Your midday sports snack.

Toast points

• The Sportsnet account @SNstats tweeted out the breaking news yesterday that the Maple Leafs had scored their 20,000th regular-season goal in NHL play during an 8-1 win over Carolina. SNStats reached the 20,000 figure by adding in 52 shootout “goals,” which aren’t actually goals but an accounting practice.

The NHL compounded the lack of basic understanding of its own game and of integers by using the same fallacious statistic in its morning media newsletter.

• Canada’s world junior team takes its winless exhibition record into a pre-tournament meeting with the Czech Republic tonight. Puck drop is 7 p.m. ET in London. The Canadians, who lost 3-0 and 4-3 in successive games against a team of university all-stars last week, will face Switzerland in Hamilton on Friday night before heading down to Buffalo for the start of the championships next Tuesday.

• Milos Raonic’s 2018 season is already off to a slow start after he withdrew from next week’s Mubadala World Tennis Championship in Abu Dhabi. Raonic, who played only three tournaments after Wimbledon because of wrist surgery and a calf injury, is being replaced by Andrey Rublev in the six-man invitational event. Stan Wawrinka also withdrew, saying he wasn’t yet prepared to return from his injuries either; Kevin Anderson will take his place. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, who himself hasn’t played since July because of an elbow injury, are the headliners.

• Marion Bartoli, the 2013 Wimbledon champion from France who retired two months after her only Grand Slam title, announced a comeback on Twitter yesterday. Now age 33, Bartoli said she’s aiming to return to the tour in March in Miami.

• The Packers were officially eliminated from the NFC playoff chase when Atlanta won on Monday night. As expected, since there is nothing left to play for, the team placed quarterback Aaron Rodgers on injured reserve yesterday, ending his season. Rodgers returned to action on Sunday against Carolina, nine weeks after he sustained a broken collarbone on his throwing side.

• Entering the annals of bizarre injuries is Texas Rangers pitcher Martin Perez. The club announced yesterday that the left-hander broke his right elbow when he fell after he was startled by a bull on his ranch in Venezuela. Of course, beef is no more dangerous than vegetables, as Brewers pitcher Matt Wise found out when he missed a couple of days in 2006 after he cut himself on salad tongs.

• Speaking of bizarre: Charlie Villanueva’s toilet was stolen last night. The former Dallas Mavericks forward tweeted his displeasure with that city’s police department after the alleged burglary, saying no one had responded to four calls of his reporting the disappearance of that essential fixture (and other home appliances). Villaneuva, whom the Raptors drafted seventh overall in 2005, hasn’t played in the NBA since the end of the 2015-16 season.

• New Miami Marlins president Derek Jeter, by all accounts, faced something of an angry mob when he held a town hall for season-ticket holders last night. Jeter contended that the off-season moves made by the new ownership, such as trading Giancarlo Stanton and Marcell Ozuna, are in service of putting the past behind them and starting properly from scratch. Jeter also had to deal with Marlins Man, the self-promoting bane of baseball. Jeter was, as always, the embodiment of detached cool.

• Major League Soccer is expected to announce at 5 p.m. ET that Nashville has been awarded an expansion franchise, becoming the league’s 25th team. Another franchise, believed to be Sacramento, is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

• The World Chess Championship got some perhaps unexpected attention yesterday when Twitter users started sharing one of its graphic designs for the 2018 tournament — emphasis on graphic.

The Telegraph went so far as to call it “Pawnographic” in a headline. World Chess doubled down later in the day by offering limited edition prints.

Nutritional analysis

Let’s circle back to Sunday, when NFL referee Gene Steratore famously used a card from his pocket to decide whether the Cowboys had been successful on a fourth-down play with just under five minutes left in the fourth quarter with the score tied 17-17 against the Raiders. The game hung in the balance.

After Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott ran a quarterback sneak, the ball was spotted with the tip abutting the 40-yard line. After the chains came out to measure, which did not appear to solve the mystery, Steratore pulled a card out of his shirt pocket and used it in some manner against the tip of the football.

