FanHouse TheBagSkate

Is it too hot for hockey? You may be right, but until the cold weather returns, welcome to The Bag Skate, FanHouse's afternoon roundup of everything that's happening on a typical offseason weekday.

Today's primal scream comes from the guys at Melt Your Face Off, who have penned an open letter to NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman in wake of the news that a small knot of his own owners engineered a loan to help a penniless businessman -- William "Boots" DelBaggio -- boost a piece of the Nashville Predators.

Did I forget to mention that they did it behind Bettman's back?

HOW DO YOU LET THAT HAPPEN? You are the commissioner for a top-flight sports league in the most industrialized nation in the world. You are supposedly the most powerful man in your sport. Now, you claim that while owners are lending each other money to keep the franchises in their own little AllTel Circle of Friends, you thought everything was hunky dory?

"Most powerful man in your sport?" Come now, everybody knows that Brian Burke is the most powerful man in the NHL. Just ask him.

That being said, the very moment when Bettman discovered this little bit of chicanery has to be marked as the low point in his tenure at the top of the league. It's one thing for everyone fan in the world to use you as a human punching bag, but it's another thing entirely when the very men who hired you to do the job don't trust you enough to let you know what they're doing.

Is it too hot for hockey? You may be right, but until the cold weather returns, welcome to The Bag Skate, FanHouse's afternoon roundup of everything that's happening on a typical offseason weekday.

We've heard about the rumors that Jaromir Jagr has an offer in his hip pocket to rejoin Avangard Omsk, the KHL team he played with during the lockout, and now, thanks to The Hockey Rodent, we have the first report of some solid numbers in the Czech press. I'm thinking Glen Sather is unmoved.

Though it has a fancy sounding name, don't be fooled: Finding Dulcinea boasts a good hockey blogger.

Barry Melrose wants you to know that the game hasn't passed him by. In fact, he now says that the game is right back where he left it. I'm thinking he's got plenty of people to convince otherwise. Elsewhere in Tampa, Bill Barber is moving on and Marc Denis has been bought out, while Brian Lawton is in.

Is hockey sexist? John MacKinnon says yes.

Here's a new feature I've been resisting for a while here at FanHouse, but with the offseason upon us I feel as if we have no choice. Welcome to The Bag Skate, FanHouse's afternoon roundup of everything that's happening on a typical offseason weekday. Why The Bag Skate? Because it's Summertime and you'd probably rather be doing just about anything else than writing about hockey with weather this beautiful. Now, might one be able to say that we're swiping this idea from elsewhere? I'd prefer to call it an homage.

The head turner of the day has to be Rick Westhead's stunner in the Toronto Star revealing that LA Kings owner Phil Anschutz and Minnesota Wild owner Craig Leipold were the money men behind William "Boots" Delbaggio's purchase of a stake in the Nashville Predators. What's worse, Leipold and Anschutz, who both sit on the league's Board of Governors and are considered allies of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, made this $17 million loan without informing him about what they were up to. I wonder why?