Deke

Because points are a bulls*** statistic. Let's say I run up the neutral zone and dump the puck in, just like I would do 10 times a game to either get the puck deep or make a line change. Not trying to make a play happen, just moving the puck. So the puck gets dumped in, my team mate comes out of no where grabs the puck and scores. I get a point, he get's a point, and the defensemen who just happened to pass ME the puck, gets a point. All we did was touch the puck. The guy who scored the goal had to beat the goalie. My opinion is that when trying to determine if a player is better than another player a goal is worth more than a pass. Sure thing: Sid played from Start of the season to jan 18th and returned 3-3 sid no sid games 46 26 Wins 26 16 Losses 20 10 Loss % 0.434 0.384 Win % 0.565 0.615 Last time I checked my 3rd grade mathbook, 61% win percentage was not only statistically significant, but a better average. Look, Crosby is a good player, if you read my previous posts before this INTRAGALATIC INTRAWEB FLAME WAR started and dude's feelings got hurt, you'll see I even said so and compared him to a young Steve Yzerman. I don't know about you guys, but in my book that's a damned good thing to say about someone. But to say he's the best player in the world? No. If he was so good, the Penguins would have fallen apart in his absense. Look at Detroit. Great team, but a few key injuries and the whole team goes down. No if anything, Crosby has been racking up points by feeding Malkin and getting all the credit for it. Crosby can score points, but apparently he can't score goals and win games. Malkin can. Malkin finally got out of Crosby's shadow and now the penguins are the better for it. I'll concede the point about Short handed goals. Short handed goals do not make a great PKer, but I was just trying to rub it in because dude was crying over the internet. It's funny, laugh.

I don't want to f*** with you? Taking it a bit personal? Here and all this time I thought I was ragging on Sid the Kid and it hurt your feelings. Ok there keyboard tough guy. What are you going to do? Just because I'm a newb to the forum doesn't mean I'm a hockey newb. We weren't talking about scoring titles, we were talking about AO vs SC and who is better. Who even mentioned scoring titles? Nice try to change the subject and take the focus off your inability to do math. Wow so he has better team mates. We already established that. The penguins did better without Crosby than they did with Crosby. That means SC has better team mates who he can pass to. Most of his points are from assists, which means someone else, if not two other people, did the hard work. You can rack up an assist just by clearing your zone, big deal. If Sid was so amazing, why did the penguins do better without crosby? First off you can't do fractions very well, and secondly you need to look at production per game as an average not career stats. It's clear that AO produces more per game than SC. Yet another forum guy who's defense is "What are you, like 14 years old or something?". Wow man, you must be a vetran of hundreds of EPIC FORUM BATTLES. You flatter yourself by thinking I was even trying to bring an "A game" on an internet forum. I was merely posting math and statistics to show you that you were incorrect by trying to show that Sids production was better than AOs. Last I checked that was called A LEGITIMATE POINT BACKED UP BY FACTS. You can talk A games and all this stupid basketball trash talk and meanwhile I'll continue to provide insightful analysis of hockey backed by facts and numbers. Pound the dog snot out of me? That doesn't even make sense. If you're going to throw insults out over the internet, where you are nice and safe, you might want to make an effort to sound a little less like someone who let a forum post hurt his feelings so much. Yea, he has 3 short handed goals. Crosby has.... Zero. Despite logging more pk time. Next question? It's pretty pathetic when the amount of time you've been registered on a internet forum equates to your "internet tough guy status" and knowledge about hockey.

I don't know about that. Datsyuk steals the puck more than Zetterberg. I trust both of them to chase down a breakaway and lift the stick, but I think Datsyuk probably the better of the pair at defense. Datsyuk probably has the best footing and balance of any player out there. He's not a big dude, but he knocks people down just by moving is torso and shouldering them with his big ole no neck shoulders. The way I call it is that Zetterberg is the better forechecker, and Dats is the better neutral zone defense. D is always batting away passes, lifting sticks, stealing pucks and generally forcing the fowards to make bad decisions.

I'd have to agree 100% on that.

Wow way to fail at 3rd grade math. Go back to your hockey arm chair where you read websites and don't actually watch hockey. Crosby's Goals Per game: .45 (95 Goals/ 207 games played) Ovechkin's Goals Per game: .65 (150 Goals / 230 games played) So here is a nice fact that you can't refute: Game for game Ovechkin produces 30% more goals than Crosby. Crosby has more assists than Ovechkin because he actually has team mates that can put the puck in the back of the net. Put Ovechkin with better team mates and he'd house him there. I don't know what game of hockey you watch where you can put points and assists ahead of goals. Ask any hockey player a goal is three times as hard to get than an assist. You can get a secondary assist just passing up blue line that happens to turn into a play. Yea, that's equal to beating a goalie, riiiight. Ovechkin has more goals scored because he's better at scoring goals. He's better at finishing checks. He's better at power play goals (55 to 33). He's better at PK, he's better at short handed goals. Oh and he has less PIMs than Crosby. Oh and Ovechkin is a helluva lot more fun to watch than Crosby. Ovechkin skates around and plays hockey. Crosby skates in squares and triangles waiting for someone to give him the puck because he's Sidney ******* Crosby. How can anyone argue that Crosby is the best player in the world when while he's been out the Penguins have been doing better. Case closed, go back to watching reebok commercials. Besides, the best player in the league is Lidstrom anyway.

