Sporticourse

Game 5 of the ALCS

2010-10-20T15:33:00.031-06:00

I found myself home early today for some bi-naz so I'm going to share some live-blogging thoughts of today's elimination game! Yay!

-Top of the fourth inning. Lance Berkman! Hahahaha! Oh man. Running a straight line into foul territory for a pop foul, he managed to slip with BOTH feet and fall down flat on his back. "Did he hit his head?" "Maybe it's whiplash?" the intrepid TBS forensic doctors intoned, before a commerical-break worth of research yielded this conclusion from Craig Sager: "MY SUITS BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!" Also, "Berkman told Joe Girardi he got the wind knocked out of him." Awesome.

-Oh look it's Brett Fucking Gardner. I hate Brett Gardner. He sucks but he's white, dives into first base and runs fast, so naturally he's key to the Yankees offense, along with Derek Jeter's steely gaze and Jorge Posada's inability to catch three outs in a row without 50 trips to the mound. Brett Gardner runs fast. That is all. So do some horses. GARDNER STRIKES OUT!!! Fuck that guy.

-After the Gardner strikeout we get a shot of Lance Berkman in the dugout. Poor guy. Get that man a wheelchair and some chamomile!

-5-1 after a homerun from Matt Treanor but the Yankees have two on with runners in on second and third with one out. Ron Washington decides NOT to walk Marcus Thames, even though Lance Berkman is up next and, as John Smoltz says in the booth, is a double-play candidate. Yes. Yes he is. Not because he's slow, but because he'll need to run in a straight line to get to first and that's not really his thing.

-Washington comes to his sense, walks Thames. Berkman walks up to bat slowly, falls face first onto home plate.

-Berkman flies out, Swisher tags up and scores. Berkman jogs back to the dugout for a high-five but trips over an extra long piece of grass.

-Inning over. Sabathia still going strong. In the dugout. With his nacho platter. He's also pitching today too; only one blemish in a day otherwise full of donuts. Har.

-First and second for the Rangers, one out. Francoeur singles, bases loaded! Swisher makes a "great play" to keep the ball from going to the wall, even though it bounced right in front of him and hit him in the chest. After going 0-2 on Matt Treanor, Sabathia throws strike three but Posada blows the frame job and Treanor's still alive.

-3-2 pitch!

-Groundout, run scores, 6-2 game.

-How are you even a minor league catcher if you have to run out to the mount all the damn time? Stupid Posada.

-Mitch Moreland is having a ridiculous at-bat. He fouled off a pitch so far outside the ballboy had to lean over, then another curve right at the knees, and just hit another one that would've beaned a right-handed batter. Sabathia eventually strikes him out and ends the inning on the same pitched that Posada blew earlier, a curve that cut across the inside corner. Posada manages not to fuck this one up and the inning is over. Maybe Sabathia should job to home after each pitch for meetings with Posada: "Hey Fucker, catch the ball like this. M'kay?"

-Granderson leads off with a shallow pop up to the third baseman, except this is Yankee Stadium so it goes off the wall for a double. There are seriously highway rest-stop parking lots bigger than this Little League Yankee Stadium.

-Runners at the corners because of Derek Jeter's amazing ability to control the motion of the earth and draw a walk.

-Kinsler makes a tough pick-up to start the inning ending double-play. Commercial! Buy a Blackberry because only Blackberry allows you to, um, drive a cupcake maker van?

-Reader Matt wants the hockey scores, so here's the latest: Minnesota Wild Fan: 1, Rick Rypien: at least 5.

-Kerry Wood in the game now and has run up a 2-2 count without requiring multiple season-ending surgery.

-Lead-off runner aboard as Wood jumped up and just missed a high bouncer. Both his shoulders are separated. Dr. James Andrews readies his credit card for another territory to his personal island.

-Kerry Wood's throw is OVER EVERYTHING! Jeff Blauser scores!

-Readers are up in arms over the lack of tsn.ca content in the liveblog. If only there was a site that catered exclusively to the TSN and Toronto Maple Leafs audience...

-Elvis Andrus hates his team and comebacks. Derek Jeter with a, you guess it, "brilliant play." He caught the ball and tagged out a runner by five feet, so brilliance is now measured by a player's ability to not turn around and throw balls into center field. Kerry Wood's last pitch was therefore also brilliant, despite being two feet outside.

-How do you get picked off second base when Josh Hamilton's at the plate with one out? Didn't Andrus see the big graphic about how Hamilton was tied for the most single-ALCS homeruns ever with four? It was all over the screen!

-Hamilton out, onto the seventh. Rodriguez picks up a one out walk but not as well as Jeter would've.

-A-Rod steals second, because he is greedy. Jeter would've done it for the team. Speaking of his team, Marcus Thames hit the last pitch so far you wouldn't even measure it in feet. Maybe parsecs. It was foul though, and Rodriguez jogs back to second in the richest way possible.

-Lance Berkman returns to the game! Moonwalking up to home plate, he is the picture of confidence, poise and dexterity. Quickly down 0-2. That's the number of feet touching the ground; the number of balls and strikes is uninteresting.

-Berkman strikes out, teammates run out and carry him to the dugout. All but Mark Texeira, who sits in the dugout and shakes his head, laughing quietly at the thought of a grown man, a professional world-class athlete, unable to run in a straight line without hurting himself.

-A quick top of the eighth, ended by A-Rod's diving catch and accurate throw to get Ian Kinsler. Yankee fans boo and hold up signs to bring back Scott Brosius.

-If the Yankees hold on, and they absolutely will with only a half inning left and the Yankees still with Rivera in the holster, their pitching is in decent shape going back to Texas. Phillip Hughes will go Game 6 and Andy Pettite goes Game 7. The Rangers will send out Colby Lewis in Game 6, so they have the edge there, and of course anytime you've got Andy Pettite pitching a Game 7 on normal rest you've got to like your chances.*

-Curtis Granderson continues to make weak contact with the ball. This time he manages to feebly loop a ball into shallow right field for an easy out. EXCEPT this is Little League Yankee Stadium, so it's a line drive homerun. You could spit it over the fence from home plate.

-Derek Jeter continues to make incredible plays. "That's what makes Jeter, Jeter." Yes. THIS is what makes Jeter, Jeter: Making awful contact on a pitch you just plain misjudged, rolling it 40 feet into a lucky dead spot in the infield, and smiling like a motherfucker over your good luck.

*Unless the other team is starting a cyborg, built from Walter Johnson's blood mixed with a liquid metal compound, sent back through time for the sole purpose of making people believe in a future worth saving through his pitching skills alone.

-Sportsnet Update! Rick Rypien has been suspended indefinately pending a hearing from the NHL about jumping up and grabbing a fan against the Wild last night. Everyone knows this so this isn't really news. But what IS news... is what Francois Beauchemin and Ron Wilson think about it! SPOILER ALERT: Nothing interesting.

-Joe Girardi decides that this is the last game of the series and he does NOT want Joba Chamberlain fucking up a five run lead. Mariano Rivera and his one pitch are the greatest weapon a manager can summon against a team looking for a six run inning. Except, of course, for literally any other pitcher in the majors, and most AAA pitchers too.

-The Yankees win! No they don't! That pitch was a foot outside! Just because a catcher catches a pitch without moving his glove doesn't mean it's automatically a strike. Posada was so far outside he was drinking Gatorade from the dugout.

-Moreland singles to left, the tying run is now six batters away. Andrus fouls out to Berkman though, who crawls his way toward the stands to make the catch. No more of that "running" for me!

-And that'll do. Game 6 coming up from Texas! Go Not Yankees! The Not Yankees have always been my favorite team, ever since their World Series victories in 2008!

Jose Bautista vs. George Bell

2010-09-17T08:18:00.002-06:00

In terms of power, the definitive Blue Jays' season belongs to George Bell. In 1987 he led the league in RBI's and total bases and was named the American League MVP. What's interesting about the 1987 MVP selection is that it's become a great example of how new statistical measures have changed the way we look at player value; Bell had 332 votes compared to Alan Trammal's 311, a pretty close race. Side by side, the MVP outcome shows pretty clearly which feats were the most important at the time. Bell had 47 HR's, 134 RBI's, and a 54 point advantage in slugging % (.605 vs. .551) compared to Trammell's 28 HR's and 105 RBI's. Bell also hit .302 so yeah, great year for sure (all numbers are from Baseball-Reference.com). Except that now things have changed; we value RBI's a lot less and are concerned more with the offensive performance relative to the player's position. RBI's, of course, have lost panache because, and this is pretty intuitive, they really have more to do with how good your teammates are at getting on base. So while Bell had a higher slugging %, Trammell had a higher on-base percentage (.402 vs. .352), drawing him almost even for OPS (.953 vs. 957). Trammell did this as a shortstop; that's a fantastic season for a middle infielder. Bell had a great year but played an easier defensive position (and played it a lot worse when you compared range factor), walked a lot less (39 vs. 60), didn't steal many bases (5 vs. 28) and had less hits overall (188 vs. 205). All this stuff is summed up nicely in a stat called W.A.R.P., or Wins Above Replacement Player. It basically looks at how many more wins a player contributes over the course of a season above what an average or Triple A player could contribute . It's complicated but it concludes that Trammell contributed an 8.5 WARP (anything over 8 is considered an MVP season) while Bell put up a 5.0 (an All-Star season, but nothing to raise eyebrows over). But what's done is done.

So George Bell's 1987 MVP may be in dispute, his team record for homeruns has not. At least until Jose Bautista hits one more. They're currently tied at 47 and with 16 games left in the season, Bautista has a pretty good shot to get to 50, let alone to the top of the team's homerun heap. But, again, who's had a better season? Comparing Bell and Bautista is actually a little easier considering they're both corner outfielders. The games played won't quite line up, but here's the basic rundown so far:

Bautista: 145 games, 47 HRs, 134 hits, 32 2Bs, 111 RBIs, 8/10 SBs, 93 BB's, 106 K's, .262/.381/.613, .994 OPS, 165 OPS+, 313 total bases

Bell: 156 games, 47 HRs, 188 hits, 32 2Bs, 134 RBIs, 5/6 SBs, 39 BBs, 75 K's, .308/.352/.605, .957 OPS, 146 OPS+, 369 total bases.

So Bell had 54 more hits but Bautista had 54 more walks. That doesn't quite even out obviously, since a hit can mean more than just one base, so close edge to Bell. Way more RBI's for Bell but, again, this isn't really important unless you believe in magical powers, called "knacks," that turn themselves on in only the clutchiest, team-neediest situations. "Knacks" for things don't exist when players have 600 plus at-bats; huge sample sizes are why baseball numbers are so statistically meaningful. ANYWAY, Bautista does have way more strikeouts and while a popular opinion suggests strikeouts are no worse than any other type of put-out, I think that logically that's wrong. At least if the ball is in play the possibility for a productive out exists. Possibilities for errors, runners' advancing on a fielder's choice, that sort of thing. Of course if the ball is in play then you can also have UN-productive outs, like double-plays. So, I guess, um, shut up. I don't like strikeouts. ANYWAYS, Bautista's walks give him the advantage in on-base percentage and OPS, but Bell retains the advantage, at least at this point in the season, in total bases. So far the best indicator is probably the difference in OPS+, which takes into account park factors and compares a player's numbers against the rest of the league's. Bautista's had a much better year relative to his peer's than Bell, so offensively we award a split decision to Jose Bautista.

You've got to at least ask the question...

2010-08-29T22:12:00.003-06:00

Damien Cox, a hockey "writer," voiced his, um, not quite opinion, not quite a question, not really any kind of reporting at all, about Jose Bautista's sudden power surge this year, complete with the requisite suspicion about PED's. This wasn't in his column but his own blog.  The issue raised here and here has been about whether or not the lack reaction against his article, compared to Jerod Morris asking the same baseless questions (albeit in a much less accusatory, faux-noble and contemptible way) about Raul Ibanez last year, is a result of a double-standard between bloggers and mainstream writers. Morris was raked over the coals for suggesting that, given the history of baseball stars and steroids, it was reasonable to be suspicious of any player who's had a dramatic performance jump. Why hasn't the mainstream media attacked Cox the same way for the same kind of unfounded character assassination? Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler went after him during, if I remember, the second game of the Jays-Yankees series but didn't mention him by name and didn't really drop the hammer. Their criticism was mostly that he isn't around the team, hadn't seen how hard he worked, intangibles, blah blah, square jaw blah. I'm here to fill in that criticism.

My problem with the Cox article isn't that he thinks there's something funny about Jose Bautista's numbers this year. I think every fan who's watched a game this year wonders how a guy with 100 career homeruns managed to hit 42 of them in two-thirds of a season. It's not even the numbers; have you watched this guy hit baseballs this year? It's like his bat is twice the width of a normal bat and he's hitting tennis balls filled with flying faerie juice. His groundouts are hit harder than Ichiro's homeruns. When he connects it sounds like missiles detonating against other missiles. He's killing so many baseballs that Greenpeace activists throw buryric acid at him like he's a Japanese whaler. Of COURSE one has to wonder why.

Cox fails to understand that "just asking the question" is tantamount to an accusation, especially when you consider that Major League Baseball does indeed test for steroids. There's no proof, no corroboration, not even an unnamed source he can point to as a catalyst for his article. There's only a jump in numbers and, remarkable as Bautista's year as been relative to other seasons, a spike in numbers isn't remarkable in itself. In fact, considering the rollercoaster Aaron Hill and Adam Lind's numbers are riding from last year to this year, we should be asking what performance-enhancing substance they were using last year. Or, rather, what performance-damaging substance they're using this year, depending on which season you think is the outlier. Statistical abnormalities happen all the time. To properly analyze stats, the analyst has to appropriately set the parameters of a player's sample size, otherwise, the comparisons are meaningless. Cox, bless him, is a hockey writer and only knows about Stanley Cup rings, Heart, Soul, Grit, Toughness, Character and (as a Toronto newspaper writer) that fighting is bad. It's common sense that the way you count and compare numbers is important, right? When you look at the Raul Ibanez example this makes much more sense.

This is terrific article on the Ibanez-Jerod Morris hulabaloo from last year. Briefly, the story was that Raul Ibanez got off to an incredible start last year, hitting .329/.386/.676 with 19 homers and 54 RBI's in his first 55 games (all numbers from the linked article). That's 55 HR's and 159 RBI's over 162 games. In other words, preposterous numbers for a 37-year-old. After some deliberation on the situation itself, Posnanski makes the astute point that the kind of stretch Ibanez started the season on was typical of many other hot streaks he'd had in his career. He points out a number of other stretches of games where Ibanez got hot and put up similar numbers only to cool off later and revert to form. These stretches, like any hot stretch for any player in any sport, seemed to come at random, either mid-season, playoffs, whenever. Has Ibanez ever hit 55 HR's and drove in 159 runs in a season before? No, but his career numbers suggest numerous occasions where he's been as good of a hitter. The point is that when an analyst says a player's performance is outside their normal range of production, they have to be very careful that they know exactly how that past performance has been quantified.

Obviously, in the case of Jose Baustita, there is no 130 game stretch one can point to and see a similar display, therefore this season stands totally apart from the rest of his career. TSN looks at outlier seasons here in an attempt to explain how Bautista's amazing season compares to other players whose careers had an unexpected jump. There's lots of examples of players coming out of nowhere, having career years before disappearing due to injury or ineffectiveness. That contextual lens makes more sense, doesn't it? He's a guy who got into a good situation in Toronto, was given all the playing time he wanted, stayed healthy and kept getting pitches to hit because Vernon Wells started out strongly too. Before long Bautista will be back platooning with some other average player and we'll all talk about his one amazing year. Right? Not steroids, just a fluke?

Or is it a fluke? Carlos Pena is one of the top first basemen in the American League. He's had seasons of 46, 31 and 39 HR's and is on pace for 34 this year. He's won a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger, played in the All-Star game in 2009 and was in the MVP discussion in 2007 and 2008. He came out of nowhere too; his breakout year was 2007 but he was drafted way back in 1998. He only went to the Rays because Boston let him go as a free agent, as did the Yankees the off-season before that. There's never been a hint of discussion about Pena and steroids. Bautista could be another Pena, a star who comes out of nowhere and excels on a young team because he was given a chance to play every day. It's not hard to see examples of players who've had seasons well outside their career averages, nor it is impossible to find players who've come from obscurity and turned into stars.

I'm not stupid or naive, of course I wonder about Bautista's line drives that dent the centrefield restaurant, but nor am I a well-known sportswriter whose job it is to do some research. Pena is a great story because he's the exception to the rule, as is Bautista and any other player who's toiled in the minors, been a free agent, been a Rule 5 or a waiver pick up only to find a home and have a great year or two. The point is that there lots of examples of this kind of thing happening where steroids weren't an issue, yet Cox doesn't even mention an alternative. Shouldn't he? I guess he's not just curiously "asking the question" since to do so would suggest he's willing to look at any explanation, not just the one he's decided on. His argument seems to be that because other players did steroids and baseball's rules allowed it, every player who's numbers go up dramatically is subject to pessimism and doubt. Well, okay, that's actually reasonable. We're all jaded and suspicious now. Except that Major League Baseball does in fact test for steroids. That's important isn't it? Shouldn't Cox address that? Well no because again, he's not actually accusing Bautista outright, he's just complaining about baseball's steroid history and tossing Bautista's name in the mud. Let's see how it looks if I do something similar. Ahem...

Don't blame me. When it comes to Damien Cox, how is it exactly that one of his blog posts, normally ignored by everyone outside of Toronto, suddenly becomes one of most talk-about stories in Major League Baseball? Chance? New keyboard? Diet (ahhh no, this is a sportswriter after all)? New reading glasses? Anyone familiar with the great Mitch Albom's brush with controversy should at least be willing to wonder about Cox's sudden transformation into the baseball writer king.

Shouldn't we at least be asking the question about whether or not Cox "borrowed" some ideas from someone else and "forgot" to credit them? I mean, this recent blog post is pretty explosive, much more than his usual body of work, and plagiarism has happened before, not that Cox has ever been accused of this sort of thing but SHOULDN'T WE AT LEAST ASK?? Don't blame me, it's certainly not my fault that it's now up to Cox to defend himself against a totally baseless charge he did nothing to deserve. I can't be held responsible for anything I write! Why? I'll tell you why? BECAUSE SOME WRITERS SOMEWHERE HAVE PLAGIARIZED BEFORE!!!

Disclosure: Cox Bloc did this same angle on Cox-as-a-plagiarizer. I read it afterwards so I did NOT plagiarize, I'm just guilty of being less clever than I originally thought. That was certainly bound to happen eventually though.

Stupid Damien Cox. Take some damn responsibility for your opinions, or do some research, or know something about steroid testing, or samples sizes, or innocent until proven guilty, or anything to do with being not just a reporter but, good God, the associate sports editor at a major newspaper.

"Go Gay Go! SCORES!!!"

2010-08-24T18:07:00.000-06:00

I was driving home from work today, as I often do, and was listening to an interesting conversation on the radio about gays in sports. Mark Spector's recent column was the topic and Spector was on the show with TSN's Ryan Rishaug and Sportsnet's Jaime Thomas. They were talking about how the pro sports world would react to whichever player was willing to come out and become the first openly gay active pro athlete in team sports. There's been former athletes come out after their playing careers and several pro tennis players and golfers have come out (do your own research if you want to know who!) but so far nobody in any of the four major sports has been willing.

I say "willing" because, as was noted on the radio, the word "courage" would be somewhat disrespectful to players who aren't willing to make that public announcement. It is their choice after all; it shouldn't come down to courage vs. cowardice dichotomy since it's hardly cowardly to want some privacy. Yet it will be bold for someone to go public, that's a lot of attention on a personal subject and potentially a lot of backlash. I suspect though that it won't be the kind of backlash we might think and that's what I want to eventually bring up.

At the same time though, there's a pretty big benefit to being that first person. Comparisons to Jackie Robinson will be made (and hopefully tempered heavily; there's sure to be some nastiness coming that player's way but it won't be as bad and there will also be a lot more support), there's TV appearances, certainly a book deal and maybe a movie. I don't care if an athlete is gay or straight, they're all brands and you gotta cash in when you can!

There's two major challenges for an athlete in a team sport coming out. First, obviously, is the degree to which they will be accepted by their teammates, opponents, fans and media. I would think that teammates would be the group any athlete considering this announcement would be most concerned with. They spend more time during the season with their teammates than with their family, after all. It's not necessary that everyone be best friends of course, but a divided team will collapse at the first sign of hardship. These are the truisms we've been taught by players and coaches so we'll just believe them and move on. Imagine a team divided along lines substantially trickier than strategies and practice length and you can see how a player would hesitate at unleashing this kind of polarizing issue in their dressing room.

That's where this debate becomes a little murkier and much more interesting. Homosexuality in our society is a hot-button issue and gay marriage rights are the fault line of a major cultural identity crisis in the United States. For a player contemplating this decision this kind of polarization is, seemingly, a major concern. Is it though? Here's a reasonable expectation for how each of the four above listed groups will react.

The media will be overwhelmingly supportive and congratulatory towards that player because, well, can you imagine what will happen if they are not? Sure you'll get a few Rush Limbaughs who say exactly the wrong thing, there will be a few irrelevant preacher types who warn of the impending Apocalypse, but this will serve the player in the end because every else in the media will absolutely shit on their head. Don't worry Mr. Gay Athlete, the media will be your loyal foot soldier because God help them or their editor if they are not.

The fans will make jokes, be supportive, be spiteful, cheer loudly, boo when he (and this is a "he" we're talking about here, in no way are the same social issues present if Serena Williams says she's a lesbian) drops the ball or goes 0 for 5. Fan will be incredibly supportive and caring, ignorant and horrible, distant and disinterested, and quickly distracted by the next game and a different channel. The player will be pretty separated from all of that. Players love the fans when they're cheering for them, are mildly annoyed or indifferent when they boo and are totally removed from any other opinion they might have. Sure, that first game will garner them a pretty good cheer but after that fans will grow bored and will find something else to argue over. It'll be a story that turns into a novelty and soon forgotten.

Opponents will be very interesting. Which player is willing to be publicly flayed in the media and heavily fined over some comment meant only to get inside their opponent's head? Apart from Sean Avery? Think of the most famous attention whores in each sport. Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco don't seem like they'd go that far, and besides that isn't about them so they won't care about it. Fame sluts in the NBA only care about joining the Heat, baseball players don't often give those kinds of quotes, and even Avery or a Steve Ott might not push this one. Hockey has its own set of accepted groups that are, apparently, considered fair game for discrimination: French Canadiens, Swedes, Russians, oh hell, all of Europe. Homosexuality isn't the same and any trash talk in this direction would quickly go public and follow that linecrosser around for their whole career, like the Avery-Georges Laraque incident. Leagues will come down hard on this kind of trash talking and it won't be worth it.

The most reactionary, backwards, ignorant comments, either from opponents or teammates, will come from league oddballs like... well, it's probably unfair to call players cavemen before they've done anything. Carl Everett was a crazy, crazy man but he's retired now. I really only wrote that sentence so I could link to those quotes. Lots of people will agree with those comments but publicly only a minority will support anyone who comes out against homosexuals in sports and in society. Maybe I'm being naive but I think that there's far more support for the first gay player than they think. Those outlying voices will be written off and characterized as unfortunately relics of an era we soon hope to pass.

Here's where it's not so simple. This player, wherever he is, will be a big, big deal when he comes out. Interviews in every city, print and radio, for himself, his teammates, opponents, management, everyone. This will be a travelling circus long after the national interest has waned because each city will need to hear his story one more time. Let's say then that the opposition this player faces from his own team isn't about his beliefs or his lifestyle but the distraction he'll cause for his team? His teammates will all range in supportiveness but none will particularly enjoy the distraction after the novelty has worn off. That's where the real centre of this debate lies to me because publicly the first gay athlete will be overwhelmingly hailed for his courage for paving the path for the future. Again, maybe I'm naive, but I think it's a pretty clear path, media-wise, as long as the announcement isn't totally botched, like right before Game 7 or something. It's the other public debate that will be misunderstood, miscontrued, poorly verballized and set up as a straw man: Will it be okay to love the announcer but hate the announcement?

Things that Are and Are Not okay with the NHL

2010-07-21T20:26:00.037-06:00

Things that are Okay:

-15 year, front-loaded, cap-circumventing contracts that are unlikely to be fulfilled because both the player and the team are aware that the player is a butterfly goalie with groin muscles made out of gossamer and voodoo.

-12 year, front-loaded, cap-circumventing contracts that are unlikely to be fulfilled signed mere minutes after a player has declared themselves a free agent on July 1st. Or by a Canadian on a Canadian team.

-8 year contracts to aging defensemen that is unlikely to be fulfilled by teams whose owner were prominent in Gary Bettman's hiring and supported him through the lockout.

-12 and 11 year contracts, front-loaded, cap-circumventing, signed by Detroit. Detroit and player contracts are like a Roy Halladay fastball that paints the outside corner: They both know what they're doing so they always get the call.

-13 year contracts signed by the league's most popular player. There's no out-clause where he can bolt for the KHL, right? Okay, yeah, then it's fine.

-Headshots, hits from behind, missed high-sticking penalties.

-Concussions.

-Bankruptcies.

-Labour disputes.

-Neutral zone traps.

-Bad attendance.

-Bad U.S. television numbers, unless absolute top-flight superstars are involved.

-Potential team owners who cobble together money from the sock drawers of magicians, couch cushions of used car salesmen and the power of Gary Bettman's prayers.

Things that are Not Okay:

-17 year contracts that is unlikely to be fulfilled IF the player is Russian, not North American or the Good Kind of Eastern European.

-Potential team owners who are Canadian and RICH AS FUCK.

-"Sloppy seconds."

-ESPN

-The 2007 Preakness Stakes.

So yeah, the Kovalchuk contract is a hilariously bad contract. Here's the breakdown, courtesy of NJ.com:

2010-11: $6 million
2011-12: $6 million
2012-13: $11.5 million
2013-14: $11.5 million
2014-15: $11.5 million
2015-16: $11.5 million
2016-17: $11.5 million
2017-18: $10.5 million
2018-19: $8.5 million
2019-20: $6.5 million
2020-21: $3.5 Million
2021-22: $750,000
2022-23: $550,000
2023-24: $550,000
2024-25: $550,000
2025-26: $550,000
2026-27: $550,000

The total cap hit is $6 million. Or "was." It's ridiculous, right? Look at the last 6 years! It takes our beloved CBA that we lost a year of hockey for, chews it for a while, spits some of it out, stores the rest in its lip for years until it develops a Lou Brown voice:

THEN sprays it all over the front page of every hockey publication in North America! A tragemedy! Except that it's totally legal, totally compliant with the CBA and would probably win an appeal, even though the Devils have said that they won't appeal the ruling. This is so stupid. WHY DOES THE NHL DO THIS?!?! I'M SO MAD I oh fuck it it's 30 degrees outside, who cares. Enjoy your summer!

The Team That Everyone Hated

2010-07-12T22:05:00.008-06:00

*I'm sorry if you read this after I published it but before I edited it. That's the wrong order to do things in. The amount of typos and spelling mistakes... just, sorry.

See those guys? A busy week for the three worst people in the world. They ruined the competitive playing field in the NBA, engaged in blatant collusion against the poor helpless owners, shamelessly flaunted the loyalties of their former and current cities, wreaked further havoc on the already-shaky sporting confidence of one of the world's great cities (over a sport they don't even like), grabbed the poor ugly kid/city who never gets the girl who tries oh so hard and punched it in the face on national TV, possibly ended the life of the NBA in one city but that doesn't matter because they set in motion a series of events that ENDS WITH CLEVELAND BURIED AND FORGOTTEN.

Oh it was quite a week. If you can find any sports news website columnist, blogger, radio personality or Guy You Met Once At A Party who thinks that Lebron's bizarre ESPN primetime Hey, Go Fuck Yourself Cleveland! was in poor taste, congratulations, you've passed into a parallel universe! Neato! Bring me back some of the Oreos with the cookie part in the middle and a shopping cart with three wonky wheels! Nobody likes it! Anywhere!

But how could you not??? We were witness to something pretty special: the culmination of all the world's sporting egos combining together to form Egonotron, the Most Powerful Ego, whose powers include 1) thinking it's okay to humiliate one of the saddest, most unlucky loser cities in North America, 2) hold a ONE HOUR ESPN SPECIAL to simply say "Next year I basket my ball in *blank*," and 3) not telling anyone in Cleveland (remember Cleveland? That city near Akron where you're from?), either the fans or the team that hired, fired and signed whoever James wanted, what he was doing and made them find out on TV SEVEN DAYS after free agency started. That sucks because there are, you know, other players out there that Cleveland might've wanted to sign if you didn't want to play there. All of this, all this self-created hype and exposure, all this attention and the weird WWE-style intro:

All this so that the Greatest Basketball Player on Earth (except for all those guys with NBA Championships like Kobe, Tim Duncan, Dwayne Wade, Shaquille O'Neal) could live with this philosophy (from Joe Posnanski's always brilliant blog. Why aren't you reading him right now?):

“We don’t have to have the pressure of going out, scoring 30 every night, or shooting a high percentage or logging long minutes and worrying about our team suffering because of that at times.”

In other words, ALL THIS NONSENSE was so that Lebron can do LESS on the court that he was before and accomplish MORE because basketball will be EASY NOW and make this whole ordeal easier without all that silly team-building. No more 30 point games! Won't it be better for the team now that I, Lebron James, one of the two best players in the game, am playing LESS? Why aren't other athletes like Gretzky, Jordan or someone else with a championship, as giving as I? Now, with Bosh and Wade and some part-time cap-friendly illegal Cubans in the lineup, James can simply stroll into his pre-ordained vestige as Basketball Demigod. Won't it be so much easier now without all that work??? We might never see anything this ballsy again. Haha! Of course we will. After all, Kevin Durant is due for free agency... wait! What's this? The youngest player to even win an NBA scoring title just re-signed in his own bland and unremarkable city? Without ESPN there to lick his balls for a full hour? Pussy.

Public opinion seems split on whether or not it was okay for Lebron to leave Cleveland at all. Public opinion, in this case, is being gauged by the two hours of sports radio I listened to on a road trip before I lost signal, or my brain shut off from lack of activity, whichever. Some callers, and one host, thought he'd blown his chance at greatness not so much by leaving his hometown team that drafted him, no, that only cost him immortality, but by going to a team with another superstar and another very good star. By giving his reason for leaving as needing to play with better players, he was basically admitting that he needed help, couldn't do it alone, and wasn't willing to stay and build a team around him like Jordan or Bryant. I counter that with "So he treated a team sport like a team sport? He didn't destroy and alienate everyone around him by insisting on doing things his way, maybe having some players traded because they were as good as him? He's going to sacrifice some vague notion of personal glory in order to win championships? What an ASS!!!!

