Your midday sports snack.

Toast points

• Sportsnet and CBC announced today that they have extended their Hockey Night in Canada sublicensing agreement to extend throughout the whole of Rogers’ 12-year deal for exclusive national NHL rights in Canada. Rogers will now continue to show regular-season and playoff games on CBC through the end of the 2025-26 season. When the Rogers-NHL deal was first announced, the CBC sublicensing deal was for only four years; it was later extended by one year.

• Easy joke alert: Anaheim won the Adam Henrique-Sami Vatanen trade. The Ducks got Henrique (plus Joseph Blandisi and a third-round pick) from the Devils for Vatanen three weeks ago, and last night the 27-year-old centre rewarded his new club by scoring the strangest, most creative of breakaway goals.

The goal was Henrique’s fourth for Anaheim and eighth on the season. But it wasn’t enough to clinch a victory: former Ducks forward Stefan Noesen scored twice in the third period as New Jersey rallied from two goals down and won 5-3. Vatanen, meanwhile, got his first point as a Devil on a second-period assist.

• A fun tidbit from the Bulls’ 117-115 win over the 76ers last night: Nikola Mirotic and Bobby Portis became the first teammates to register double-doubles off the bench in the same game this season, per the Elias Sports Bureau. They’re also the first teammates to do so after punching each other in practice. Chicago is now 6-0 since Mirotic’s return from facial fractures he suffered in an Oct. 17 fight with Portis, a span over which the Bulls are plus-18.8 per 100 possessions when the two are on the court together.

• Texas Rangers pitcher Cole Hamels and his wife have donated a 32,000-square-foot mansion and 100 acres of land in southwest Missouri to Camp Barnabas, a camp charity for children with special needs and chronic illnesses. ESPN found the house on a real estate website where its value was listed at US$9.4 million. An attorney for the couple told the Springfield News-Leader that they never lived in the house, which is near where Heidi Hamels grew up, after Cole Hamels was traded from Philadelphia to the Rangers. They ended up making their off-season home in Texas.

• Convicted murderer Oscar Pistorius is appealing the recent prolongation of his prison sentence. South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal extended Pistorius’ sentence from six years to 13 years last month, calling the initial punishment he received for shooting his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, to death through a washroom door in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2013 “shockingly lenient.” Pistorius, a former Paralympic champion sprinter, has claimed he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder.

Nutritional analysis

Prolific sportswriter Joe Posnanski published a story on his personal blog yesterday picking up a reader suggestion to compare the abject futility of the current Cleveland Browns with that of the 1962 New York Mets, the worst team in modern baseball history. (Posnanski’s piece also shares a great anecdote about that Mets team, which is worth the price of admission alone.)

Posnanski’s reader, “Patrick,” thought it would be interesting to compare the Mets’ season, in which they won 40 of 160 games, with a period of time that covered the last 160 games the Browns had played. One hundred and sixty games works out nicely to 10 full NFL seasons.

The conclusion: the Browns, who are on track to have only the second 0-16 season in NFL history, have won 39 of their last 160 games, which stretches back to the last two games of the 2007 season.

A commenter on the Posnanski post threw out the spectre of the Detroit Lions’ stretch of futility between 2001 and 2010, which included the first 0-16 season in NFL history, the 2008 Lions. The Lions also won only 39 of 160 games in that 10-year period. Thinking of those terrible Lions teams and the comparison between baseball and football brought to mind the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who challenged the Mets’ record before winning five of their last six games to finish the 162-game season at 43-119.

Below is a chart showing the 160-game win progression of those four teams.

The Pythagorean win expectation for the Mets, according to Baseball-Reference.com, was actually 50-110. They were 10 games worse than their 1962 run differential expected them to be. The 2003 Tigers had a win expectation of 49.

Running the pythagorean win expectation for the two football teams shows they both would be expected to have won 49 games among the 160 based on their points scored and allowed.

Photos of the day

The NHL played its very first games 100 years ago today: the Montreal Canadiens beat the original Ottawa Senators 7-4 and the Toronto Arenas lost 10-9 to the shortlived Montreal Wanderers. The Canadiens’ and Senators’ inaugural meeting was feted with an outdoor game in Ottawa last weekend, and this afternoon the Toronto franchise — later known as the St. Patricks and, of course, the Maple Leafs — is celebrating its official centennial.

As Toronto tries to snap a three-game losing skid against the Hurricanes, flip through this gallery of old Leafs photos from our archives.

At nationalpost.com

• If you’d like some words to complement those photos, Lance Hornby has a thorough recounting of the Leafs’ first 10 decades in the NHL, from the players and figures who made their mark on a particular era to the games and events worth remembering today. The piece is also a sightline into the development of Toronto, for, as mayor John Tory says, “the Leafs are the team that’s most intrinsically woven into the fabric of the city.”

• Last year, Nick Faris profiled the greatest Leafs team of them all: 1933-34. Before Auston Matthews, Mats Sundin, Dave Keon or Syl Apps came along, Charlie Conacher prowled the wing for Toronto in front of King Clancy, Ace Bailey and George Hainsworth. Those Leafs outscored each of their opponents by more than a goal per game — and played witness to some of the zaniest, most remarkable moments in NHL history.

TV tonight

All times Eastern

2 p.m. NHL: Carolina at Toronto SN Ontario
7 p.m. NHL: Minnesota at Ottawa TSN5, RDS
7 p.m. NCAA Football: Boca Raton Bowl, Akron vs. Florida Atlantic TSN1
7 p.m. NBA: Sacramento at Philadelphia NBATV
7:30 p.m. NHL: Boston at Buffalo Sportsnet, TVAS
8 p.m. NHL: Winnipeg at Nashville TSN3
8 p.m. NBA: Cleveland at Milwaukee TSN4
10 p.m. NHL
— Montreal at Vancouver TSN2, SN Pacific, RDS
— Tampa Bay at Vegas SN One

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