Show of hands: who knows that the NHL playoffs are starting tonight? Monkey, you don’t count.

Anyway. For the first time since the 1991 season (Norm sucks!), I’ve watched a lot of Minnesota hockey this year. As such, I will offer up a few talking points before tonight’s series opener against the Colorado Avalanche.

Talking Point #1: The Wild are pretty good.

The won the Northwest division title for the first time ever, in a year where all five division teams were in the race for the playoffs down to the season’s final weekend. Essentially, the Wild have been playing playoff-type games for a month now. Of course, since Colorado is also in the NW, so have the Avs. Whatever, the talking point still stands.

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I can see it now… April 5th, 2010. Opening day for the Minnesota Twins coming off of their promising 87 win 2009 season.

But… opening day at the new ballpark will have to wait because there is 7 inches of snow on the field, and it’s still coming down.

Now April snow isn’t a guarantee in the frozen tundra, but it certainly isn’t unheard of either. Nor is a month of solid rain (anyone remember June of 2004 when there were two days it didn’t rain?).

Not putting a roof on the new Twins stadium (I boldly predict) will be a huge mistake.

Of course a bigger mistake would be for the great State of Minnesota to foot the bill for it.

Ah well, it’ll just make for a lot of double headers… nothing wrong with 6 hours of baseball (or drinking).

that’s correct– boston’s backup first baseman missing the first two games of the season due to a sore neck qualifies as top news on espn.com. i eagerly await the update on long reliever manny delcarmen, who apparently is a little tired after not getting to bed until late on sunday night.

normally, i try not to pick on sid hartman too often– or, at least as much as he deserves. being overly negative to grandpa sports and other very old, nearly dead people (like carl pohlad) seems like an invitation to bad karma. however, sometimes i need to call el sid out.

sid is famous for painting overly rosy pictures of local sports teams. which, as a regular listener of dan barreiro, i can appreciate– a little yin to my typical yang. but his sunday column, featuring the almost onion-like headline of “Garnett Deal Looks Better All the Time”– deserves some analysis and, well, ridicule. (and, yes, i take kevin mchale to task below as well. he deserves just as much ridicule.)

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Further proof that we’ve been slacking here at SP:

This has been up for 3 days on the internet and I’m finding it just now!

http://deadspin.com/351147/chris-berman-is-somewhat-perturbed-with-the-help

I blame Alex… he’s our resident Deadspin watcher.

Which is worse, Berman taking the Lords name in vain several times, or the 3 or 4 f-bombs?