As Ben Austro explained on his website footballzebras.com, the whole card thing was sort of meaningless because the officiating crew knows exactly what they’re looking at. On first downs, to guard against these kinds of dramatic snafus, the ball is always placed touching a yard-line marker. The crew would have known this, and really didn’t need the chains to decide if it was a first down. They would know by looking down from above as to whether the ball was on or over the 40-yard line marker.

Steratore may have been using the card to see whether there was any 40-yard-line paint under the card when he placed it against the tip of the ball. The chains, it would appear, were irrelevant to the whole exercise.

As happens after any controversial call by an official, Steratore was asked to meet with a pool reporter chosen from among the beat reporters in attendance. Two Raiders beat reporters, Michael Gehlken and Vic Tafur, tweeted the transcript of Steratore’s remarks after the game. It’s not clear who the pool reporter was.

Below are Steratore’s comments, along with the questions posed by the pool reporter. Steratore REALLY wanted to be clear that the card had very little to do with his decision. The reporter couldn’t quite get Steratore to explain how he used the card to “reaffirm” the call, which would have helped stop the launch of a thousand Raiders conspiracy theories.

Q: Why did you use the index card?

Gene Steratore: “Didn’t use the card to make the final decision. The final decision was made visually. The card was used nothing more than a reaffirmation of what was visually done. My decision was visually done based on the look from the pole.”

Q: How did it reaffirm?

Steratore: “That was already finished. The ball was touching the pole. I put the card in there and as soon as it touched, it was nothing more than a reaffirmation. The decision was made based on my visual from the top looking down and the ball touching the front of the pole.”

Q: So the card was used for what purpose?

Steratore: “It was just for reaffirmation, but the decision was made based on my visual, looking at the ball touching the pole.”

Q: It reaffirmed it how?

Steratore: “The decision was made based on my visual look that the ball was touching the pole. The card did nothing more than reaffirm. The judgement was not made by the card itself. It was made by my visual looking at the football as it relates to the line and the pole.”

Q: How did it reaffirm your call?

Steratore: “My call was made based on my visual looking at the football and the front of the line and the pole.”

Q: Have you used the card before or how did you think of using that?

Steratore: “It’s maybe been done at some point in someone’s career, but I didn’t use the card for my decision. I used my visual looking at the ball reaching the pole.”

For today’s analysis, we broke down the 215 words in Steratore’s comments and found that the same 11 words (or iterations of the same word) covered 33 per cent of his utterances. We didn’t include the word “the,” which he used 34 times alone.

Photo of the day

Would you buy merchandise with this logo?

At nationalpost.com

• The above image comes from this Victor Mather report on the IOC’s rules for branding and apparel that Russian Olympians will have to adhere to in Pyeongchang. “Print size for words ‘Olympic Athlete from’ should be equivalent to the word ‘Russia,’” reads one line in the IOC’s painfully detailed set of instructions, released earlier today. (To go on record with our answer: We would absolutely splurge for a button, hockey jersey or quarter zip with that logo.)

• The climbing season was over, so the corpses were left in the “death zone” to stiffen and freeze. A year later, five Sherpas returned to Mount Everest to bring them home. New York Times reporter John Branch has a story of deliverance from 27,000 feet, the journey of two Indian expeditioners to the toughest stretch of the world’s tallest mountain — and the effort it took to ensure they wouldn’t lie there forever.

TV tonight

All times Eastern

7 p.m. Hockey: World junior exhibition, Czech Republic vs. Canada TSN1,3-5
7 p.m. NBA: Toronto at Charlotte SN One
7:30 p.m. NHL: Toronto at Columbus Sportsnet, TVAS
8 p.m. NCAA Football: Frisco Bowl, Louisiana Tech vs. SMU TSN2
9:30 p.m. NHL: St. Louis at Calgary SN 360
10 p.m. NBA: San Antonio at Portland NBATV
10:30 p.m. NBA: Memphis at Golden State SN One

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