a little on the high side if he continues on his 2020-21 trajectory—just 14 points in 41 games—it also does not come with any required commitment beyond next year, as he is still in restricted free agency. Though if given the choice, I would rather have Trent Frederic. Just 23, the St. Louis native (since you’re going to ask me—DeSmet) hasn’t had anywhere close to DeBrusk’s NHL production and has been more of a fourth-line type, but he has provided solid defensive output and is scheduled to make just $1.05 million for each of the next two seasons—I am not at all concerned about paying him Kyle Clifford money to be a younger version of Kyle Clifford.

This trade wouldn’t really impact the Blues’ Expansion Draft strategy in any meaningful way, because whether the acquisition was DeBrusk or Frederic, he would almost certainly be immediately exposed to the Seattle Kraken. And if the Kraken took said player (most mock drafts I’ve seen have them taking Vince Dunn; I am holding out hope that Doug Armstrong is smarter than this and instead exposes Torey Krug, whose $6.5 million price tag for the next six years of his thirties would absolutely scare off Ron Francis from selecting him), then the Blues essentially got a first-round pick for Vladimir Tarasenko and didn’t have to lose somebody in the expansion draft. And this would be a massive victory for the Blues. A #21 overall pick isn’t an insignificant asset for a team to have—it may not allow you to draft a Connor McDavid, but it’s just one pick shy of where the Blues selected Robert Thomas. In recent years, it has garnered such solid NHL contributors as Filip Chytil, Colin White, and Our Old Friend Robby Fabbri. And it would give the Blues $7.5 million in cap space—in addition to the $14.35 million in cap space being shed with the contract expirations of Tyler Bozak, Mike Hoffman, and Jaden Schwartz, the Blues have an intriguing opportunity to reinvigorate their forward group on the fly.

If the Blues do opt to protect Vladimir Tarasenko, I am going to convince myself that this is Doug Armstrong exhibiting patience once again. In 2017, protecting enforcer Ryan Reaves over David Perron, a productive offensive player who had committed the mortal sin of “having a bad few weeks at the end of the last season”, seemed like malpractice, but it seemed a whole lot more defensible when it turned out that Armstrong had, somehow, convinced the Pittsburgh Penguins to trade him Oskar Sundqvist and the first-round pick that turned into Klim Kostin for Reaves and a second. Maybe the Bruins want to wait until the Seattle Kraken draft their team so that they wouldn’t be forced to protect Tarasenko. Either way, it does seem like a matter of if and not when the Blues and Tarasenko part ways. And if a young forward and a first-round pick comes back in return, the Blues will have won the trade in a landslide.