san jose | ALDLAND

On Thursday, December 26, 2024, Detroit Red Wings General Manager Steve Yzerman announced that the team was firing head coach and Gru lookalike Derek Lalonde and replacing him with Todd McClellan, late of the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks and a former Red Wings assistant under Mike Babcock, effective immediately. And the effect was almost immediate.

At the time of the coaching change, the Wings were 13-17-4, having lost three games in a row and nine of the preceding twelve. McLellan’s first game behind the bench came the very next night, and it was a 5-2 home loss to Toronto.

The team has not lost since then, though. The active winning streak now stands at seven games, a stretch never matched during Lalonde’s tenure. In fact, it’s been thirteen years since Detroit last won seven consecutive times. They did it exactly that many times in January of 2012. (They actually had two winning streaks of exactly seven games that season, the earlier one spanning November and December of 2011.)

I caught a Red Wings game that season, a loss at Chicago, in which my chief complaint outside of the result appears to have been that the home fans didn’t do enough different cheers. I still haven’t been back to the United Center. I also attended the team’s preseason intrasquad scrimmage in Grand Rapids, where it seems I encountered Ken Holland in the concession line. I’ve been back to Grand Rapids since then, but I don’t have any other Ken Holland meetings to report. Detroit’s 2011-12 season ended with a first-round exit from the playoffs at the nasty hands of the Nashville Predators.

The last time Detroit won more than seven in a row, they won the Stanley Cup. They’ll have a chance to match that eight-game streak from January and February of 2008 when they lace them up against the Sharks tomorrow night.

Between 1913 and 1915, there was a third baseball league, the Federal League, competing with the two established organized leagues we already know, the National League and the American League. Players’ salaries skyrocketed, and the NL and AL ended up breaking up the FL by buying up some clubs and inducing others to leave the League. The sole remaining FL team, from Baltimore, sued the organized leagues and the National Commission, arguing that their action in breaking up the FL violated antitrust law.

In Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League of Professional Baseball Clubs (1922), the Supreme Court said it didn’t violate antitrust law. Justice Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, said this didn’t fall within antitrust law because it wasn’t interstate commerce (and the presence of interstate commerce is expressly made necessary by the text of the Sherman Antitrust Act). Of course, this is contrary to many decades of later jurisprudence: there’s no way the Supreme Court would have decided this way if the case came up today.

But the Supreme Court reaffirmed its 1922 decision in a short 7-2 per curiam in Toolson v. New York Yankees (1953), saying if baseball’s exemption was wrong, Congress should fix it.
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In Flood v. Kuhn (1972), the Supreme Court reaffirmed Federal Baseball again.
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Now San Jose wants to challenge the antitrust exemption again. San Jose claims that Major League Baseball has undermined the Oakland As’ desire to move to San Jose. Of course San Jose lost in district court, but the case is being fast-tracked to the Ninth Circuit, which . . . could hear it by May. . . . Interestingly, one of the possible grounds that the Ninth Circuit could use would be to read the baseball exemption narrowly, as limited to labor issues like the reserve clause — which is how the previous cases arose — and not applicable to issues here like restraints on relocation of teams. … Read More

(via Volokh Conspiracy)

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It seems as though the Detroit Red Wings like their new coach

San Jose wants to overturn baseball’s antitrust exemption (via Volokh Conspiracy)