Other callers, and the other host, seemed to think that it's fine for him to leave, Clevelanders are embarrassing themselves by showing how angry, sad and hurt they are and after all James did spent seven years there, re-signing once and giving the team every chance to build a championship around him. He left because management couldn't find any complimentary talents to play with him, so he took charge of his own life and career and made the best move for himself and his family. I'll counter that with BUT HE WON 60 GAMES TWICE! If the Lakers or Heat had back to back 60 win season and didn't even make the finals, Kobe and Wade would be labelled chokers! Why is it different with Lebron???

The lesson, of course, is that nobody's right about anything and everyone's an idiot. Well, except for everyone who says the one hour on ESPN was stupid. When they announced The Decision would air on ESPN, it was like when the Oilers traded away the 17th overall pick in the 2003 draft to New Jersey and the Devils took Zack Parise. I was watching and knew it was stupid right away and it would only prove itself a stupider and stupider move the more time went by. Same thing with The Decision, everyone knew it was preposterously arrogant, self-important, journalistic unethical and embarrassing the minute it was announced. It got so much worse when it included, as a bonus, the crushed soul of an entire city which simply accelerated the rate at which this ridiculous experience has sickened our taste for the famous and powerful in sports. Only when they actually act rich and powerful though; we're fine with with them when they act like cole miners, pulling out teeth and getting stitched up in hallways. Athletes: They're Not Really Like Us At All!

Perhaps the only thing more universally agreed-upon than the denouncing of ESPN's Big Stupid Mess, at least among fans, is how much everyone wants to see this team get its ass kicked. Every caller I listened to giving their "opinion" on whether it was okay for Lebron to leave Cleveland either loudly cheered for or quietly conceded that they hoped the Heat lose out at some point this year, either suffering the embarrassment of not making the playoffs at all or the heartbreak of an overtime playoff loss. I'm hoping for a Final where Kobe hits an impossible three-pointer to give the Lakers the lead with seconds left and for Lebron to miss the buzzer-beater while Wade and Bosh wave their arms and scream "I'M OPEN!!!"

How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters

2010-07-01T00:52:00.000-06:00

How Mariano Rivera Dominates Hitters

Taylor Hall

2010-06-25T23:33:00.000-06:00

It's finally done. Since, what, January this has been going on? It's a case of the Oilers taking the safe pick because you can't ever be second-guessed when you take a two-time defending Memorial Cup champion and two-time tournament MVP. It's also the risky pick because of the recklessness and higher injury factor. If you're flipping coins and everyone says don't worry, both heads or tails wins then, well, shouldn't you be happy?

I went to the Oiler draft party and it was great, mostly because I won a Hall number 10 jersey. I'll get to spend my remaining years explaining to strangers that yes, I know Hall isn't number 10 and yes, I realize that Shawn Horcoff will always be number 10 after turning his career around, signing another long-term deal, captaining the team to many Stanley Cups and having his number retired, and having a taller, stronger statue built, out of pure gold, right in front of Gretzky's. I'll call it commemorative, and whenever I cross ways with one of the other 99 Edmontonians who won a Hall 10 jersey tonight we'll shake hands in a way you CANNOT BELIEVE.

Now, if only we can make some trades.

"No spot on this team is safe, I don't care if your name is Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle or... Smithers, what's one of the bad players' names?"

"Robert Nilsson, Patrick O'Sullivan, JF Jacques, Ethan Moreau, Marc Pouliot, Liam Reddox?"

"Or... all those players!"

Phutebhawl

2010-06-20T18:51:00.000-06:00

I like soccer. It's a great sport, it's outdoors and anyone, regardless of age or physical prowess, can pick up and play it right away even if their last period of outdoor exercise occurred during the Nixon-Kennedy debate, resulting in friendly black-and-white lecture and a severe beating. Chances are, in a group of six or more friends or family, someone has a ball and someone else lives near a park so there's always a fall-back activity if, you know, that friend who doesn't drink is hanging around.

The World Cup is different. When you're neutral to a professional sport you'll always take the opposite of whatever opinion you're facing at the moment. Not with much conviction, but if someone hates soccer you'll find yourself defending it and if they love it you'll complain. That's probably a good way to determine if you're actually neutral. I am neutral but given the way closet soccer fans are coming out of the woodworks during this and every World Cup, I'm spending a lot more time bitching about the whole production than enjoying it. And with good reason; here's all my Reasons Why The World Cup Sucks:

-The Diving - No sense waiting with this one. After two months of Stanley Cup playoffs where players block shots with everybody part you can nightmare about, nothing makes me want to learn how to shoot guns than watching soccer players writhing around on the ground, in tears, covering their faces and being helped off the field by three players to sell a kick to the shins. This is almost a silly thing to complain about because nobody's going to argue against this, but that's why it's a problem. It's so accepted in the sport, but for the occasional governing body complaint, that it becomes part of the sport's identity. It's Okay To Dive Because You Won't Score Otherwise. Yeah? Fuck you soccer.

-Soccer fans - I cheer for England, I guess, or Scotland, or Ireland. But not really, because I'm not English, Scottish, or Irish. Know what, fair-weather soccer fans? If you life in Canada, chances are that you aren't actually Spanish, Greek, German, Italian, or whatever. I know, you'd cheer for Canada if they were in it and you're just supporting your heritage, but why? Ever seen any of those countries play? Think those players care that some people in Canada support them? If the Oilers don't make the playoffs, I don't just pick my next favorite team because their next on the list. I kind of hoped Chicago would win the Cup, or that the Tampa Bay Rays win the American League East and that Roy Halladay and his Phillies win the World Series. But these teams aren't my teams and I don't pretend they are, unlike every half-assed some-time soccer fan. It's worse when you're faking whole COUNTRY allegiances. It's treason. You all suck for committing treason.

-It's Boring - Baseball, at times, under very unfortunate but rare circumstances, on the wrong day, with the wrong weather, without any beer, can be a little, just a smidge now, boring. I can see that. It's still wrong but, like a fat woman wearing 3/4 length pants and a sweater, I can at least see it, unspeakable as it may be. What separates baseball from soccer though is that something could happen literally anytime. Each pitch is a homerun, great catch, double-play or hilarious error in waiting. Soccer is a bunch of puttering around at midfield with the occasional shot that misses high and wide by 50 feet. Sometimes, after an effective dive that punctures a lung (cured only with a split second on the bench and presumably some oranges), a goal is scored. This is exciting but you already knew it was coming because...

-Why Are The Nets So Big And There's No Scoring - I guess the title covers this. Keep the big net but cut the number of players and field size in half. Also, swords.

-This:

These are not athletes. These are cartoons from the gayest Saturday morning cartoons you've ever seen. Athletes have scars, bruises and body hair for God's sakes.

-The vuvuzela. It's an instrument that makes a culturally unique sound: whenever the instrument is played by a large number of people anyone listening will say, and ONLY say, "Man. That sounds like a shitload of bees." Every time. Like they're the first person to notice this. In other words, it's an instrument with perfect pitch.

-Ties. Or, in soccer parlance, "0-0 For the Bad Team." I know, lots of sports have ties in their preliminary rounds. They're wrong too. Overtime and shootouts! Then only overtime in elimination rounds! Give us Winners and Losers! Number will tell us who is brilliant and noble and weak and cowardly!

- France. France sucks.

Armando Galarraga and the Mostly Perfect Game

2010-06-03T18:24:00.005-06:00

Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game last night, the third perfect game this season. It was a close game, some great defense by the Tigers to keep the night alive, highlighted by Austin Jackson's brilliant running catch in the ninth and a difficult 3-1 put-out at first to end the game. Except, of course, that isn't what happened. First base umpire Jim Joyce (man, we're really getting good at knowing the names of umpires and referees aren't we?) looked to move into a punch-out motion before changing his mind and calling the runner safe. Replays clearly showed the runner was out and after the game, which ended after one more batter, Joyce would say that he was wrong and felt terrible for taking away Galarraga's career highlight.

First, obviously, a moment for Jim Joyce for man-ing up and admitting his mistake, not in a press release, not hiding behind Major League Baseball's official statements, not making excuses like it was a close play, coulda gone either way, I stand by my call, etc. Nope. He apologized, healed the situation, and certainly eased the increasingly volatile relationship that seems to have developed between managers/players and umpires. This last week had Joe Maddon and Kevin Gregg ejected in the same Jays-Rays game two nights ago, Joe West (and his publicist) continuing to make an ass of himself, Ozzie Guillen flaming West after a game, and that other really heated argument from a few nights ago. So it's been a tough go for the umpires lately, much of it their own doing, and it was nice to see what would've been the uber-climax of recent umpire-embattlement handled with some humility and class.

This is baseball though, and so any type of umpire mistakes become fodder for those who want to see increasing use of instant replay. A few years ago, umpires forgot what a homerun looked like and MLB had to institute an instant replay to determine if a potential homerun was foul, off the wall, or legitimate. Of course after last night, there's a new call for instant replay use on the bases to avoid this kind of situation. The traditionalists, who are comprised of Old Columnists, Old Former Players Who Are Now Announcers, Anybody Directly Employed By MLB and People On TV. That's almost everyone, isn't it? Oh, except for fans. The argument against more instant replay use is that it'll make the game longer than it already is. That's valid. You can counter that by saying that ANY FAN IN THE GODDAMN WORLD will wait an extra few minutes in a three-hour game to get the call RIGHT. And that's the problem here, there's too much emphasis on the broad and vague idea of "maintaining tradition" and not enough on "getting the fucking call right."

I hate listening to this debate in baseball, especially when an incident like this raises the intensity and importance of the debate. I tip my hand I suppose with my own leanings on the matter, but maybe unfairly. I'm not sure how exactly instant replay will be used, if I want more instant replay, if I want the game to take even longer, if it should be a coach's challenge, which plays should be reviewable. What I know for sure is that the traditionalists' argument is infuriatingly stupid. "The games will take too long?" Bullshit. This sport has done NOTHING to speed itself up, priding itself on allowing players to call time between pitches, endless catcher visits to the mound, batters stepping out of the box and performing a full-body epileptic fit on their batting gloves, and on and on. Joe West was right on this one, even if he should keep his mouth shut. Time has never been a priority for baseball, so why pretend to make it one when changes are being proposed to get more calls right? The other main argument is that it's important to keep something called the "human element" in the game. Why? Because fans like the memory of Doug Eddings and AJ Pierzynski, Don Denkinger at first base, or Phil Cuzzi missing a Joe Mauer double by five feet (from probably 20 feet away, what a shithead)? These aren't quaint parts of a grand sport's legacy. These are embarrassing mistakes that the system was not yet advanced enough to avoid. MLB has the means to advance the game and will eventually implement them; every other sport has a replay and/or challenge system, it's inevitable baseball will too.

What would be great is if baseball was willing to retroactively change the ruling on the field from last night's game. Does it create a dangerous precedent? Maybe, though in this case I think everyone involved can agree that the player and the team getting credit for the perfect game is the most important thing. Would other teams attempt to have calls that went against them reversed? Absolutely! Every chance they got! But couldn't baseball simply make the ruling, then say that because of the extreme and rare circumstances (it would've been the last out!) this event will not be considered precedent for future retroactive corrections. The league will announce that it will take another look at instant replay feasibility in light of recent events, and the game would evolve without any suffering. I'm not a lawyer, this might not be a perfect strategy and there may be issues in the future, but how could they be worse than last night?

Update: *SIGH*

How Are The Blue Jays Any Good?

2010-05-27T18:31:00.004-06:00

Well they were for a while, but after last night's near-comeback against the Angels they sit today at 27-22, fourth in the American League East. That's a tough spot to be in with a record that good. Any arguments that suggest playing in the AL East absolutely sucks need only gander at some of the numbers below:

-The Blue Jays have 27 wins. That's tied for third most in the American League and tied for FOURTH IN THE MAJORS.

-The Major League home run leader is Jose Bautista with 15. He's tied for fourth in RBI's, putting him on pace for a 49 HR, 128 RBI year. No big deal.

-They have three players (Bautista, Vernon Wells, Alex Gonzales) on pace for a 30 HR, 100 RBI season. John Buck is on pace for 30 HR, 99 RBI's.

-The team leads the Majors in doubles, HR (by 14 over Boston), RBI's, Runs Scored, SLG %, Total Bases and, obviously, Extra Base Hits. That's the MAJOR LEAGUES.

-They've done all this with the following stellar performances: Aaron Hill (.154/.268/.324), Lyle Overbay (.200/.281/.337) and Adam Lind(.228/.293/.391). Hill is coming off a hamstring injury but nothing is stopping Overbay and Lind from hitting like Major Leaguers any time now. Hill and Lind were the team's second and third best players last year so they have a longer leash, but Overbay is a free agent and a prime asset for a rebuilding team to move for, well, anything. Right now he has no value and that's disappointing. They'd surely love to move him and give Brett Wallace some at-bats. Anyway, the point is that for how good they've been offensively, they could be better. That's unlikely of course, Hill and Lind will probably heat up as Bautista and Gonzales cool off, but it goes to show how over their heads they've been to this point.

-Some good signs from the pitching staff. They've given up the second fewest HR's in the American League, fourth fewest earned runs, lead the AL in strikeouts, second in strikeouts/flyouts ratio (always a good sign), third in slugging % against, and have caught the second most runners attempting to steal (a shared pitcher/catcher stat).

-The defense has also been good, they have the third best fielding percentage in the AL, fourth in double-plays turned, third fewest errors (they have 25, behind the Yankees with 20 and the Twins with, holy crap! 9!), second in assists credited and first in put-outs (any caught ball, tagged out, or thrown-out. No strikeouts, basically).

So that's the good, and lots of it as you can see. There's some bad though...

-The batting averages are terrible. Nobody is over .300 (Wells is .299), six regulars (played over 30 games) are below .260. That would fine, except for...

-The on-base percentages are awful too. For perspective, a good-to-great hitter will have three slash line number (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) of .300/.400/.500. Bautista leads the team with a .361 OBP and four are under .300 (important guys too, Gonzales, Lind, Hill, Overbay). The indicators are bad for guys like Gonzales, who's hitting .263 but has an OBP of .296, Wells, who's hitting .299 but has an OBP of .355, and recent pick-up Fred Lewis, who's hitting .283 but has an OBP of .316. To me a good sigh is a hitter with an OBP of about 70 to 100 points higher than his batting average. That's arbitrary of course, but that indicates a player who will still get on base if his hitting slumps or he runs into bad contact luck. These three aren't walking enough and when the hitting drops off the team will suffer.

-Overall, the team is 22nd in the majors in walks, 10th in the AL.

-They strikeout A LOT. Second most in the majors.

-Their OPS (On-base % plus slugging %) is fourth in the AL. That's pretty good, except when you consider how many other categories they lead the league in. Specifically, the fact that they lead the entire MLB in slugging % but are fourth in their own league in OPS (8th overall) speaks to how disproportionate their offense is. In other words, they're hitting a LOT of homeruns proportional to their walks, singles, etc. That's good though, right? Kind of like a skinny girl with big boobs? "In proportion" isn't always best! Well yeah, except that when you aren't walking enough to keep up with your homeruns and doubles, you're prone to offensive slumps when the ball isn't dropping between fielders or landing in their gloves at the warning track. Or you lose even when you hit six homeruns in one game.

-There's some poor pitching indicators too, mostly in the bullpen. Overall, the pitching staff is 8th in American league ERA and only have one complete game (tied for second last). That's starting to tax the relief corps who've finished 48 of 49 games, have needed to record to fourth most average outs per game, have thrown the fourth most average pitches per game (all AL stats) and have already blown 6 saves. The bullpens' ERA is a little higher than the team's, 4.49 vs. 4.36, but that's only 0.02 points higher than the league average. They've done a good job of overworking individual relief pitchers; they're below league average in back-to-back relief appearances as well as relievers pitching over one inning. So Cito's managing his bullpen well enough but the starters have to start pitching deeper or the bullpen ERA will creep higher and higher every month. And there's no Stephen Strasburg to pick first overall.

Basically, you've got a team that kills baseballs when it makes contact, misses a lot, has a lot of players putting up hilariously unexpected offensive numbers, fields pretty well, and pitches okay but is overworking its relief pitching. The fact that they don't walk enough and are using the bullpen so much indicates that they won't maintain their success level, especially with 12 straight games against divisional opponents, six of which are against Tampa Bay who have the game's best record. We know this already though, don't we? This team was supposed to finish last or lower, right? Probably, but when you look at where they'd be in other divisions, whether in the AL or NL, it's frustrating because it's the same story every year.

When you talk about re-alignment, it very much depends on the salary structure of the sport. In the NHL, re-aligning the divisions because one is weaker than the rest is pretty silly; a hard salary cap ensures some degree of balance and fairness so that if you aren't winning, well, too bad because everyone's rules are the same. Major League Baseball, with it's capless spending, regional TV channels and flimsy luxury tax, should have to deal with the periodic re-alignment question because teams are playing by such dramatically different rules. You can point to low-revenue success teams like Tampa Bay or the occasional Florida Marlins run, but those both flukes and exceptions to the rule. Florida had much bigger payrolls in their World Series wins before stripping them down to nothing and Tampa had years of not just high draft picks, but high draft picks that worked out. They're the Pittsburgh Penguins of MLB, but with no protective salary structure to keep the Yankees from signing away Carl Crawford next year, and whomever they want after that. It's a well-stated argument that the MLB salary structure is unfair, I'm not going to get into it again, but it spills into the re-alignment debate. If you won't institute some player salary restrictions, can't you at least let the Yankees and Red Sox beat up someone else for a while? You got to toss the mid and low-revenue market teams a bone, don't you? Hello?

"No, I think we should stay!" "Why?" "Because I'm in the dumpster already!"

2010-05-21T00:25:00.004-06:00

3D TV is the focal point of consumer electronics this year. My experience in the industry suggests that most customers, as is the case with any new technology, are taking the wait-and-see approach. In fact, most people roll their eyes and shake their proverbial fists at how the world is changing so fast, there's always something new, Things in My Day were just fine thank you very much, how do I know when to double-click, and Get Off My Lawn!!!

Anyways, what's telling about the reactionary nature of most people is, at least when it comes to technology, there's an admittance of their own culpability for not seeing how new products, ideas and paradigms will fit into their lives. People generally don't like change unless it's an improvement over something they already know they don't like; if they don't know they don't like it, they won't like the thing they'll eventually like that's better than what they don't like but think they do. Totally.

This is not true in professional sports, where some fans and the majority of media take conservatism to a level where, if you translated it into the real world, would be like watching a mob storming Apple and protesting the cost of the new iPhone because they've been writing letters with parchment and quill for three hundred years and that's GOOD ENOUGH. The Stanley Cup playoffs, apart from almost everyday in Major League Baseball, is probably the worst cesspool of the kind of reactionary, Thug Life, xenophobic mindset that you hear shrilling from the mouths and pens of the hockey media.

This shouldn't be new to anyone, is it? How long have we had to listen to CBC's choice of buffoons in the booth or in the intermission shows, from the lovable and silly (Don Cherry, yes you love him even if he is crazy) to the horrible and unfortunately (Mike Milbury) to the better but only by comparison (Glen Healy) to the inexplicable (PJ Stock). It's not that I dislike their commentating, I'm slowly getting over the shock of seeing a mediocre third line agitator taking air time away from Ron MacLean, it's just that they all thump the same old-school mindset in lockstep with each other. The old-school hockey dogma, always around but LOUDER during the playoffs, encompasses the following ideas bellowed out as Facts: The superiority of Canadian role players to European skilled players, the importance of Grit, setting the Tone For The Next Game (because NHL players are terrified by facewashing and are not able to emotionally recover), the importance of intangibles (which, by definition, is something that cannot be demonstrably proven to be beneficial), the often overrated Underrated Player (if Maxime Lapierre is the key to your team...) which is often paired with the Well-Known Player who "surprises" in the playoffs, except that everyone knows who they are (look, Joe Pavelski was an Olympian, stop discrediting him as a nobody because YOU'VE never heard of him and don't understand that he's facing weaker defensemen than Thornton-Marleau-Heatley), the importance of Toughness, silly sayings like "It's not a series until the home team loses" (by that logic, Montreal, down 2-0 going back home after being outscored 9-0, had NOTHING to worry about), the importance of both Heart AND Soul, how it's a great story when a bad player scores a bad goal off a bad line change on a bad deflection in overtime and, of course, character. It's exhaustingly repetitive. At least when Don Cherry's talking about covering the point men and screening the goalie he shows some actual video evidence. Imagine that.

All these so-called "old-school" ideas are frustrating because they're repeated ad nauseum and because they're examples of the kind of lazy journalism you see all the time. We've been hearing about how having role players, hot goalies, Good Ol' Canadian boys and experience gained from prior losses are keys to playoff glory. The causal links between these "truisms" and actual successes are questionable. If a team full of role-players wins, it's because of effort but if they lose it's because they just lacked the talent. Hot goalies are great, they really are, but even this year Jaroslav Halak, who certainly has been utterly brilliant, and his team would've been eliminated if Bruce Boudreau could get his Vince Carters to drive the damn puck to the net instead of firing wrist-shots from the blue line. Not to mention how soft many of the goals against the Capitals were. Michael Leighton, after two straight shutouts, is the current Hot Goalie even though he has Chris Pronger playing against the top TWO lines, not to mention 6"5' Braydon Coburn, Matt Carle and Kimmo Timmonen playing against everyone else. Pretty sure lots of goalies could put up a few shutouts with that defense. The point is that there's plenty of teams that win Stanley Cups in spite of their goaltending (Chris Osgood never had to be any more than Chris Osgoodenough), and plenty of hot goalies whose teams are gone after one or two glorious rounds. Lastly, I think we can finally put the myth of the Great Canadian playoff stars to bed; Malkin and Zetterberg have won the last two Conn Smythe trophies, Nicklas Lindstrom won it in 2002.

I'm not taking the argument that good goaltending, role players and grit and intensity aren't important components of a Stanley Cup run. My problem is that we hear about this stuff all the time and the media uses these phrases to paint a broad stroke and avoid digging any deeper. Identifying Grit and Intensity and Will To Win is like walking outside like you do everyday and being shocked when you see the sky. Everybody is working their ass off in the playoffs, there aren't any bad teams with lazy players left and when there is, like whenever Alex Kovalev's team is in the playoffs, they're the exception to the and stand out. The increase in effort, speed and intensity from regular season to playoffs is astonishing and it's important to notice it and celebrate it, but don't "prove" this to us using examples of shot-blocking and beating out icing calls. We see that in the pre-season. Narrow the focus a bit, highlight the guy who returns after having all his teeth knocked out, the player with the bad knee, the stitches on the bench. Putting all the examples of toughness and grit together cheapens the impressive ones and makes them seem ordinary. They're all tough, incredibly resilient and every night they risk permanent injury. We know this and that's why we love hockey, we don't need to hear it ALL the TIME. You're CBC/TSN/Sportsnet, your audience knows why it's watching. Teach us something we haven't heard about yet.

Corsi numbers were discussed a little while ago on Coach's Corner (I think, Cherry "mentioned" them) and were, of course, dismissed as bad new-age hoodoo. Corsi numbers count the number of shots for and against that a player was on the ice for; a shot for is a plus one, a shot against is a minus one. It's like plus/minus but with shots, not goals. There's a host of new stats out there (QualComp, Team Regression, David Staples' Error Stat) that bloggers and hockey writers are playing around with, suggesting that we might be at a dawn of a new statistical age similar to the Bill James baseball statistical revolution that had its roots in the 1970's. I kind of doubt it, hockey's a tougher sport to measure because it doesn't stop and start in the same quantifiable way, but the effort and research being done is outstanding. These are hockey fans who are dedicating their free time to digging deeper into the sport to try to understand what exactly is going on out there, how are some teams winning consistently more often than others even with a salary cap, how can you evaluate two players with similar basic stats, which position is the most important, and so on forever.

This isn't the place for an insufferable argument about blogs vs. mainstream journalism, that's been done to death. Instead, I'm simply asking why CBC, TSN and Sportsnet continue to feed us cliches about momentum and effort while fans in their own time are testing their statistical hypothesis and risking their new ideas in the flamewars of the Internet to see what works. There's problems with any stat in the hands of an idiot, particularly in hockey where the very collection design can be called into question (you can image how easy it is to poke holes in the Quality of Competition Faced measurement), but bless those souls who use their great minds and limitless patience on trying to figure out which millionaire should be signed by which team's billionaire owner instead of curing cancer or writing books explaining the stock market. Without them, we'd be reduced to Doug MacLean's assurance that Montreal has All The Momentum Now because of tonight's big win.

Stupid Telus Puppy!

2010-05-06T21:45:00.000-06:00

So I only got halfway into my grand experiment of picking playoff series results based on one game, only to have "someone" kick out one of those tubes that keeps our internet motor running. More to come...

Round 2.1

2010-05-01T19:05:00.000-06:00

Pittsburgh vs. Montreal

Boy, do a lot of people ever know everything about hockey eh? You'd think Montreal was the first seed and Washington scraped into the playoffs! Who were we to think that the highest scoring team in the league, with the most points, with the highest goal differential and the best powerplay would beat a team with a forward corps full of Oompa Loompas, a defense as mobile as a Hal Gill on skates (wait...), and a goaltending situation perhaps best described as having all the unity and cohesion as that guy from Identity. None of you called it! Stop pretending!!! Anyway, Pittsburgh looked really good in the first game, the powerplay had four goals and Halak was chased after five goals on 20 shots. In keeping with the integrity of this experiment you'd have to take Pittsburgh by quite a bit, especially with Montreal losing Markov for probably the series. The Pens, against this opponent anyway, have more than enough to compensate for the loss of Jordan Staal, who is currently listed as out indefinately. Pens in 5.

Round 2: DING!!!!

2010-04-30T10:47:00.001-06:00

I love the playoffs! God I love them! More than sunshine and Hawkins cheezies! I love them so damn much I couldn't be bothered finding out when the second round started! Yep, that's true love and not that stuff they talk about in Nicolas Sparks novels, but only because hockey doesn't have cancer.

All is not lost though! Wait, were you thinking all was lost or something? Jeez. It's spring. Relax okay? Okay? Okay. Instead, we're going to try something different. I'm going to make all my predictions for the second round based entirely on the first games. I guess it's not that different, since they do that after every game anyways on TSN and Sportsnet, but it'll be different here because we're going to attempt to see, with a short sample size of course, exactly how indicative one game is of the rest of the series. I'm less interested in my own predicting ability, since obviously it should be much better than the first round (and if it's not I can simply blame the team that choked away a 1-0 series lead!), and more interested in how much we can predict based on one game.

Detroit vs. San Jose.

I didn't watch this game at all until the last three minutes so we're not off to a good start. I was at work and even Bell TV didn't think the game was on, it thought I was watching Sportscentre. San Jose wins 4-3 but led 3-0 at one point, so we can easily conclude that Thornton played soft, Nabakov probably only faced five shots and Joe Pavelski incredibly managed to put up four goals and four assists. A cursory glance at the boxscore shows that some of these things are not true and Thornton in fact put up a +36DD Softness Quotient which is, of course, league average. If you were to pick this series on mental toughness you'd take Detroit in three, but given that the Sharks overcame the Dan Boyle goal against Colorado (and really, the series wasn't that close afterwards), maybe San Jose is pulling it together. Even though they almost choked away last night's game, maybe it's a sigh of San Jose's new found ability to handle adversity instead of shrink away from it. Of course, Detroit handled way more adversity this year than San Jose, and have players who always show up in the playoffs, as evidenced last night, so this is a tricky one. Detroit in 7, goaltending issues on both sides cancel themselves out and Detroit's superior net-crashers are the difference.

Round 1 Recap

2010-04-29T11:20:00.006-06:00

Western Conference:

San Jose vs. Colorado - Whew. That was close eh? Then, suddenly, it wasn't at all as San Jose outscored Colorado 10-2 in the last two games. So I was off by one game in my prediction, thanks to stupid Dan Boyle, but otherwise not a bad prediction. Sharks-Wings should be just awesome, if San Jose can keep their heads out of their asses long enough.

Chicago vs. Nashville - NOT OVER SOON ENOUGH. Didn't these games, whether the games were in Chicago or Nashville, just look terrible on TV? Too dark or something, like there was nobody else there. Gross. Yuck. Play a real hockey teams now plz.

Vancouver vs. Los Angeles - This was my big swing and miss, though if the Kings had held those third period leads I'd be dead on. This was the series I watched the most and yeah, Drew Doughty is pretty good eh? Great to actually get some prolonged exposure, it's pretty tiresome to see how people just jump on the "he's the next Bobby Orr" because that's what they've read online or heard on TSN. It was the worst around the Olympics, all the self-styled pundits who'll assure you of the future greatness of a player that, come on, there's no WAY you've actually seen him play. I'm thinking here of people I work with. But yeah, great puckhandler, great passer, creates space so well on the powerplay or when trapped in his own zone, and physical too. Not enough though. Stupid not-good-enough-conspiracy. Let's see the NHL really flex their muscles when Vancouver plays Chicago, a team Bettman surely has marked for the finals.

Detroit vs. Phoenix -Pretty close here too, great showing for Phoenix and you know they probably win if Shane Doan doesn't get hurt. Going by what I heard on the radio, the Coyote/Jets franchise has never won a game 7. James Duthie had a great line about how since Detroit had a bad record in day games, like 2-8 or something, that the NHL should change game 7 to an afternoon like game 6 was. That the league could own a team the entire season, and into the playoffs where said league can influence the schedule, is pretty bush. Not bush like being allowed to own two CFL teams or anything, but pretty close. Now with the two who-cares teams out in the first round (Nashville and Phoenix) we can start some real hockey.

Eastern Conference:

Washington vs. Montreal - Just. Wow. I wanted to see an Ovechkin-Pronger matchup in the second round, then of course the epic Washington-Pittsburgh Eastern final, but Halak... oh man. Washington became a pretty hard team to cheer for in game 7 too; how many times did Ovechkin take the puck from his own zone or blue line, skate up the wing, and take a wrist shot with the defender as a screen. EVERY time. Drive the net for God's sakes! Draw a penalty! Take a hit! It's hard to accuse Ovechkin of a lack of effort, but when you watch last night's game you can easily accuse him of lacking creativity and being way too stubborn. Did you see the fans leaving when Montreal went up two goals with five minutes left? Inexcusable. A bad hockey city that merely masqueraded as a good one for the last year or so. Can't hope for you to win when you're team fires Jason Blake-wrist shots all game and your fans bail.