It's an irrational hatred. When he first started playing he had all this hype in the media, and he wasn't even proven yet. He received attention that he was supposed to earn, but hadn't yet. He had endorsements without even scoring his first goal. I didn't like Crosby at first for this very reason. But if you like hockey, there really is no rational reason to hate the kid. He's earned his stripes. He plays with heart and a great work effort. There are better hockey players out there, but Crosby is definitely elite and will be one of the best players the game has ever seen. Don't hate the player, hate the game. The game being the media and the NHL for trying to hype him before he earned it. If he hadn't received all of this attention before he started playing, people would look at him like a Cinderella story and it'd be different. Everyone hates the favorite and roots for the underdog. Crosby was never an underdog thanks to the media. Then there is the whole Canadian aspect. Yes they overhype their players. Yes they think they are better than the Euros. Everyone thought that the Canadians were going to take the gold in the Olympics. Yea right. I talk hockey with a Canadian buddy of mine and for a while he was convinced that the Canadians had INVENTED the game of hockey. . . Sure Canada has a rich hockey history, but thinking they invented it is just dumb. Canada loves their hockey, but they need to tone it back a notch and realize that it's a global sport. Which one of the hundreds reasons I think it's the greatest sport.

I agree, Ovechkin is the better hockey player. I think Malkin is better as well. That said, Crosby has the potential to become a better leader though. He could be the next Steve Yzerman the way his leadership is showing at such a young age.

You make a good point. I don't personally look at just those two figures. However, the Norris has a precedent to go to the Defensemen with the best combination of those two stats. That's just a fact. In the past couple of decades, the defensemen with the best plus/minus and points generally wins. Is it right? Maybe not, but those two stats are a good correlation to good defensemen, even if they aren't defensive stats. When I watch what makes a defensemen great, I don't look at those stats. I look at how a defensemen assesses a play and then what they do to stop it. How they handle 2on1s. How they clog lanes, while still keeping a stick on their man. How they steal the puck. How they keep the puck in their offensive zone to keep plays alive. How they perform on the powerplay. How they feed their forwards and make transitions. The wings have one of the best transitions in the league thanks to great Defensemen and there are few better passers, in both technical skill and in seeing the ice than Lidstrom. His assists testify to that. It's not that those stats make a good defensemen. But it is that a good defensemen will have those stats. But when you look at the Defensemen out there, and you consider the qualities I listed above, you will find no greater player than Lidstrom. He does it all. If it were up to me, there would be a whole lot more stats kept in the NHL for just that reason. I'm not saying that plus/minus and points are what it takes to win the Norris. But that great defensemen will have high marks in those stats in addition to what else they do. It's a side-effect or an indicator of being a great defensemen. He's just the best there is in all defensive categories and I can't even begin to understand how anyone else thinks so. If they do, they don't watch the same hockey that I do, or they are playing favoritism.

What NHL are you watching? Chara with 10 +/- and 45 points? The Norris doesn't go to the team who's defensemen is carrying them. It goes to the best defensemen. Besides, let's get serious, Chara isn't the reason why the B's are winning games these days. Savard and Kessel deserve the credit for that if you ask me. The big difference between Lidstrom and Chara is Lidstrom makes fowards look stupid and Chara just makes them look small.

ESPN hates hockey because hockey does not sell shoe commercials. Let's look at the stats. At the time of this post Nicky's stats are: in 62 games: 7 Goals, 50 Helpers for a total of 57 points. His +/- is 39. The next closest players in +/- are Pavel Datsyuk and Danny Heatley with 31. But those are fowards. The next closest Defensemen is Duncan Keith with 65 games played with 26 +/- and 24 points. That puts Duncan Keith performing at about 60% of Lidstrom in the plus minus department and about 40% of his points. The next closest Dman is performing at about 50% of Keith too. So stat wise, Lidstrom has it. The defense he puts up that the stats don't keep track of, steals, blocks, passing lanes clogged, forcing forwards to take bad shots or bad passes, Lidstrom has it. Leadership wise, Lidstrom has it. If anything the fact that he was playing with the flu for at least a week before he was injured AND was injured, forcing him to miss games even further solidifies him as the best defensemen and Norris candidate. He's done so much more with less. If Lidstrom doesn't win the Norris this year, it would be the upset of the decade.