Weekly Takes - Monday, June 27 Edition

Weekly Takes - Monday, June 27 Edition

1. For as happy as I am for Nazem Kadri, it is hard not to be absolutely annoyed watching him do what he did for the Avs this season knowing he should have been doing it with the Leafs.

Kyle Dubas and his staff flat out whiffed on the trade. Not only did they misjudge how good their own asset was, they flat out misjudged how good Tyson Barrie and Alex Kerfoot were.

It is as costly of a trade as any trade the Leafs have made this century, because the player Kadri is, is the exact kind of player this Leafs team is missing from being able to lift the Cup themselves.

Other bad trades, for as poor as they may have been, were never the difference between the Leafs reaching their ultimate goal or not.

2. The trade is an indictment on Kyle Dubas and how, or at the very least, how he used to do business.

Mike Tomlin had a great quote on Ryan Clark’s podcast last week when he said “when you a coach and talking about somebody can’t learn, you’re seeking comfort because your teaching is struggling.”

Dubas and the Leafs gave up on him. And he made them pay in the ultimate fashion. Taking the easy way out is never the right decision.

3. If Ilya Mikheyev wants $4M to $5M, which I bet he does, he can walk.

In all three postseasons with the Leafs, he provided absolutely nothing. Let him walk, let him score 20 regular season goals somewhere else, and take that money and invest in a much better third line.

4. The Raptors drafting Christian Koloko was a no-brainer.

A centre with a first-round grade and the tools that he has is a player you take a flier on every day of the week. He may be a year away but the hope has to be that Khem Birch can have a bounce-back year and be a placeholder for Koloko a year from now.

5. Every time I watch McLeod Bethel-Thompson play quarterback, all I can think of is the fact that he is just a guy.

Maybe, on an absolutely stacked team around him, he could win a Grey Cup. But on this Argos team, which very well may be great but not elite? There is little to no chance.

6. The negativity towards the start TFC has had this season is confusing to me.

They have won the 2020 Canadian Championship, they have punched their ticket to this year’s Championship, almost all of their young players have taken positive steps forward, Alejandro Pozuelo has had a bounce-back season, and they are only five points outside a playoff spot, with the arrivals of Lorenzo Insigne, Domenico Criscito, and likely others imminent.

They are not going to win MLS Cup this season and they may not even make the playoffs, but they sure look like a team ready to compete come next season.

Which was always the goal for this franchise.

7. I will say this about Roe v Wade getting overturned, since everyone seems to have a take on it.

The fact that unelected autocrats (Supreme Court justices) have this much power truly is breathtaking. As a Canadian, I have always been baffled how no party leader has, with great focus, campaigned on abolishing our Senate structure, given they too are unelected autocrats.

But the structure in the States is next level when it comes to this.

As for the actual ruling itself, it is not going to stop here. This has nothing to do with the constitution. It has everything they do with radical, religious conservatives wanting to use their unelected power to dictate how you can live your lives.

Sure, a small majority may actually care about the “unborn child” (although the second the child is born, they no longer care as evident by their child care, welfare, tax, etc policies, funny enough) but largely speaking, they want to dictate how you can live your lives. And we know that because Clearance Thomas made that clear in the moments that followed the announcement.

Gay marriage is next, followed by contraception. After that, maybe it will be interracial marriage. It may seem hysteric, but the reality is, right-wing America fully understands that now is the time to bring America back to the 1940s. They control the Supreme Court, they are months away from controlling the House and Senate, and they are two years away from controlling the White House if Joe Biden runs again. This is their time to bring America back to the "good old days."

And, of course, the largest group of people who should be blamed for this are the Democrats. This all goes back to the 2016 Election, which allowed Donald Trump to set up the Supreme Court the way we all know it to be now.

They knew no one liked Hillary Clinton and that she was an awful candidate, but the entire party threw their support to her because they did not want the anti-establishment Bernie Sanders to win.

Sanders, of course, would have destroyed Trump in the largest election defeat in decades.

Instead, Trump won, and the fallout from it will be felt for the rest of our lives, which serves as a great reminder to people who vote for the candidate that “tells it like it is.” It is hard to tell some times, because so many in the media portray politics as a sport, but politics and elections are serious and lead to consequences that greatly affect lives. Remember that the next time you go into a voting booth while being uneducated on the consequences that may play out as the result of your vote.

And for those that say “the justices are simply following the constitution”, that is… wrong, but regardless of that, on an issue so serious, why can a country not evolve on an issue instead of taking a document written in 1787 as gospel? I thought Dave Portnoy made a great point when he said “if we wrote laws today for 1,000 years from now, they would make absolutely no sense 1,000 years from now.” He is, of course, completely correct.