New Jersey vs. Philadelphia - Well I bombed this one. Not sure what else to say. All that stuff that made Philly look good on paper in the off-season, and bad during the regular season, sure looked REALLY good against the Devils. Without Gagne and Carter for at least a few weeks (and Carter done for the playoffs I think I heard) who knows how much further they can go.

Buffalo vs. Boston - Like Philly-Jersey, the Play Your Big Defenseman All The Damn Time Stratagem was a good one. For a team that didn't blow a third period lead all season (!!!!), Buffalo sure looked soft in those two third period Bruin comebacks. Tuukka Rask also takes out the Olympic Hero (who, um, lost by the way), showing that the playoffs are where trends go to die (blown leads, teams who can't score suddenly flipping a switch). I really didn't mind getting this one wrong, it'll be nice to see Marc Savard able to play in the playoffs since he's apparently been cleared.

Pittsburgh vs. Ottawa - I did pick them in six but this and Vancouver-LA might've been the most exciting first-round series. A great show by Ottawa, they played as well as they possibly could. Reminded me of the old Edmonton-Dallas series where the Oilers would try hard, hit like crazy, hit a few posts, then make one mistake and the game would be over. Does Ottawa trade a goalie in the off-season now? Perhaps in exchange for a veteran one with an exaggerated back problem, super-short term salary and mild propensity to be "festive" before driving during his injury rehab?

I finished the first round with a paltry 4-4 record, but when there's three upsets in the East I can't imagine that many people did much better. I should have been 5-3 but I had to take that gamble on Los Angeles, after all, how easy is it to feel contempt for a city that declares a special day after winning a first-round series?

Another Google ad for Oiler fans

2010-04-15T13:07:00.000-06:00

Google's new Edmonton Oilers ad

2010-04-15T10:11:00.000-06:00

Comments Part II

2010-04-14T23:03:00.002-06:00

Product testing has been completed.

Comments

2010-04-14T22:25:00.001-06:00

I didn't realize this, but apparently to add comments you have to input a whole bunch of stuff like email address and another email address. I'll try to find the setting to change that, even I wouldn't comment here if I had to do all that stuff.

What's a "map?" Oh, you mean one of those things a person can be "all over?"

2010-04-14T18:50:00.004-06:00

Handy infomercial tip. Get a PalmWallet! It'll hold EVERYTHING in one tiny space in your pocket! Like, everything that you used to need two full suitcases for will now fit comfortably in the back of those Dockers! Pretty sweet, eh? Yep, it sure is one all-in-one solution! Oh, and if you buy now, you get a second one FREE!

First off, I neglected to mention New Jersey's big trade acquisition Ilya Kovalchuk in my playoff predictions. That was dumb, obviously, but I'm not sure how much of a difference he'll make in that defense-first system. If Jersey wins it'll be because of Brodeur and their defense holding up and not so much because of guys like Parise or Kovalchuk. But I still should've brought him up, he did have 27 points in 27 games since the trade. I am, as always, an idiot.

The big news last night, of course, was the NHL Draft Lottery. The draft is clearly the Super Bowl of the NHL season, both in importance and in hype, especially when you consider the parallels between how both leagues figure out the teams then wait, like, forever before getting to the big day. It's just too bad we have to wait through all that meaningless spring hockey before we get there. Hockey in JUNE?!? Lordly-loo that makes my pacemaker smart. These kids today. Cold weather. Uphill both ways. Etc.

With the Oilers drafting first overall, like I wrote before, I think they either take Hall or trade down to take Seguin. I don't think they take Seguin first overall because there's more demand for Hall later, and they'd be smart to exploit their leverage. Boston also has some cap space, depending on how they re-sign Wheeler, Boychuck, etc. The dream for Edmonton would be to get both; they've got lots of wingers coming up in the system so one of Hemsky or Penner could be available (I might prefer Hemsky, Edmonton needs one big player) and one of their smaller prospects, some draft picks, whatever. It would take a huge offer to get that pick out of Boston of course, I'm not suggesting Hemsky and Cogliano gets that deal done, but you'd have to think the price would be a little lower trading that pick to Edmonton rather than to a division or conference rival. I just hope that if the pick is Seguin, and I've been seduced into thinking it should be because of his position, he doesn't bust. If he's only a good NHL player, that's fine. Hall looks sure-fire, it would kill this city if Edmonton passed on the better player and took the other sure-fire only to have it jam.

It reminds me of Moneyball, whichever chapter where Michael Lewis talks about Oakland's mandate of only drafting college players. In some case in the draft, you'd run into a case where the college player is good but a high-schooler might be GREAT. The A's, being the cash-strapped ugly step-child of MLB (one of many!), couldn't afford to take risks on pipe dreams and fairy dust and would therefore draft the college player because they'd played longer and there was a greater statistical sample size. Play it safe, don't waste picks going for the homerun. Now Hall and Seguin are pretty close, but are the Oilers interested in playing Moneyball? Hall's resume is pretty decorated and has played an extra season, whereas Seguin's is just starting. There's more evidence of Hall's future stardom, so by definition Seguin is the greater risk because he's the greater unknown. Plus, if Edmonton can't clear out some of their roster redundancies they might put Seguin back in junior, let him dominate another year, play in the World Juniors, and not waste a year of entry level contract. That's fine, the Oilers don't need either prospect to be any good next year, but if Seguin can't crack the roster and Hall scores 30 goals it puts a lot more pressure on Seguin the following year. Also, in spite of everyone in Edmonton saying they're willing to rebuild properly and be patient, the opposite is true. We want the 1980's to start NEXT YEAR DAMMIT, and God help Lowe and Tambellini if it doesn't. This is driving me crazy.

Sheldon Souray wants to be traded? Really? Huh, nobody knew that. Wow. Makes my pacemaker smart, getting shocks like that. I really think the only person who didn't know Sheldon Souray wants to be traded was Sheldon Souray. He proved that by getting into a stupid fight with Iginla right and getting hurt before the deadline when there were apparently teams willing to trade for him. There's two issues, totally separate, going on with his comments to Mark Spector: Should he have said anything and Was he right. The first one's easy. No, you should not make trade demands public and no you should not trash the organization before leaving it (for the second time). The timing was brutal too, right before the big draft announcment, totally coloring what should have been a happy, positive press conference. Was he right though? Dude, who knows. He was pretty specific in his criticisms though, and Tambellini's typically tepid, lukewarm, (Who's that sad dog? With the rain cloud or whatever? He's blue? If only there was some sort of Internet search thingy, with which one could use engines to find things about stuff) response didn't help the perception that Oiler management is aloof and displays the emotional range of cold to frigid. These are the kinds of things that make fans flip out. It's one thing to suck on the ice, you can turn that around. It's another thing to be a northern city that's cold and windy without much to do, you can't help that. You can sure as hell can help how you treat players though; no matter how much money they make they should be allowed to repair a surgically repaired shoulder without being harangued into playing. If that part was true, and if it's part of an ongoing behavioral pattern in Oiler management, then screw those guys and clean house. I'm the guy who wants the team to get better WITH Lowe and see his legacy in Edmonton recover, but if this is a sound description of the atmosphere surrounding the players (and, by extension, the real reason why free agents allegedly won't come to Edmonton), well screw that. If a change in management means an immediate improvement in the free agent quality we can attract then sorry guys, team first. I'm indifferent to Tambellini's legacy, if you were wondering why I left him out.

One last thought on the Draft Lottery coverage. Peter Chiarelli has to change his look. Just sayin...

Right? Okay, now compare him to that guy from Sex and the City whose name I certainly do not know:

And finally to Tyler Stewart of the Barenaked Ladies:

See? Even Gary Bettman can't tell the difference! "Hey you! Hey, in the eyes when you talk to me! Little lower... Okay! This guy? Let him in, he can eat whatever he wants on me! Why? TWO first round picks! Yeah, BOTH years!"

Round 1: DING!!!

2010-04-12T23:14:00.004-06:00

It's playoff time! Or, as we call it in Edmonton, golf season. Or would, if our seasons weren't over while there's still a foot of snow on the ground. Right, sorry. Other teams!

Western Conference:

1. San Jose vs. Colorado - In the past I've kind of cheered for San Jose. They had some decent players, it's actually a good hockey market and, unless you absolutely hate a team, there's no particular joy in seeing a team choking away its prime seasons. Except this year. Thornton was awful in the Olympics, Marleau was okay early and same thing for Heatley, who must've thought he was playing in the world championships because of all the goals he scored against crappy countries. So screw San Jose, I hope they lose. They won't though, and the whole world can pick this series. San Jose in 5.

2. Chicago vs. Nashville - Man is it hard to care about a series that Nashville's playing in. It just sucks all the energy out. Chicago's a really interesting team, lots of big names, big market, franchise on the comeback, great chance to win their first Cup since 1951, it's ALL good stuff! But pick any other team in the whole CONFERENCE, let alone other playoff teams, and it's worth ten times more of our interest than this. Chicago in 5. Get it over with. Move 'em or fold 'em for God's sakes.

3. Vancouver vs. Los Angeles - I like Los Angeles! They have Ryan Smyth! He is all that is man, no bottle of syrup would last if he were highway patrol. Dustin Brown is a tank, that's guy's awesome, except that Mackenzie, or McGuire maybe, were probably over-selling it when they said that Canada didn't have an answer for Brown when we played the U.S. in the Olympic round robin. We learned that Drew Doughty is Bobby Orr too, and the Kings' goalie is named Quick which is awesome. Will L.A.'s team of coolness counter Vancouver's video game style strategy (cycle, pass to slot, one-time, repeat as necessary)? You know what, I'm going Yes to the upset in this one. Los Angeles in 6.

4. Phoenix vs. Detroit - Another cool series. One team is a pretty inspiring story, incredibly shutting out all the financial disasters going on around them, pulling together as a team, and making the playoffs when, for a while, nobody thought they would. And the other team has to play in a desert! Weird, right? I can't see Phoenix possibly winning here, Detroit is too healthy with three or four players better than Phoenix's best... except that Phoenix's goalie might be the NHL MVP this year. I'd like to see a long series but if Detroit gets a split in Phoenix it's probably over in 6. Let's say that.

Eastern Conference:

1. Washington vs. Montreal - Alex Ovechkin and the Electric Mayhem bring their travelling circus to hockey's greatest cathedral, and then to Montreal for two more games to wrap up the series. The only way this goes more than four games is if Montreal's Marauding Midgets can expose Washington's "defense" and "goaltending." That's unlikely though, especially with GM George McPhee's shrewd pickup of Sheldon Souray at the deadline OH WAIT SORRY GUYZ, Souray broke his hand on Iginla's face, costing him the last half of the season, in a fight that was revenge for Iginla injuring Souray for the FIRST half of the season. Washington still wins (and should still trade John Carlson and Karl Alzner for Souray in the off-season), but I'll give Montreal a game. Caps in 5.

2. New Jersey vs. Philadelphia: With neither shootouts nor Olli Jokinen to worry about, New Jersey would appear to have an edge in many categories. Goaltending, despite Brodeur's struggles against Philly this year (3.38 GAA) is definitely in Jersey's favor and Jersey's defense is better, having allowed 191 goals (NHL best) to Philly's 225 (T-14th best). While Philly scored more goals this year, 236 to 222, Jersey's top three scorers had 82, 67 and 61 points compared to Philly's top three who had 62, 61, and 55. With Jersey having a slight top-end offensive edge, a substantial defensive edge and monstrous on-paper goaltending advantage, this should be an easy series to call as well. Oh, but Philly has Chris Pronger. He'll play 30 minutes a night, in all situations, and will be charged with shutting down Zach Parise who, by comparison, is probably 4'2". That buys two more wins for Philly, especially when you consider that Pronger's powers increase five-fold when playing for an eighth place team with goaltending questions. New Jersey in 7.

3. Buffalo vs. Boston: Ryan Miller is the league's best goalie who doesn't lead the league in anything. He's second in GAA to Tuuka Rask, fourth in wins, second in save percentage (to Tuuka Rask again. Boy, he's good eh?), seventh in shutouts, and seventh in games played. And yet if you were to name your instinctive Vezina trophy winner, who would you say? Yeah, not Rask. He only played 45 games. You'd say Miller, you know you would. So you have the league's consensus Number One goalie against the league's consensus offensive slug. Both teams have good goalies, though Miller's resume is certainly longer and more impressive, only one team can score, and both are pretty close defensively. Still, Zdeno Chara plays for Boston and, like Pronger, will play ALL the time. That alone should cut down on the offensive disparity, but not enough to change the result. Buffalo in 6.

4. Pittsburgh vs. Ottawa: This and Caps-Habs are the premier playoff series in the East by far. On paper this should be a sweep, with Crosby, Malkin, Gonchar, Staal and Fleury up against Spezza, Alfredsson, Karlsson and, um, Brian Elliot. Elliot's been pretty good of course, better than Leclaire: 2.57 GAA vs. 3.20, .909 save % vs. .887. He's also been a little better than Fleury too, who has a slightly higher GAA, 2.65, and a lower save %, .905. Even if goaltending is a wash in this series, the offensive isn't and since Volchenkov and Phillips can play either Crosby and Malkin and not both, scoring is certainly in Pittsburgh's favor. Still, there's something about Ottawa this year... nah. Pittsburgh in 6.

Rangers vs. Philadelphia

2010-04-11T15:55:00.002-06:00

Well, I was pretty close. I'm sure I would've been right if the Rangers hadn't left their entire season up to Olli Jokinen. Right Flames? Isn't he such a valuable asset!?

Why Your Team Didn't Verb the Noun

2010-04-09T22:48:00.012-06:00

Why Your Team Didn't Make The Playoffs

In Part 2 of the massively popular series, Why Your Noun Didn't Verb the Noun, we look at the other 14 teams that make up the ever-glorious National League of Hockey. Last time I said rather definitely that the teams that were in the playoffs then were guarenteed to be the final 16. So far so good, except that the New Matt Rangers beat Philly tonight and now sit tied for the eighth spot. I'm fine with being wrong if it means Philly misses the playoffs. Philly sucks. Go Rangers, they managed to trade or sigh some of the ex-Oilers that not everyone in Edmonton despises. A bold declaration then! The first of many! Many unrelated to the title! Rangers WILL make the playoffs, beating Philly in a shootout on Sunday. Book it.

Other predictions before the shenanigans start. I made a bet at work today that Tyler Seguin will play next year in junior. He'll play the first few games of course, but before reaching the 10 game limit he'll be sent back to the OHL by... Edmonton. The Oilers have by far the best chance at winning the draft lottery (this Tuesday, 5 pm ET on TSN), but they only have a 48.2% overall. So at slightly worse than a coin flip, the chances are strong that they'll end drafting second (since that's the lowest they can fall) and that's where they'll take Seguin. Of the other four teams most likely to jump up to first overall, Boston (via Brian Burke's "brain") has the next best shot. They'd draft Hall since they need a winger to replace Kessel (assuming Hall is actually as good as advertised, of course) more than a center who'd play behind Savard and Bergeron. Tampa has the next best shot and they're in even better shape down the middle with Stamkos and Lecavalier. Florida is next and could draft either way but would probably have to trade either Horton or Weiss since Seguin, should he play in the NHL right away (again, we're assuming he's as good as advertised too), would play on one of the top two lines. Besides, Hall's more exciting and they need someone who can make the fans PAY ATTENTION. The Islanders are the next (this is all as of today of course) and could draft either way, but given their inability to score as well a winger like Hall might be more appealing. In other words, of the five primary lottery teams, the Oilers have the biggest void at center and will do one of two things: drop to second in the lottery and draft Seguin or retain the first pick, trade down to second for either some cap relief or another prospect and draft Seguin then.

I'm personally unsure which player the Oilers SHOULD chose, they both seem pretty equal except for their position. It's not like the Oilers have a surplus of snipers who play big on the wings either, but they have even less at center. IF, and the intentional capitalization indicates a Very Big If, both players are exactly as good as each other and have identical careers and wear the same clothes and eat at all the same restaurants, Edmonton should draft on their needs and get Seguin. BUT, and that's a big But, Hall's won the OHL and CHL Rookie of the Year and was Memorial Cup MVP last year, played well in the World Juniors and, apparently, was good enough that if he was draft eligible last year would've been taken over Tavares. Seguin didn't make the World Juniors, has only had one great year in the OHL and STILL had less points-per-game than Hall. BUT he's apparently better defensively than Hall and kills penalties. BUT Hall outplayed Seguin in their recent playoff matchup and his Spitfires easily beat Seguin's Whalers. BUT... Oh God Who Knows. I'm pretty sure Edmonton takes Seguin. Who knows who they should take.

Why Your Team Didn't Make The Playoffs:

Western Conference:

9. Calgary - HAHAHA! HAHAHA! HAHAHAHA! Stop! Please! You're killing me! Matt Stajan for 4 more years at $3.5 million? After FOUR POINTS IN SEVEN GAMES!?!?! It's called a SAMPLE SIZE, y'ever heard of it?!?! You traded away the ONLY DECENT PLAYER you've drafted in 10 years FOR CAP SPACE!?!?! And then spent all that space on the TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS SECOND LINE CENTER!?!?! Oh GOD! Jokinen's $5 million was coming off the books and you turn it into two more years of $3 million statue ALES FUCKING KOTALIK? No more, please! You have HOW many draft picks in the top 60 in the next two years? Two? Because you basically traded Jordan Leopold and a first round pick for KOTALIK and Chris Higgins? And WHY did you trade Dustin Boyd for a 4th round pick? Did you forget about all the scoring you WEREN'T doing!?!? Was his $650,000 making it hard for him to fit in!?! I have to catch my breath here. Okay. Slow it down. Pulse... lowering... lowering... okay, I'll risk one more look at your NHL Numbers page and wait, is this a typo? Is your cap hit for Steve Staios, Cory Sarich, Matt Stajan and Rene Bourque next year really just under $17 million dollars? ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?! WHAT IN DEEP DARK MOUNTAINS OF HOLY FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!??!?! How I am supposed to write anything for any other team now? Dear Calgary Flames fans, the reason the Calgary Flames are not in the playoffs is because Darryl Sutter absolutely fucking hates you the way Allied forces fucking hated Dresden. And now they want to trade Iginla. Marvelous.

Also, scoring was an issue.

10. St. Louis - There's other teams? Shit. Um... okay, got one. Keith Tkachuck was impressed with Chris Mason's confidence, poise, and quick reflexes for the 2008-2009 playoff-bound Blues. He took the coach's words of "feeding off their goalie" too literally and devoured Mas... Wait a second. Rene Bourque's contract was for SIX YEARS!?!? WHY!!?!? Is it THAT hard to find a player to average 0.54 points-per-game over his career that you just COULDN'T LET THAT SHIT GET AWAY??? Was it his single point, -2 +/- and 22 penalty minutes in the playoffs last year that made you think he was a KEEPER!?!? It WAS, wasn't it?!?! You're KILLING me Sutter!!! MY TUMMY HURTS NOW!!!

11. Anaheim - Lingering effects of Sutterarian influence in the organization. Team acquired some Leaf cast-offs of their very own in Vesa Toskala and Jason Blake, presumably because team's confidence in their goaltending and scoring ability was holding them back. That resolved, the team's character improved and Coach took them out for ice cream even though they lost the big game.

12. Dallas - I dunno, just seems like they needed a spark, some kind of agitator or something. Don't get me wrong, Steve Ott seems like a super nice guy, but what about someone who could REALLY stir the pot? And not just on the ice either. Forget it, not with Brett Hull running the team. He's not? Oh. Well, maybe there's hope!

13. Minnesota - Team announces big plans to change their style of play from boring and defense-oriented to wide-open and exciting. They unleash their new attack with the acquisitions of Kyle Brodziak, Chuck Kobasew, Robbie Earl and the continued employm...er... "deployment" of Derek Boogaard. Martin Havlat continues his point-a-game pace from the year before in Chicago, but only if you look at Total Net Points where you add up points for, 54, with his net plus/minus, -19. So, in 73 games, Havlat "contributed" 73 points. No? Well, he hasn't kicked anyone yet.

14. Columbus - Big declines in play from Derek Brassard, Steve Mason and Mike Commodore lead fans to wonder why in the world they were entrusting the Columbus Rick Nashes to Derek Brassard, Steve Mason and Mike Commodore. Having something called "Grant Clitsome" playing defense probably didn't keep the guys focused either. No, really. Look him up.

15. Edmonton - Well, losing out on the Jay Bouwmeester Sweepstakes really hurt and wait, What? In the first of five years averaging $6.68 million, Bouwmeester has THREE GOALS?!?! "Where's the offense going to come from Calgary?" "Haha, silly Everyone In the World! We'll get lots of offense from our defense! With Phaneuf AND Bouwmeester, scoring won't be an issue at all!" That's AWESOME!!! Way to go Flames! That quick-transition game got you 28th IN THE NHL IN GOALS FOR AND 26th ON THE POWERPLAY!!! HAHAHAHA!!!

Also, injuries.

Eastern Conference:

9. Philadelphia - Third-string janitor Buck McShineykins lets in two questionable goals in the third period against the Rangers, and fails to stop even one shootout attempt (Pierre McGuire names him the game's Monster anyway). Local fans and media loudly voice their objections to the failure to land a goalie at the trade deadline. GM Paul Holmgren insists that he put in a call to Islanders' GM Garth Snow only to find out that Snow himself is not available.

10. Atlanta - Despite accomplishing the Perfect Trade by acquiring a puck-moving defenseman AND a top-six forward AND a draft pick in the SAME trade, team falls just short of a playoff spot. Team blames the distraction of the Todd White sweepstakes hanging over the heads all year. GM Don Waddell promises that NEXT TIME players will be re-signed or traded before their value completely diminishes. Probably.

11. Carolina - Realizes too late they can't possibly rob Edmonton of two kinds of glory in a five-year span, and decide to try to make the playoffs instead. Recchi is a diver.

12. New York Islanders - Team hopes that John Tavares living with Doug Weight will become the Islander version of Sidney Crosby living with Mario Lemieux, but without enough goaltending depth the team falters. Yet the rebuild is underway with off-season plans to sign Vesa Toskala, Marty Turco, Ray Emery, Josh Harding and, as insurance, Martin Biron. Matt Moulson's 52 year, $176.8 million contract extension is expected to be announced early next week.

13. Florida - David Booth's inspiring return to the lineup, after missing 45 games with a Severely Detached Head (officially called "a mild upper upper body injury"), fails after Jaroslav Spacek reaches in with a welcome back hug. Team can't recover, and Booth now tattoos important information on his arm and remembers not to trust Teddy's lies.

14. Tampa Bay - Despite a wildly successful and unexpected season from Steven Stamkos, the Lightning fail because teams with only one play can be kind of predictable. Also, players claim financial distractions when team owners suggest a new plan to compensate players not in salary but with a "jaunty song-and-dance." Bettman claims record attendance and profits.

15. Toronto - High expectations followed Brian Burke's summer of free-agent signings as Truculence, Pugnacity, Belligerence and Testosterone all agreed to team contracts. Unfortunately, none were acquired because of any hockey-related skill and the team's penalty kill (last), powerplay (last), and defensive-zone play (second last in goals-against) suffered. Some in the media attempted to lay some blame at the feet of Ron Wilson only to find that, when things are laid at Ron Wilson's feet, he assumes they are offerings from mere mortals and his powers grow. When asked about his repeated warnings of greater accountability from players and management, Burke flew into a insane rage, smashed his fist into the table, screamed about Vancouver trading Alex Burrows to Tampa for Hedman, traded away all the team's draft picks forever for a one-season wonder with questionable chuzbah, and called Kevin Lowe a rapist. The Toronto media nod their wise old heads in approval of The Burke's patient re-build, and Michael Lansberg comes out of his coffin and promises to interview Burke every single day. People who accidentally stumble onto Lansberg's "show" see no difference.

Ryan Smyth vs. Trevor Linden

2010-04-02T10:04:00.002-06:00

Sort-of-recently, a fellow hockey connoisseur and I were talking about Trevor Linden and how he's probably the greatest Vancouver Canuck of all-time. He's not the best PLAYER to play for Vancouver, you'd have to say either Pavel Bure, Mark Messier, or Roberto Luongo were that. His career does comprise the best numbers and accomplishments of any player wearing a Canucks jersey, and I think it's easy to see that difference. It's also a distinction that probably matters more to fans, since trades and free-agency move players around the league so much that for a fan, the only thing that matters, when evaluating a player, is how well they played for THEIR team. We're also talking about right now; it's certainly possible that Luongo or Henrik Sedin take over and become the player most successful and most identifiable with the Canucks. Today though, it's Linden.

To be fair, the conversation came up when we were making fun of the Canucks, and were making the point that the best player in franchise history wasn't even close to Hall of Fame consideration. It's no knock on Linden of course, I always liked him, and should certainly not affect how Canucks fans' feel about him. I assume that it doesn't matter anyway; rarely do you find fans whose favorite player is or was the best player on their team or in the league. Sure, some people will tell you that Sidney Crosby or Alex Ovechkin is their favorite player. Those people, unless they live in Pittsburgh or Washington, are a) bandwagoners, b) not hockey fans, or c) both, but those are the same thinga anyway. Most fans, at least in my little world, hold the grinders a little closer to heart, perhaps because we can better associate with and can better understand a player who looks like everything takes a world of effort. At his career peak (probably 1993-1997), Linden was among the upper echelon of that kind of physical, hard-working, fan-favorite, team-drafted and developed players that fans are always drawn to. What it says about the Canucks that Linden is the franchise's greatest player isn't something I want to get in here, but more about a comparison that I wonder whether or not is fair. At work this same conversation came up and I suggested that Trevor Linden was to Vancouver what Ryan Smyth was to Edmonton: both drafted in the first round, both became huge parts of their team's identity, both represented Canada internationally and, of course, both lost heartbreaking seventh games in the Stanley Cup Finals. So intuitively, at least to me, they seem like an excellent comparison. But what do the facts say?

Fans are irrational, emotional, and often their intuition of what seems right is totally wrong. The Smyth-Linden comparison seems pretty apt but let's break it down a little further (all numbers from Hockey Reference) to see how close they are:

Regular Season Stats:

Smyth is still playing obviously so this will be incomplete, but he's not likely to play as many seasons as Linden. Linden played 19 NHL seasons, starting at 18 years old, Smyth has played 14 complete seasons and started in what would be his first full season at 19 years old. Linden finished with 1382 games played, 375 goals, 492 assists for 867 points with a -64 plus/minus (0.63 points per game). Smyth finished last season with 920 games played, 310 goals, 350 assists for 660 points and a -27 plus/minus (0.72 points per game). So Smyth is the better point producer, but Linden played more games and in a physical sport that's more to his credit than if this was baseball. Smyth played almost all of his career as a first or second line player; Linden was a third liner for most of his last 5 years. Edge: Smyth, but slightly.

Peak years:

Comparing both players' peak seasons means playing around a little bit. I wanted to look at each player's five best seasons, but on a points-per-game basis as one of Linden's best came during the strike-shortened 1994-1995 season. I'm going to include that but take his numbers over an 82 game season, then reduce both players' stats to a points-per-game number. I think you have to do it that way because while Smyth's peak seasons all occurred in 82 game seasons; Linden had one in a 48 game season (1994-1995), two in 80 game seasons (1990-1991, 1991-1992), and one in an 84 game season (1992-1993). Yeah. What a jerk.

Linden's best five seasons (the four listed above, plus 1995-1996 which was certainly his best overall) totaled 374 games played, 148 goals, 189 assists for 337 points, which works out to 0.90 points per game. Smyth's best five seasons (2000-2001, 2006-2007, 2005-2006, 2002-2003, 2008-2009) totaled 371 games, 156 goals, 168 assists for 324 points, averaging out to 0.87 points per game. Good samples sizes as both players played an almost identical number of games. Smyth had more goals but Linden had many more assists (a product of playing in a more offensive era) so edge, in another close one, goes to Linden.

International Play:

Why count international play? Well, don't you love it when your favorite player plays for Canada (or, um, another country)? I think international experience, by virtue of raising that player's profile nationally and internationally, serves to strengthen a fan's relationship with that player. Plus, international hockey is always a big deal not just in Canada but in any hockey-playing nation, and is considered as part of a player's Hall of Fame credentials. Both players have impressive international resumes, but you might already know where this one's going.

Linden's international experience is all over the map (har!). One World Junior Championship (1987-1988, 7 games, 1 goal, 0 assists, 1 point), one World Cup Hockey (1996, 8 games, 1 goal, 1 assist, 2 points), one Olympics (1998, 6 games, 1 goal, 0 assists, 1 point), and two World Championships (1991, 1998, 16 games, 2 goals, 8 assists, 10 points). Scored the tying goal against the Czech Republic in the 1998 Olympic semi-final, also played in the World Championships that year. Kudos to him for putting in extra time in what must have been a very long year.

Smyth's international experience is well-known, carrying the nickname Captain Canada for his willingness to play for Canada year after year in the World Championships. His overall international experience includes one World Junior Championship (1994-1995, 7 games, 2 goals, 5 assists), seven World Championships (60 games, 15 goals, 17 assists, 32 points), one World Cup of Hockey (2005, 6 games, 3 goals, 1 assist), and two Olympic teams (2002, 2006, 12 games, 0 goals, 2 assists, 2 points). Edge: Smyth.

Association with city:

I'm not even sure I need to break this down. Linden played 16 seasons with Vancouver, had his number retired, was heavily involved in many B.C. charities such BC Children's Hospital, Canuck Place, and his own Trevor Linden Foundation and was named to the Order of British Columbia. He even ran in the 2010 Olympic torch relay (source). On the ice, he's best known for leading the Canucks on their 1994 Stanley Cup run, his captaincy from 1991-1997, putting Jeff Norton through the glass, and really looking like Bradley Cooper.

Smyth was involved in the Edmonton community, donated time to charity but is certainly most associated with his on-ice play. He was never captain, served as assistant captain and captained Canada's World Championship teams from 2001-2005. Captain captain captain. He created his own version of the Gretzky office in front of the net and for a time was among the league's best at tipping pucks and creating screens. The peak of Edmonton career, much like Linden's, was in his team's 2006 Stanley Cup run. In game 3 against San Jose, Chris Pronger's clearing attempt hit Smyth in the mouth, knocking out several teeth and leaving blood everywhere. Smyth returned and set up Shawn Horcoff's double-overtime goal, paving the way for four straight victories in that series. A fan favorite, he cried when traded and almost cost Kevin Lowe his job (I have to find the source on that, it was a long story by David Staples who writes for the Edmonton Journal and has a great Oiler blog, The Cult of Hockey) and was "famous" for that "hairstyle." Edge: Linden, and it's not really close.

