3 things I think: NHL player empowerment, gambling ads, Peanut Punches

A couple of weeks ago in this newsletter, I mentioned that legendary NFL reporter Peter King had published a new book, and I used that as a hook to reminisce on what I consider the glory days of internet sportswriting in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Fans of King's work will remember that one of the best features of his beloved Monday Morning Quarterback column for the Sports Illustrated website was the "10 Things I Think I Think" segment in which he blended his reporting with opinions and observations on football and anything else that interested him. Besides being informative and entertaining, this gimmick proved quite influential in the sports media community as countless writers over the years have appropriated it in their own way.

Well, now it's my turn to rip off Peter King! I always have a bunch of random thoughts and takes on the sports world rattling around my head, and I figured it might be fun to put them down in the newsletter from time to time. So here goes. Here are three things I think:

1. I think I'm not really enjoying the NHL's new player-empowerment era.

In today's more player-friendly media environment, we're no longer supposed to shame anyone for wanting to go someplace else, contract be damned. But I'll just point out that there's a cost to the recent NBA-ification of the NHL, and right now it seems Canadian fans are the ones mostly footing the bill.

Within the last year, we've seen American stars Quinn Hughes (Vancouver), Brady Tkachuk (Ottawa) and, most recently, Connor Hellebuyck (Winnipeg) trigger a trade from their Canadian-based teams by telling them they wanted to move on. Each guy still had more than a year left on his contract, and Hellebuyck had five.

Tkachuk and Hellebuyck negotiated