Some TPL Notes, Bertuzzi: Win-Win Situation, and Lebda: RubleRich?

As you may have noticed, we’ve been fairly absent parents (nee, deadbeat dads) over the last couple of weeks. Aside from the pain of talking about hockey knowing that the Red Wings season ended, we’ve got a few things in the works for the site over the coming months — as cryptically teased on Twitter.

There’s quite a bit happening being the curtain, and I wish I could share them all with you now, but I can’t. But I promise that the wait – and the frustration – is worth it. It’s a very exciting time in TPLand.

Next order of business: guest posts. In the coming weeks, we’ll be putting up posts written by some of our very favorite commenters/Tweeps/friends — those that don’t have a blog of their own. We were excited to get the responses we have, and we look forward to receiving more. If you weren’t e-mailed, and felt you should have been (or would like to be), it’s most likely because we didn’t have your e-mail address and/or couldn’t find you on Twitter. If you’d like to be included in our end-of-the-season Retrospectacus, drop us a line and we’ll get you the details.

Below the line, ACTUAL Red Wings news. Word?

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It’s no secret that this half of TPL has a violent, borderline obsessive hatred toward #44 in red. Disch swings back and forth — at one point during the season, he was completed on board the Contuzzi Express (headed for Disappearance, arrival time: FEBRUARY).

So when news came down this morning that Todd Bertuzzi had been offered a two-year extension to stay in Motown, you’d probably expect my eyes to burn with the furor of 10,000 suns. But you’d be wrong…

Like I mentioned on the latest episode of The Obstructed View, whatever happens with the Todd Bertuzzi contract talks is a win for TPL. If he pulls a 2007 and signs for $11 more on the West Coast (zero of us should be surprised if we witness this again), good — get the hell off my team. If he accepts the two year offer, every time he does something positive (evidently 18 times a year), negative (dozens of times nightly), ill-advised (offensive zone penalties FTW!), ridiculous (no-look, spin-o-rama, falling down pass), or in between — we reap the benefits. Also, my Shirtuzzi increases in value. Although I’m not sure you can increase from “priceless.”

In equally unsettling, but much funnier, news — Brett Lebda was being courted by the KHL…until his salary demands made the Russians scoff. Read that again. HIS SALARY DEMANDS to the league notorious for over-paying the shit out of borderline NHLers made the KHL shut down negotiations. I’m not sure what to make of it, unless he threw out a ridiculous number because he didn’t really want to spend a year (or more) in Siberia… I dunno, something like $9.50 an hour.

What it does tell me is that he’s probably been told what the rest of us already knew: the Wings are going to let him walk — because I doubt he’d search for gainful employment if he had any sort of indication that he’d be back with the Wings.

Finally, like we all assumed, all of the RFAs have been qualified. Yeah, I know — even Derek Meech. More on that later in the week…