So that means we need some sort of tiebreaker, some sort of artificial measurement to break the deadlock. Suggestions...?

Why Your Team Won't Win the Stanley Cup

2010-03-24T23:07:00.004-06:00

Calgary's four points behind eighth placed Detroit, Atlanta's three points behind Boston (the Rangers are five back after losing to Bahston over the weekend - sorry Reader Matt, theyz wicked retahds in New Yawk!) so I'm calling the playoff teams set. Sure, the order will change in the next two weeks, but that won't matter to wizended scribes like myself since we already know why Your Team Won't Win the... well, you already know what I'm doing here.

A shoutout to the Oilers, and this might be the first one of the season. Despite the fact that if the NHL were like the English Premiership, they'd long ago have been relegated to the kind of rec leagues that decree at least two women per team, they recently managed something special. In one week, the Oilers managed irreparable damage to the playoffs hopes of the Detroit Red Wings, the San Jose Sharks and the Vancouver Canucks. Oh, not because they won't still make the playoffs, but because after losing to Edmonton they can't possibly have any Hope left. Sorry to the fans of all those teams, or in the case of Vancouver, "fans," but instead of playoff hockey you'll have to settle for the beach (San Jose), moving your family, drugs and guns to a different abandoned mansion (Detroit), or, wait, nevermind, Canuck fans don't know when the playoffs start. They do know when they end though. Right after the first round!

There are other teams who won't win the Stanley Cup this year though, in fact, there's 13 other teams with serious flaws that just can't be overcome. Without pausing to check my math or spellyng, here they are..

Western Conference:

1. Chicago - Will give Cristobal Huet most of the playing time. This would be fine if anybody knew where he was; in fact, NHL shooters haven't seen evidence of him all year.
2. San Jose - Lost to Edmonton. Strike one. The score was 5-1. Strike two. Prior to Game 1, assistant coach Trent Yawney will open the locker room door, just to let a little air in. The force of the breeze shatters the team's confidence. Strike three, you're out.
3. Vancouver - Lost to Edmonton. Also, at some point in the first round, Southern inbred hick goaltender "Bobby Lou" will let in a goal. Earthquake is caused as entire city jumps off bandwagon, city sinks into the ocean and is destroyed. Post-script: rest of provinces' Canuck fans insist the team will be better next year.
4. Phoenix - Player spirit is crushed when they look into the stands to find the entire crowd was only able to spell GO COYO on their bare chests.
5. Los Angeles - Dean Lombardi decides to play it safe, not deviate from their youth movement, and tank the first round to ensure a better draft pick. Promises fans the future will be bright.
6. Colorado - Suspended from play until team due to inability to field a full NHL roster. Team objects that it indeed has a full compliment of players, it's just that no fan or league official can name any other than Paul Statsny. League concedes that it can name some AHL players, like Darcy Tucker, but will still uphold its original ruling.
7. Nashville - League terrified of a Stanley Cup celebration where XXX appears on the Cup in magic marker and a suspiciously powerful clear liquid is being served. League rigs the first round so that Nashville plays a dominant team with an invincible lineup. Bettman is told too late that the Harlem Globetrotters don't play hockey and there's no time to find a replacement for San Jose.
8. Detroit - Will keep winning until a first-round matchup with Vancouver is achieved. Early in game one Nicklas Lidstrom will take an innocent shot from centre. Seconds later, inexplicably, the city sinks into the ocean and is destroyed.

Eastern Conference

1. Washington - After a disappointing playoff exit, team explains that it just find any rhythm. Just when they thought they had it, the team's best player would start beating the drums, screaming and shouting incoherently, and just generally driving the rest of the Electric Mayhem crazy.
2. Pittsburgh - It's Game four of the Stanley Cup Finals, Pittsburgh is leading 3-0 in the third and a second straight championship is virtually assured. God then calls back His Only Son, sends him to his room and lectures him for not "fitting in down there." Team falls into confusion and disarray as message is lost.
3. Buffalo - You know why. There's still a lot of empty pages in the NHL rule book they can fill in at a moment's notice.
4. New Jersey - NHL is not against seeing the Stanley Cup brought to Russia, but is very unwilling to having Ilya Kovalchuk keep it as a souvenir of his wacky adventures in North America.
5. Ottawa - Maple Leafs have already proven they have the power to make entire hockey teams in Ontario cease to exist. This will be much easier. Also, goaltending issues.
6. Montreal - An exciting year in Montreal as team is featured in a TLC reality series "Little People, Big Trophy." Crew unfortunately runs out of tape, NHL assume that all TV plays by NBC's rules, audience gets to watch the 2010 Preakness instead.
7. Philadelphia - Not enough scoring up front. Team addresses weakness in the off-season by acquiring Joffrey Lupul, a defensive prospect and some draft picks in exchange for some old tall defenseman.
8. Boston - Cannot win games 0-0 despite pressure on the league to go to a European Champions League-style aggregate scoring system. Injuries were also a factor as David Kreiji and Patrice Bergeron are injured on controversial hits. Some say the hits were legal, others suggest that fans in the second deck leaving with player heads as souvenirs proves the need for a head shot rule.

The Story of the Oilers Since The Pronger Trade (Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love the Draft Lottery)

2010-03-23T20:42:00.005-06:00

It's a big year in Edmonton, not because of anything on the ice of course, but because of the combination of things that could go right for the Oilers this summer and next season. Fans are on board for a full-rebuild, we'll have either the first or second overall draft pick so either Taylor Hall or Tyler Seguin, World Junior hero Jordan Eberle will get every shot at being an Oiler next year, and depending on roster space, cap room and talent levels, we might see last year's 10th overall draft pick Magnus Paajarvi-Svensson, college star Jeff Petry, Sweden's best 2010 World Junior Anton Lander, as well as the continuing development of Taylor Chorney, Theo Peckham, and Johan Motin. The idea of a dynamic young core of stars is pretty tantalizing here, and management is sounding like they're fully committed to assembling one. We've seen what a well-organized talent development can really do, that's why Edmonton, maybe more than any other city, understands the importance not just of superstar talent, but that it be homegrown.

Before the lockout, Kevin Lowe and Craig MacTavish were on record, after losing yet again to the Dallas Stars in 2003 (ah, the Marc-Andre Bergeron hipchec k...), as saying that you couldn't hope for too much in the NHL absent a true star. The first move after the lockout? Trading away useful pieces and prospects that had made up the struggling, small-market Oiler identity (Eric Brewer, Jeff Woywitka, Doug Lynch and Mike York) for big names envisioned to make up the New World Order Oilers (Chris Pronger, Mike Peca). That year, Oiler fans saw what a combination of true stars, breakout youngsters and role players could accomplish (along with one of the greatest Trade Deadline Day acquisitions ever, Dwayne Roloson. I'll justify that in a later post) as the team went as far as possible without ultimate glory. It was the first time arguably since 1991 (with a case to be made for the Curtis Joseph years of 1997-1998), that fans and management saw an Oiler team with serious talent and both were seduced by the new NHL where stars could be theirs again.

In the years following the debilitating Pronger trade and departures of Mike Peca, Jaroslav Spacek and Sergei Samsonov, Kevin Lowe tried and failed to duplicate his golden touch of 2006. He attempted to acquire (if you believe the rumours) Tomas Kaberle (in the Pronger trade sweepstakes), Zdeno Chara, Michael Nylander, Marian Hossa, Jaromir Jagr and most infamously, Dany Heatley. That same superstar-first dogma did bring in Sheldon Souray, Lubomir Vishnovsky and Eric Cole but the team hasn't made the playoffs since with an ever-increasing player payroll. This year's team, guaranteed to finish last in the NHL, has all the requirements for a complete demolishing. It wasn't easy putting together this mess of failing players and worse contracts, but it makes a little more sense when looking at each step.

None of Souray, Vishnovsky or Cole were in the same class as Pronger, Chara, Hossa or Heatley but the way they were acquired is indicative of management's focus on older, more expensive and more established players at the expense of youth and cap space. In 2007, Lowe made a huge offer sheet to Thomas Vanek which was matched by Buffalo, did the same with Dustin Penner and signed him to a 5 year, $21.25 million contract, then finally signed Souray for 5 years at $27 million. Penner was certainly a young player but his RFA signing, which famously cost the team its first, second and third round draft picks, forced the team into a win-now mentality. If Anaheim had matched instead of passing, Lowe might have kept trying other RFA offer sheets but it's more likely he would have given up, settled for a rebuild instead, and passed on Souray entirely. After all, you can only drive up the RFA salary base so many times in one off-season. Presumably, Lowe had intentions of attending GM meetings without wearing a black mask with a question mark on it. Penner would have an average year, Souray tantalized early but only played 26 games after a shoulder injury, and the Oilers would miss the playoffs despite a late run fueled by a crop of rookies. More on that later.

On the heals of an unexpected playoff push, the summer of 2008 saw more big swings and bold moves. Hossa and Jagr were sought and missed out on while Cole and Vishnovksy did come to Edmonton in trades. Vishnovsky was acquired at the beginning of a 5 year, $28 million contract for Jarret Stoll and Matt Greene, two players drafted and developed internally. Vishnovsky was having a strong season with 31 points in 50 games before, yes, injuring his shoulder and missing the rest of the season. Losing Stoll and Greene hurt the Oiler penalty kill, it was 5th in the NHL at 84.7% at the end of 2008 and would plummet to 27th (77.5%) by the end of 2009. There were obvious similarities between the Souray and Vishnovsky acquisitions: they were both expensive, injury plagued, effective when healthy, and both their signings contributed to weaknesses in other areas. Penner and Souray are linked in my mind; that combined cap hit of $9.65 million certainly stifled any thoughts of resigning effective role players like Curtis Glencross and Jan Hejda, while also putting pressure on signing today's RFA's Sam Gagner, Andrew Cogliano and Gilbert Brule. Vishnovsky's salary and the loss of Stoll and Greene hurt the Oiler cap situation, penalty kill and seemed to weaken the leadership core and physical play. The 2008-2009 Oilers often drove fans and media crazy with many subpar efforts and while Vishnovsky wasn't a specific target of criticism, losing Stoll, the team leader in hits the year before and Greene, a big, stay-at-home defenseman, certainly cut into the team's physical intensity.

The Cole story goes back further and serves as a good example of Oiler management trying to retool and rebuild on the fly. Chris Pronger was traded for Joffrey Lupul, Ladislav Smid, a first round pick in 2007 (Riley Nash) a conditional first round pick (Jordan Eberle) activated when Anaheim made the Finals in 2007, and a second round pick (long story, but it was shuffled around into the Marc-Andre Bergeron/Denis Grebeshkov trade). Lupul was a well-regarded sniper and along with Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Dustin Penner represented the future of the Ducks. He was a restricted free agent when acquired and quickly signed a three year, $6.935 million contract. A reasonable trade on paper for Edmonton, getting a young shooter to pair with Horcoff and Hemsky on the top line, plus one of the best young defensive prospects not in the NHL, and three picks for a player at his absolute peak trade value. This was a true rebuild trade but even so, the Oilers expected to be a strong team in 2006-2007, one that even had aspirations for a 300 goal season (adding up what their assembled roster had scored the previous season). Instead they struggled, ended up trading Ryan Smyth for Robert Nilsson, Ryan O'Marra and a first round pick (Alex Plante), and would eventually plummet in the standings. The Pronger and Smyth trades signaled that it was time to forget the glory of 2006, clear salary, and focus on youth. The Oilers went into the 2007-2008 with recent 6th overall draft pick Sam Gagner, college draft pick Andrew Cogliano, Robert Nilssen, Tom Gilbert and Denis Grebeshkov. They had positioned themselves well for the future in one set of moves, except that a different set would soon be running parallel.

Instead of being content with a true youth movement though, Kevin Lowe got impatient. He aggressively tried to supplement their young core with the expensive signing, in dollars and draft picks, of Dustin Penner and attempted signing of fellow RFA Thomas Vanek. Signing Penner and losing their draft picks meant, obviously, that they had to be good right away lest Anaheim draft a Stamkos, Doughty or Bogosian the following off-season. The Penner signing, therefore, necessitated the Souray signing and would lead to the game of musical chairs to follow as management fumbled around in the dark looking for the elusive formula. That same off-season they gave up on Lupul after his disappointing 28 points and traded him, along with Jason Smith for, principally, Joni Pitkanen. Pitkanen was younger than Smith and gave the Oilers a slightly bigger but far less physical puck-mover who could run the powerplay. Like the Vishnovsky trade to come, they sacrificed grit and intensity for pure skill. Pitkanen played 63 games, had 26 points, was ineffective physically and was traded the following off-season for Eric Cole. Cole's season started terribly and was eventually traded at the deadline for Patrick O'Sullivan, a once well-regarded prospect and current owner of the worst plus/minus in the NHL. Today, it all amounts to Pronger and Jason Smith for Patrick O'Sullivan, Ladislav Smid, Riley Nash and Jordan Eberle (and if you like, you can add the Marc-Andre Bergeron for Denis Grebeshkov component).

The path of Eric Cole to and from the Oilers shows how management was all over the map with their short and long-term planning. The trades in particular made sense on their own and were mostly justifiable, they just never worked out on the ice. Jason Smith was getting older, Lupul crumbled in his hometown and they didn't have any defense who could skate and pass the puck out of their zone, so Pitkonen was a likely target. When his defensive lapses, lack of intensity and Tom Gilbert's emergence made him expendable, he was traded for rock-solid power forward Eric Cole. Cole was struggling and was a UFA so he was traded for O'Sullivan, a young shooter under contract. It all made sense. Management was trying new things, they made trades to address their weaknesses, and any fan or columnist could instantly recognize why each move was made.

The problem was that the team was constantly making trades and personnel decisions that ran parallel to each other. In the summer of 2007, going into a year where they'd start with four rookies (Gagner, Cogliano, Gilbert and Nilsson) in the lineup, they signed Souray and Penner, they pursued Vanek in a deal that would have cost them five consecutive first round draft picks and over $50 million, and were spurned by Michael Nylander, an aging center whose stats were grossly inflated playing with Jaromir Jagr in New York. These are signings a team makes when the young core has some legitimate experience, in other words completely unlike the Oilers going into 2007-2008. With ice time committed to developing so many rookies they should certainly have avoided any RFA offer sheets lest the team fail on the ice. If the rookies fail, a lottery pick stands as a pretty satisfying consolation prize. If they succeed, management can then add veteran talent later when they know what holes need filling.

The summer of 2008 saw more of the same big-money moves and ignored the necessary small steps of rebuilding. They made the Vishnovsky trade, pursued Marian Hossa with a rumoured 9 year, $90 million contract, re-signed Shawn Horcoff to six years and $33 million in a deal that was fairly popular then but since, well, not so much. All this win-now mentality was running contradictory to the product on the ice; in 2007-2008 it was rookies Gagner, Cogliano, Nilsson, Gilbert, Grebeshkov, free-agent Mathieu Garon and the effective checking line of Kyle Brodziak, Curtis Glencross and Zack Stortini who overachieved and lead the late-season charge for a playoff spot. This all occured when the expensive veteran core, made up of Stoll, Moreau, Horcoff, Torres and Souray, had succumbed to injury and the season considered lost. After an inspiring playoff push it seemed like a great time to go for broke; the Oilers were exciting to watch again and looked to be on the rise. Kevin Lowe thought they were the Chicago Blackhawks and just needed the finishing touches. In reality they just got lucky; the rookies saved the team from watching the Ducks draft a franchise cornerstone and only mitigated the cost of signing Penner. Instead of seeing this, Lowe (and most of the media and fans, including me) dramatically overvalued the Oiler assets, raised instead of tempered expectations, ignored the contributions of young, cheap and soon departed players like Glencross (Oiler stats: 26 games, 9 goals, 13 points. That's 28 goals in 82 games) and Matt Greene and failed to realize the most important lesson: rookies playing freely with no expectations play differently than sophmores in a pressure city on a team predicted by many to win the Northwest division. Going for broke left them as just that.

All this means is that the rebuild occurring now, instead of the 2007 and 2008 off-seasons, is happening under a much more difficult set of circumstances. While selling a complete tear-down so quickly removed from a Finals appearance would not have been popular, they would have been operating under much easier circumstances. First, the NHL salary cap increased in 2007 and 2008 by approximately $6 million each year, meaning any big contracts could have been traded away much more easily. Not that they had many, following the Pronger trade the highest paid Oiler was Ales Hemsky at $4.22 million after re-signing in 2006. Compare that to today. Horcoff, Souray, Nilsson, O'Sullivan and Khabibulin all have contracts considered immovable, especially in an era where the salary cap has been stagnant for the last two years and teams have been extremely guarded with their draft picks. Three years ago they might've got a first round pick and a prospect for Lubomir Vishnovsky. Instead, they had to settle for merely cap savings of just over $1 million on Ryan Whitney's contract of the same length. Of course, nobody could see such a dramatic economic recession coming, but the result was that the Oilers ended up with a long list of long term contracts, no cap space, at the worst time. In retrospect it seems pretty obvious, management totally overestimated the quality of their team, swung for the fences when they should've been conservative, grown their young talent, accumulated draft picks, and planned for the future. It's a disaster, it'll take time to fix and the fans are frustrated with such obvious miscalculations.

It's important to remember the context to understand why Oiler management made so many bold moves and tried for so many more. Suddenly, following the lockout and fifteen years of mediocrity, the Oilers were Haves again. After so many years of low expectations and short ends of the trading stick the team had the means, the cap system and the soaring Canadian dollar to return to the NHL's elite. Stars would come back to Edmonton, the playoffs were no longer an endless gauntlet of big-money American franchises and the Oilers would be a feared calendar date once again. Once the city had that again it was hard to let it go, impossible really, as fans and local media handled the Pronger trade with the highest orders of denial, insisting that since Carolina had won a Cup with a no-name defense, so could Edmonton. After all, there was still playoff hero Dwayne Roloson, our own Dominik Hasek, complete with the flopping and histrionics, a five-forward powerplay begging to be unleashed by Craig MacTavish and newly re-signed core of playoff cogs ready for another run. When it began to crumble away, Lowe did everything he could to quickly put it back together but his magic was gone. Nothing worked, injuries broke the team in 2007-2008, again this year, and all the big signings and trades may have had their individual merits but one can't argue with four straight post-season absences. All the mistakes look obvious now but, given the heady days of 2006 and a topsy-turvy world where a team from Edmonton could make the Stanley Cup Finals, it was probably inevitable.

Squeak

2010-03-18T22:49:00.003-06:00

Are you enjoying the squeakity-squeak? It's Final Four time! It's that glorious time of year where Canadians from coast to coast put together something called "brackets," throw themselves into a sport they deliberately ignore the other blessed 11 months of the year, and jump and down when St. Mary's beats Villanova. Final Four BABY!!!

I'm not a fan of American college sports, but I see the appeal. My favorite tournament of any year is the World Junior Hockey tournament which, if the IIHF knew their ass from a hat, will be held in Canada four times a month. The appeal of the World Juniors is pretty similar to college sports, or the Olympics for that matter. Sports fans have the ability to know whatever they have time to expose themselves to. The Great Canadian Myth is dead; there are no more hockey players leaving frozen ponds to be discovered on Opening Night, no Gordie Howes signing with the Red Wings for a jacket or Bobby Orr signing for a new stucco job on his parents' house. Canadians know The Next Big Thing before they're even drafted into the OHL (Crosby, Tavares), Lebron James' high school basketball games were on Pay Per View, Stephen Strasburg was tabbed for the MLB Hall of Fame while still in high school. There aren't a lot of surprises left, and considering Wayne Gretzky had an agent when he was 13, this isn't a new development.

It's a matter of semantics I suppose, the whole idea of "discovering" an athlete. When Gretzky said that Crosby might be someone who could break some of his records, well, I guess that's when many people "discovered" Crosby. Or maybe it was seeing his first big YouTube moment, the goal where he picked up the puck from behind the net, lifted it up, and wrapped it around into the top corner. Knowing that Lebron James would probably be the NBA's next Michael Jordan years before he was draft-eligible was great marketing; it certainly built up anticipation for that draft, revitalized the Cleveland Cavaliers' national and international merchandise sales, TV ratings were up and perhaps, though this being the NBA it isn't really documented anywhere, the play of the team itself. In Canada, we can be a little fragile so it's exciting to know that Canada can still deliver our own heroes even while our game was being dragged through the American swamps, deserts and airplane hubs. Even if we're losing World Championships (we were), World Juniors (we weren't), Stanley Cups to teams with SWEDISH captains (we did, but his English is better than Don Cher... hmm, bad example), Canadians could sleep comfortably knowing that while the future might not see the NHL permanently filled will good Canadian boys, we could still churn out the occasional super-prodigy. The same future would also guarantee that they wouldn't catch us off guard either.

So we love "discovering" new athletes, that's obvious, but what's the difference between discovering Sidney Crosby at 14 and skeleton racer Jon Montgomery in Vancouver? It's all about timing, isn't it? Each day I'd wake up during the Olympics, see who was competing in what, realize I didn't know any of those names and ask friends and co-workers "Are we any good at this?" "I don't know" they'd say, and you'd watch the event and find out. It's the same way with the World Juniors or college sports; we discover these athletes right as they're in the heat of battle. We don't have years to get to know them, form opinions, argue over their value, find flaws, and de-mythologize them. They truly do come out of nowhere, like hockey superstars used to, but then often disappear just as quickly. Think of all the Olympic athletes who's name you recognize but receded into the obscurity in which their sport spends most of its time. Remember Clark McArthur, Anthony Stewart, or Matt Halischuk? Great times. What about Mateen Cleaves? I don't know much about NCAA basketball, but I can't hear the word "floor general" without thinking about him because that's ALL they called him during his Michigan days. The sudden fame of these kinds of athletes, which is just as suddenly gone, give fans the idyllic myths that we instill on our sporting experiences. There's no scandals, no unrepaid hype, no contract disputes and no steroid accusations. In other words, they're gone before they spoil.

I'm not saying that we don't get steroid scandals and other controversies in these kinds of events, that would be silly, I'm just saying that because each World Juniors or NCAA event usually starts on a fresh note, isn't ongoing over several years and features a lot of unknown athletes there's a sense of new beginning. Professional sports don't really end, the offseason can be just as interesting as the regular season and certainly as influential. There's free agents, trades, drafts, rumours, and sometimes international tournaments to track. It's a lot of work being a sports fan, we have to know players, stats, teams, trade and free agent history, draft successes and failures and now we need to be experts on collective bargaining. These kinds of tournaments don't require us to know anything, we just show up, let the analysts spin human interest stories about sick siblings, supportive parents and 5 am wakeup calls. We don't know any better to be cynical, we can't counter the talking heads with mounds of internet data and common sense, so we're resigned to sitting on the couch and enjoying ourselves.

"Boy, it's bad out there." "HOW BAD IS IT???"

2010-03-16T22:53:00.003-06:00

Pretty bad. At least it's bad NOW, but all that could change with a win tonight in Minnesota for the first time in almost three years!*

I wanted to write this at the end of the year, for obvious reasons, but we'll take that drive today if it suits ye. This is a cap system, right? Parity? Right? No, in fact. This team isn't last because of some goal posts and bad calls. They're in last place (by nine points, entering tonight's action with both Edmonton and Toronto playing) like a couple of white people in Mexico: All-inclusively.

Team stats!

-Last in the NHL in goals against

-Second last in goals for

-Last in the NHL in five on five goals for/against ratio (0.75, meaning for every 1.0 goals scored on them they respond with 0.75 goals. That is not enough goals folks)

-They have the most regulation losses in the NHL with 41. Toronto is next with 34.

-They have a .536 winning percentage when scoring first, that's third worst.

-They have a .146 winning percentage when scored upon first. Yes, that's last.

-Their winning percentage when outshooting their opponent is .227. Last

-Their winning percentage when being outshot is, um, .333. Second last. Things are looking up!

-Oh, and their faceoff percentage is 46.8. That is... drum roll... last.

Individual stats!

-They do not have a player in the top 40 in NHL scoring. Their leading scorer, Dustin Penner, is 49th with 53 points. Next is Sam Gagner, 116th, with 39 points.

-They have one 20 goal scorer.

-Of the 10 worst plus/minus players in the NHL, four play for the Oilers: Sheldon Souray (9th worst), Robert Nilssen (6th), Shawn Horcoff (2nd), Patrick O'Sullivan (1st). 4th worst is Steve Staios, who Calgary recently acquired for defensive depth.

-The Oilers top 3 centers, Gagner, Putolny, and Horcoff are 69th, 74th and 75th in faceoff win percentage.

Factoids!

-Of the 69 games they've played, they've lost 41 games. Of those 41 games, 22 were by 2 or more goals and 14 by 3 or more.

-They've played 7 games where they've allowed over 40 shots on goal. Actually, that doesn't sound very bad.
-They have the worst goal differential in the league. By TWENTY goals.

Yeah. A rough year.

*They did not, for those keeping score at home. Why are you doing that anyways? It's being done FOR you by big computers!

There is writing now!

2010-03-15T22:41:00.005-06:00

This was a hockey blog once. In the heady days of this site words were plentiful, jokes abundant, laughs occasional, and comments were, well, available. Then, without any warning, the posting stopped. Nobody knows why it stopped, who was responsible for all those opinions drying up, and nobody knows when it will start again. Except that last part, because we DO know when it's starting again! Today!

It's not that I stopped having sports opinions. It's not that both real people and people on the internet stopped being stupid. It isn't that "important people" started coming up with progressive ideas instead of this. It's certainly not that journalists stopped being either hilarious by accident or simply because time has passed them by, and that makes old people funny. More awesome websites indeed kept cropping up that I should've been linking to a long time ago. Writing is like rolling a snow-packed midget down a ski hill: the bigger the hill, the bigger the snowball. It's all about momentum, and unlike sports where momentum is not a Thing or a Reason for Similar Things Happening (I'll never believe in momentum again, after Oilers-Hurricanes Game 6), you need to keep that momentum going or your creativity will dry up like a... umm, how lowbrow did this blog used to be? Not very you say? Okay, creativity will dry up like freshly spat-out bubble gum in the Enchanted But Somewhat Arid Candyland Forest. I will try to gather some momentum today so that your palate is, well, not satisfied exactly, but presented with a menu.

Today's date, March 15th (because you are too riveted to these words to adjust your eyes for even a SECOND), sees the Canadian sports fan with a lot to think about. Matt Cooke on Marc Savard, potentially a new rule on headshots next year (you can't just change rules in the middle of the year! What is this, the NHL (Sean Avery Rule Link)? No, it is not), the Oilers' ongoing attempts to dig for black gold at the very depths of the NHL standings (the luscious crude in question: Taylor Hall. Not because he curses too much or anything, it's just a metaphor for a light at the end of the tunnel... even though oil is black and not light... except... fuck it, jokes in parentheses don't count anyway, why try to save them), to the rest of the sports world: Andre Agassi vs Pete Sampras vs Dignity, MLB spring training (will newly acquired Brenden Morrow and Kyle Drabek smartly take out huge insurance policies on their Tommy John's?) and a pivotal no-cap year in the NFL which will not be looked at here.

But none of that is as interesting as a Live Blog of the epic Oilers-Blue Jackets Game on Sportsnet West! Or not "live," per se, because I won't be time-stamping and there's only five minutes left in the third period. Devan Dubnyk is doing is best Jeff Deslaurier impression tonight; a brilliant pad save followed up with two tough deflections that would have been tough for any goalie to stop, except that he deflected them both with his own glove. It is currently 4-3, Aaron Johnson has a goal and an assist to "lead" the team. Theo Peckam and Jarred Boll had a fight earlier that cost Peckham some light bruising around the facial area and Boll some back-of-head bruising which GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL GOAL GOAL GOAL!!! Sorry to interrupt, Columbus scores the empty netter and the game will end at 5-3.

Where was I? Oh right. Jarred Boll got bodyslammed at the end of the fight and while it was cute to see the linesman cradle Boll's head like an American Girl doll, it's sure to be featured on Sportsnet, TSN and in every column who's writer is looking to explain why Things Are Worse Than They Used To Be. The Oilers' loss, however, guarantees another good night's sleep for the Oiler "faithful". Some folks in E-town were starting to get a little antsy when their beloved Oil managed to win two games in a row, though the recent return to crapitude with four straight losses, including a clutch performance in the big four-pointer against the Leafs on prime time Hockey Night in Canada (an Oiler loss AND no Mark Lee? Good times!) ensures that Taylor Hall (or Seguin, but really Hall) will continue his unabated march into the hornet's nest next year. You'd better like pressure, young squire. You know the last number one pick who went to a Canadian team? Bryan Berard, 1995, to Ottawa. Before that, yep, Alexander Daigle in 1993. It's funny is how Ottawa gained a reputation of building through the draft in the 1990's, and deservedly so (Redden, Alfredsson, Havlat, Spezza) but their two number one picks were a) traded and b) unfortunately not traded for the number two overall pick. I'd ask if you remember who that was, but you don't have to remember anything anymore because of The Internet. It was Chris Pronger. And yes, I know you remembered that.

On to TSN, who's broadcasting Calgary vs Detroit. Holmstrom goes down in the corner, the play goes up the ice and is then blown dead. Holmstrom is getting up slowly and McGuire says that Holmstrom's in a heap of trouble. This is excellent analysis because it goes against the grain, ignores the obvious, challenges our assumptions about God and the Universe because Holmstrom is smiling at the ref and looks just fine. Pierre then admits he was wrong, which also challenges our assumptions about God and the Universe.

Intermission. Duthie voiceovers the clip of Jarred Boll getting slammed by Peckham and yes, asks the question "Is it time for a rule change?" Yes. No. I don't know. But the analysts do! Dreger: "Player safety [matters]. The league would love to push a [rule change] forward. It [could] be enforced." He does not know, I guess. Mackenzie: "Paul Kelley wanted to change things! [And now he's GONE FOR GOOD]" (in parentheses because while he didn't SAY that, it's basically what he meant. Basically. Sort of.) Clip of a junior player delivering a headshot to another junior player, a hit that will be a penalty in the NHL next year. Barnaby admits that his mind has likely changed on the matter, that headshots need to be addressed. Milbury, offscreen from his cave, argues with Barnaby and calls him a nancyboy while dragging Hedger off by her hair. Jarred Boll is forgotten, the matter is unresolved, and viewers are left to believe their beloved game is in terrible shape and no solutions exist.

But wait! From the Desk of Dreger comes exciting news! A new rule with some clear(ish) language about what is a legal or illegal hit! Great news! Will there be anything specific in there about what will constitute supplementary discipline and what the range of punishments will be? What will the difference be between a major and a minor penalty? Hello?

Well that was too much for my first day back. Going to go ice those creamy hamstrings and report back again soon. This time for sure. Maybe. Sort of.

