Who Wants to See ESPN’s Pierre LeBrun Naked?

With all due respect to Pierre LeBrun of ESPN, I’m not sure that there’s any hockey journalist we would like to see running naked in the press box at the Stanley Cup Finals. Unless, of course, Eric Erin Andrews develops a sudden interest in hockey.

Mr. LeBrun does a great job writing about hockey for ESPN and when he first heard about Claude Lemieux’s comeback, like a lot of us, he was skeptical that Lemieux would ever see NHL ice. So skeptical that he said he would run through the press box at the SCF naked if Lemieux were to make it to The Show.

Today, some rather interesting news broke.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – San Jose Sharks Executive Vice President and General Manager Doug Wilson announced today that the club has reassigned forwards Brad Staubitz and Tom Cavanagh to the Worcester Sharks, the team’s top development affiliate in the American Hockey League and recalled forward Claude Lemieux.

From Pierre’s latest column at ESPN:

Before we continue, crow must be eaten. We promised to run through the press box naked at the Stanley Cup finals if Claude Lemieux’s NHL comeback bid came to fruition. Ahem, media colleagues, you’ve been forewarned. Please make sure to have eaten dinner before we make good on our promise next June.

“That’s why we called him up,” Sharks GM Doug Wilson, joking of course, told us Monday.

We weren’t the only ones to make fun of this comeback bid. The laughter was universal around the hockey world. And Lemieux took notice.

“I got into this with my eyes wide open, knowing that most folks out there would think that I was out of my mind to attempt to do something like this,” Lemieux told a bunch of us media folk on a conference call Monday. “But it’s OK. I’ve had no problem taking criticism along the way. It motivated me even more. It’s been a fun road.”

Obviously the promise was made tongue-in-cheek, but just to be safe, I’m going to watch the Finals from my couch this year (OK, you got me, that’s what I do every year)._uacct = “UA-1868762-1”; urchinTracker();