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    Mitch Marner's new reality includes Kasperi Kapanen on his opposite wing

    Justin Cuthbert
    Yahoo Sports CanadaSeptember 15, 2019
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    ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — The morning after he stood side-by-side with Kyle Dubas to together navigate questions about his brief and since-resolved contract stalemate, Mitch Marner was finally able to settle back into his comfort zone.

    On the ice Sunday with his teammates in St. John’s for the final training session in Paradise, Marner posed for photos, led stretches, showed flashes of his $65-million skillset, and shot smiles into the crowd and at his teammates.

    This, here, is what Marner signed up for.

    And it’s what the Newfoundland fans were waiting all weekend to see.

    “It was nice,” Marner said after the skate. “It was nice being in front of this fan base, especially down here - I mean the love for our team is awesome. It was a lot of fun.

    “It was great getting back on the ice with the guys today.”

    It was a far more relaxed setting for Marner, but he isn’t quite out of the woods. With a stop in Ottawa before more questions are inevitably asked of him when he returns to Toronto, the process of repairing or at least steadying his image will continue.

    But it can continue concurrently with phasing back to his previous reality — which means being stationed on John Tavares’ wing.

    Their training camps delayed for different reasons as the Tavares family welcomed their first child into the world while the Marner clan was deep in contract negotiations, the two eight-figure linemates travelled to Newfoundland together on Saturday to begin the process of picking up where they left off.

    The two formed an immensely successful partnership in their first year together, each posting career numbers with a combined 73 goals and 182 points.

    But things will be different this year, at least to start, with the third member of the most routinely selected forward trio from last season, Zach Hyman, slated to miss the first chunk of the year while rehabbing the ACL he tore in the Maple Leafs’ first-round loss to the Boston Bruins.

    Head coach Mike Babcock’s favourite facilitative grinder, Hyman did plenty for Tavares and Marner, and his contributions shouldn’t be overlooked.

    Which is why Kasperi Kapanen will play such a crucial role for Toronto at the outset of the season.

    Slated to start on the left side, Kapanen has been tasked with temporarily servicing the Tavares-Marner partnership — a role that is not just crucial to the Maple Leafs’ success on the ice, but also in muzzling the fans eager to see Marner’s numbers and performance potentially fail to measure up to his enormous price tag.

    Those duties will also require a move from his preferred right wing, but it’s not like Kapanen is sweating it.

    “It’s easy playing with them. Today we were just getting a little chemistry going. It was good,” Kapanen said after the skate.

    “I’ll let them do all the nice things, and I’ll do the dirty work.”

    The Maple Leafs will open their exhibition schedule in Newfoundland on Monday night in St. John’s.

    No word yet on whether Marner, Tavares and Kapanen will be included in the lineup.

    More NHL coverage on Yahoo Sports

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    A 5,000-Year-Old Plan to Erase Debts Is Now a Hot Topic in America

    Gisdrunos: Paying off student debt will only reward the overpriced colleges and universities by shifting the demand curve, along with prices, up (with costs to consumers reduced by such pay offs, more will be able "to afford" college - and remembering that demand is not want or need, but want or need accompanied by the ability to pay). The explosion of college costs are result of government aid programs, and giving more aid will only push those costs higher without higher education having to reorder its house and become more efficient and funttional. Richard Vedder, professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University did an interesting interview with Business Insider in which he observed... "More student borrowers might partly explain why government financial-aid programs have grown enormously — but that's also causing tuition increases, according to Vedder. In 1970, financial-aid programs "were almost nonexistent," he said. "Generally, middle-income people didn't get money from the federal government; the large majority of students did not." In 1978, Congress passed a bill known as the Middle Income Student Assistance Act. This made all undergraduates regardless of income class eligible for subsidized loans and middle-income students eligible for Pell Grants, according to NASPA, Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. More and more students started applying for financial aid, Vedder said. "Knowing that students will get this financial-aid money, the university raises fees and takes advantage to capture that themselves," Vedder explained, referring to an idea known as the Bennett hypothesis. Named for a former education secretary who believed that more government aid for students led directly to college cost increases, the hypothesis is an ongoing topic of political debate. But it has some vertical support in Vedder's eyes. Citing a statistic from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Vedder said that for every new dollar of federal student aid, tuition is raised by 65 cents. Though tuition rose in 1978, so did people's incomes, making the burden of college less than it was in the 1940s, Vedder explained. But between 1978 and 2015, the burden of college began to rise again as tuition fees doubled and economic growth slowed."

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