My, there was a lot of Sports news in July, so much so that it has its own recap post. The main reason for this was because the NBA and NHL free agent period started in July.

This year, with BB (that’s Brian Burke, not Blackberry) at the helm and sizable cap room left over, there promised to be a bunch of changes. We traded for Versteeg and added a couple of lesser known free agents. It wasn’t as exciting as it could have been, but we still have one more potential change; Tomas Kaberle’s trade window ends on August 15^th, and BB has made it be known that he wouldn’t be adverse to trading him for some more exciting parts. For once, I am excited for the upcoming season!

Most of the NHL has been held hostage by the Ilya Kovalchuk saga. The LA Kings and the NJ Devils have been courting him, with multiple reports saying that he had spurned both teams. Finally he signed a CBA-circumventing 17-year contract with the Devils, which of course the NHL promptly rejected. Now the league and the NHLPA are taking their sweet time trying to decide on an arbitrator to resolve the issue.

That wasn’t even the biggest sports drama this month. The Raptors aren’t usually headliners in the NBA free agency period, but this year Chris Bosh left the Raptors. He ended up joining King(-in-exile) James and Dwayne Wade in Miami. The decision took an entire week of meetings and a 1 hour ESPN special to announce. I’m surprised none of them appeared on Oprah.

Oh, and the biggest sporting event in the world, the World Cup, continued it’s schedule from June with Spain coming out on top. And George Steinbrenner died.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: hockey, recap, sports