Morning Flurries: shortened season and Tyler Seguin’s cologne ads

Tyler Seguin has officially hit the level of quarantine horny™ that the rest of the world did back in late spring.

The Dallas Stars alternate captain has been in the news for his off-ice behavior throughout his career, although it’s been a roller coaster of a journey watching him go from a healthy scratch for missing team meetings to a rubber duck-carrying nude model for ESPN (who talked about how good he is at pinching people with his toes in his Body Issue interview) to a protest-attending, anthem-kneeling social justice champion this very summer.

It’s been the best kind of personal growth for the former Boston Bruins phenom — but now, he’s sort of taken things full circle with a hilariously bizarre cologne partnership that social media users just can’t get enough of:

The fragrance Seguin is hawking from the Michel Germain Séxūal line was launched in 2012, and apparently it’s actually a real thing? I had to learn that by Googling the Canadian perfumer, since it wasn’t entirely clear if 1) the post was a real thing and not an elaborate prank, and 2) if it was something that people routinely buy with a completely straight face. But apparently, Germain has been dubbed ‘Canada’s Master of Fragrances’ in the past, which is the kind of powerful title that we should all wish to one day achieve.

The campaign itself, though, is fairly hilarious. It features Seguin posted up on his sofa at home (thank you, covid marketing techniques) while giving an intense stare that just doesn’t seem to line up with the kind of personality he’s established over the years. Seguin is the player who lamented last month that he’s out of Netflix shows and is going to have to start reading books, and once took part in an NHL video series about binge-worthy TV shows in which all his teammates talked about Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones while he shamelessly hawked One Tree Hill.

I honestly think this sums it up about as well as it can be summed up:

In actual hockey news:

The NHL-NHLPA discussions surrounding the upcoming 2021 season have been ongoing, although the date to have a firmly-set decision on start times and games played (along with locations, attendance protocols, taxi squads, and player-team financials) is fast approaching without too much headway being made.

There was a bit of news that trickled down on Friday, though:

The potential 56-game season would put the 2021 campaign at a shorter game slate than the interrupted 2019-20 year, but still longer than the lockout-shortened 2012-13 campaign that left such a poor taste in everyone’s mouths. It would mean squeezing the games in fairly closely; for perspective, most teams typically only have around 35-45 games left to play by the start of the new year, and there will only be a handful of extra weeks to work with between the cancelled All Star festivities and an extended timeline for the projected Stanley Cup Final series. That would likely mean carrying a beefed-up taxi squad of extra players, although it’s tough to tell how teams would work that out in order to best support their developing prospects who would typically float between the AHL and NHL during a non-pandemic season.

Ultimately, though, the more games the league plays the more revenue it brings in — and with both players and owners seemingly unhappy with how revenue projections will impact them next year, that could benefit both parties involved. Now, they just have to figure out the logistics of that kind of season — and soon.

In college hockey news:

ASU and Notre Dame got to witness their puck drop Friday night featured on national television — which was awesome news for Sun Devils fans excited to see the game grow in the desert, even if their team did drop a heartbreaker against the Fighting Irish in the final minutes of the contest.

Doing commentary for the game? Another game-grower in Kendall Coyne-Schofield. For those who forgot, she’s made history in the last few weeks with the announcement that she’ll join the Chicago Blackhawks coaching staff this upcoming year:

Finally, in hockey (but not) news:

The Vancouver Canucks have confirmed that they’re parting ways with long-time anthem singer Mark Donnelly, who found himself in hot water after it was reported that he was set to sing the national anthem at an anti-mask rally in Vancouver on Saturday.

People took the news of Donnelly’s planned performance poorly, calling for the Canucks to do something about the team employee’s short-sighted decision during a time period in which Canada is seeing some of their biggest spikes in covid-19 cases since the pandemic hit North American shores last winter. So team owner Francisco Aquilini decided to do something, all right — and in the most Canucks way possible:

Tired: firing your anthem singer for promoting the endangerment of the general public

Wired: firing him via Twitter.