Eddie "The Eagle" Belfour

Sorry I haven't written in a while. Honestly, nothing really happened at the office until yesterday when EVERYTHING happened.

As Im sure all of you know by now we signed Eddie Belfour to come to South Florida. I got the announcement from the intern in our hockey ops department at about 2:30 yesterday. Our GM, head coach, Director of Hockey Ops and Belfour himself are all in Canada for different reasons, so therefore we did the whole Belfour thing via lots of phone calls.

(What I must add here is I grew up a Blackhawks fan for some odd reason and I always loved Belfour. You can say he was one of my heroes growing up. Now I work with him. How cool is that? I cant wait to meet him.)

Before a release was even written, we called all of our media outlets to let them know what was going on and to schedule a 5:30 conference call with our GM Mike Keenan. Then we wrote the release, then we got Keenan on the phone. Then we got Belfour on the phone. It was caos between 2:30-7:00 when I finally left the office. Belfour is a huge recognizable name, so of course everyone is eating this up. Tomorrow we have another Cats Cookout at the BankAtlantic Center and I expect TV crews to be coming out to get fan reaction to signing Belfour.

The reason some of our guys were not in the office was because Jay Bouwmeester took us to arbitration and that meeting Monday afternoon. We got the results today in which Bou was given 2 years at 4.5 mil. Now, I;m just waiting to hear what our front office wants to do. We can either sign him for one year at 2.1 mil or two years at 4.5 mil. If we take the one-year, that makes Bou an unrestricted Free Agent next summer. If we take the two-year deal, he is still Panther property after the contract expires. I expect us to take the 2-years, but you never know. That is tomorrow's agenda.

I'm now feverously working on our pre-season media guide. We are 6 weeks from the opening of camp, and it'll take a week to print, so I have 5 weeks left to put this thing together. What is slowing me down is all of our prospects. I have to find their stats and write bios for them. No one realizes this, but hockey minor leagues are actually more complicated than baseball's minor leagues. Plus, in the NHL, your players can play overseas, but still be your property. So I am going crazy trying to find these stats. But I'm getting it done.

For the actual media guide, I am trying to update each player's stats vs. every team individually. What makes this hard is having to add each team stats for each player. So multiply 30 NHL teams X approximately 25 players = 750 stat lines I must do. It's really simple, but really tedious. But again, I will get it done.

More to come later. When I get a chance, I will update you on the rest of my life. Now its bedtime because I am beat.