Do NHL Players Need Enforcers To Protect Them From Michael Bublé?
Michael Bublé was performing in Columbus the other night and he had a few words for all of the UFAs who left the Blue Jackets this summer in free agency. In case you forgot, the Blue Jackets didn’t sign a single unrestricted free agent on their roster this summer. Quite literally everybody who had the chance to leave Columbus on July 1 got out of there. Duchene, Bobrovsky, Panarin, Dzingel, Kinkaid. I’m pretty sure the only players they signed this summer were Ryan Murray, who was a restricted free agent so he didn’t have much of a say, and Gustav Nyquist. You really just hate to see it.
So Michael Bublé, being the polite Canadian who he is, sensed that the crowd in Columbus would probably be a little butt-hurt over everybody leaving them and decided to throw a few words of encouragement their way. “I know that Bobrovsky, Panarin and Duchene are all idiots for leaving”. This is similar to something you’d say to a friend after a bad breakup to make them feel better about themselves, even if it’s not entirely factual accurate. It’s pretty much just an instinctual thing to say to someone who has just been left in the dust. But you still have to wonder if this was a cheap shot from Bublé.
Matt Duchene isn’t much of a fighter. I just looked up his fight card on Hockey Fights [dot] com and he only has 2 fights in his NHL career and one fight when he was playing in the OHL. He hasn’t fought since 2013. So since he’s not much of a fighter himself, he decided to just chirp Michael Bublé back about the fact that nobody listens to his music unless it’s around the holidays.
Quality chirp, no doubt. But is that going to stop Bublé from calling out every UFA who left to sign with a new team this summer whenever he’s in that city on his tour? Bublé’s tour stops in Toronto next week. Is he going to rip Mitch Marner for not re-signing with the Leafs yet and tear into Tyler Ennis for heading to Ottawa? Then his tour stops in Ottawa on July 30. Is he going to rip pretty much everything that has happened with that organization over the last year or so? It’s just that right now, Michael Bublé is basically out there skating around and taking guys’ heads off one by one. Somebody needs to step in and put an end to it. Maybe Matt Duchene can release a country diss track or something like that. They just need something. You’d hope that the refs would do their job here and keep this game under control, but sometimes the boys just need to police themselves out there.