This feels weirdly like that moment when a hockey season is over, and the excitement for the coming season starts to seep in. Late June for a team that’s rebuilding and you believe it will be better next year. And yet it’s still sad that this is a kind of ending.

I went back and read the first real article I wrote for this site, something that is both amusingly overly hopeful and still ideologically valid. It’s from 2016 and is all about the Coyotes and how they have to be careful with their money vs the rolling in it Leafs, who can buy anything they want. Anything but a Cup, of course.

The Coyotes are still a mess — likely a worse mess — after all these years, and the Leafs have worked relentlessly to use their financial advantage to build a great team, weather a Pandemic, and survive with a salary cap that hasn’t budged in years while player salaries have risen unchecked.

I think they’ve done a good job in some very trying circumstances, and Kyle Dubas is a guy who I watch as a model of how to do business as much as for how he runs the Leafs. In a world that increasingly says you have to be an asshole to succeed, he just smiles and laughs and does things his way. Which appears to be to put people first as much as possible.

As for PPP, there’s lots of stories yet to write, lots of games yet to be played and lots of people to read them, to watch them and to talk about them, so nothing is changing except everything.

Here’s what’s happening:

  1. This site in this form will freeze up sometime on or before April 1, but likely the evening of March 30.
  2. The new, fresh scent PPP, is available right now at https://pensionplanpuppets.ghost.io/
  3. At some point in the coming days the new site will pick up the phone if you dial the old URL. I just can’t tell you exactly what day.
  4. Please don’t ask for technical assistance in this post. I’m not going to be checking comments here. Please use the comments or contact form on the new site.

Come on in, the water is fine. There’s stories there, and soon all the archives dating back to the origins of PPP will be there as well. We’ve got games this weekend to watch together. The puck has dropped on a new season of PPP. You’d be a fool to miss out.