Buppy

End of the AHL regular season today. Pulkkinen lead the league in goals, despite playing only 46 games. Also apparently the highest PPG in the league. Congrats Teemu!

If you assume Seguin would have emerged the same way if he'd stayed in Boston, they'd certainly be better off, though I don't know that I'd go as far as that. Too many variables in winning a Cup. But in defense of the trade, keep in mind that Eriksson was an extremely good player in Dallas. Three straight 70+ pt seasons before a down year in 2013. And he was only 27 at the time I think. His failure to produce in Boston is what makes that deal so lopsided now. Two of Seguin's three seasons in Boston were less than impressive, so I don't think it's a given that he'd be producing the same way.

I agree that their standards were likely higher this season. They did win the President's Trophy last year, their standards should have been higher. Should have been Julien to get fired though.

ZS% shown on NHL.com seems to be wrong. If you want fancy stats, http://stats.hockeyanalysis.com/ or http://war-on-ice.com/ are much better.

Now that they have nothing to not play for, let's hope they come out to play tomorrow and beat the Pens. Though Boston will probably lose anyway...

Not only that, but now Pittsburgh is 2nd at 8 years and Boston 3rd at 7. One of them practically certain to end. Our streak is longer than the next 3 (almost 4) combined.

That isn't really true though. No matter what the scoring system, straight W/L, 3-2-1 system, or going back to ties, there'd still be close races. Just about everything that's undecided now is still undecided in any system. In some cases a race may end earlier, but in some cases it'd be the opposite. For example, if you went to just W-L record, the playoff race in the West would be over but in the East Columbus would still be alive. There's really no good argument in favor of the loser point, aside from maybe, "it doesn't really matter so why bother changing it".

Actually, since they played an odd number of games, the first home game for whichever team played 2 @ home is thrown out. So whatever that leaves. I'm too lazy to look at the schedule.

ACL. Done for the year. Should be ready for training camp next year though.

Callahan is injured, else I'm sure there'd be plenty.

Ferraro is having a better year.

Tatar, Nyquist, and Abby have combined for more goals than any other 3, 4, & 5 forward group in the league, and are 6th in points as well. Datsyuk and Zetterberg are 24th in goals and 16th in points in the 1&2 group. Over-reliance on them is about the only thing that hasn't been a problem for this team this season.

Have a link for that? Most recent player poll I know of is from 2012. At that time, Babs was 3rd in "coach you would most like to play for". http://redwings.nhl.com/club/blogpostprint.htm?id=6596

I get what you're saying, and certainly more goals allowed can make a goalie look worse even if they're the result of poor defense. But if anything, I think it's more the poor goaltending making the defense look worse. The defense hasn't been amazing or anything, but it's been a far cry from terrible. Certainly good enough to win. Take out the weak goals and you're left with 2 or 3 goals against in each of those games. Depending on how lenient (or not) you want to be with the "iffy" goals, that's slightly above to slightly below average. I sure don't think anyone would be talking about "terrible" defense. Some stats from war-on-ice: Wings are 2nd in the league in scoring chances against/60 - all situations: 23.3. Fla leads with 22.5. I didn't actually calculate it, but the league average looks to be around 26ish. Looking at our last 7 games SCA: Fla - 15 (23.4) TB - 24 (28.9) StL - 15 (27.3) Ari - 26 (25.6) SJ - 17 (28.9) TB - 22 (28.9) NYI - 21 (32.8) # in parentheses is average SCF60/all situations. So actually above average every game except Arizona (which surprised me, since we were pretty dominant in possession that game). Of course, not all scoring chances are equal even by war-on-ice's definition. But bottom line, the defense has not been bad lately.

Wow. WTF? Sweden has some awesome stat tracking. NHL should talk to these guys if they're really serious about jumping on the fancy stat bandwagon.

Seems odd, but really it's not. I forget the stats now, but the drop-off after the top handful of picks is fairly dramatic. Even mid-1st rounders are far from a sure thing. We haven't had a ton of 1sts, but I'm pretty sure we're a bit better than average for the range we pick. We're just a lot better than most when it comes to the 2nd and 3rd rounds.

Aside from some noted Howard bashers, who would bash him regardless, no one was saying anything about Howard. What I'm saying is scoring chances are going to happen. Giving up a breakaway or a 2 on 1 doesn't mean the defense sucked. The Islanders did not have many really good scoring chances yesterday. Nor did SJ or Phoenix. Some, but not any ridiculous amount. If the only goals we'd allowed in those games were on those chances, we probably win those games and no one would be talking about poor goaltending or poor defense. If we're up 3-0 and Howie lets one in on a breakaway, no one would be complaining about not getting the big save. Unlike scoring chances, bad goals are not something that happen every game around the league. Seeing 6-7 of them in 3 of our last 4 games is worth talking about.

The last three losses have all had multiple soft goals. You can't lock down every game. There's going to be mistakes, breakdowns, bad bounces...teams are going to get chances. Goalies have to make some tough saves, and they most definitely should be making the easy ones. Arizona hardly had any more chances than TB, but nothing seemed to hit Jimmy that night; maybe his positioning was off; then he gave up a buttery soft OT goal. Half the goals in SJ were weak. 2 of Mrazek's today were, and a 3rd was a little iffy. Neither the Sharks nor Islanders had an unusually high number of good chances. Not all the goals were bad and we wouldn't have had shutouts, but you don't need a shutout to win. With as much luck as we've had with our own scoring lately, we should have gotten more than 3 points out of the last 4 games. And we most likely would have if we had gotten decent goaltending. I agree the tangents can get ridiculous at times, and goaltending is not the only problem with the team. But this last week it has been by far the biggest, and all the ranting is about as justified as it'll ever be.

Not playing for the Devils is not playing for the Devils. Whether sitting on his ass or working in some unrelated business or playing for a non-competing hockey team on the other side of the world makes no difference. None of it has any impact on the Devils.

Not exactly. NHL players are allowed to retire. They have every right to, "decide one day, nevermind...". Regardless of whether doing so makes Kovy a dick or not, two wrongs don't make a right. You might speculate that had the Devils wanted to block him from playing in the KHL, he might have stayed with them, but I could just as easily speculate that the Devils wanted out of the deal themselves. Going on the assumption that he wasn't going to play in NJ regardless, then allowing or not allowing him to play in the KHL doesn't have any impact on the Devils. There's no reason to block it except out of spite. And it isn't detrimental to the organization at all. It may become detrimental if Kovy wants to come back to the NHL and the Devils in fact no longer retain any rights to him and he can still play up to the level of his previous contract and the Devils would indeed want him and his contract back. That's a lot of ifs.

Tied him to his contract in what sense? They couldn't force him to stay in NJ. All they could have done was maybe block him from playing in Russia. And IMO, doing something to hurt someone even though you don't gain anything from it is pretty much the definition of being a dick.

Kovy officially retired from the NHL, I don't believe there's anything the Devils could have done to stop that. Maybe they could have done something to prevent him from playing in the KHL (or IIHF games at least), but that would have been kind of dicky. I don't think 'not being a dick' is the same as doing someone a huge favor.

Hey, I answered it too, and much more succinctly.

I don't think there's any problem at all with our offensive production if you include Zidlicky. We could use a true stud shutdown guy or another Kronwall-esque two-way guy at the top. Ericsson isn't good enough.

Our defensive depth is great. The quality at the top is what's lacking. That'll be a problem at forward soon enough as well. We should be looking at trading quantity for quality in both areas, though that is far easier said than done.