Joe Biddle is a fixture at The Tennessean, and has "been writing sports columns for 29 years in Nashville". Today, he managed to post a blog today about the Phoenix Coytoes situation. I'm going to be a bit charitable here and posit that it's only a rough draft and was perhaps published prematurely (although it's been up for over 30 minutes), as it's a truly awful piece of work that even the proverbial "blogger in his mother's basement" would be ashamed of.

Fittingly, the tagline for Biddle's blog is "A brief look at recent happenings in the bizarre, often zany, world of sports." That's pretty fitting, because what follows is certainly bizarre. I wouldn't normally quote the whole thing, but it's pretty short:

In baseball, it's three strikes and you are out. I don't know how many you get in hockey, but Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie wants an NHL franchise in the worst way.
He took his third strike this week when a bankruptcy judge rejected the sale of the Colorado Rockies to Balsillie, who has never tried to hide his intentions to put an NHL team in Canada.
He tried to worm his want into buying the Predators, but failed when a local group stepped forward and purchased the franchise from original owner Craig Leipold.
Balsillie was also rebuffed when he sought to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins, who recently won the Stanley Cup.
Now, Phoenix has presented another roadblock.
Maybe guys with a billion dollars don't understand the meaning of "no.''
Balsillie will keep trying, and cost is of no concern with him.
As long as people keep buying his Blackberry cell phones, the money will keep rolling in.
But when it's apparent no one from the commissioner, to the NHL Governors don't want anything to do with Balsillie, how long does it take for the message to sink in?

Colorado Rockies? Has Biddle been trapped in a time warp dating to the early 1980's?

"He tried to worm his want"???

Holy cow, what a hackneyed, uninspired waste of time. I don't know what led Biddle to write about hockey for the first time in ages, but if this is what we can expect, I think we'd all be better off if he stuck to NASCAR and football.