Ice Cold Takes: Let’s try using baseball bats, not hockey sticks, to bully robots

Ice Cold Takes is a weekly humor column focused on what is trending around the NHL. Which, in mid-August, is nothing.

What do you guys want to talk about? It’s the middle of August, meaning even the folks over at NHL.com are grasping at straws for content. A quick glance through their feed shows that four of the top 12 posts are about the Minnesota Wild. You know there isn’t much going on when the league has to talk about Minnesota. They are peppering in as many Toronto Maple Leafs posts as possible to try to tip the scales back from “I’m LITERALLY dying of boredom” to “I need another coffee.”

It’s not the NHL’s fault. There’s only so much that can be covered during the long NHL summer. We’ve already seen the Stanley Cup on a boat or filled with food and drink and we have to wait a little longer for those RFA contracts to come through. These are literally the dog days of summer in the league. Thankfully, this league often chooses to spend those days focused on actual dogs.

NHL Trends

Joe Thornton’s new teammate

Because it’s summer and because hockey dogs are always the best boys and girls out there. Meet Finn, the San Jose Sharks newest roster addition. He is so much cuter than Brent Burns.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0Wz1PfF1jf/

Finn joins the ever-growing list of hockey’s best friends. Teams adopting and training pups is a great initiative. Props to each team that participates in this and here’s to hoping every team gets on board before the end of the summer. There’s literally no downside here.

Summer camp with Sid

Sidney Crosby can score in more ways than the Latin exchange student you went to high school with.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JxaSZhsRG/

What exactly is the goalie supposed to do here? Sit back, relax and get ridiculed as the best NHL player on the planet makes you look like a fool. Sounds fun, sign me up…

Crosby hasn’t lost a step. The Penguins are going to be contenders until he shows any bit of a downward trend in his game. Yes, I know this is just a practice video, but it’s still pretty impressive that he undressed this likely decent ‘tender three different ways in just under three seconds.

Speaking of training videos, here’s one on the other end of the spectrum.

PK Subban 

PK is having another fun offseason on social media, with a new training video surfacing every six hours or so. Unfortunately (read: fortunately for us), they seem to be getting more and more nonsensical.

In the latest (Although there are probably six more out since this has been posted) PK is getting ready for when the NHL adds the “You must stand on a second puck while handling the first puck” rule. Game changer.

This is obviously very difficult, but someone is going to have to explain to me how it helps him become a better NHL player. Perhaps PK is doing this for all of us. He knows how boring it’s been talking about the Minnesota Wild, Mitch Marner and… well that’s about it, so he is providing us with some form of content. I just got about 150 words out of this so I won’t make fun of him anymore. Next!

Killer Robots

This may seem a little far from the usual topic but we’ve discussed the bullying of robots in ICT before and it’s happening again. Bullying these increasingly impressive robots is literally how the end of the world starts and it seems like a hockey stick is always involved somehow. After they band together, declare their independence from humans and murder half of the population to save the Earth, guess which community of people they’ll be targeting first? Hockey fans.

The robot is just trying to do his job! He has a delivery to make and judging by the training he’s undergoing, the location of the delivery is difficult to get to. There’s no need to be pegging him with dodge balls and slashing him with a hockey stick.

The steel chair? Really!?

These two working with the robot are the two guys in the movie who tell you they have complete control over the robot army and that the army will listen to their every command. Yeah right. When you eventually robots turn on us, remember that I was here defending you.

The NHL Awards Committee

Robin Lehner, G, New York… wait.

https://twitter.com/RobinLehner/status/1160261832864608257

That’s embarrassing. You had a 50% chance of getting that one wrong and you did. Wasn’t worth the quick Google search, buddy? Come on.

March&MillCo

Hey boys! Here’s a free ad in hopes that you’ll return the favor some day.

https://www.instagram.com/march_millco/

Brad Marchand and Kevan Miller have started an outdoors company and you best believe I’ll have a couple of these shirts on the way come September. Check them out if you are into the outdoors and no I am not pandering to two of my favorite players.

Keep your head up.