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It looks like the Men's Canadian hockey team coach will be loved by Avalanche fans.
The men who will coach the Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team in Sochi will be announced on Monday.
While the names have yet to be released, but it is believed the team will be coached again by Mike Babcock of the Detroit Red Wings, who guided the host nation to a gold medal in Vancouver. Joining him as assistants will be Lindy Ruff of the Dallas Stars, Ken Hitchcock of the St. Louis Blues and Claude Julien of the Boston Bruins.
Speaking of the Olympics, Sochi might have some controversy.
Less than seven months from the opening ceremony, the 2014 Olympics are already promising to be one of the most controversial in history — and that’s just among the folks in the accounting department. Various reports suggest that the costs of the Games have careered out of control. The price to run Sochi, initially budgeted at $12 billion, is said to have reached $50 billion according to a recent article in The Economist. (The Vancouver Olympics, by contrast, billed out at about $9 billion.) There are accusations that widespread corruption is gobbling up large chunks of this cash. Critics of Vladimir Putin are already suggesting that the Russian president’s most famous act of sporting larceny is no longer the petty pocketing of Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring.
Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader, has called Sochi “an unprecedented thieves’ caper.”
As Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master turned politician, tweeted in the wake of The Economist report: “I never doubted (Putin) and his cronies would ‘take the gold’!”
The new Leafs' CEO isn't too fond of how the team is looking at the past for the Glory Days.
For a guy who hasn’t really done anything here in Toronto yet, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment CEO Tim Leiweke continues to talk a big game.
Leiweke granted an interview with Bloomberg News the other day and vowed that he will double the value of MLSE within seven years and greatly enhance the appeal of the Raptors across Canada. He also added that MLSE and the Leafs have to stop living off their past glory.
“I don’t want the players walking in the hallways of the Air Canada Centre and seeing pictures from 1962. Get rid of those pictures and tell them (the players), ‘This is your legacy,’ ” he said.