Welcome to August! For those of us in Carolina pining away for anything hockey related, I have some good news! The Hurricanes rookie/prospect camp is scheduled to take place later this month. If you check out the CanesCountry Calendar, you'll see that the camp is set to be run from August 15th to August 18th. The prospects who are coming might be surprised to see that they only have an hour of ice time reserved each day at the RecZone. "Don't tell the kids" that most of their time in Raleigh will be spent with trainer Pete Friesen and from all previous accounts, he does his level best to wear them out. During this camp the prospects will learn what it takes to be a professional, from a training perspective. By the end of the day, they will all be looking forward to taking the ice even if it is for just a short time. Usually the ice sessions are open to the public and the times are convenient ones this year. Wednesday and Thursday the scheduled ice time is from 5-6PM. On Friday and Saturday it is from 3-4PM. So, take note if you'd like to see some of the Canes prospects up close and personal. An official list of attendees has not been released yet, but CanesCountry will be watching and as soon as one is made public, we'll post it! I would expect most of the prospects to be there, including new draft pick Brandon Sutter and top rated prospects Bobby Hughes, Harrison Reed, and Noah Babin.
Speaking of the CanesCountry Calendar, I finally got that set up recently and placed the link along with the other CanesCountry links on the left sidebar. We will have that available all year with updated Hurricanes event and game information. Right now it's only current up through September, but we'll be plugging in the regular season schedule shortly. If anyone has suggestions for the calendar or has a relevant Canes event that we should include, please let us know! While you're checking the calendar, feel free to join the forum and share your opinions with our other members. Things have been quiet lately, but I expect activity to pick up again soon.
I was going to talk about some arbitration awards since they are usually pretty interesting, but this year the whole scene has been pretty much a non-issue. Most players eligible were signed by their respective teams just before the hearing. One player who did make it through the process was Sean Avery. Sean was seeking 2.6 million while the Rangers were holding firm at 1.3. The arbitrator actually did a decent job this time around and met the two in the middle with a 1.9 million dollar, one year award. I think that's fair and apparently so did the Rangers as they signed him almost immediately afterwards at that amount. TSN has a complete list of the players who were set for arbitration, but you can see most of them already settled. Boring!!
For those of you who haven't seen it yet, there's a great story about the enigma, Eklund on Fanhouse. People seem to hate him or love him and while I don't take as fact anything he posts, he doesn't bother me either. I just look at his rumors as entertainment of sorts, which he admits to himself at the end of that report. He is a money grubber though, there's no doubt about that. In other league news, things are looking very positive for the city of Nashville and Predator fans. A local group has agreed to buy the team and yesterday signed paperwork with current owner Craig Leipold to start the process. Of course it's not a done deal yet so it's not time for anyone over there to rest on their laurels, but things look much better now than they did a month or two ago.
Finally, 850 The Buzz has started another "buzzbabe" competition and this one looks better than ever. Good luck to them all and may the best girl win!
Dio