Blog Days of Summer

2008-09-04T07:51:00.002-06:00

So we’re in the dog days of sports right now, the Jays are well out of the race after coming up short in a pretty good series against Boston. Now it’s all about whether AJ Burnett and Roy Halladay can each win 20 games. They will not, by the way, in case you were still wondering. Burnett shouldn’t even be at 16 with a 4.46 ERA and while Halladay has won his last four decisions, he might start wearing out with nothing to really play for. Oh, and because Cliff Lee has won 20 games not only is he the Cy Young winner but should also win the MVP, in both leagues, as well as the MacArthur Genius grant and a Nobel prize. I like pitcher wins too, I want both Burnett and Halladay to win 20 but it’s like an Academy Award: just as an actor’s performance in a movie is the same whether they win an award or not, so is a pitcher’s performance the same whether their team scores 10 runs or 2.

It’s kind of hard to be really optimistic about this team going into next year. Going into this season, we knew their bullpen and starting rotation would range from very good to excellent. It was. We knew their defence would be excellent and it also was. The question mark was about the offense; on paper it should have been pretty good but it was all based on the assumption they’d be healthy and play to their career numbers. Neither happened as Wells played very well when healthy but missed a lot of time with wrist and knee problems. Overbay and Rios both struggled; Overbay just hasn’t found his 2006 form where he hit .312 with 22 homeruns and 92 RBI’s while Rios’s power declined (on pace for just 12 HRs after 22 last year) and lack of patience (just a .339 on-base percentage) continued. Rolen was the big question mark because of a inability to stay healthy over the last few years, and the question was answered as he’ll likely only play 110 games and is on pace for 9 HRs. Frank Thomas was released early this year, Reed Johnson was released in the offseason to make way for Shannon Stewart, who was injured, ineffective, and then released as well. Matt Stairs and David Eckstein were just traded…man, that’s a LOT of offensive problems!

What do they do next year? The biggest need is at DH and maybe shortstop, depending on who the DH is. If they get Jason Giambi, Adam Dunn or Mark Texiera (none of that will happen, to be clear), then Scutaro and McDonald can platoon at short because you can’t sacrifice too much defence with such a groundball-heavy pitching staff. Then again, this team could probably use all the offense they can find. Hmm. They will get a full season of Adam Lind, and maybe Travis Snider, either of which can DH. After that though, the real promise of this team going into next season isn’t offensively, it’s pitching. Scott Downs has been incredible this season, posting a 1.25 ERA in 64.2 inning (going into tonight), Brandon League’s velocity is back around 98 mph, Jesse Carlson has been an excellent lefty specialist (1.99 ERA now!), and they’ll get Casey Jansen and Jeremy Accardo back for next year. BJ Ryan has made things interesting but has still converted 25 of 28 save opportunities. For the starters, Dustin McGowan and Shawn Marcum will be healthy, David Purcey has flashed some top-notch stuff (well, mostly that one start against Seattle, 8 IP, no walks, 11 K’s on 94 pitches. Seattle absolutely sucks though). Burnett will likely be gone but that money saved could go into getting a big DH bat, if there’s one out there. Offensively, that’s probably the best reason to optimistic going into next year since Rolen, clearly, isn’t going to ever be the player he was three years ago. The pitching and defense are just SO good, it makes the offensive display even more tragic this year since this should have been a playoff team. Another goal I probably won't keep is to work out what this team's winning percentage would have been with a league-average offence at the end of the year. That'll be depressing, so I won't keep it.

Pound for Pound

2008-08-19T21:06:00.002-06:00

No, not Richard. I'm talking about Canadians and our inability to keep any sort of perspective on our medal count at the Beijing Olympics. It was a long while before we won our first medal, none until Day 8 when we won three, but since then the results have come in pretty fast. As of this post we have thirteen medals, well short of the overall medal leader U.S. (79) and gold medal leader China (43). We're seventeenth overall and this has caused, at least to a lot of people I've talked to in person, a lot of anxiety. "Yeah, but look how many more the U.S. and China have. Our athletes are choking/not funded enough while our government doesn't fund them enough/doesn't fund them properly." Bitch bitch bitch. Honestly. We're a pretty small country, remember? Our population is 1/50 of China and 1/10th of the U.S. and we have around 1/6th of the medals those countries have. We're pretty lucky that we're even able to COMPETE in all the events, let alone win some, given how bloody cold it is here. Have some pride Canadians! Pound-for-pound we're pretty damn good!

But how good, exactly? I was going to let it go, assuming we've done better than most other countries with maximizing our resources, but now I'm curious as to where we stand in terms of medals per population ratio. There's other ways to determine medal efficiency of course, you could look at funding per medal or facility square footage but I don't have those numbers. Looking at population is still a good measuring stick; it basically tells us how much success a given country can produce with the resources they have. It also ignores a countries' spending methodology and simply looks at results, and after we've determined who's done the best with what they have that you'd go and look at how they've allocated their resources. I'll look at the top twenty countries in the current medal standings, which will of course change but I'm interested in this NOW, not in a week, so we're rolling ahead. Also, the medal rankings are done by the number of gold medals, not total medals won, so I just went with that list. I didn't realize that until after I'd done all the copying and pasting, but it's still the official rankings so whatever. The population numbers come from Wikipedia, which uses the most recent census figures.

Country	Medals	Population	Population per one medal
Jamaica	5	2804332	560866.40
Australia	35	21370000	610571.43
Netherlands	13	16408557	1262196.69
Slovakia	4	5379455	1344863.75
Great Britain	33	60587300	1835978.79
South Korea	24	49044790	2043532.92
Czech Republic	5	10403136	2080627.20
France	29	64473140	2223211.72
Canada	13	33351000	2565461.54
Ukraine	17	46372700	2727805.88
Romania	8	22246862	2780857.75
Germany	28	82217800	2936350.00
Italy	19	59619290	3137857.37
Russia	42	142008838	3381162.81
United States	79	304909000	3859607.59
Kenya	8	34707817	4338477.13
Poland	8	38116000	4764500.00
Spain	9	45200737	5022304.11
Japan	22	127433494	5792431.55
China	76	1321851888	17392788.00

China, not surprisingly, comes in a distant last with 1 medal per 17,392,788 people and a big KUDOS to Jamaica for abstaining from their other interests to lead the way, just ahead of the always impressive Australia. Canada finishes in a rather pedestrian 10th place, meaning that relative to the other top 20 countries in the medal standings, we couldn't be more average. So, in keeping with the stream-of-conscious approach to this entry, I've proven myself pretty wrong but won't re-write the introductory paragraph. Still, compared to the two top countries, China and the U.S., we're pretty darn efficient. Compared to some of our little brethren though, we've got some efficientizing to do and so perhaps some of the national complaining has merit.

But it's still pretty damn cold here, so there.

Cy Young

2008-08-13T00:20:00.002-06:00

The important thing to remember about keeping a blog is to post something on a fairly regular basis. Not too regular though, then people won't check in all the time. Psych studies show that conditioned responses are strongest when the subject is rewarded in random intervals, and while they might take a little longer to develop, those associations will last a lot longer than if the subject were rewarded each time. For example, if you checked my blog every two days and there was always a new entry, your behavioral pattern would change pretty quickly. You'd immediately see the benefit in visiting the site and would do so on a regular basis. However, if I stopped posting anything and you kept visiting, you'd stop visiting pretty quickly since you'd realize there was no reward. With rewards coming on a regular basis the subject learns quickly but then drops off just as quickly. Yet if you visited every two days and I was posting on a random basis, where sometimes you'd find nothing and other times find two or three new postings, you might take a little longer to develop a long-term habit but would also take longer to stop visiting entirely if no new postings were coming.

Of course, this all means little when I haven't written anything at all, regularly or randomly, in almost two weeks. But things have been busy, so whatever.

More picking on Jays announcers, but this time because they're right and I hate them for it. Let me explain. AJ Burnett won tonight against Detroit, going six innings, giving up four earned runs, eight hits while striking out six and walking one. On August 9th Roy Halladay pitched six and a third innings, gave up one earned run, ten hits while striking out six and walking two. Halladay had the better start of course, a few more hits but three less earned runs, and took a loss while Burnett was credited with a win tonight. In Halladay's start, the Jays made two errors in one inning, stretched out Halladay and making him throw way more pitches than necessary as Cleveland came back and won. Tonight, Burnett and the Jays were down 4-1 in the top of the seventh when Toronto scored four times, added another in the ninth, and got excellent bullpen work to seal the victory. So, who "earned" the decision more? Halladay was let down by bad defense and zero run support (only six hits and zero walks against Paul Byrd, who has a 4.53 ERA this year and a batting average against of .282). Burnett finished six innings, gave up three homeruns (solos, luckily) and left with his team down three. Only because he was the last pitcher in the game for Toronto was he given credit for the win, since the Jays scored four in the very next half-inning to go ahead in the game. Had they scored those runs in the eight inning, rather than the seventh, Brandon League would have received credit for the win and Burnett would get a no-decision. In other words, only by virtue of the offense's timing did Burnett receive a win decision.

Back to Jamie and Pat. I can't remember if it was tonight or last night, but they mentioned how the Jays' lack of offense was costing Roy Halladay wins and as a result could cost him the Cy Young this year. This is so frustrating because it reflects the mindset of so many baseball people, journalists and otherwise. Wins are a terrible way to judge a pitcher's value, as I tried to illustrate in the examples above. If Roy Halladay throws nine shutout innings but Rios drops a ball in the ninth to allow a run to score, and the Jays don't score any runs at all, Halladay gets a loss. If Mike Mussina gives up eight runs in five innings but the Yankees score fifteen, he gets the win. Which performance is better? Pretty obvious. So the fact that Halladay could lose out on Cy Young consideration because of factors beyond his control, such as errors and run support, would be tragically ignorant on the part of the voters.

So, how close is he now? Right now the conversation for best pitcher in the American League comes down to Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Mike Mussina. For a control comparison we'll throw in AJ Burnett's numbers, because he happens to be tied for second in the AL in wins. Here's the breakdown, with AL rankings in parentheses:

ERA: Halladay-2.72 (3rd), Lee-2.45 (1st), Mussina-3.27 (10th), Burnett-4.62 (26th). So a pitcher with a 4.62 ERA can be second in the AL in wins, eh?

Walks and Hits Per Innings Pitched (WHIP): Halladay-1.05 (2nd), Lee-1.08 (3rd), Mussina-1.20 (13th), Burnett-1.44 (31st). Halladay's second in the AL to Justin Duscherer's 0.99, which is ridiculous. Anything around 1.20 is considered "good," so Halladay and Lee are firmly in "excellent" category while Mussina is just "good." Burnett is what we call "BAD." Shawn Marcum, for interest's sake, is actually fourth.

Innings Pitched: Halladay-182.0 (1st), Lee-161.2 (3rd), Mussina-140.1 (32nd), Burnett-157.2 (7th). Some big seperation here, as Halladay has two more starts than Lee and one more than Mussina, but has put up the equivalent of two complete games and change over Lee and nearly five complete games more than Mussina. Suddenly the incremental differences between Halladay and Lee's ERA and WHIP are more substantial, since Halladay's put up very similar numbers in a greater sample size. Halladay also has seven complete games while the next highest, James Shields and Kevin Slowey, are tied with three. The ability to not just be very very good, but also very very durable, is a pretty important factor. It's the difference between Greg Maddux and Jose Lima. You'd take either at their ABSOLUTE BEST, but which one plays for your dream team?

Strikeouts: Halladay-155 (2nd), Lee-128 (8th), Mussina-96 (24th), Burnett-165 (1st). Neither Halladay or Lee are big strikeout pitchers, both use location and try for bad contact, but strikeouts are an easy way to determine how successful a pitcher is on his own, without relying on defense. Mussina's getting left behind...

On-base percentage against: Halladay-.278, Lee-.274, Mussina-.306, Burnett-.339. I didn't include league rankings because Foxsports includes relievers, which are a whole different deal because the sample sizes will be far smaller. Halladay and Lee are basically the same while Mussina is a jump up and Burnett another jump up from that. .339 would be a bad on-base percentage for a batter, but you'd still expect a pitcher with 15 wins to be lower, wouldn't you? No you would NOT, because wins don't matter!

I wrote a long post about AJ a short while ago so it should be clear that I like him, but it should now also be clear that he's a substantial ways behind Roy Halladay. It's only August so there's a long ways left in the season for the Cy Young to be determined of course, but listening to the Jays commentary prompted me to retort and defend Halladay's performance this year. As Burnett piles up the wins and strikeouts he'll start getting mentioned in the Cy Young race as well, great for him, but as you can see right now it's not even close. Halladay and Lee are the class of the AL, Mussina is having a very good year in his old age, and even Justin Duchscherer would be in the discussion if he had more innings because his numbers are awesome. You'd have to give the current edge to Halladay, who has far more innings and strikeouts at this point. So even when you see Halladay stomp off the mound after his team screws him out of a win, know that his team hasn't screwed him out of being the best pitcher in the AL, at least at this point.

Rance Mullinicks and other silly things

2008-08-02T19:17:00.003-06:00

Jamie Campbell and Rance Mulliniks seem like REALLY nice people. If I were older and had a daughter who brought either one of them home, I would probably wait until they'd finished cleaning my house and cooking my steak before burying them in the backyard. They're just so bland, if you could listen to pablum it would sound like these two. They're also homers in the worst way, sometimes you need to watch for a good hour to see who the Jays are actually playing, and yet there's something very harmless about it. They're never rude, never rip players or managers for mistakes and seem more like old people in church than baseball announcers. It's baseball Sunday school I guess. If you go to Sportsnet.ca (why not go now?) and check out the selection of blogs kept by the Ryerson grads they employ, you'll see Jim Lang's asinine "thoughts" on Moneyball, Sean McCormick bravely fighting the Good Oiler Homer Fight (bless that boy), Mike Toth fusing his incredibly annoying hyperactive on-air personality with shot-gun topic sentences, pun-filled contrarianism, and out of the mist Campbell's blog that consists of saying nice things and apologizing for others. Disappointingly though, Campbell's latest entry does not end with his trademark "what do you think," as though the internet is full of to-do gentlemen in smoking jackets with British accents politely waiting for their chance to respond. Campbell and Mullinicks are the nicest people in the world, but that doesn't mean they don't say stupid things.

I've wanted to do a live-blog of a Jays game, with Mulliniks rather than Tabler (who, I think, is turning into a very good announcer), but I'm always at work when the games are on. It's becoming a real nuisance so I might not be able to do it at all. The job I mean, the live-blog of Mulliniksianisms is an imperative.

Here's a sample:

"As crazy as it seems, I don't think you have to give in." On a 3-1 pitch to Ian Kinsler, the best hitting second-baseman in baseball, with one out and the BASES LOADED in a one run game. Um, no. You give in and throw a damn strike. Walking in runs is BAD, and given that Kinsler has a batting-average-on-balls-in-play of .336 (over the last 365 days), you stand a 66.4% chance of getting him out by making him put the ball in play.

"[As a baserunner on first, none out] Unless I sense that I can make it to third on a single, I shouldn't go." Sensible. Any specifics on HOW one should decide this? No?

After Josh Hamilton throws an absolute cannon, on the fly from rightfield, to throw out Marco Scutaro trying to go first to third, five minutes of crosstalk occurs between the two about the right way to take third base on a single before Mulliniks bothers to say "And a pretty nice throw by Hamilton." This throw was video-game, cartoon super-hero, what-Roberto-Clemente-must-have-looked-like Good. In other words, the throw was not "good" at all. It was awesome. Just say it. Saying nice things about the other team can be a "good" way to announce games too!

"No disrespect to Hamilton [after choosing Bradley Hamilton over the city of Hamilton in a "Which Hamilton would you choose" contest (wait, WHAT?)], they do have a great football team." Combined record from 2005 to present: 13-47. There are girl's softball teams that are better CFL teams than the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. This one was Campbell actually, guilty of being ridiculous and, again, WAY TOO NICE.

Commercial time. What in the holy hell is the deal with that stupid Rogers' commercial where the two unlikeable yuppies are bickering over whether to get Blackberries for their company? Black Yuppie is on board, it's the cost of doing business, but White Yuppie isn't so sure. Apparently getting a phone means companies need to re-think their caffeine-office paradigm. Why do Blackberries mean the end of the Columbian Dark Roast? What the hell does that have to do with getting office phones? WHO IN GOD'S NAME DOES YOUR BUDGET?

Brad Wilkerson just made a friggin' great catch! Wow! Except that no, he did not, he caught a ball that hit the top of the fence then bounced into his glove. Well sold by Wilkerson, the Jays get a break as replays clearly, CLEARLY show he trapped it and quickly raised his glove for the umpire. Even Campbell comes up with a true-blue, clearcut opinion, pulling a hamstring in the process, and definitively says Wilkerson trapped it. But...

"Even with that replay it's very hard to tell" says Rance, who has not updated his eye prescription since his playing days.

"He just struck the umpire out." I don't know what this means, but Rance disagreed with a ball-four call. He's right, it was a strike, but I just thought it was an odd thing to say.

"Awfully close." Mullinicksian reaction to a replay of Scott Downs picking off Travis Metcalf at first base. Metcalf was very obviously safe. Jays 2, Umpires 0. Campbell, dictated by his BE NICE perogative, says nothing. Hey! One of you two baseball guys! ADDRESS THE CONTROVERSY BEFORE YOU! THAT'S WHERE THE STORIES ARE!

Commercial time, and another one doesn't make any sense. Couple of yuppies running around the house turning off sprinklers, running bathtub water, and ovens cooking a huge-ass turkey. Why? Because they were SUPER YOUNG and VIRILE and SPONTANEOUS and were having S-E-X. Great. Except that Cialis, the product in question that raises said roof, doesn't take effect for four to five hours. And she was making a TURKEY, that's like, what, five hours of work? Their "maritals," I'm afraid, have all the spontaneity of an accounting firm's office supply order meeting.

EMAIL IS JUST $15 BUCKS A MONTH MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!

B.J. Ryan is on to save the game. After blowing last night's game in hilarious fashion, he's SURE to bring the heat this time! Oh, solid single to rightfield on a baloon down the middle. Ryan is pretty big right? Physically, I mean. When he's twirls the ball around in his hand while getting the sign it looks like he's holding a golfball. So why can he only throw 90 mph? If Josh Hamilton really wanted to hit one of of Yankee Stadium at the Homerun Derby, he should've brought Ryan as his pitcher.

Ryan gets the save, due largely in part to getting a called strike three on Chris Davis that could generously be described as a "bloody awful" call. Barajas caught the thing with his catching arm fully extended. Jays 3, Umpires 0. Rance?

"Chris David doesn't like the call." He does not, because if Chris David were right-handed instead of left-handed, he would be on first base and rubbing his bruised ribs. Just SAY IT! No?! Curse you, bland homers.

I think that's a fair sampling of the Silliness on Sportsnet. Just an unwillingness to show any outright opinions of the stickier elements during the game, which I realize is expected from guys who travel with the team and see the players every day. But these were obvious bad calls and while Campbell did at least address the Wilkerson trap neither seemed aware or willing to connect the dots and state that the Jays, overall, really benefited from some shoddy umping (shumping?) tonight.

I felt bad for mocking Nice People so I did some research and realized that Rance was actually a pretty good hitter back in the day. I remembered him at the end of his career when he was the reason Pat Gillick decided that the DH spot shouldn't be a liability anymore, and proceeded to get Dave Winfield for 1992. If you look back over his earlier career though, he put up some very good seasons. When? 1984 was one! .324/.383/.440 with a 124 OPS+. What I can't figure out is how in the world he managed a .440 slugging % when he only hit THREE homeruns all year. Another one? 1988 was probably his best overall, hitting .300/.395/.475, 143 OPS+, 12 HR's and 48 RBI's. Those are some excellent on-base percentages by the way (.383 and .395), that basically means he got on base 40% of the time. I guess when he says Rios should keep his damn hands in he's not talking out of his ass.

A.J. Burnett against the world

2008-07-28T17:58:00.003-06:00

I like watching AJ Burnett, when he's pitching well that is, more than anyone else on the Blue Jays' staff. Out of Halladay, Marcum, McGowan, and Litsch/Purcey/Parrish, Burnett makes hitters look the worst but again, when he's actually pitching well. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with watching Halladay, but it's a different kind of excellence (and a better kind, to be sure, than almost any else's in baseball). Halladay can get six outs on five pitches; since 2001 he's average a ground ball out/fly ball out ratio of 2.27, as a reference point this year's leader is Brandon Webb at a freakish 3.34 and at a distant second, Aaron Cook of Colorado's 2.33. Halladay's ability to avoid high pitch count innings (this year averaging 14.26 pitches per inning, 6th in the majors), move the game along quickly, and pound the strike zone has made him the best candidate to succeed Dave Stieb as the franchise's best pitcher (some would say he's the best now, but I disagree and will prove it another time.)

Halladay's strength is picking corners, cutting fastballs all over the strike zone and forcing bad contact. Burnett's strength is just filthy stuff which he uses to get more strikeouts, which lead to higher pitch counts and shorter outings. Halladay will go through a lineup and make them all feel like they "just missed that one" because they made contact. Burnett, and I say WHEN HE'S ON as loudly as I can type it, makes hitters look like small children swinging shovels at flies. 98 mph fastball, a curveball that starts out as a beanball and ends up in the dirt, and, apparently, a changeup that he learned and never throws because, I guess, that would make him too good. There's nothing as satisfying as watching the vaunted Yankees totally overmatched by Burnett's A game, and this is exactly why J.P. Riccardi should absolutely not trade him. They bought him so they'd have someone to follow up Halladay in those series against the Yankees and Red Sox (and now the Rays too), and every time you watch Jesse Litsch get run out of the game after four innings and 100 pitches against those teams, you're reminded why you need real pitching to win divisions.

Oh yeah, sometimes Burnett sucks. Sometimes he nibbles the corners and walks too many guys, he throws way too many pitches when he's up 0-2 in the count, and even Ben Zobrist can hit homeruns off 98 mph heaters when they're down the middle. Oh, and he gets hurt a lot, making over 30 starts in a season just once. And he's more inconsistant than Brett Favre's retirement plans; in his 20 starts this year (prior to tonight) he's given up five earned runs or more in six starts. And yet he's given up two earned runs or less in nine other starts, so there's been some stellar performances in there as well. This is not a great pitcher, there aren't any stats out there that suggest he's been under-rated or under-appreciated, but this is, as the refrain with AJ always goes, a tremendous talent. He should end up with 15 wins this year, which usually means nothing since wins are such a bad way of measuring a pitcher's performance, but in this case it might actually be indicative of AJ's value. See, when AJ's on, he's lights-out good and when he's bad he's terrible, so when he gets a decision in a game it'll be after giving up something like seven runs over four innings or none over eight. In other words, he EARNS his decisions. The irony, therefore, is that wins, a useless measurement, might say more about him than good stats like WHIP or ERA+, since with Burnett those numbers will be based on extreme performances. His performances are better approximated by flipping a coin than averaging out previous performances.

So keep Burnett because, while he might not ever become the pitcher his talent would indicate, he's exactly what the Jays will need to keep pace in the American League East. I like Jesse Litsch and Shawn Marcum, they're both good control pitchers who've done well with the stuff they have. They just don't have the stuff to mow through a lineup, any lineup, like Burnett and Halladay, and even McGowan some days, are able to. It's true that with Burnett you are indeed flipping a coin to see what kind of performance you'll get, but at least you know that getting heads might get you 8 innings, 10 K's and 2 hits. Lots of pitchers can do that against Seattle or Kansas City, but there aren't many with the stuff to do it against the AL East's big spenders.

The Sporticourse Principle

2008-07-24T23:24:00.001-06:00

Can we talk? Honestly? Thanks, you’re such a good listener, even though you probably don’t know me very well. I just have to get this out, I’ve had a kind of revelation and I need to explore it. I’ve spent most of my life under the assumption that I was a creative, artistic, big picture person, best suited to a lifestyle full of ideas and expression. This assumption allowed me to shrug off late-high school struggles with math, physics and chemistry and instead embrace the more forgiving, subjective nature of social sciences and humanities. Choosing that path years ago provides now provides me with a built-in excuse for lower professional expectations while still maintaining a sense of arrogant altruism, since money “just doesn’t mean that much to me.” It also lets me tell anonymous lies on the internet.

I have a book that, every time I read it, changes me a little bit. Most of us have a book like that, or a movie, maybe something counter-culture, like Fight Club (either the book or movie), something uplifting and reassuring like the Shawshank Redemption or, speaking of altruism, the Bible. For me it’s the Dilbert Principle. Scott Adams’ 1995 book is my Lord of the Rings, something that needs to be re-read every few years for its central message to remain. I’m reading it right now during my breaks from work and realized that I’ve miscast myself throughout my entire life. Adams, in his chapter on office personalities (the book’s at work so no exact quotes for you), describes engineers as having a singular goal in human interaction: proving their mental superiority over others by explaining complex ideas. That, and finding their true happiness in electronic toys and gadgets. I already knew that I valued electronics way too much, my home theatre system is worth more than my car or university degree (in dollars, the arrogance you get with a political science degree is priceless), but reading the description of engineers and their social goals seemed surprisingly familiar.

But this is a sports blog, you say! There’s no room for self-centered epistemological meditations! Just tell us whether or not Souray’s contract will cripple the Oilers in the last few years so we can call you a Nazi in the comments section! Well, this DOES relate to sports because I’m realizing that it’s only in this area where my engineering tendencies take over. I started this blog because I hoped that, after a few years of practice, I’d be able to write something as insightful and educational as Joe Posnanski, something as funny as the guys at FireJoeMorgan, or contribute something as unique as Loxy's Hot Oil or MBK (it pays off to comment). In other words, I knew where the ceiling was, knew how far I had to go to analyze sports as well as the best. I was humble, I knew that people are out there who know more, a LOT more, about sports than I do. My problem is that I can’t recognize them when I see them.

Baseball is a great sport to talk about because statistics are so well measure and maintained. The complexity is measuring player value is staggering at first, but if you take a little time to understand what VORP, WHIP and OPS+ are all about you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of people who talk about baseball are idiots. Now you’re smarter than they are, and happier as a result. But hockey’s harder, you can’t quantify performance the same way because the sport doesn’t break down into short, measurable increments. Now, you’ll find yourself listening to the same stupid arguments about “leadership” and “great teammate” and “clutch performer” in any sport. In baseball though, you can refute this nonsense pretty easily but in hockey you have to grit your teeth knowing your counter-argument won’t be much better. But this is summertime, which means baseball, which means baseball on the TVs every night at work (home theatre sales, for disclosure’s sake), which means LOTS of arguments over player performance. Now I’m in sales, I have to be nice to people, listen to what they have to say, make them feel welcome but I will be DAMNED if I’m going to let them say that Alex Rodriguez sucks in the post-season (39 games, .279/.361/.483, 7 home runs, 17 RBI’s). That’s the engineering side right there, no matter what the social situation the primal need is there to say NO YOU’RE WRONG HERE’S IMPENETRABLE LOGIC SHOWING YOU WHY. I DON’T CARE IF WE’RE NOT FRIENDS ANYMORE I DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU. I’M NOW ADDING VOLUME TO MY EXCELLENT ARGUMENT. I WIN. Totally disregarding the nuances and subtleties of the social context, my only goal is to explain in great detail how WHIP and ERA+ show how Pedro Martinez was more dominant in 2000 than Bob Gibson was in his famous 1968 Cy Young/MVP season.

Of course, the temptation is just to sit back, rationalize oneself, and assume that all sports fans are like this, none of them just “let it go,” never pass up a chance to one-up someone else with greater knowledge or “better” stories, even if that person is in the middle of interviewing you for a job. Yeah, that’s probably true, fans are by nature deranged and dangerously volatile, they can’t be held responsible for their suddenly crippled social skills when someone says Bernie Williams should be in the Hall of Fame (correct answer: No). It’s not just me, we’re all arrogant and belligerent. Right! Right? Right.

2008-07-12T19:53:00.003-06:00

What is an athlete's legacy at the end of their career? As a fan, do you watch your favorite player's retirement ceremony and think, damn, what a great hitter that sonofabitch was, he had the broadest shoulders, squarest jaw and dirtiest uniform I did ever saw? Do you think about his character, his willingness to block shots, hold the line, and take a hometown discount? Do you associate him, or her, with their greatest victory, their first memorable appearance or their fall from grace?

I ask these questions of you, the reader, because it's pretty clear that to athletes it doesn't matter what you think. It's not to say they ignore you with any degree of disrespect, but that clearly an athlete has a different mindset entirely from what their legacy should entail. That paradigm doesn't fit into the heroic or legendary or larger-than-life motif that fans place athletes into, but rather one that's perhaps more akin to you with your career. For athletes, the sport they play is a job, a preposterous one that could only exist within our weird little world, but still a job where you have to show up every day, work overtime, miss your family, and get yelled at by your boss.

The idea that I have any kind of insight into the mind of a pro athlete is absurd; the closest resemblance I have to a friendship with a pro athlete was serving Dan Hamhuis sweet and sour pork once. Hey, it was a small town. I defy you though to argue with the assessment that an athlete's understanding of their place in history (well, sports history anyway, which exists in a parallel universe) is pretty damn different than how the rest of us would like to place them. Especially in light of Brett Favre's public displays of indecision that would make a social sciences grad shake their head. This is, of course, the catalyst for this little ramble, but it really illustrates the point that athletes live in their own little world.

And not a bad world to live in, if you can. Oh, in case you were wondering, this IS a blog and not an essay, and if I want to start a new paragraph with "And," or ":-)" or the Batman symbol then BOOYA for me. Favre finished the 2006 season on a down note, his completion percentage and his touchdown/pass ratio was the worst of his career, and his quarterback rating was 72.7 (25th in the league, all stats here). So when he hummed aloud about whether he was coming back, people seemed quite reasonably bummed out that he'd be leaving after a bad season. Not a great way to remember a sure thing Hall of Fame player. But Favre did come back, and 2007 was a tremendous year for him and the overachieving Packers. His QB rating was 6th in the league at 95.7, 4th in passing yards, 6th in yards/game, posted the BEST completion percentage of his career and nearly doubled his TD/pass rating (more stats here). His name was tossed around as an MVP candidate as he took one of the youngest teams in the NFL and brought them within one OhGodPunchMeInTheFace interception (his own, obviously) of going to the Super Bowl. Heady days for the Cheeseheads as the great Favre had proven he wasn't finished, was still great, and left the loyal Wisconsinites in a perfect position regarding his future and their memory of him: if he retired, he did so near the top of his game, if he came back he was doing so in a position to lead his team, not drag it down just for one last painful hurrah.

