dropkickshanahans

Very good signing: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/03/12/lions-reach-five-year-deal-with-golden-tate/ He has some of the best hands in the league (144 catches out of 149 in his career), and will put up better numbers in the Lions' offense compared to Seattles'. Great compliment to CJ on the other side of the field.

Maybe I'm just burnt out on twitch shooters but Titanfall didn't look too appealing to me after awhile even though I'm positive the game would fit my hyper aggressive playstyle. I will buy it though and get around to playing it whenever I'm in the mood again. I've been jumping around from game to game, just trying stuff out. I played goalie in club games for awhile (I consider that a whole new game in itself ) I got Civilization Revolution on Xbox for free and played that with friends for awhile. Very fun, I ended up getting Civ 5 for PC. World of Tanks popped in here and there. Thinking about getting back into Guild Wars 2... Btw, does anyone know if the ESO beta is still going on? A co-worker told me it was but it's been about a week and they still haven't sent me an email for a beta key even though they said it would take up to 72 hours...

The only time I take +/- seriously is when it's consistent with the whole team, like Chicago and St. Louis having consistently positive +/- this year. But even then it shouldn't be viewed as an individual stat. It just shows that those teams play good team defense and have a good goalie. Individuals should be looked at objectively by how well (or bad) they play defense. Looking at individuals, Weber is like -14, but he's considered one of the best in the league defensively by many. Kopitar is +27 and Mike Richards is -2, but lots of people have considered Richards as one of the top two-way players in the league. Zetterberg is +19 and Datsyuk is -2 and they've been debated many times for their defensive play even though Datsyuk has 3 Selkes. And like Harold mentioned, Lidstrom was 148th in the league with a -2 when he won the Norris, but his partner Rafalski was a +11 that year. It's a flawed stat that can't be looked at correctly for individual players when there's other factors in the game that affect that stat, such as a goalie playing bad, a teammate blowing an assignment, a puck deflecting off a leg, etc.

I remember this being brought up when Weber was an RFA, the offer sheet for him was insane. IIRC, GM's don't typically put in RFA offers for high caliber players like Weber because for one, it's way too much to give up for one player (which I assume the offer sheet was set up that way to protect the team's high caliber RFAs) and two, you won't be well liked for screwing that GM over by forcing them to match and commit more money than they could have offered. I think Holmgren was the only GM to put in the offer for him which Nashville quickly matched. The point I'm trying to make here is that with Nashville willing to match Philly's offer sheet, and with Suter gone, I don't see Weber being moved any time soon unless he demands it.

My theory for the low scoring is the modern butterfly style dominating the league, as well as lots of those goalies being bigger now, or at least playing aggressive enough to look bigger. Had to do some quick research and it looks like there were only a few goalies back then that implemented dropping to the knees in some situations, with only a couple goalies throughout the years actually using the style as a main like Tony Esposito and later Patrick Roy. It seemed to me that there was a bigger transition somewhere in the '90s/early 2000s where current pros switched to a hybrid or came into the league with some type of hybrid playstyle, where now today the butterfly style is dominant across the league. I wonder how much scoring would be achieved back then if goalies had better masks and the butterfly was more popular; It seemed that a lot of goals back then that you can find on youtube were low-- between and around the skates.

Why do the Blue Jackets have banners of every team logo hanging up?

Nice rip by DeKe.

I agree with this.

What a rip by Goose!

The Mule is just on fire!

Gillis currently pleading with NJ management for a mulligan. Lamoriello said "No taksies backsies."

Yup. Claude Giroux too. I was curious about the all time players from the Q,and found this: http://www.rds.ca/hockey/le-magnifique-a-%C3%A9t%C3%A9-le-meilleur-1.245893 Interesting to note who's at #40. I had no clue. I also didn't know that Pat LaFontaine and Mike Bossy played in the Q too.

Don't pretend it's not the most debated topic on this forum.

So people don't like Franzen yapping and slashing people but they're alright with Ottawa's players cross-checking Franzen in the head and taking cheap shots at Datsyuk all game? I guess apparently you need to be a fighter to stand up to Ottawa's antics in order to be accepted around here, but slashing as payback or chirping is a big no-no.

"Nownownow wait a minute, whaddya mean Al doesn't loik me? Al and I getalong just foyne!" That's how I imagine Jimmy Stewart would type anyway.

They're 2nd in the league in goals for, that doesn't sound like goal scoring trouble to me.

ESO sounds great and all but... it's Bethesda... can't imagine this game doing well online with the bug reputation, the overpowered builds, clunky interfaces, etc. Great single player games but I feel they have an uphill battle to fight with this game. I'm rooting for them, though.

I'm kind of surprised Ovechkin wasn't #1 tbh

Dabura is disappoint.

Franzen should've done this after the scrum was over for some more laughter:

wat

Neil

Lol nice move by Ericsson there.

Btw, what's with the pictures of Swedish and Finnish players riding around on pimped out bicycles? I seen it alot during the olympics.

Was hoping for 5 goals in the first. Last time that happened IIRC was in '09 when Hossa was on the team.