Who Let the Dogs Out?

The dog days of August is a phrase that was first used in ancient Greece and has primarily survived these days as a baseball term, referring to the time of the season when things begin to drag on through the long schedule and the often unbearably hot weather of late summer. The advent of the internet has perhaps extended the concept to ice hockey -- during the dog days when there is nothing happening on the ice, hardcore fans have little else to do other than speculate about how their favorite teams have reshaped their rosters.

So where do the dogs come in? The Greeks characterized the dog days as a time "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies," according to an 1813 text called Clavis Calendarium. In our time, unscrupulous rumormongers are the mad dogs causing us "hysterics and phrensies" with their unfounded ruminations -- like the Rangers trading Scott Gomez to Vancouver to open up salary cap space with which to sign Mats Sundin.

Never mind that the Rangers just let Jaromir Jagr get away because they were reshaping the roster around Gomez and fellow 2007 free agent signee Chris Drury -- why on earth would they then sign Sundin, another version of Jagr, at the cost of Gomez, who is nearly a decade younger? Why let facts or logic get in the way when you have a "trusted source" telling you differently? One initiator of this particular rumor is a known fraud who admitted flat out when asked about last year's Jagr-to-Edmonton rumors that he made them up to keep his readers well fed -- we're not going to mention his name, link to his site, or otherwise give him the attention he so desperately craves other than pointing you to this Puck Daddy posting on this same subject, which has links to all relevant material should you be interested in reading more.

We'll go gentle on another purveyor of the Gomez rumor, Greg Caggiano of the Bleacher Report, because a) he admits here that he made a mistake in posting his initial report too soon (after first defending it in an E-mail quoted in the above-linked Puck Daddy report), and b) he's a Ranger fan. Having gone down the path he himself is on from "fan reporter" hoping to elevate his game to professional hockey writer, we have a bit of advice for Greg: journalists verify their original source for this very reason -- your second source contradicted the first, which would have been a much better story than going with an unverified rumor ("someone told us Gomez was going to Vancouver, like he who shall not be named reported, but a better source said the rumor was false"). We can't claim to have never gone with an unverified single-source story, but we always make sure to let people know in those cases that the story is as a result less than watertight.

So where does it all stand then? Larry Brooks of the Post, who has a strong personal relationship with Gomez, says that he is not being shopped (in a footnote to a perhaps more interesting story on the status of European players like Ranger draftee Alexei Cherepanov -- see Beyond the Blueshirts for an update on him). The Ottawa Sun, on the other hand, not only parrots the unfounded rumor, they throw Drury into the mix as well. The Toronto Sun adds more, while RDS adds that the Canadiens are not interested in signing Brendan Shanahan if they can't get Sundin.

In other reading, the IIHF has an interview with the GM of the Russian team the Rangers will face in Bern, Switzerland for the inaugural Victoria Cup, Prospect Park has more on that as well as the Gomez rumormongering, and Blue Notes reports that MSG will televise all Ranger pre-season games for the first time that we recall including the two games in Bern. Hartford has signed a back-up goalie, career minor leaguer Mike Brodeur (for more see Howlings).