Do you like the title? It’s an attempt at levity to hide my utter shock/sadness/anger (Shanger?) regarding the trade of Simon Gagne for a former Smashing Pumpkins drummer and a half eaten bag of Funyuns. Okay, I just did a quick fact check and apparently it’s a different, far more irrelevant, Matt Walker. Since the other part of this blockbuster move is a 4^th round pick, seeing a half eaten bag of Funyuns working its way through the Flyers farm system in the near future cannot be ruled out. Ideally, it’ll retire early and take over as General Manager for Paul Holmgren. I’m not going to bore you with a lot of “knowing a lot about hockey” like those other bloggers, I’ll let the guys at Flyers Fan Central do that (download their Droid App). What I will do is lay out some simple truths of the situation just to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Losing Gagne is upsetting and was unnecessary: I get that the salary cap was basically hit, but there are other things you can do. For instance, we have about eight mediocre goalies at this point; take them all out behind the Spectrum and shoot two. My plan kills two birds with one stone: we no longer need to pay two people and we’ll have six mediocre goalies literally playing for their lives (Win/Win). This trade is still not at the level of the Donovan McNabb trade, but it’s pretty damn close. The Flyers at least traded Gagne with his dignity intact. The Eagles felt it was best to sell NcNabb via a Craigslist ad. Some where between the St. Louis Rams turning down the trade and the Oakland Raiders denying any interest I think the Florida Tuskers of UFL fame must have been picking up the phone. This Gagne trade isn’t that bad, but it’s worse than watching Charles Barkley in a Phoenix Suns jersey (I’m not going to talk about the whole Brian Dawkins situation). Eric Lindros I was happy to be rid of. Rod Brind’Amour I just wanted to see happy. But Gagne was fine where he was, he wanted to stay, and his Myspace page is awesome.

You’re not going to like Matt Walker: Don’t bother trying, just start hating him now. Sure, he say that he’s excited, “to be back in a hockey town”. He won’t be; when everyone hates him. He can score 80 game winning goals. If we lose the 81^st people will talk about how Gags would have buried it. If he races to the 30^th floor of a burning hospital to save a floor full of veterans, babies and puppies Gags would have just stopped the fire and built another hospital. Sorry Matt, you’re just not winning this one. Your best move may be just to go down injured. That way we’ll have our scapegoat and you can just sit around and talk about how it sucks not to be able to help the team (again Win/Win). Luckily for whatever piece of meat we pick up in the 4^th round, they’ll be so far removed from this situation that hardly anyone will heckle them as they go about their job at the local Appleby’s  (Google “famous 4th round NHL picks”).

Simon Gagne will hoist the cup: I want to end on a good note here, so just know that Gags will get his. If Philadelphia sports teams were as good at assessing and getting what they actually need as they are at trading key pieces to other teams as they are being a Philadelphia sports fan might actually be enjoyable. Historically one of our best skills has been to trade players to future championship teams. So rest assured we not only gave the Tampa Bay Lightning a great player, but we most likely took enough weight of their salary cap so they can make some moves and make a series run. Maybe they can beat us in the playoffs and injure Jeff Carter in the process. Who know, the sky’s the limit on this one really (Win/EpicFAIlL).