Then he did retire, and people were surprised but seemed pleased and impressed. It's hard to leave something you love, and Favre was doing it not far from his peak years. Aaron Rogers could now take over, once three years' worth of clipboard splinters heal. Favre would fade into memory and legend, wearing a cowboy hat or a cheesehead, a big belt buckle and flannel shirt while driving a combine or something. Anyone from Wisconsin? Is that right, or offensive?

Favre is now back, wants to either play for the Packers (which means Start, not Backup like that chump Rogers, who's only been prepping all summer to be the starting QB for one of the most notable sports franchises in North America) or be released to play elsewhere. Some in the media do not seem to agree with Favre's decision, and that's kind of the point. NOBODY wants Favre to come back now, and certainly not this way, forcing the team and management into shuffling around the deck chairs to accompany the way-too-late requests of Combine Belt Buckle Man. So Favre said, presumably in the same voice as the captured alien in Independence Day, "release me," and the Packers said No. This "legacy" stuff is pretty hard for Favre to grasp obviously, not quite realizing that when you move on to other things, other things won't be there when you come back. Who can say if a player should be able to unretire and play until they absolutely suck, like Rickey Henderson or Tom Poti, if they really want to? Fans and media can't, and wouldn't be listened to anyways. It's a different world they play in. It's their job, not ours.

Kevin Lowe kills the whole town

2008-07-05T10:28:00.003-06:00

I am SO tired of talking about hockey. Not because I don't get excited about the draft and free agency, because I REALLY do, but because it's 30 damn degrees outside and I don't want to find myself looking forward to winter for any reason. Until the Blue Jays start resembling a team that's in any way enjoyable to watch, the pennant races heat up and the CFL season builds some more momentum (Esks-Stamps last weekend!? Huh!? HUH!!! Aw yeeeeeah!), it's more stuff about hockey to talk about!

Brian Burke got very upset when he felt that his rhubarb had been rubbed by another man. Meaning, of course, that he didn't appreciate another GM poaching his property, since hockey players, as you well know, were brought over from Africa on the Middle Passage. Now, that Burke has said some pretty mean things about Kevin Lowe, and has taken his time getting all of his hurt feelings out as it's been a little less than a year since Pennergate and he still won't shut the hell up about it. Some of those things were personally and professional insulting (last line) to Lowe, some were high-handed and self-serving, while others were simply stupid and contradictory. Lowe sat piously at his desk, polishing his Stanley Cup rings that he earned on the ice rather than in a Lazy-Boy, and said little in the hopes that Burke would turn his bile at the Toronto media, or GM's overpaying players, or a small puppy.

Until yesterday. Scorched Earth policy indeed. I'd rather he hadn't ripped Duck fans, if only because now all Burke has to do is say something high-handed and self-serving like "If Kevin Lowe wants to criticize me that's fine, I'm a big boy, I can take it. What I won't stand for is having our terrific fans and wonderful city ripped by a jealous, petty individual who is tired of never getting a tan." That, of course, implies that compared to Burke, hockey fans in Anaheim can't take criticism and are small, weak individuals. Still, that's the angle Burke will probably play, and hopefully Lowe doesn't apologize or anything. *Shudder*

Good God

2008-07-02T10:38:00.003-06:00

When I worked at a gym, selling memberships and making people feel bad about themselves, I got a glimpse into the mechanics of where these amazing stories about ordinary people going through unbelievable problems with their monthly gym payments came. What I saw was an industry of independently-owned businesses which were managed by guys who worked out in squalor their whole lives and wanted to Move On Up. They were like, Damn, that guy raised prices AGAIN, I'm not paying $11.50 a month for this place, let's go off and Make Our Own Gym. So you have gym guys now acting in a management capacity when instead you should have, say, ANYBODY ELSE. Like an accountant, or someone with sales management experience, or someone with a background in marketing, or a corporate finance grad, or... this is fun isn't it? There's a long list of choices, as long as the amount of time you want to toss out random qualifications ("Welder!" "Cable repair man!" "Drifter!") that would be better than a holier-than-thou fitness maniac with -8% body fat who can't understand why you have to cancel your membership with this new job, couldn't you just work 14 hours THEN come in five days a week? You've got a cousin or something, right? Can't they water your six kids for you? Broken leg? You've got TWO, suck it up! No? Well just die then.

The same inmates running the asylum motif exists in the NHL, and was never more evident than July 1st, 2008. Ex-players in management, in their own minds still blocking shots and picking fights to defend their honor, leap at the chance to do whatever's necessary to better their brethren. This CBA was supposed to hinder this behavior. In a cap system, a player isn't really paid a salary, they're paid a percentage of the cap space. Players have a portion of their salary held in escrow so that, at the end of the season, if league earnings have decreased the players take home the designated percentage less than their salary indicates. It's that "cost certainty" we heard so much about during the lockout, a way to make absolutely positively sure that general managers could managed to keep salaries under control this time and not pay more than what league revenues could sustain. Well, those GM's showed us! They were insulted by the league and players' attempts to hamstring their efforts to reduce the league to six teams, owned by the six richest kings of Europe, and steely-eyed and eagle-determined, they set their minds to finding new and hilarious ways of making the sane among us smash our faces into our keyboards each time we re-load TSN.ca on July 1st. At the rate ticket prices keep going up you'll only have six people attending games, arguing about what to do about this maddening Prussian quagmire.

Cristobal Huet is a nice person who recycles his bottles, watches friends' houses when they're out of town, and is rarely found punting puppies into nearby ravines. I wish him nothing but the best. Cristobal Huet now has a greater annual salary than Martin Brodeur, having signed yesterday for four years, $5.6 million per year with Chicago (all signings, with commentary, can be found here). This is fucking ridiculous. He'll be 33 when the season starts, and while coming a season where he did win 33 games for Montreal and Washington, before that never won more than 19. He's never played more than 52 games in a season, which indicates than while he doesn't have the miles that other 33 year old goalies might have, he was likely NOT GOOD ENOUGH to warrant more icetime than that. At least Nikolai Khabibulin was coming off a Stanley Cup.

Wade Redden is 31 years old, coming off a season of 38 points, +11, and averaged 22:13 of ice time per game. An above average defenseman for his career though showed signs of slowing down last season. The Senators tried to move him at this year's trade deadline and last year's draft, say the rumors, but he wouldn't waive his no-trade clause. He rejected an offer from the Sens prior to July 1st of, I believe to be, two years, $9 million if I remember correctly. So good player, wearing out, thanks for the great years on the Ottawa blueline, see if Detroit will sign you and give you one last shot at a Stanley Cup. Except that the New York Rangers woke up and thought, this is terrible. We've become only the 3rd most embarrassingly run team in New York City! How did that happen? Maybe we can't top the Mets firing Willie Randolph at 3 am while he was on the West Coast, or Isiah Thomas burning the Knicks into the ground with awful signings and sexual harassment suits, but by God, people will NOTICE US NOW! Six years, $6.5 million per season later, the Rangers have themselves Wade Redden until he's 38 which, according to the Sens management fans and media, has been his age for a few years now. This is maybe the worst free agent signing I can remember. This isn't a case of gambling on a player and having him not pan out, this is the Rangers paying for somebody that EVERYBODY knows is running out of time and will be, at best, a 30 point player with injury problems for the next six years. At least Sheldon Souray can hurt people with his shot.

The Leafs are in full rebuild mode and are paying a lot of money to do it. Darcy Tucker was bought out, Brian McCabe is being forced out of town, re-signing Sundin seems like an afterthought, and they recently waived Kyle Wellwood and Andrew Raycroft. This team is going after Tavares and damn anybody who gets in their way, like say, their own good players. The first step in a rebuilding mode is, of course, to sign bad players to replace the bad players you just got rid of. Oh, and pay them a little more will ya? Jeff Finger signed a four year deal worth $3.5 million and Niklas Hagman to a four year, $4 million deal. Ha ha! That's not 3.5 and 4 total you big silly, that's PER YEAR. Finger is 28, just finished his second season in the NHL, had 19 points in 72 games, and was so impressive for the Avs in the playoffs that they sat him for five of their ten games. Hagman had 41 points last year and 29 the year before that (both in 82 games) which is nice, except that Darcy Tucker had 34 in 74 games last year and 43 in 56 the year before that and was making $3.5 million per season. Won't the Leafs be so much better this year with Finger and Hagman than McCabe and Tucker.

There were some very good signings yesterday, like Colorado getting Tucker for two years, $2.5 million each, Chicago overpaying but at least getting the best defenseman in Brian Campbell, and Brian Rolston going back to the Devils for maybe a year too long (four years, $20 million) but at a fair market value. No I'm not going to pull numbers to justify that, but I did see him score lots of goals against the Oilers and all with slapshots, even on tip-ins and wrap-arounds. I just saw that Hossa went to Detroit for $7.4 million on a one year deal, which is great for Detroit. A really odd choice for Hossa though because, in a sport where you're one shift away from ending your career, you'd think it wise to take the long-term, big money deal on the table. The rumor was that Edmonton was the highest bidder on Hossa, offering $63 million over seven years. That's WAY too much, kind of glad they didn't get him, but if you're Hossa why wouldn't you take that? I know winning a Stanley Cup is important, but you'd think at some point in the next seven years Edmonton will be a contender, maybe even this year (!?). Man. Detroit. So smart/lucky.

Quick comment on the two other trades the Oilers made yesterday. After getting Visnovsky and making me share my sad feelings late at night while drinking scotch, Lowe traded Raffi Torres for Gilbert Brule and Joni Pitkanen for Eric Cole. Both are great deals, principally because now I won't have to misspell Pitkanen "PitkOnen," anymore, which I realized I've been doing this entire blog. Torres was a salary dump and was probably being dangled at the draft for a mid-round pick. Getting Brule instead is excellent, a former 6th overall pick and Vancouver Giants star, he's struggled in Columbus (139 games, only 10 goals and 18 assists while -25) but is still very young (21) so there's still time for him to revitalize. He's a lottery ticket in other words, and the payout could be huge. Oh, and he's from Edmonton.

Erik Cole has one year left before unrestricted free agency, which was likely the same amount of time they'd have had with Pittckonyn if they'd re-signed him, since it sounded like they were far apart and thus any deal would be only for one year. They finally get another scorer, one they've wanted for a while apparently, and have another option on the second powerplay unit. Guess he'll also replace Curtis Glencross too, who played well for 20 games or so but wanted too much money for the Oilers. Remember Scott Fraser? Of course you don't. Even if Glencross continues to develope, hopefully not for the Flames as rumors suggest, he still wouldn't have been as good for the Oilers this year as Erik Cole will be. So great trades on paper, this team looks pretty complete until game eight of the season when Souray hurts his shoulder, Moreau breaks both his arms, Garon gets lupus and Roloson goes back to letting in one bad goal every four periods, and Gagner and Cogliano get sent to the minors. Hey if we prepare for it, it won't happen right?

TSN now says that Carolina re-signed Pehttquonnin for three years, $12 million, under July 2nd transactions. Couldn't we have afforded that?

Free Agency, RFA's, and a tough goodbye

2008-06-30T21:15:00.006-06:00

Start your engines for tomorrow, because that's when teams starting throwing inexplicable amounts of money at old players coming off career seasons in a contract year. Ryan Malone already cashed in, getting seven years and $31.5 million ($4.5 million/year) after seasons of 27, 16, and 22 goals. Not bad. I don't want to be one of those complainers always rolling their eyes at pro athlete contracts, but look at the market. Consider the absolutely childish fit Brian Burke pulled (and continues to pull whenever TSN baits him with questions about Kevin Lowe, which is as often as possible) when Penner got $4.25 million last year. Penner was coming off a season of 29 goals, played all 82 games, hardly saw any powerplay time (only 9 goals on the PP), and is three years younger. You could make the argument that Malone was the more proven commodity, but really, if you're an NHL GM, are you going to throw big money at a guy who scored 29 goals on the third line in his rookie season, or at the guy who scored less while playing with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin? I like Malone, him and Penner are pretty similar players (okay fine, I'd rather have Malone, he broke his nose twice in the same game and barely missed any time so yeah, of course I want him more than the Penner who sleepwalks through way too many shifts), but numbers-wise Penner is the better investment. Of course, Edmonton also paid three picks for Penner, but that's not what Burke said he had a problem with.

So I dunno, Hossa to Vancouver, Jagr to Vladivostok, Sundin to the Leafs (in December though, don't rush Mats!), Campbell to the LEAFS (yeah, out on a limb baby!), Sakic to the Avalanche (duh), Naslund to the Wings (I'm not going to bother checking to see if this is even possible under the cap, but he's Swedish so it's either Vancouver or Detroit), and Demitra to the, um, Senators. It's all madness anyways so it's more fun to watch than try to predict and make sense out of. Who thought the Rangers would get both Drury and Gomez last year? Or that Philly would get Briere, Timonen, and Hartnell? There's no way to predict any of the ridiculousness, so there's a half-serious attempt before the storm hits.

Since Kevin Lowe became the first GM to ever, in the history of the known universe, sign a player to an offer sheet, the talk around the NHL, or rather from the brilliant analysts on TV, is how the whole free agency landscape has changed. And that's somewhat true, since teams are now locking up their young stars, sometimes after just their second seasons, to long-term deals to avoid any poaching (ex. Ovechkin, Crosby, Malkin's is coming soon, Ryan Getzlaf, Corry Perry). So rather than having a player go through a standard three year entry-level contract, then a moderate raise in a no-competition negotiation, before finally cashing in when they reach unrestricted free-agency, they get rich after year two. So yeah, things have changed for the young stars, but have things changed for the not-ready-for-primetime players? And what is this change based on? An actual change in strategy or just fear and paranoia?

If you account for the actual events that have occurred to stimulate this sudden shift in free agency and career contract structure, there haven't been too many. There's probably a reason for that. Lowe signed two players to offer sheets last year, one team matched (Buffalo with Vanek) and one didn't (Anaheim of course). This was BIG NEWS, because this NEVER HAPPENS. Actually though, it does. Trivia: other players have been signed to offer sheets before. Yeah I know. Shocking. Some actually changed teams. But only now, because Brian Burke threw the most public tantrum since I couldn't find the droids I was looking for, has the entire salary structure in the NHL apparently changed. It's flattering to think that Kevin Lowe is the most influential GM in NHL history, but come one. This whole fuss is still about an irregularity because non-superstar RFA's just don't get poached that often. It's not like everything will change because Lowe did it, and to suggest it will is to suggest that GM's watched Lowe and thought "Really? You can DO that? I'M gonna do that TOO, I HATE sitting through two boring-ass days at the draft each year. Looks like an extra round of golf!" There was Kesler two years ago, and Chris Gratton and Joe Sakic before that in 1997. That's it, and to re-emphasize, there's a good reason for this. It's a pretty big risk and a really big cost to go hunting for young RFA's when, if you draft properly, you could end up with someone younger, cheaper, and possibly better.

Some sad news today though. Jarret Stoll and Matt Greene were traded for All-Star defenseman Lubomir Visnovsky. Stoll is coming off a year where he had 36 points in
81 games, a -23 plus/minus, and saw his role diminish into a third-line checker, both because of performance and the emergence of Cogliano and Gagner. Greene had one assist in 41 games and played on the third defensive pairing, though does project as a 4th defenseman. Visnovsky had more points than both last year (41), and had seasons of 58 and 67 points before that. Lots of people hate this trade for Edmonton, thinking that the Oilers got softer or something. Those people are idiots, and are happy to prove it by posting their "thoughts" on TSN's Your Call. Edmonton clearly wins this trade, they get one of the top 10 defensemen in the NHL and only gives up depth players whose roles are already filled. Just like the Pronger trade of years ago, they gave up some depth to get top-end talent. Great trade.

It's a sad trade for the same reason the Pronger and Peca trades were bittersweet. Edmonton lost Eric Brewer and Mike York and later traded away Marty Reasoner for Sergei Samsonov at the trade deadline. Obviously the 2006 Finals run was amazing, an entire spring of uncharted territory for a city that was starved for hockey success. Edmonton earned it, having gone through the agony of nearly losing the team, trading away fan favorite after fan favorite, suffering the humiliation of being one of the NHL's great franchises yet being on the outside of all serious hockey talk. Free agency, deep playoff runs, individual awards, these were not discussions that involved the city of Edmonton. 2006 was a reward for a lot of suffering, not everything we wanted but far more than we could have ever hoped for. And yet despite the success, the attention from the entire hockey world, the awe and praise for 16,839 Oh Canada-singing fans, the re-ascension of the long-dormant Oilers into a major force in the NHL once again, something was missing. A lot of players went into that Finals run, but a lot more of them weren't around to reap rewards borne from years of futility. 2006 was about Pronger, Roloson, Smyth, Smith, and Horcoff, but it was also about Weight, Joseph, Marchant and the recently traded Reasoner, Brewer and York. I predict right now that the Oilers will win the Northwest and make some noise in the playoffs this season. It'll be great to watch, another generous reward for two pretty tough seasons, but it'll be missing a few pieces. I long thought of Stoll as a future Oiler captain and Greene at times indeed looked like the heir apparent to Jason Smith. After Ryan Smyth, Stoll was my favorite Oiler, and any success the team has with Visnovsky will always have the same twinge of sadness that the 2006 Oiler team had. Godspeed good sirs, you'll be missed!

The Draft!

2008-06-21T11:54:00.002-06:00

Got to watch the draft while at work, and glad I did. Very entertaining, lots of trades with perhaps more to come. Calgary did what was necessary and moved Tanguay's salary while picking up Mike Cammalleri. There had been rumors earlier about Jarret Stoll possibly going to L.A. for Cammalleri, which would have been an amazing pickup for Edmonton. Calgary downgrades slightly I'd say, but saves some cap space to presumably go towards Daymond Langkow. The Leafs give permission to the Canadiens to talk to Mats Sundin, though after Sundin made it clear he wanted to be a Leaf and didn't believe in being a rental and abandoning his team, it would be hard to see him actually going there, or anywhere else. I think he'll either retire or re-sign in Toronto. Either would be fine, it would pretty hard for Leaf fans to see him refuse a trade at the deadline, one that would have brought the Leafs a huge package of picks and prospects, only to see him bolt at the end of the year. Olli Jokinen to Phoenix was a surprise, kind of looked like they were going to stick with their rebuilding plans as they appeared to be going well, but looks like they're going for a playoff spot right now, and certainly more if that Southwest division fades. More trades are rumored and Edmonton has some names in play so maybe today there'll be more news.

The draft itself went as planned as far as player order, but teams were trading up and down like crazy. You have to wonder about the mindset of the New York Islanders though, here they are at 5 with a chance to pick either Luke Schenn or Nikita Filitov and they trade down not once, but TWICE down to the 9th spot. Sure, accumulating depth picks in later rounds is nice but there's something to be said for drafting top-end, possibly NHL-ready talent. Especially for the Islanders, at team with few blue-chippers besides Kyle Okposo. The Leafs did well in moving up to get Schenn, who I thought was Canada's best defenseman at the World Juniors, the Oilers did the expected and grabbed Jordan Eberle, and the rest of the teams made picks that made Pierre McGuire happy, which is the most important thing. Because this is THE DEEPEST DRAFT IN YEARS presumably most teams will be labelled "winners," but I have to think the Islanders blew it by not picking the best player. Drafting is about asset accumulation, and those assets are never rated more highly than they are at draft time. Grab Filitov or Schenn and trade them later, you might be able to get more for them than just trading the draft position. I still remember when Edmonton had a chance to draft Zack Parise, they instead traded down to get a few extra picks that became Marc Pouliot and JF Jacques. Jacques has fallen behind, Pouliot played well at the end of last season but Parise has 63 goals the last two seasons. Yeah, mistakes get made, but everybody thought Parise was a much better player than Pouliot, so why not grab Parise and flip him for somebody else, and still draft Pouliot later? Then at least you've made a trade where you sold high, rather than selling just a draft slot. It's just odd to see teams tank at the end of the year to get a higher draft slot, then trade it away for depth picks.

Cito Gaston is the new manager of the Toronto Blue Jays! The most successful coach in team history, also described as a terrific batting coach, also brings back Gene Tenace as hitting coach, who's probably the best hitting coach the team has ever had. So things are looking up!...except that their first game, against Godawful Pittsburgh Terribles, sees them go 12 innings without scoring a run for their best pitcher. I don't know about you, but I LIKE steriods in baseball.

Potpourri

2008-06-18T10:47:00.002-06:00

The news that Glenn Healy will be leaving TSN to take a job with the NHLPA will undoubtedly do greater wonders for TSN's ratings than any theme song acquisition could. Just fabulous news; just as TSN's hockey coverage will enjoy even greater exposure this year the broadcast quality will improve considerably, even if Healy's spot is left entirely vacant. "I'm Chris Cuthbert along with Maggie the Monkey, here in beautiful Raleigh...."

The sale of the Edmonton Oilers to Bruce Wayne is complete. Who knows what this will really mean for the team and city. Maybe nothing. Maybe he's crazy. But maybe not. His promises were spend to the cap, pitch in for a new rink, and build a new training facility at the U of A. Well, the team already spends near the cap, arena development is proceeding slowly, and good for the U of A I guess, since that won't really benefit the average person. Yes yes, raising the city's profile as a world class sports city and all that, but so would a giant Easter Egg, or a giant dinosaur, or a giant whatever in God's name this thing is. Check that link out. I'll wait.

Toronto Blue Jays baseball, as of today: 12th in the AL in RBI's, 13th in homeruns and 12th in runs scored despite being 5th in OBP, 3rd in walks and 6th in stolen bases. So they get runners on, they often advance without sacrificing an out, then...nothing. The team is two games below .500, 9.0 games out of first place (and currently in last), despite having a pitching staff with the 3rd best earned run average, 3rd fewest runs allowed, 3rd fewest homeruns, and the 3rd lowest opponents' batting average. Feel the excitement!

NHL draft on Friday, MSNBC has the Oilers picking some nobody Swede or Swiss or something instead of local AJHL star Joe Colbourne or flashy center Jordan Eberle. Yeah, that's why nobody reads their hockey coverage. TSN promises a ten-hour draft preview on Thursday, where Dreger and McKenzie articulate reasoned analysis of each team's needs, Duthie will mock them and himself, Milbury will predict that Tampa will trade the top pick for Joni Pitkonen, who will then be signed to a 15 year contract, and McGuire will periodically come roaring into frame, inches from the camera, telling all of Canada how important it is to provide puck support and be Dion Phaneuf. Duthie will raise one eyebrow and segue to Darren Dutchyshen with a pithy comment. Dutchy will talk about boxing and Canada changes the channel. Meanwhile, at Sportsnet, Millard will be covered in spit while Kypreos argues for the immediate trade of Stamkos since, in three years, Tampa won't be able to afford both him AND another player, while Watters bellows his agreement while blaming Richard Peddie for 9/11. Tumbleweeds ripple through the studio.

At least Americans are watching hockey...

2008-06-12T10:21:00.001-06:00

I don't post many videos but this one belongs here. Take it away, good sir:

"The Hockey Song?"

2008-06-10T09:21:00.010-06:00

Who the hell calls it "The Hockey Song?" TSN does, now. It's now official, after some hope that CBC might still be able to renegotiate a deal that would save the Hockey Night in Canada theme, CTV stepped up and "saved" the song by purchasing it from "legendary" octogenarian jingler Paul Anka, I mean, Dolores Claman. How noble.

I have pretty mixed feelings about this. I'm glad the song will survive, somewhere, but this whole process really illustrates the campiness of the product. It's a 30 second jingle, written 40 years ago. How much money should a person honestly believe that to be worth? I'm sure CBC isn't blameless in all this, considering their history of penny-pinching Canada's favorite program, but really, consider the balls on this woman, holding CBC ransom for between $2.5 and $3 million dollars after 40 years of collecting royalties for a song she was ludicrously lucky enough to have land on Canada's favorite show, and holds its inflated value as a result. What she failed to understand, as will TSN when they realize ratings haven't skyrocketed as a result of their use of the song, is that nobody gives a crap about the song itself. Oh we love the song, it is Canada's second national anthem, it's justifiably considered iconic and a unifying part of Canadiana. Except that there's something much more iconic, of far greater value and historical significance than the song, and that's the fucking show itself. The song won't retain much of it's lustre when it's divorced from HNIC because Canadians only like the song because of what we associate it with. We watched Hockey Night in Canada before 1968 (since 1952 actually), I'm pretty sure we can manage without your little jingle.

Hmm, maybe my feelings are more "numerous" than mixed. It's sad to see a part of Canadian tradition fractured over greed, but when you're reading public negotiations and leveraging of a cultural symbol for more royalties it's easier to just say the hell with it. The audience will determine the value of the product, not a copyright company or Scott Moore. I don't think there'll be any significant ratings changes as a result of the song being used by another channel, I can't see anyone getting confused and thinking that now Hockey Night In Canada is on TSN and Ron Maclean has been replaced by wit-machine James Duthie, and now the show is on two or three days a week instead of Saturday night. Despite holding this opinion now (and holding it vengefully as in the paragraph above), it'll be very interesting to see if this will hold true. Maybe this will change the hockey viewership balance of power in Canada. Maybe that old hag was right. Nah.

The other issue with the song changing channels is the type of production attraction in question. The appeal of HNIC is tradition, knowing you'll see the same features as were shown twenty years ago. Typical first intermission interviews of some kid playing his first game on HNIC and saying Hi to his parents and friends back home in Moose Jaw, talking about how they watched HNIC growing up and how amazing it is to be on it now. Don Cherry ignoring (pick one) Crosby/Sundin/Jagr/Lemieux's first period hat trick and instead showing Gary Roberts blocking a shot on his one and only shift, then forgetting that sports are a distraction from the real world and forcing us to relive a recent soldier's death in (pick one) Iraq/Kosovo/Iraq/Afghanistan. The round table discussions in the second intermission where Al Strachan's "sources" are saying that Mats Sundin has agreed to waive his no-trade clause and will be going to the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of the Japanese Pacific League while Scott Morrison wonders how hard it would be to throw Strachan out a window. The folksy video intro, highlighting HNIC's past, kids playing pond hockey and a general casual, old-fashioned feel to the broadcast. The show knows its appeal and plays on it, and that's fine with us. The former theme song, one has to think, is only a small part of that appeal.

Contrast that with TSN's broadcast, a super-hip, cutting-edge production featuring seizure-inducing opening graphics, a clever and ironic host, pop culture references galore and a massive staff of newsbreaking "insiders." Well okay, just Dreger and McKenzie, but that's two more than CBC and Sportsnet. To be sure, this is an ESPN-style show for the spastic ADHD generation. Mixing that with Canada's best known symbol of sports tradition with make for interesting gumbo. The saving grace is that TSN's previous hockey theme was pretty lame and will now get a big boost, as did their play-by-play announcing when Chris Cuthbert came over and Glenn Healy was tragically eaten by a pack of wild boars in my imagination. Don Cherry did some "work" for ESPN during these playoffs, wonder if a few more years will see him and Milbury beating the hell out of each other while Duthie spins a pun.

Oh, and who cares what Tiger Woods thinks about the NHL and hockey in general. He excels at a sports that real athletes play when they retire. There, add that to the multitude of cheap shots he's taken after knocking hockey. I'd like to think that mine's at least better than Milbury calling him Tiger Wuss. I thought hockey shows had writers?

June 5th, not bad

2008-06-05T16:30:00.003-06:00

Nice to see the season end as early as it did. Much better than in 2006 when the Oilers-Canes series lasted until about the middle of September. Kudos to Wings I guess, but that's enough of that for a while now. Time for that franchise to have a prolonged slump, the place wasn't sold for early round games and I don't know if it was the TV feed or not, but the building sounded awfully quiet. Much louder in Pittsburgh anyways, though I did notice that when watching games on CBC HD, the crowd noise was much more drowned out than on regular CBC. So well done to the Detroit Braves, now get lost.

Apparently the Penguins are going to have to trade Malkin, let Hossa go, raise ticket prices to match oil and whore Sidney Crosby out to a thousand fat chicks just to get under the salary cap, which seems to be $8.71 million dollars. This is so stupid and yet it's everyone's favorite rumour. I'm listening to Nick Kypreos right now, yelling away at Darren Millard about how STUPID it would be to pour $20 million dollars into two players in the cap system. Next to Nick is Bill Watters, vigoriously agreeing and calling Richard Peddie a rapist. Oh wait, a commercial break for Millard to clean spit off himself. Ug. Ray Shero is the GM of the Penguins, and a regular reader of this blog. Listen to me, Mr. Shero. Your team was lucky enough to plummit into depths of Godawfulness reached only by the Leafs in the fantasies of the rest of Canada. As a result, you've been able to draft in the top two four years in a row. You have two of the three best young players in the NHL, and they both play center. You are SO LUCKY to have the CHANCE at having and re-signing two players good enough to merit $8.7 million a year (for Crosby). Like Denzel says in Training Day:
"Okay, the dick lines up straight like that right? To the right of it and to the left of it are pockets, right? In those pockets are money. Look in either one of 'em, pay the bill."

Now, if you want to trade Malkin because he had (until the finals) a terrific playoff, an MVP-nominated season, took over the Penguins midseason when Crosby got hurt, and established himself as either the 1 or 1A center Pittsburgh, well that's different. That's not what Nick and Watters are saying by the way, they think he HAS to go because having the two best young centers in the NHL, with the cap leaping every year and a new arena coming to Pittsbugh in two years (I think), is foolish. It's a different argument to say he should go because it's the best time to trade him. I don't like fantasy sports mentality lots of people take with team rosters, the coldness that goes into discussing trading players, but whenever you're talking about trading a player at his peak there's always a reason to listen to that argument. That's Malkin now, he's at the absolute peak of his tradeability, the only way he'd have higher trade value is if he was already locked into a long-term contract. That's impossible, given that this is his second season. So perhaps the fantasy mentality isn't a bad one in this case.

Kypreos, in his infinite SCREAMING, I mean, WISDOM, apparently was told there was an offer from Los Angeles, Malkin for Dustin Brown and Anze Kopitar. That's a good trade, a GREAT trade even, if you look at it in a vacuum. If you're Shero, you certainly consider it if you lose Hossa because you're replacing a big winger with another big winger, albeit one with less scoring skill but much more checking ability. That trade also looks good, even necessary, if the Penguins don't re-sign Ryan Malone either. Malone's a restricted FA who, if you listen to Kypreos and Watters, and you have to because if God spoke to you directly it wouldn't be as loud, will want $5 million. If you make that trade, you're committed to Malone, Fleury, Stall, Orpik, etc. and, this is my whole point here, if you're going to trade Malkin, a 21-year old 106 point player, you better be fucking sure. And not just sure of the trade itself, but of the effect that trade will have on your team. This proposed deal probably won't happen and is only meant as an example to illustrate this fact: there's two kinds of trades. Ones you can look at on their own, just the players and picks involved, and ones that you have to evaluate based on not just the transaction, but the ripple effect afterwards. If you trade Malkin to sign Fleury, Stall, Malone, you better not just get the right players back but hope that those three are worth it as well.

