Cards On Ice

Clarke MacArthur spent last season with the Atlanta Thrashers and Buffalo Sabres.  He was arbitration-eligible in the off-season, and received a stunning award of $2.4 million per season from the arbitrator.  Not surprisingly, the Thrashers (who must have gone in low-balling) walked away from the award, making MacArthur an unrestricted free agent.  Today, MacArthur has signed a 1 year contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs that will see him earn $1.1 million per season.

MacArthur will provide depth to the Leafs forward core, at a reasonable price.  He should fit in well on the Leafs third line.  He has been an effective NHLer, but the highlight of his career was likely his inclusion on Team Canada at the 2005 World Junior Championships.  Canada won a gold medal at the tournament.

Yes, Upper Deck is still going to release a 2009-10 product.  Yes, you may have observed people breaking a 2010-11 product right here on this blog (and others).

Yes, this is stupid.

Release dates have been creeping further and further back every year.  Although, this is the first year where the product years of a single manufacturer have overlapped to this degree.  In The Game has taken to releasing Ultimate Memorabilia in November, after Upper Deck is already well into their next season, but it technically could be seen as their last release of the previous season.  Personally, I would consider Ultimate Memorabilia to be the first product of ITG’s new calendar, but it isn’t nearly as big an issue due to the lack of rookie cards.

People will still want a John Tavares Cup RC, but UD is really pushing things here.  With competition in the market for the first time in five years, they picked a bad year to drag their feet.  Victory is its usual timid self, and 10/11 Score has a lot of buzz.  Hockey collectors are looking forward to having another licensed manufacturer.

Current word is that 2009-10 The Cup will be released will be released mid-September.  Typically, Cup rookies have all summer to gain momentum.  Collectors are all about the next big thing.  Tavares and Matt Duchene will quickly be eclipsed by the likes of Nazem Kadri, PK Subban, Taylor Hall and Tyler Seguin.

Twitter is full of random awesomeness.  today, your little bit of awesomeness comes from Mike Sundheim, the PR guy for the Carolina Hurricanes.

“Calling players to update personal profiles for guide. Many switching “person I’d like to meet” away from a certain golfer”

… but at least the end is near.  Tomas Kaberle’s contract calls for a period where his no trade clause (NTC) is removed, and he can be moved freely.  That period ends today.  Brian Burke has said it is likely that Kaberle won’t be moving, as the offers just haven’t been good enough.

I would be surprised if the Leafs traded Kaberle, and I actually wouldn’t be shocked if they resigned him at some point this year, especially if he is willing to take a cut like he did last time.  Kaberle is a huge asset as a puck mover on a team with a lot of gritty d-men.  Phaneuf, Beauchemin and Gunnarson can all move the puck, but they are a step behind Kaberle in this respect.

With the way Burke has been going about this, I trust him to not make a deal unless he gets a good enough return for Kaberle.  As a Leafs fan, it has been a while since I could say that about our team’s GM.

Upper Deck Victory is a product that hasn’t changed too much in the past few years.  Small base set, lots of guys in the wrong uniforms, some rookies who debuted last year, gold parallels, black parallels, Stars of the Game inserts, and Game Breakers inserts.

I hope you stayed awake through that.

This year, UD has added a bit of a new wrinkle to the set – in retail rack packs (the ones containing 36 cards that you see hanging at wal-Mart or other places) have an exclusive parallel – Red.  These cards aren’t hard to come by the rack packs, you get two per, but they might be a little hard to track down for a specific player – 250 different cards, 2 per rack pack.  With perfect collation, that’s 125 rack packs.  In Canada, these packs run $6.97 + tax.  I got two rookies (Derek Smith and JT Wyman) and two inserts (one Stars of the Game (Jeff Carter) and one Game Breakers (Jarome Iginla)) in addition to my two red parallels (Patrick Sharp and Vaclav Prospal).

So, just a heads up to player collectors that these cards are out there, and I can’t see them being heavily broken for resale, so you might want to grab your guy when you see him, rather than wait.

Also – my scanner is not going crazy.  These cards are called “Red”, but they are really a strange shade of magenta.

In a post on Hobby Insider today, Panini Hockey (username: PHK) shared a bit of info about their upcoming Score product.

Just got the first of our 90-91 Score buyback autos in house: the great Patrick Roy. Nice, clean, on-card sigs, and took less than a week from shipping to get ‘em! If only every athlete was that gracious, this gig would be a breeze!
The rest of the lineup is just as strong…Sakic, Lindros, Brodeur…think these will be a nice cherry on top of the program.

Can’t give out the complete checklist just yet, but 10 of the 15 players are in the Hall (or will be), two are extremely popular in Western Canada, one has a high-profile job and the other two were key RCs at the time who went on to enjoy fairly solid careers.

For me – the Lindros is huge.  Anyone have any guesses on the “high profile job” one?  I am guessing that one of the “extremely popular in Western Canada” players will be Trevor Linden and the other might possibly be Theo Fleury.  Feel free to speculate away in the comments.

If you want to see the new line of hockey cards this season, head on over to Waxaholic, he busted a box of Upper Deck Victory so you don’t have to.  Unless you want to.

Me?  I am hopelessly behind.  One of the great things about finishing up school was that it meant I didn’t have to sit in front of a computer for approximately 26 hours a day.  This also meant that I got hopelessly behind on my blogging and general card geekery this summer.  Overall – I think the pluses outweight the minuses.  I joined a gym, and I have a new camera which I love taking around and playing with.

I still have the card bug, though.  You probably won’t see a Victory break on this blog though.  I have high hopes for Score, so I am going to hold out until I get my hands on a box of that stuff.  Also, if any of you guys are busting Score – I am going to be looking for an autographed Lindros RC.

The NHL is heading into treacherous territory.  By now, everyone has heard that the league has rejected the contract that Ilya Kovalchuk signed with the New Jersey Devils.  Now, the NHL seems like they are going to use the precedent that the arbitrator has set to go back and look at some of the other really long term deals signed by players.  Now, the league is looking into deals signed by Roberto Luongo, Chris Pronger, Marc Savard and Marian Hossa.

That’s all fine and good, but what is going to happen if they have a problem with these deals.  These teams were up against the cap most  of the season, and a difference in these contracts could have had very, very large cap implications.  Marian Hossa was a key contributor to the Hawks Cup win – how can the NHL invalidate or modify his contract after the fact?

Sometimes being a fan is very frustrating.

Just a short while ago, Antti Niemi was the conquering hero in Chicago.  A promising young goalie who helped the team to a Stanley Cup victory.

Today, it appears that he is an unrestricted free agent, as the buzz on Twitter is that the team will not pick up his arbitration award.  Niemi was awarded a very reasonable (for a Stanley Cup winning goalie) $ 2.75 million.  All of this comes just shortly before Niemi gets his day with the Cup in Finland.  Kind of a downer for him, and also kind of a downer for Hawks fans.  To replace Niemi, the Hawks have signed perennial playoff flop Marty Turco for $1.75 million per season.

I realize I am not the general manager of an NHL franchise, but this move strikes me as penny-wise and pound-foolish.  Turco clearly isn’t the goalie he once was (and he has never shown himself to be the goalie Niemi was in the playoffs), and the Hawks are a mere shadow of the team they once were.  Their core of forwards and D is intact, but are these guys going to be happy with the long-term deals they have signed when the Hawks become perennial also-rans?