Draft Bloggin: Chilling at the Holiday Inn

What you’re looking at is the piece de resistance of what I like to call the "Pat Steinberg Super Sex Suite" (stealing from a former radio colleague) at the beautiful Holiday Inn Express in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Actually, this is my sad office in Minny, as I’m staying here for the first night before joining the rest of the media at the Hilton one block away.  Wednesday was fairly vanilla in the Twin Cities, but Thursday will be busy.  A reminder: FlamesNation radio will be on the air on Sportsnet Radio FAN 960 starting at 6 pm Thursday night with Kent and I.  We’ll be using live comments on the site to drive the conversation and you can also interact on the phones and on Twitter.

The power couple of Kent Wilson and Robert Cleave will check into the Hyatt Regency sometime Thursday in one of their prime honeymoon suites to complete FlamesNation’s draft coverage.  If those two lovebirds get any work done.  Quite honestly, not a whole lot going on on Draft Wednesday.  I had a bit of a star studded plane ride in, with Flames assistant coach Dave Lowry headlining the cast; both his sons are draft eligible, however he’s down for a coaching seminar that starts Thursday.

The weirdest part of the day was seeing Olli Jokinen at Harvey’s as he was on his way to Florida for the summer with his family.  We talked a little about the draft, as he thinks it’s going to be crazy, and of course got into some UFC talk as well; he seems pretty excited for the start of the season.

Thursday inclueds the top prospects luncheon, which is always very interesting.  You’ll get the mainstream media types asking their mainstream media questions to these guys, and you’ll also get some…alternative media types as well, asking them different questions.  It’s actually pretty entertaining overall, and it’s a good time to get some good questions in to some of the prospects.  If there’s anything specific you’d like asked to a prospect, put it in the comments section and I’ll try and get to it while I’m there.

Also on Thursday, we may have a chance to sit down and chat with Jay Feaster, Craig Conroy, Tod Button, Chris Snow and others in the Flames organization.  I’ll have those interviews up on the site plus we’ll have plenty of articles coming from them as well.  Draft coverage is underway!  To finish things off, here’s a picture of where all the (non) magic happens…