With hockey done and the eternal NBA season mercifully ending soon, baseball takes center stage. BJ Ryan has blown his last two save opportunities, including today where, after the retiring the first two batters, blew a two-run lead to the Yankees. I don't like seeing people lose their jobs, I like organizational stability with coaches and managers having enough time to implement a team culture, like Joe Torre in New York or Bobby Cox and Leo Mazzone (until 2005). That said, JP Riccardi has to go at the end of this year. Manager John Gibbons was on pretty thin ice last year but has shown a greater willingness this year to try a few things, like stealing bases, hit-and-run, and bunt. Now for most teams those are bad things, products of old-fashioned ignorance of the percentages that exist within baseball over the course of a season. For the Blue Jays, a team who can't score runs (4th worst in runs in the AL), can't hit with runners on base (4th worst in runs batted in) and can't hit homeruns (3rd worst), these are necessary risks you have to take. Any port in a storm.

Back to Riccardi. Releases struggling Frank Thomas who they still have to pay $8 million to hit for Oakland, and in the off-season released Reed Johnson, a favorite of all Jays fans, in favor of Shannon Stewart. The choice was Stewart's offense over Johnson's defense, except that at this point Johnson is on pace to hit .266 with 5 homers and 65 RBI's, while Stewart's on pace for .253, 3 HR's and 37 RBI's. Johnson is also one year removed from a .390 OBP, so his offensive production is just FINE thank you, he has better outfield range than Stewart and can actually get a ball from the outfield to home plate without looking like he needs to lie down with a damp cloth afterwards. Riccardi also overpaid Vernon Wells, WAY overpaid AJ Burnett, and made the bizarre decision to give John MacDonald a contract extension, then sign David Eckstein who can hit a little better but defend worse, THEN trade for Marco Scutaro ALL TO PLAY SHORTSTOP. Scutaro's been a pleasant surprise actually, Eckstein is short and tries hard and people like that I guess, and MacDonald is, of course, the best defensive shortstop in baseball (no I won't source that because while he's pretty friggin' close, no stat in the world will back me up on that). But how many mediocre shortstops/utility infielders does one team need? The payroll keeps getting higher and while the pitching is fantastic, it's coming pretty cheap so all the cash is going into the team's terrible "offense." What happens when Marcum, McGowan and Litsch want new contracts? Oh, and their draft record sucks and they never bring in any impact Canadians (that's draft-wise, Stairs doesn't count). Anything else?

Raffi Torres, Denis Grebeshkov, Rob Schremp, Taylor Chorney and a 1st round pick for Evgeni Malkin. Yeah? Of course "yeah," because this year's draft is SHAPING UP TO BE THE DEEPEST DRAFT IN YEARS. If you don't believe me, flip on Hockeycentral and YOU WILL SOON BE A TRUE BELIEVER! KALI MAH!

....

2008-06-03T12:44:00.001-06:00

Not much time to post anything these days, I'd like to work on that over and under-rated player list for the next post but because those are lists you see everywhere I feel the need to find a different angle. Or, as Impressed Reader Matt hinted at, which players will have the biggest drop-off next year, which may be a more interesting way of looking at over and under-rated players. Yeah. That's what'll happen. Next time...

Go Seven Game Finals! And a three-way tie in my pool!

Round 4: DING!!!

2008-05-22T23:09:00.004-06:00

Wrote this a few days but didn't post it. I realized that what I was proposing was far too massive of an undertaking to be completed here so I saved, closed, and drank beer instead.

A much better third round, as will certainly be recognized in the comments section by fawning minions. I hate saying it, but I would've taken the Pens in 5 if I'd known Timonen wasn't going to be playing (even though he later did), simply because of how well he played against Washington and Ovechkin. Dallas won the expected 4th game at home but where did they come off winning Game 5 in Detroit? Rude.

Finals? Pittsburgh in six. I have no confidence in this. None. I don't even have any rationale either, because in my mind both goalies are the same, Pittsburgh's scoring is a tad higher-end than Detroit but the Wings defense and puck control is better. Powerplays both have lots of pop, but since Detroit is still missing Franzen (likely to miss the first game or two), I'm leaning towards the Pens. With little confidence.

I was challenged by Unimpressed Reader Matt to follow up on my off-the-cuff comments about most over-rated athletes. The charge was that it's easy to come up with over-rated athletes, but under-rated athletes would make for a more interesting list. Over and under-rated are pretty subjective, if they play on your team they're under-rated, if they play for the New York Yankees they're over-rated. A true list of under-rated players should, obviously, juxtapose a player's performance against their perceived value. Player performance is pretty easy to quantify, certainly not perfectly, but there's no end to the number of statistics you can pull and manipulate. Yet how would one quantify a player's perceived value? The first things that come to my mind are the market they play in, since more media coverage will yield a more exaggerated characterization of value, both good and bad. The second is obviously salary. That's a commentary on our society isn't it? That we assume that salary is an appropriate measure of a person's value? It's only after that I come around to the number of awards a player has won, peer-voted or otherwise, which really ought to be the first thought but instead comes in a delayed third.

The final product would be the result of the following equation. Take a list of players from a league of choice, categorize them by position, and rank them according to their statistical performance. For example, points per game by defensemen in the 2007-2008 NHL season, or the team's record in games they played in vs. games they did not play. That's the Performance ranking. The Hype rankings would be a composite of awards (maybe), salary, and market size. Rank the same players by salary, awards won, and market size. Salary is a straightforward numeric ranking, awards won would include not just end of year awards but also awards from the Hockey News, Globe and Mail, TSN, stuff like that. Market size, I propose, would be determined by calculating the average NHL city size, then for each player on the list ranking them against the mean. I'm not going to do that here, but let's say the average NHL city is one million people. Anyone playing for the New York Rangers, the largest NHL market at 8.2 million people, would receive 802% more attention than the "average" city-size. So, players would be ranked on a plus, or minus, ranking in order to sloppily account for player hype and attention received in proportion to their market size. You'd do the same with salary, take the average and rank players according to their relation to the mean. Awards are where I'm stuck, not sure whether to include them in Performance or Hype. Some are strictly for performance, like the Art Ross for most points, but others, like best defenseman or goalie, are much more subjective. I don't know about that one yet.

You'd take each of the three (or two) Hype Quantifiers (Yes? No? I like it, catchy and faux academic), reverse rank them so that the top ranked players receive the most points (so if there's 100 defenseman, the highest paid receives 100 points). This is just so that the players at the top of the list have the highest Hype Quantifier numbers, making them stand out more. Add the two (or three) sets of points together for each player, then re-rank the players according to Hype Quantifier results and compare them with your Performance rankings. The players with the biggest discrepancy are your most over-rated or most over-rated, depending on which list they're highest on. That's my rudimentary formula for now. It's pretty flexible since it would allow a person to use any stat they want to measure performance since points obviously is not always the best performance indicator.

Quantifying perception is pretty hard. When talking about hype, most of it comes from the media. In my last post I linked to that article writing about Dion Phaneuf is over-rated. Well, where does that rating come from? Pierre McGuire mostly, but the rest of the media has fallen in love with him too. That's something that should go into the Hype Quantifier somehow, but I don't see how. If you included some sort of points system that counts the number of times a player is mentioned in the media, Sean Avery would probably be near the top. A media ranking wouldn't really work since they simply cover a story rather than performance. Often that's both, but suspensions and poor performance are stories too.

As mentioned at the top, I'm not going to do this list now. That's simply HOW I'd like to do it and since I'm finding there's too much subjectivity in my own blog analysis, I'm trying to find ways to formulate some actual answers and results. No stat is perfect or tells the whole story, but this is a first step. I might not even do the list, just keep tweaking the formula according to Unimpressed Reader comments. I'll call it the Brian Urlacher Performance and Hype Composite.

Some people are so smart

2008-05-16T22:20:00.002-06:00

See, this is the kind of wonderful product you find on internet blogs. I don't know where they get their information, but anytime you see an entire article written to prove how over-rated Dion Phaneuf is you have to think, wow, you sir are sir totally awesome sir. Well-researched, good use of statistics with large sample sizes and a totally biased premise.

I can't say I've watched the Flames and thought my GOD does Phaneuf ever suck. I've had lots of other thoughts. While listening to his interviews I've thought "Geez, I wonder if his IQ could top Edmonton's summer time temperatures," and "I could see him eating puppies to sustain himself" and "I would like to hit him with a shovel." Just watching him squirm his way though CBC softball questions is so unpleasant, it's like watching Hannibal Lector describe his new floor: the blandness of the topic and phrases only serves to accentuate his obvious evilness. I have no doubt that Phaneuf doesn't tip, doesn't say thank you, doesn't hold doors open for the person behind him, and spends the off-season hunting the most dangerous animal of all, Man. I'm a fan, I'll think whatever I want. Never thought he was over-rated though, since he seems pretty good I guess. Thanks to someone else's research though, I now think of Phaneuf another inexplicably celebrated athlete in the great tradition of Darin Erstad, David Eckstein, Tracy McGrady, Dougie Gilmour ("Doug" Gilmour was a very good player but "Dougie" Gilmour was as insufferably hyped as a demi-god), Wendel Clark and, yes, Brian Urlacher. Yay internets!

Parity vs. Dynasty

2008-05-07T15:38:00.003-06:00

I didn't appear at work today but, being playoff time, I can't disclose the reason. All I can say it's that it's an mid-body injury.

With Anaheim mercifully eliminated early (giving Edmonton the 22nd overall pick), articles are abound over whether or not parity in the NHL is a good thing. This year's Stanley Cup winner will be the ninth new champion in a row (omitting the lockout year of course), and there appears to be little evidence that winning a Stanley Cup two or more years in a row is even close to possible. Carolina was a team that got hot at the right time and beat teams that were injured, then missed the playoffs the following two seasons. Last year Anaheim steamrolled the competition, literally, then added Matthieu Schneider and Todd Bertuzzi to replace Scott Neidermeyer, Dustin Penner and Teemu Selanne. Those were downgrades, but then Neidermeyer and Selanna came back to form an awfully formidable team. I picked the Rangers to win the Cup (though not to beat Pittsburgh, because I'm Super Smrt) but never really believed they could win their inevitable matchup with the Ducks. Not only did the Ducks not make the Finals, they lost in six games to Dallas without a lot of fuss. A rare playoff series that was not as close than the series score would suggest. That Anaheim team was build for now and the future too, with excellent young players (Perry, Kunitz, Getzlaf, Pahlsson) a big part of last season's Cup win. There was every reason to think they'd challenge for a long time, but it was not to be. Neidermeyer is likely done, same with Selanne, Bertuzzi is broken (not Steve Moore-broken, but pretty beat up), and everyone else is a year older.

Three seasons is an awfully small sample size, but there's lots of information to suggest that any team who even comes close, let alone wins a Cup, won't be around the following season. Carolina and Edmonton both missed the playoffs last season, Ottawa and Anaheim went out feebly in this year's first round. Carolina lost a couple of players after winning the Cup but when Matt Cullen is your biggest loss, your team is still pretty similar in quality. Edmonton, of course, was forced to deal Pronger, lost Spacek, Peca, and Tarnstrom to free agency. By picking up Roloson, they also lost a first-round draft pick. That team really went for it that year and a drop-off was probably not unexpected. Had they kept Pronger though, things would have been different. Ottawa simply fell apart this year, they had some injuries but evidently Ray Emery showing up late for a few practices was enough to shatter that team's psyche and cost John Paddock his job. Anaheim was the real puzzler; they simply couldn't score enough goals, finishing with only 205 for an average of 2.40/game, 28th in the entire league. Clearly, Dustin Penner was the key to that Cup run and Edmonton is lucky to have him. My own conclusion is that of these four teams Anaheim was by FAR the most likely to repeat. If they couldn't come close, with the excellent goaltending and dominant defense they have, who can?

At this point, Pittsburgh and Detroit are the favored teams to win this year. Pittsburgh could lose Marian Hossa, Pascal Dupuis, and Ryan Malone, putting a damper on any potential Cup defense next year. Detroit is in great shape going into next year, with only Hasek as a UFA. They should be pursuing a real goalie in this case. Philly has R.J. Umberger and Jeff Carter as restricted free agents this off-season, and both could be targets of offer sheets. Otherwise, they're in pretty good shape as well. So is Dallas, with only role player RFA's to re-up with or dismiss. Of these teams, Pittsburgh has the most to lose but also has the most high-end talent returning next season. None of these four teams have rosters full of players that would scare anybody, nothing like what Anaheim had going into this season (and would later have after Neidermeyer and Selanne returned in mid-season), each is either flawed in goal (Detroit and Pittsburgh, unless Fleury finally proves otherwise) or on offense (Dallas has little after Richards and Modano, while Philly could sure use a healthy Simon Gagne next year). In other words, there's no reason to think any of these four teams, based on their rosters next year, will fare any better than Anaheim did this year.

So why is this? The salary cap, of course. Teams can still afford to go out and get high-end talent, that much was obvious this past off-season. It's depth they can't afford. A few injuries or slumps to top players means more ice time for younger, cheaper players who make more mistakes and weaken the team. With players paying into escrow we can't yet know exactly what the average player salary was from this past season, but we do know that the highest payrolls reach only as high as the $50.3 million cap (and with the higher Canadian dollar, more teams able to spend that high) compared with the $77 million spent by the Red Wings in 2003-2004. Clearly, talent is spread around the league to a far greater degree than pre-lockout, more so because the high-revenue, highly-desirable teams, like the Ranger, Flyers, Red Wings and Leafs, can't buy up everyone. Those players have to go somewhere, might as well be Nashville or Pittsburgh. Every team has obvious flaws, and those flaws are what you hear about at the trade deadline: "Well James, the Stars would like to add some secondary scoring before the deadline," "The Penguins are in the market for a depth defenseman," and of course "Ottawa is searching for some MUCH NEEDED GRIT." Teams were trading for those elements before the lockout of course, but now the need is so much more obvious.

For a league with an average ticket price of $48.72 (112.10 for premium seats), a system ensuring league-wide competitiveness and quick rebuilds (Exhibit A: this year's Flyers) is imperative. It's even more important because of the number of teams in non-hockey markets (yeah, that's almost all U.S. cities, I know). Sports played on ice are not part of the culture in probably 95% of the U.S., so having a fair shot at a competitive team each year is paramount. Parity also forces management to improve its team-building methods, as is already becoming evident in Vancouver under Mike Gillis. The old salary system was broken not just because the lower-revenue teams couldn't afford to keep players they'd drafted and developed into their prime, but also because the financial advantage held by high-revenue teams meant little effort went into new methods of statistical analysis. You just simply spent more to cover up mistakes. People point out the Red Wings as an exception, but that's not entirely true. Detroit certainly was successful both before and after the lockout because of their superior European scouting, rather than their ability to simply buy the best players (as did the Rangers), but having that kind of international scouting, as well as the resources to retain those players once they reached their peak, is due to the fact that they just had more cash. So, more money meant more dominance. The salary cap changed that.

Of course, when high revenue teams had to slash salaries by as much as the Red Wings did from 2003-2004 to 2005-2006 ($77 million down to the cap limit of $39 million) without cutting ticket prices, that's pretty good for owners. All that money that went into player salaries? Go buy yourself a new island. Toss some of it back into player development and scouting, always a good investment, but based on how many drafted players actually become NHL players the draft is still a lottery. In that sense, high-revenue teams still have an advantage since money previously spent on player salaries can now go into player development (or into management, as the rumoured $5 million/year Brian Burke-to-Toronto salary suggests). Ultimately though, if the money's spread out so to are the quality players. So the cap, and the parity that inevitably followed, is good for the league, isn't it? Well, that's one argument.

The other argument that parity ignores is the importance of dynasties, made possible under the old system but seemingly gone for good now. Dynasties, flagship teams, marquee teams, benchmarks, whatever you want to call them, are incredibly important in any sports league. Fans watch sports to see glimpses of greatness, to see athletic feats regularly performed that are impossible in their own world. 150 mph serves, 40% 3-pointers, 100 mph slapshots, knee-buckling curveballs hit 500 feet, 60 yard spirals, all performed in ways that make them look easy. Players who often perform great feats become great players, and teams with great accomplishments are admired and copied. Yet a system of imposed parity strips away a team's greatness; a sense of randomness appears when 16 teams make the NHL playoffs with little to distinguish each one. Fans aren't attracted to sports for randomness, in fact, nobody likes randomness in anything. It's chaotic, and as creatures of habit chaos is unpleasant. What fans love, however, is the unexpected. There's a huge difference between randomness and the unexpected. For something to be unexpected, obviously one would need to have a set of expectations already in place. Those would be based on prior events and precedents already set. In other words, if the higher seeds always beat the lower seeds, if the top two or three teams are always the same and usually win the championship, then an upset is far, FAR more exciting and memorable than if lower seeds win some degree of regularity, which in the NHL they currently do.

For that reason, a dynasty is important for any league to have. Teams that gradually build themselves into a league power and remains at a top level for years on end, winning several championships consecutively while establishing themselves as the obvious alpha, provide a sense of stability in an otherwise relativistic environment. Teams can only be judged against others, that's the nature of competitive sports as opposed to judged sports, such as figure skating or gymnastics. As such, it's important to have one team set the standard and provide a stable yardstick from which all other teams can be judged. In the early 1980's, the Edmonton Oilers, while a fabulous regular season team, could never be considered great until the defeated the previous yardstick, the New York Islanders. In this case, there was a perfect sense of ordered transition from one alpha team to the next: the Islander won four Cups in a row, beat the Oilers to win their fourth Cup, then lost to the Oilers who would win five in the next seven years. The torch was seamlessly passed, and the rest of the league's teams, as well as fans, journalists, and historians, had that benchmark teams to compare all others to. Teams like Philadelphia and Boston, whom Edmonton played and defeated in two finals each, are more easily understood because they could be compared to the Oilers.

It's the same in all sports, fans and journalists love comparing the 80's Oilers with the 70's Canadiens, the 80's Lakers with the 59-66 Celtics, the 20's Yankees with the 60's, 70's, or late 90's Yankees. Winning a championship is a tremendous accomplishment by a team that played great, but it does not make a great team. Are the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals a great team? Uh no, they had fewer wins than any other World Series Champion, and fewer than many non-playoff teams that year. What about the 2008 Super Bowl champion New York Giants? Nope, they finished 10-6, a record that tied them with the Cleveland Browns, a team who missed the playoffs. It just shows winning a championship does not a great team make; truly great teams, ones who'll be remembered and compared with other historical dynasties, aren't ones who back their way into the playoffs and suddenly get hot. It's not to knock their accomplishments, this year's Giants beat what was about to crowned the greatest NFL team of all time, but there's another level, reserved for the elite and immortal, of which those teams fall short.

So dynasties are good, even necessary, but can they be allowed to exist under a strict salary cap system? The NHL is the first pro sports league in North America to implement a hard salary cap, meaning there's no circumstances or loopholes allowing teams to go above the limit, while still maintaining guaranteed player contracts. In other words, there's no other model they can look to for new ideas. The challenge is finding a way to allow teams to dominate the competition without resorting to financial advantages. When the new CBA was introduced, three challenges were introduced for teams trying to build a dynasty. I'll break them down.

Not only did the new NHL CBA come with a hard salary cap, but it also stated that the age of unrestricted free agency would steadily drop from 31 years old towards the age of 27 in 2008-2009. So, with the salary cap, teams are restricted in their ability to buy talent on the open market, and thus need to develop their own through drafting and trading for younger, more affordable players. Now that strategy is hampered by the fact that teams are faced with having to re-sign those players at an earlier age, when they're in the heart of their prime. Previously, when the UFA age was 31, players were beginning the downside of their career and big contracts were more of a reward to years of service where they were likely being paid under market value. It was accepted practice for big revenue teams to overpay players in the last years of those big deals, while probably only getting market value for the first few season. Now, players are UFA sooner are during their very best years, meaning there's more competition for their services since they're a far more attractive commodity to all teams, not just high-revenue. As a result, it's even harder to build a team that's consistently challenging for a Cup while your players are allowed to walk for nothing at 27. The mandate falls on the team to give them long-term deals sooner, thus eroding their value as a low-cost young player much sooner.

Another obstacle, of which Kevin Lowe was the catalyst, is teams poaching other teams' restricted free agents. As Lowe smartly realized, it makes more sense to grab young players and pay them big money during their prime seasons (while giving up a few lottery tickets/draft picks) rather than waiting for them to become UFA's. Sure, they become UFA's at a younger age so they're still in their prime, but you have to pay them even MORE money because of the greater demand for their services, as well as the fact that the player has earned total control over where they want to go. Obviously this summer will show how big of a strategy this actually becomes, since so far only Kevin Lowe has tried it. Maybe it catches on, maybe not. It likely will, because when Evgeni Malkin becomes available next year (barring an extension this summer), wouldn't you give up a few draft picks for the chance to have him in your lineup for possibly the rest of this career? Of course you would, a player like that is almost impossible to come by. For Pittsburgh though, it's like winning the Set For Life Lottery or whatever it's called, where you get paid $10,000 a month for 25 years or something, but having someone else come along and buy it from you after three years because that money wants to go to someone better who'll invest it wisely and not buy hooker, porn and blow. Sure, you could match their price but what if you're already out of money? The lottery cash might originally come from a bank in another town and wants to back there (Toronto, of course), or the money's wife just hates you. In other words, the lottery you thought you'd have for a long time got yanked away because you didn't keep your house in order. That's kind of a stretched metaphor. Why only three years? That's the next challenge.

Once you draft a player, you can only sign him to a three-year standard rookie contract. No longer, and for a maximum of only $850,000 a year. That's pretty good, you get Ovechkin, Crosby and Malkin for almost nothing. After year two, you pretty much know what kind of player you have, whether it's a superstar like those or just a very good player like Jay Boumeester. The problem is that everybody else knows too, and now the RFA poaching begins. As a result his next contract is going to be his big money contract. THAT means you'd better re-sign his ass as fast as you can, like after year one or two, before his stock rises too much more in his third year. THAT means if you're lucky enough to draft a couple of franchise players, like Pittsburgh with Crosby and Malkin, you have to sign them to big money extensions after only one or two season in the league. Great for the players, but impossible for teams trying to keep their costs down as they try to build their dynasty. One of Brian Burke's few coherent, non-profane criticism of Kevin Lowe's RFA poaching was that by inflating the value of young players, Lowe has essentially erased the three contract system (three year entry-level, then RFA, then big money UFA) that helps teams keep young players for longer and cheaper. Lowe's point was that the second contract is the one you really should want to spend on, since that's where you're getting the player's peak seasons. True enough, but another challenge against teams keeping their own players.

Back to the initial question. How does a league promote non-financially based dynasties? Looking at the above three challenges makes a few suggestions self-evident. Everyone wants teams who build through the draft to succeed. Fans like it because they get to follow young players from 18 years old through their career. It builds better fan connections and a more community feel around the team. The league likes it because it lends more credibility to the draft, which it can hype because it has a tangible affect on teams' long-term futures. Owners and GMs like it because it's cheaper to draft and develop than constantly buying or trading for established players. Therefore, the league needs to take steps to promote internal team building. Here are my best suggestions, in general terms.

First off, there needs be an incentive granted to teams re-signing their own players. There's two stages where this should be done, the RFA stage and the UFA stage. I'd like to see teams granted a provision where, if they are re-signing their own players, they are granted a kind of discount on the cap hit on that contract, say 75%. Let's say that after two more seasons Sam Gagner has impressed the Oilers enough to warrant an extension. The Oilers sign him to a five year, $20 million contract, yet because they are re-signing their own player the cap hit isn't $4 million/yr, but rather 3$ million per year. Gagner makes the full salary so the NHLPA is happy, but it only counts for 75% against the cap, granting the Oilers an advantage in contract negotiations. Let's say Gagner signs an offer sheet with Anaheim for that same contract, Edmonton could match but while Anaheim's cap hit would be 4$ million if Edmonton passes, it would only be $3 million if they matched. Same thing at the UFA stage. Let's say Gagner gets a pile of offers from other teams for $8 million/year (this is assuming Sam Gagner becomes Joe Sakic of course). Edmonton can offer 25% more money per year for the same salary cap hit, thus giving them an advantage in any negotiations. If Edmonton trades Gagner during his contract, his new team absorbs the same 25% cap discount. This way, teams have the upper hand in negotiations with their own players. If the player just doesn't want to player there, then he walks anyways. This would mean less RFA poaching and thus teams could keep their players through at least a second contract. If the player wants to leave, the team trades them.

My other suggestion is to simply lengthen the entry-level contract to up to five years, since if you're lucky enough to draft a Crosby or Stamkos or Tavares the team should at least have the option of signing them for longer than just three years. The rationale behind the three year rule was to keep salaries lower until their later years, but with an increasing willingness (probably) for GMs to go after RFA's those top young players will be poached for big money early in their career anyways. Give GMs an extra two years but raise the minimum salary, since if you put in the discount clause there's going to be less RFA poaching, and thus big salaries for young players won't be as high. They get a little less later and little more sooner.

The other thing that'll happen is that players will have a little less control over where they play, since the team that drafted them will have that signing advantage. Yet with more players getting no-trade and no-movement clauses in their contracts, the playing field is a little more even on the management side and player side. Teams spend money scouting and developing, it's only fair they have some tools to retain those assets. Besides, often players on longer contracts are often more appealing to trade for since contract length adds certainty to the asset. Whatever you think about the Pronger trade, there's no way Lowe gets as much as he does if Pronger wasn't signed for four more years. Trades might actually be easier if these suggestions went into effect; you'd presumably have more long-term deals for less money and teams wouldn't be constantly faced with trade offers involving impending free agents for players under longer contracts.

Of course, nobody knows what GMs will do with new rules. The conventional knowledge after the lockout was that players would change teams a lot more frequently due to short-term contracts and more free-agency. Players are moving more, but now we're seeing the kinds of long-term contracts that have never existed before, like the 15 deal for Rick DiPietro, 12 years for Ovechkin, and 12 years for Mike Richards. One would have thought that with a cap GMs would hedge their bets a lot more and be unwilling to commit valuable cap space to anyone other than the absolute upper echelon, but they've done the opposite and thrown long-term deals at any B-rated free agent (like a Chris Drury or Ryan Smyth) that comes along. So while it's impossible to know what affect those proposed changes would have, I think the goal of creating a CBA that allows teams to remain dominant based on non-financial factors, such as drafting and shrewd trading, is one the NHL needs to pursue.

Round 2'n 3 Results'n Picks

2008-05-06T21:25:00.003-06:00

A truly superlative set of second-round guesses on my part. That's the worst set of picks I've ever had in a single round, and I'm so happy I posted them for all to see the true power of my prognosticating power. But Brian Burke is still not going to the Leafs.

Round 3, DING!!! Two very interesting series indeed, with good guys against bad guys in each series. Detroit and Pittsburgh are "Good" only because they stand for Truth, Justice, and the Offensive Puck-Controlling Way. Dallas is "Evil" because they trap and beat Edmonton a lot, while Philly just sucks llama scrot. Like most people I picked Montreal but if you look at both teams at the beginning of the year you'd come to similar perspectives. Both rebuilding, lots of young players, neither looking likely to go on long playoff runs just yet, both with rosters filled through the draft. In fact, before the season started you'd be hard pressed to find anybody that thought Montreal would finish higher than Philly in the standings, let alone finish first in the conference. Montreal did overachieve this year, that seems pretty obvious, as did most of their players so really their series with Philly should have been recognized as the saw-off it was. That includes me, obviously. And Montreal shouldn't have traded Huet at the deadline.

Philadelphia vs. Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh has taken down the defending conference champions (which is like saying they beat up Muhammed Ali, like, yesterday rather than 40 years ago) and the sexy pre-season Stanley Cup favorite. And their foreigners are scoring a lot. That's pretty good. Philly has shown in can deal with superstars with solid supporting casts, dispatching Ovechkin with Green, Backstrom and Semin as well as Alex Kovalev with the Kostitsyns, Koivu, and Plekanec. The difference this time is that Pittsburgh isn't one superstar (or former above average star having a superstar season, as was the case with Kovalev) with a bunch of very good players, but three top-end certified platinum ass-kickers, who ALSO have a very good supporting cast. Yet Philly's goaltending, if Biron plays as well as he did against Montreal, is markedly superior and their defense is quick and physical. No letdown for either team as the Battle of Pennsylvania won't allow for any slacking, which is a factor that helps Pittsburgh more than Philly. It's more of a toss-up than it looks like on paper, but Pittsburgh is the better team and has already beaten superior opponents. Pens in 6.

Detroit vs. Dallas
Dallas has the better, and presently red hot, goaltending in Marty Turco while Detroit will only offer up a steady Chris Osgood and a seemingly unhelpful Dominick Hasek. The Wings have shown a lot of offensive depth so far and probably have the better top-end scorers, while Dallas is a little more physical and has beaten far tougher opponents. It's mostly that reason why this series is closer to a toss-up than it would appear on paper; Detroit had an unexpected time with Nashville and swept away a badly beat-up Colorado team, while Dallas beat the defending champs and the other sexy Stanley Cup favorite. Detroit has too much skill though, and will take it in 5.

We shall see...

The Not-So-Great Debators

2008-05-01T10:36:00.006-06:00

Blogs. Are there any old people they can't alienate? There's lots of great sports blogs on the Internet, none of which are found on Sportsnet.ca. I like Sean McCormick's bold attempts at ruining his reputation as a fair and honest reporter, Jim Kelley writes a column, not a blog, and the rest either pander to the more idiotic contingent of their commenters or serve up bland tasteless cliché-gumbo (I'm looking at you, Jamie Campbell). None of the Sportsnet blogs are bad, they just don't offer up anything new or challenging. TSN blogs are either just more "Insider" news and rumours and not really in the true spirit of a blog, or are written by James Duthie and are awesome, if still pretty safe and avoid any real outspokenness.

