Jannik Hansen Will Re-Sign with the Canucks

Jonathan Willis made an excellent post on Hockey or Die today about the benefits of arbitration for fringe and depth players in the NHL. Essentially, the main benefit for a fringe player is not necessarily that he'll be awarded a higher salary but that his team will be forced to re-sign him if the arbitrator awards a salary below a certain cut-off point.

Right now, the Canucks have only two players going to arbitration; Shane "Pain Lion" O'Brien wisely elected to forgo arbitration and accept his qualifying offer, while Tanner Glass was headed to arbitration before Gillis stepped in and signed him, and no one's in a huge hurry to re-sign Mario Bliznak and Eric Walsky. That leaves Mason Raymond and Jannik Hansen as the two remaining RFA's, both of whom filed for arbitration. Of the two, the cut-off point clearly won't affect Raymond, who will most likely be awarded between 2.5 and 3.5 million in arbitration, well above the suspected 1.3 million cut-off.

For Jannik Hansen, however, arbitration will likely net him a one-way deal between 600,000 and 800,000, which fits right in under the cut-off. The Canucks won't be able to walk away from that decision and likely won't want to. It will, however, give Hansen a leg-up going into training camp. With a one-way contract, he's less likely to be sent down to the Manitoba Moose, which may help him find a spot on the third or fourth line. Players on two-way contracts like Victor Oreskovich, Alexandre Bolduc, Jeff Tambellini, and prospects Sergei Shirokov, Cody Hodgson, and Jordan Schroeder may be more likely to get sent down than Jannik Hansen.

Urban Dictionary Fun with Darren Pang and Gord McIntyre

Puck Daddy has a good take on the amusing back-and-forth between Darren Pang at TSN and our very own Gord McIntyre. So, in case you missed it, let's get you up to speed:

Darren Pang says a little bit about Mikael Samuelsson, but the line that got Gord's goat is when Pang says that Samuelsson benefits from "playing with the Twinkies." McIntyre gets upset because, well, the Sedins have become tough, tough players, and they have a history of earning sissy nicknames. The Sedin Sisters, for example. Anybody with a lick of sense knows what a twinkie is, just as those same people (save Gob Bluth) knows what a poof is.

Looks like Darren Pang only meant twins. He needs to get with the times. It may not have been as bad as that time Lynn Westmoreland called Barack Obama "uppity", but it's still a poor choice of words. That's all, mind you; it's a small controversy.

I'm more interested in Puck Daddy's link to Urban Dictionary definitions of the term twinkie. Hilarious. But what some people don't know is that the Urban Dictionary can be an endless source of fun. According to the dictionary of street, everybody's name is a slang term for insane, sexual conduct.

For instance, I would imagine Gord McIntyre used the Urban Dictionary to verify his outrage. But my outrage begins the moment I see his name in the Province at all. Here are some definitions. Here is a sentence using definition number five: Oh man Josh Gorded me and the smell was horrifying.

Yeah. It gets much, much worse for Darren Pang when you look up his last name, and obscenely inappropriate when you look up Panger, which he is sometimes called. Here is a sentence for Pang: Sulla eats pang. My guess is that "Sulla" is a friend of the definer. Or perhaps no longer. Either way, that is unprofessional dictionary management of the highest order. The OED this ain't.

Long story short: urban dictionary is not a source.