There's a reason why official news outlets, whether online, print, or on TV are pretty safe. They're written by reporters, beat reporters mostly, who cover the same team for a whole season and as such don't have the leeway to write anything too challenging. Annoying the players, after all, means no golden juicy "110%," "it is what it is" and "he adds some MUCH NEEDED GRIT" quotes for you, Mr. Reporter Man! As a result, sports journalism is kind of stuck right now; traditional (meaning non-bloggy) sports media has become so invasive and omnipresent while also becoming stagnant in its ability to cover the game. It's paralyzed by its own omnipotence. Mainstream sports journalism is usually conservative and derivative and when it tries to be radical and push the limit, such as with sports-talk radio or anything written by the critically under-medicated Mike Toth, it comes across as contrived and formulaic as a Flavor of Love ho-spat.

At the other end of the spectrum, since it's perceived this way in world of mainstream journalism, sports and otherwise, are blogs. Blogs in the sporting world are viewed the same way as they are viewed in general: irresponsible, profane, unaccountable, low-brow and, of course, written by pale-faced virgins living in their mother's basement. Mainstream journalism is a highbrow, contemplative, respectable, gentlemanly art form undertaken only by those of the highest fortitude, wisest minds, and owning the greatest number of slaves. The reality, as is evident to anyone with an ounce of common sense, is that both are wrong. Newspapers, TV outlets, books, websites and blogs are just mediums. To ridicule a conduit of information rather than the information itself merely exposes one's ignorance of the conduit's content. We're supposed to dismiss blogs because some people are immature psychopaths? Hmm, better not read any books then.

Of course, this is common sense and everybody knows this. Wait, no they don't. My two favourite sports blogs, linked on the sidebar, are Joe Posnanski's and Firejoemorgan. There are lots more great sports blogs and I'll discover them in time, in the true organic tradition of Internet searching: Huh, what's that. *Click*. Lame. *Click*. Haha, cool. *Bookmark*. *Click* What an asshole. *Click* Ew!!!! OMG that’s DISGUSTING!!! *Bookmark*. ...And so forth. Both blogs were involved with, in a matter of speaking, last Monday's HBO show "Costas Now" where Bob Costas, wearing his father's best suit, (he seriously looks like he's posing for his fourth grade class photo) (Costas seems like the kind of kid who would’ve worn a suit to fourth grade class photos too) (right, like Michael Scott) (I wonder if they'd get along) (Hmm, maybe not, Costas seemed pretty cool on Newsradio years ago) interviews people about stuff. Firejoemorgan's intrepid Ken Tremendous was on the panel and Joe Posnanski, actually a columnist for the Kansas City Star and named best sports columnist in the U.S., was initially asked but did not appear, much to his apparent relief. Both websites give their impressions (Firejoemorgan's are here, read from the bottom) on the bizarre performance taken by noted writer Buzz Bissinger, which you can watch here if you hate yourself. Buzz says blogs are bad while across the U.S. (those who bother paying extra for HBO) other old people nod their heads in agreement while cleaning cat hair off their sock garters. Meanwhile, common sense everywhere watches and becomes paralyzed in frustration.

The Internet has a real problem with its interactiveness (new word). Old people have a point, the Internet is a pretty nasty place. People can hide behind anonymity and toss out the kinds of verbal grenades that would have you beaten to a pulp in any other circumstance. It's pretty shocking to see the depths of depravity that exist in both blogs and comment sections of otherwise innocent websites. When you read a thoughtful article that's even-handed and well-researched, as is usually the case with JoePosnanski's Star columns or Spector's Foxsports blog, and find comments like "yur a f.u.c.k.face go die in hell," it's a pretty disheartening portrayal of our society. People who don't like the internet don't like how id-driven human interests and opinions can be when in public society people will bother to control themselves. There is a positive in this though, and that's what pillars of the old-school sports journalism don't understand. Internet journalism, whether in blogs or independent websites, says all the things about sports that columnists and reporters won't say because of they’re in too deep. Bloggers can say David Eckstein sucks even if he tries hard, that is doesn’t matter if Darin Erstad played football in college, he can’t hit worth shit. This deliberate contrarianism (awesome new word) can be a problem when the subject is race or homosexual rights or any numbers of hot-button issues, but when the subject is sports that contrarian perspective can do wonderful things and spread terrific research and findings with incredible speed. Of course, that's often accompanied by, and greeted with, the requisite Internet ignorance, psychotic rage and profanity.

The idea of a debate between Internet and "traditional" journalism is rather silly, being that both are just vessels for ideas both good and bad. There's plenty of crappy journalism anywhere you look, the only difference is that on the Internet you become exposed, without consent, to the "thoughts" of everyone else who read the article. I've never really understood the value of having comments sections on "traditional" sports outlet websites, I have one since I figure only friends will say anything, but if you're Foxsports or TSN what's the point? They just turn into flame wars or get flooded with spam. At least if you go to an individual's blog you know what you're getting, it's like rolling into a bad neighbourhood and wondering why you got shot. Unfortunately then, whether you’re talking about a person's blog, an online publication or a professional website, there's going to be blowback in the comments section that you’ll have to ignore. If you want to get your crappy sports journalism somewhere else, and avoid these nuclear tirades and clever swearing loopholes, you can always read it here, here, or here.

Prediction

2008-04-24T15:47:00.005-06:00

Brian Burke will not go to Toronto this year. So says TSN, Burke, Ducks CEO Mike (don't call me Dan) Schulman, and presumably owner Henry Samueli. Unless the Leafs want to let Cliff Fletcher drive the Leafs' little schoolbus for the next year, at which point Burke's contract will be up (barring an extension), another name will have to be drawn out of a hat. Also, the Leafland media is gradually coming to the realization that the Leafs GM position is perhaps not the equivalent of Guy Who Counts Roomfull Of Cash Because Nobody Knows How Much Is In There job, and publicly offering up said job will probably not bring Ken Holland, Lou Lamoriello or Bob Gainey racing their Segways to the MLSE offices, slapping and shoving each other up the escalator, jamming papers back into their briefcases while simultaneously shouting their names to Richard Peddie's secretary.

I'll pause while you enjoy that image.

Right then. So with none of those candidates interested and/or available, who are the most likely candidates for the Leafs job? I can't seem to find anyone in my usual website roundabout willing to write loud, boisterous columbs, no bold predictions or top 150 candidates for Who Should Run This Crappy Team. Even TSN, with a hockey staff roughly the size of the old Stasi, just keeps churning out the same stories about Brian Burke's status with the Ducks. Sure you hear lots of names thrown around, but nobody's willing to make blind foolish predictions. That won't do. So, as a public service, I'll submit to you the Loyal Reader my list of options for the Leafs GM position.

1. Colin Campbell
2. Doug Armstrong
3. Neil Smith

That's it. This isn't the Vancouver Canucks or Sacramento Bumwads, this is the New York Yankess of the NHL. As many have correctly stated, this team doesn't need to take chances with new candidates, bright young up-and-comers or former player agents. No sir. If you're the Leafs, you go out and buy the best name. If he fails, go buy the next best name, and so forth. The salary cap only serves to increase MLSE's profits and since it has no effect on management salaries, there's no reason to shop Zellers when you can peruse Harrod's instead. These three are are the best available, have the most experience, good media skills and the high profile necessary to front the biggest hockey market in the NHL. I don't know how you qualify "biggest," there's a few U.S. markets that dwarf Toronto of course, but between the large southern Ontario population and the large capacity on the back of the bandwagon, I think it's a safe bet that the Leafs have the largest, if most lethargic, apathetic and delightfully unhappy, fanbase.

The best of these candidates is Doug Armstrong, former assistant GM and GM of the Dallas Stars who, with the exception of the Brad Richards trade made at this year's trade deadline, was responsible for building a perennial division and conference challenger. Since 2002-2003 the team has averaged 104.8 points per season, won a Stanley Cup in 1999 with Armstrong as Assistant GM, and hired Dave Tippett who, in five seasons, has compiled a 235-121-28-26 regular season record. He was fired following a bad loss to Los Angeles last November, a loss for which he, as GM, was entirely responsible and should have been able to personally prevent.

Neil Smith won a Stanley Cup in 1994 with the Rangers, he's used to big media, used to a corporate atmosphere but is a second choice. He hasn't been a GM since 2000 (not counting his six week tenure for the Islanders) and may be viewed as a consolation prize.

My prediction is that despite Armstrong's rep, Colin Campbell will get the job. He's an ex-league disciplinarian, like Brian Burke, and has seemingly wanted the Leafs job for a while since he turned down the Flyers GM job in November 2006. Assuming that's true, he comes in motivated and perfectly able to handle the Leaf media, since as the NHL's sheriff he's faced FAR tougher questions than whether Jiri Tlusty is really a long-term solution. I imagine after years in a pretty thankless job he'd love to run the Leafs, though not having a Stanley Cup or NHL GM experience won't be in his favor. Richard Peddie was pretty clear, he wanted a guy with a Stanley Cup and long-term experience, so that would appear to erase Campbell's chances entirely. Still, I can't see them going with a successful though still relatively unknown Armstrong or lack of any recent success Smith so my guess, which is not an argument for or against, is Campbell.

The other thing that I keep thinking about is the league's suspension and discipline policies. Campbell was unwilling to make any bold statements or set precedents when given the opportunity by Chris Pronger this year. The league, rightfully so, is being hammered from all sides about its inability to make consistent suspension decisions and create any kind of meaningful standards. Matthieu Schneider said today on Bob McCown's radio show that he was unimpressed with the inconsistency shown in the Chris Simon and Chris Pronger suspensions, NHLPA head Paul Kelly endorsed the idea of having specific guidelines for suspensions rather than treating each incident in a vacuum and fans, goaded by the media, are growing increasingly frustrated with with the seemingly random, out-of-a-hat method of deciding the length of suspensions and amount of fines. This would appear to be the ideal time to make a regime change and implement some of the many player, management and league suggestions. It's perfect, Campbell gets the job he wants, the league brings in a few face to restructure the rules and utopia arrives. Pretty hard to make any substantial guesses without much inside information, but it's very easy to make foolish, unaccountable ones.

So my reasons aren't very good but it's not about reasons, it's about who's right. Look, I've won my playoff hockey pool two or maybe three years in a row, so I think I know how to hire an NHL General Manager. If they hire Campbell I'm not sure how they spin their flip-flop as they seemed pretty determined to get a Stanley Cup winning GM. Ultimately it's foolish to make any predictions, nobody knows anything about the process or how they're interviewing. Still, with the draft on June 20th and free agency starting July 1st, you'd think they'd want somebody on the job in the next month or so and therefore you'd hear more rumors and news. There are long-term decisions to be made this summer; this isn't dumping veterans for prospects at the deadline. Fletcher made the deadline deals he could to "set the table," as he said, for the next GM. You can't let him make the upcoming long-term team decisions unless he's going to be around long-term, otherwise you handcuff the new guy.

In writing this I realize why there aren't many articles out there listing the Top 5 Leaf GM candidates, and instead lots of just general name throwing. One reason seems to be that it's possible the Leafs have truly sealed off any leaks and nobody knows anything. That was no more on display than with the Brian Burke predictions, saying he was the first choice, his negotiations with the Ducks were unclear, and that he was leaving the door open to take the Leafs job. Burke has been the number one rumor since John Ferguson Jr. was fired, despite all his rantings to the contrary (Brian Burke does not speak, he RANTS. "...and would you like fries or salad?" "THIS OFFER IS AN ACT OF DESPERATION FROM A SERVER TRYING TO SAVE HER JOB. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME YOU HAVE OFFERED A GROSSLY INFLATED NUMBER OF SIDE CHOICES." Here's the original article the Burke Rant Template comes from), and there really hasn't been a strong second choice to rumor over. In theory then it should be pretty quiet until the decision is made, what with the ability of the MLSE board to keep quiet, at least in this matter.

Round 2: DING!!!

2008-04-23T12:46:00.003-06:00

Over the last four days in Edmonton, a lot of snow has fallen. Estimates range from the conservative (16 cm) to the accurate (16 billion jillion cm). In Prince George, previous home of Sporticourse (before it existed, but whose destiny lay forward...), there was a lot more snow. Annually, Prince George would receive between 1 and 100 billion jillion katillion cm of snow. The difference is that in Prince George, as a result of being a smaller, more boring town stocked sky-high with individuals whose sole skill is to operate heavy machinery, actually will plow a street now and then. The City of Edmonton's road map is unlike the one you'll find on Google or Mapquest; it only shows freeways, bus routes, and rich neighbourhoods. Those get plowed, but anything upper-middle class or less gets you a big one of these. As a result, Prince George may get more snowfall but Edmonton receives a far higher volume of Actual Snow and Slush (the A.S.S. volume). In other words, one week after wearing shorts and promenading (like walking, only with Lululemons) the river valley, baseball interest=shot and playoff hockey interest resumes!

A very nice first round, though had Washington coverted any of their 16 third period shots in last night's game seven, my hockey pool would have a real smooth veneer to compliment a single rough edge (picking the Rangers in seven; thought Brodeur could push it at least that far). The second round looks fantastic, despite that interest begins to wane by now with warmer weather and only American teams remaining. With only one of those still true this year, the second round will be far more watchable, especially considering these reasons:

Detroit vs. Colorado
Hockey's best non-traditional rivalry is renewed and with much of the original cast from the late 1990's, at least for Colorado. The Avs bring back Adam Foote and Peter Forsberg to compliment Joe Sakic and Milan Hejduk, while Ryan Smyth, Jose Theodore, Andrew Brunette, John-Michael Liles and Scott Hannan will enjoy their first taste of the famed rivalry. For Detroit Henrik Zetterberg, Pavel Datsyuk, Tomas Holmstrom, Niklas Lindstrom and the surprising Johan Franzen and Jiri Hudler will look to pick up where they left off against Nashville.
That's my best impression of the bland, uninsightful series summaries you have to read this time of year. It's that or worse: the overbaring, unnecessarily loud opinionated shrieking from TSN's panel. THIS TEAM IS SOFT THEY CAN'T WIN. YES THEY CAN THEY ARE SOOOOO GREAT. YOU WERE ONCE A MEDIOCRE BACKUP. HAHAHAHA. (repeat for each team analysis).
Detroit's goaltending looked shaky last round but they had the puck the whole series so they made it through. Colorado was outshot in every game against the Wild and thus looks comfortable playing a containment-style defense against Detroit, who will stick with their puck-control style. Colorado has the better goalie and more playoff-proven offensive depth, so I go with them in 7.

San Jose vs. Dallas
Both teams came out of grueling first-round series playing two very physical teams. This series should be a little more skillful and thus would appear to favor San Jose, though Dallas won the season series. Well, sort of, going 4-2-2. Sharks looked great at times against Calgary, a very tough team to ever look good against, have the better goalie (Nabokov, just nominated for the Vezina), the best forward (Joe Thornton) and the best defenseman (Brian Campbell). I didn't get to watch much of the Dallas-Anaheim series but of beating the defending champion Ducks you'd have to say, in the words of the record executive in Guitar-Queer-O, "That's pretty goddamn impressive." Still, Sharks in 6.

Montreal vs. Philadelphia
Montreal has a rookie goalie with an A+ ceiling while Philly has a proven goalie with a B+ ceiling. Biron held pretty steady though seven games against Washington, while Carey Price had a meltdown in game 5 and let in another 5 goals in game 6. In the other five games he only let in five goals though, so he can match up with anybody when he's playing well. Montreal has more scoring while Philly is more physical. Both teams are coming off seven-game series but while Montreal looks like a team who'll be stronger after overcoming the underdog Bruins, the Flyers could be worn out after a really tough series fighting off Ovechkin, Semin, Backstrom and Green. Montreal in 6.

Pittsburgh vs. NY Rangers
This is a toss-up. Stingy defense, great goaltending and enough scoring against WAY more than enough scoring, an underrated defense and a young goalie who was excellent against the Senators. It's really only because of Montreal's youth and inexperience, but I say both the Rangers and Penguins are the Eastern Conference frontrunners for the Cup. At this point I'd say that the winner here goes to the Finals, though I might retract in a few weeks. This series to me is like the Carey Price-Martin Biron matchup. You know what you'll get from the Rangers but Pittsburgh has the better top-end talent and thus the higher ceiling. I'll go with the ceiling; Penguins in 6.

These are the same picks as I made in my hockey pool, of which I am one point back of the top spot. I've won the last two years (or three, can't remember, that will probably be corrected in the comments section soon enough) so the pressure's on since I'm due to fall off this year. There really isn't a series that you try to avoid, no Minnesota, Boston or Calgary anymore. All these teams are legit and feature real superstars. There's even some old rivalries renewed, not just Detroit-Colorado but Montreal-Philly and Pittsburgh-New York. Should be fun.

Dave Nonis fired!

2008-04-18T16:51:00.006-06:00

...a few days ago. So the shock has subsided somewhat, though the arguments for and against (mostly against) have remained pretty boisterous. Deserved or not? Here's a quick look at Dave Nonis in Vancouver:

The Good:
-Traded for Roberto Luongo. This could be the whole list frankly, because this was a trade where, right after I heard it, thought holy GOD, that's an incredible steal for Vancouver. This was when Bertuzzi was still considered an elite player, albeit one who needed out of Vancouver after SteveMooregate and probably starting his decline. Still, playing with Olie Jokinen in Florida I still figured him for 30-40 goals in what was still being called the "New NHL." WELL. Bertuzzi hardly played the following year due to injury, only 8 games for Florida, and was traded to Detroit for promising prospect (and future Canadian World Junior hero) Shawn Matthias and some conditional picks. Vancouver, with Luongo signed to a long-term contract, would win the division, set a team record for points and went to the second round of the playoffs. Luongo set team records for wins, shutouts, shutout streak, saves in a single game, and save percentage while finishing second in Vezina, Hart, and Pearson trophy voting. It's already considered, after just two years, one of the most lopsided trades in NHL history. The other players in the deal cancel themselves out, in my mind.
-What, more? That's not enough for you? Guess you're qualified to own the Canucks. Okay then, he also managed to dump Dan Cloutier to Los Angeles after acquiring Luongo, signed Willie Mitchell (the next Canuck captain?), replaced Marc Crawford with subsequent Coach of the Year Alan Vigneault, and currently has the team set up with lots of room under the salary cap with which to pursue desperately needed scoring. In other words, the team has the NHL's best goalie, excellent defensive depth, and money to spend on goal-scoring.

The Bad:
-Missed the playoffs two of the last three years.
-A team on the rise clearly took a step backwards after winning the division last year.
-Failed to acquire scoring at the deadline, with the rumored Brad Richards-for-a-LOT deal not going through.
-Um. That's all I can think of. He only had the job three years. Go read the Stupid Draft Analysis From Hell I did a while ago for his draft record.

Addressing The Bad:
-Yes, they missed the playoffs two of the last three years but last year they won the friggin' DIVISION. A very, very tough division no less. The year before that they barely missed out despite having more wins than powerhouse and Finals-bound Edmonton, so nothing to be ashamed of. Still, in 2005-2006 they were considered a Cup favorite and missing the playoffs was certainly unexpected, but most GMs get a few years on the job before you hold them accountable. They're also not judged on their first seasons either since that's when they're still using the old regime's players and staff. True, Nonis was the Assistant GM but he wasn't the Boss, as nobody could be under Brian Burke. You do what you're told or YOU'LL BE YELLED AT LOUDLY. Gms aren't coaches, they aren't judged year-to-year and generally get at least five years to show results. You can also add in that a season after a lockout is going to be more prone to fluxuations and unpredictability than a normal season, especially considering the many rule changes. So one write-off season, one division title, and...
-Yes, the team took a step back in 2007-2008 but look at this: Sami Salo missed 19 games (that's their powerplay right there), Aaron Miller missed 25, Mattias Ohlund 29, Brenden Morrison 43, Kevin Bieksa 48, and Lukas Krajicek 43. That's a stunning amount of injuries and except for Morrison, all to defenseman. Missing the playoffs this past season was certainly a disappointment, especially after leading the division at one point, but you could make the argument they were lucky to have any shot at all.
-Just to counter-point myself, despite all those injuries to the defense they still finished 6th best in the NHL in total goals against. So there wasn't much better they could have been defensively had they been healthy.
-Counter-counter-point: Yeah, but they would have had more goal scoring from the defense, especially from Salo, which would have made a difference.
-The Richards trade. Click that link and read where Darren Dreger says the proposed deal was for Cory Schneider (their top goalie prospect), Luc Bourdon (top defense prospect, arguably), and a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd round picks. That seems like a monster price to pay for a very good player to be sure, but also one with a $7.8 million contract and only 62 points by the time the season was over. That's a big chunk of the cap gone, as well as two good prospects and three draft picks when $7.8 million this summer might get you Marian Hossa. If that was the price then that's an excellent trade not made.
-Counter-point: I realize that Bourdon has tailed off in his development (not exactly the next Dion Phaneuf, as some had hoped) and Schneider won't play in Vancouver maybe ever because of Luongo. These are definitely tradeable prospects then, not keepers, but if you can keep them for another trade while spending your $7.8 million somewhere else this off-season, that's a smarter deal to me.

I know that new ownership often means new personnel and that's probably why Nonis was fired. New owners like their own guys and a fresh start. If you weren't sure about Nonis, you wouldn't want him taking this team forward at a point where they have so much cap room and flexibility. Even when a new GM comes in the coach doesn't usually last (not that they last long anyways), so from this angle it wasn't unexpected. Here's the thing though: you don't actually HAVE to fire them. When Brian Colangelo took over the Toronto Raptors, he took over a mess of a team with a coach who'd been voted the worst in the NBA. Colangelo ripped apart the roster but decided to keep Sam Mitchell as coach and the team would win the division and Mitchell Coach of the Year. These intact transitions can be done with success. If you look at Dave Nonis' record, this is a terrible decision. It would be one thing if the official reason from owner Francesco Aquilini had simply been "We want our own guy," but to blame it on missing the playoffs (and implicitly on Nonis' record) is foolish, ignorant, and a bad sign of things to come for Canuck fans. Maybe he hires Doug Armstrong or Neil Smith and stays the hell out of their way, but hiding behind this idiotic rhetoric is pretty underwhelming.

Nonis to the Leafs? Naw, they'll put Dougie in there.

Jose at the Bat

2008-04-15T12:23:00.007-06:00

Like most baseball fans, who watch the game from a distance and don't know any players or have much inside information, I don't know what to think about Jose Canseco. These days when one thinks of Canseco, steroid scandal and "author" come to mind. If you take another few minutes, you might think first 40 homer, 40 steals season, 1986 Rookie of the Year, Simpsons guest star, and producer of maybe the greatest baseball blooper of all time. When I read his first book on the plane ride back from Mexico (a four hour trip, still left lots of time to read the paper), I enjoyed it. What I mean, of course, is that I enjoyed it the way a parent enjoys their kid's first drawing on the fridge: with a cheerfully exaggerated "GOOD FOR YOU!" It's disorganized, simplistic and lacks anything resembling style or elegance. Yet it does satisfy one's voyeuristic indulgence, as any fan living far away from any baseball team will undoubtedly have, and holds nothing back when discussing baseball's steroid use, as names and teams are thrown around with ridiculous abandon. So that's pretty entertaining.

I finished reading a great article on Canseco that further complicated my impression of him. He's a polarizing figure to say the least. A bad writer who wrote, arguably, the most important book in triggering baseball's steroid catharsis. A cheerful, engaging, regular-guy personality but, according to Pat Jordan's article, regularly failed to show at charity events. In his own book, Canseco re-tells a number of well-publicized events in his personal life, always blaming someone else, portraying events as wrongly presented or exaggerated in the media, or just dismissing them as irrelevant. Jordan's article creates a figure who is lazy, foolish, irresponsible, lacks foresight, and is constantly in need of structure imposed upon him. He thinks he's misunderstood, Jordan implies he isn't. I don't know what to think.

As a player, Canseco was pretty much everything you watch sports for. Big, fast, powerful, everything he did was done with excess and spectacle. No short home runs that scraped the back of the outfield fence. In his prime, he was the best combination of power and speed in the game, the first 40-40 player of course, but also a player who could give fans those Bo Jackson kinds of visuals. The upper-deck home run at the Skydome, flexing his biceps at Red Sox fans chanting "steroids," the bodybuilder physique, the dalliances with Madonna and bloopers, like the one above, that simply could not have been done by anyone else. I liked Canseco in 1998 with Toronto, he had a really good year with 46 homers and 107 RBI's but of course was overshadowed by McGwire and Sosa chasing the home run record. He hit some very, very long homers, stole 29 bases (BUT that's in 46 attempts, a 63% success rate which = ew) and arguably had his best season since 1991. After 1998 he was injured, which was a common theme for most of his career, why he only played an average of 99 games from 1992-1997, and why he was basically finished as an impact player after 1999.

Injuries help contribute to any player's legend, whether Bo Jackson, Sandy Koufax, Bobby Orr or Bill Walton. With Canseco, the injuries seem to have hurt his legacy since they were attributed to his steroid use, a debatable contention. I think that's unfortunate and shows a bias against Canseco, since he certainly is not receiving the same proportional adulation ascribed to his fellow Tragically Injured. Last year he only received 6 Hall of Fame votes, or 1.1%, and less than the 5% necessary to remain on the ballot for another year. This for a player with careers numbers of 462 HRs (31st all-time, more than HOFers Carl Yastrzemski, Duke Snider and Al Kaline), 1407 RBI's (63rd all-time, more than HOFers Robin Yount and Joe Medwick), AVG/OBP/SLG of .266/.353/.515. This isn't an essay to get Jose Canseco into the Hall of Fame, his career wasn't that good, just a point that he was swept away pretty quickly for a high-impact player. Clearly, his career numbers were overshadowed by his cartoony persona and current steroid association. Maybe his NHL comparable would be Eric Lindros, just not impactful (not a real word, but a sports word) long enough. That would be an interesting stat analysis for another day...

These are the endless circles you run around in when you talk about Jose Canseco. I don't think he should be in the Hall of Fame but do think he should have generated more debate. His career is rightly degraded because of his admitted continuous steroid use, yet with no rules against steroids at the time it's hard to hold him as accountable as an athlete caught today. His terribly bad book ratted out former teammates and friends for the sake of making money and raising his own profile, yet he was the only person to bravely (I guess) speak out and draw attention to the extent of the problem. You can't dismiss him as a loony toon, even though he is, because of how important he's become to baseball in the last few years. You also can't give him any credit because it seems like he did it accidental, that highlighting baseball's culture of PED's was a bemusing side note while he made a few bucks. I guess what you can do is write blog entries and throw up your hands.

Isn't that the damnest thing

2008-04-11T19:13:00.003-06:00

Watching Ottawa-Pittsburgh and Washington-Philly tonight, both are terrific games and make me wish I hadn't said I don't care about the playoffs. That was a shortlived lie. The best part of the first game is that to this point (3-3, 9:00 of the third), Martin Gerber has been brilliant. All we heard this year from out east, after the Sundin trade nonsense and the Leafs' GM search ("Which GM candidate can eat the most earthworms in 30 seconds? Find out next, on 'The Biggest Loser: Search for the Leafs' GM'") was about Ottawa's goaltending situation. Gerber's terrible! Emery is killing the team! It's Bryan Murray's fault! Woe is all things Senator! Why can't this team EVER have a goalie!?!?!?! It's only two games of course, but this is some of the best goaltending this team has had, probably THE best. Hilarious.

Potpourri

2008-04-10T18:19:00.006-06:00

I didn't want to post a whole bunch of playoff predictions because I don't care. No Oilers of course but even besides that, I'm just not that into it this year. There doesn't seem to be a lot of compelling storylines for some reason, but it just might be that it's supposed to be in the 20's this weekend. So no predictions. Go, I dunno, Montreal!

I heard some interesting reaction to TSN's overblown-yet-still-cheap-looking production of the NHL's lottery draft. Some people think the lottery is a waste, just give teams the picks in the order they finished in. As for teams tanking, who cares, their season's been lost for months anyways. The other side thought that the draft odds (where the last placed team, Tampa Bay, had a 48% chance of winning the first overall pick) favored the Lightning too much, and would rather see more balanced odds that gave all the bottom five teams a legitimat shot at the top pick.

Here's what I, the smartest, wisest, most insightful writer on this blog, would do. The whole point of the draft is to re-alocated talent to bad teams to counter the balance of power in the league. Right? But, you don't want teams intentially losing games to gain a better draft pick since that's wrong and fans are paying $200 a ticket, hence the need for some kind of element of chance. Right? You also cannot create draft rules based on specific types of drafts, such as ones with a clearcut number one pick like this year (or 2005, 2004, or next year). Right? Though even in drafts that have no dominant player at the top, teams with the top pick have a huge advantage; whether they keep the pick or trade it away, they have a big step over other teams in terms of how they rebuild their team. Right? So why should only the dead-last team be given such a heavily-weighted opportunity for the top pick? ALL of the bottom five NHL teams are terrible, there's nothing that makes the last-placed team dramatically worse (and thus more deserving of the top pick) than the other four. According to NHL.com, here are the point totals for the bottom five teams in the standings over the last three years since the lockout:

2007-2008
Tampa Bay-71
Los Angeles-71
Atlanta-76
St. Louis-79
New York Islanders-79

2006-2007
Philedephia-56
Phoenix-67
Los Angeles-68
Washington-70
Chicago-71

2005-2006

St. Louis-57
Pittsburg-58
Chicago-65
Washington-70
Boston-74

So between the last and fifth-last place teams, there's been a difference of 8, 15 and 17 points, going in reverse order. A small sample size of course, but the spread is shrinking. My guess is that trend will probably continue because of all the three-point games. In any case, since all five lottery teams are terrible, why not take their point totals, add them all together and give them the exact weighted percentage that they earned. For example, this season the bottom five teams combined to earn 376 points. Here's the percentage breakdown for each team:

Tampa Bay-18.8%
Los Angeles-18.8%
Atlanta-20.2%
St. Louis-21%
New York Islanders-21%

That adds up to 99.8% because of how I rounded it off, but you get the idea. So, take the percentage of points each team contributed to the combined total, REVERSE them so that, in this case, Tampa and Los Angeles each have a 21% chance at winning the lottery, and draw teams' chances accordingly. I'm going to leave this proposal as is for now to see if any problems show up. Yup, already see some, but I'll leave those for another post.

This Blue Jays-Oakland series is pretty awful to watch as a Jays' fan. The A's are in fullblown rebuild mode, the Jays don't face any of Oakland's top two pitchers in the three game series, Toronto comes in having swept the defending World Series champs, they're in Toronto, etc. As of the eighth inning of game three, Toronto's best relief pitcher has blown two games (9-8 and 6-3), they've been outpitched by a journeyman and two rookie starters, and they've left 46 runners on base, an average of 15.3 per game, or 1.703 per inning (for a reference point, a pitcher allowing 1.703 baserunners per inning is most likely throwing out the Ceremonial First Pitch from his Ceremonial Wheelchair). Maybe they salvage one game, as the bottom of the ninth starts with Frank Thomas up...