shoobiedoobin

stick in the gut for 5 straight seconds pulling? legal for them. illegal for us. ugh.

Pav just grabbed this game by the balls and squeezed.

Since I'm sure this is in response to the penalty he took, that was NOT a penalty. That was a ref tripping a STL player and White was closeby. It doesn't have to be a penalty in the NHL today, it just has to look like one.

Almost every issue we stick a bandaid on would be cured with widened rinks. The trap becomes almost impossible with that much room. These huge players who have gotten bigger over the decades will finally have more room. Less board related injuries should occur. If they widen the rinks and change the size of the offensive zone you won't really be able to just play boring collapse defense in your own zone, either-too much room to move around. It really would fix a lot. The one argument I see is that it'd take out a few rows of expensive seating, but you don't remove the expensive front row seats, you just move prices back a few rows each and remove the less expensive closest seats to the concourse. Coordination would probably be the biggest thing.

Ref trips a Blues player. We get 2. This is the reffing I remember.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/teams/cob/depthchart I dunno what we could possibly want that's worth that much. I have a hard time finding anything I even want. This has to be one of the most hurt rosters in the league.

I'm sure this will be spun and some excuse will be made, sounding a lot like "that doesn't mean he's lazy that just means he's got to" I dunno "be a better goal scorer" or something. Along with irrelevant examples of great goal scorers going through slumps. A good place to look for quotes if he's so curious would be around the time he was sent to the third line, that might yield something. You don't get demoted for slumps, and on this team a demotion like that speaks volumes. He's working harder this year I'll give him that but it's still not that hard. I've still seen him get knocked down and lay on the ice for 4 or 5 seconds, or stand completely still watching a play go on around him. I've still seen him covered and refuse to really give it that necessary burst to get open. I don't know why he gets compared to Flip so often. I see people saying they'd rather have Mule on the ice if we need a goal in the last minute instead of Flip. Sure, so would I but hockey isn't a last minute goal derby spread out over 60 minutes.

No thanks, I'd rather wait to make my judgment. I'm not so blind and arrogant as to assume that because I don't see something, it isn't there.

He didn't say he blamed losses on him, and really I couldn't be bothered either. This isn't a contest. But I've definitely seen comments from Babcock hinting in that he'd like Franzen to work harder, in the usual Babcock way.

Same ol' same ol'. Leads in goals. Scores. Yadda yadda. Some can see past that smoke screen. Some can't. And didn't Babcock demote him a couple lines when it got really strikingly obvious? For a team like ours that says something. But what's he going to do, bench him? That'll never happen, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't. The problem with a guy like him is that he's actually valuable (not just hollow "stat sheet" valuable) when he decides to try. But how long do you hold on to hope? It's not blind hate it's called knowing when a guy is literally giving half effort and pointing it out.

Yup sounds like a doofus. To his credit he consulted his team first. Still stupid.

Uh huh. When do we hint anything about anyone? Read between the lines, Babcock's alluded to it many times. It's as simple as using your eyes. And not having a blind love for the guy.

I'm not saying replace him with Joe Grinder who scores 3 a year. I'm saying a top 6 caliber guy who works harder but scores a little less would be more than welcome. Like I said look at the Nashville series. Look at plenty of teams around the league who rely on hard work and it's effective. Look at when we lose, we're almost always more skilled but won't move our asses. Now think about how often we lose when we're really moving our feet-hardly ever. Franzen's play can kill entire shifts. That negates his 25 or so goals a year, 15 of which are gifts from his hard working teammates. I can't remember the last time I even said "man that was Franzen who made that happen". It's always someone else and he cashes in.

I can't stand attitudes like this. All of this is easy to say from behind a keyboard. And maybe they did, we don't know. It's just fun to judge so we're judging. Like I said it's probably just him being a stupid kid but we don't know. I just know that it's not always cut and dried and sometimes roles can reverse and actions can become justified with a little more info.

Blah blah same ol' justification I see every time someone wants to defend him. He scores so he's allowed to do whatever he wants. I'll take hard work and a little less skill over floating and a little more skill any day. The Nashville series was the entire Franzen argument in a nutshell-worse team beats the pants off of a super skilled team because they worked harder. We've "lost goals" before (a silly argument anyway) and survived. This sounds like a beaten wife defending her husband because after abusing her he buys her a nice necklace or something. Or because deep down he's a good guy. Whatever. The production that makes him untouchable to some, is overrated anyway.

When it comes to rivalries, screw 'em. You don't build conferences around rivalries, you build conferences around travel and time zones and let rivalries develop. Every rivalry we see now began somewhere, and many have died due to realignment (Det/Tor for example). If some have to go away to make travel easier on everyone so be it. I'm more a fan of genuine rivalries where the players dislike each other anyway, like Det/Col, rather than local stuff only fans care about. Let the chips fall where they may.

I've seen better players benched plenty of times. We don't know the story.

Not wrong on most of this but maybe he was the better goalie. I'm not justifying it but we don't know the whole story. It's easy to judge and condemn without hearing both sides. Odds are we're right but still.

It'll be interesting to see how Hank and Brunner work with a guy who will skate like he gives a s***. I know he's been skating harder but that doesn't change the fact he still floats. He just doesn't float as much. In a scenario where you have two skilled players who work well together, it's always fun to see who will mesh well with them. One plus one doesn't always equal two in the case of chemistry, it's not always the obvious choice. It could be someone like Cleary or even Eaves, who knows. I'd use this as a chance to bring up Nyquist and see if he can do something on that line. I'm more concerned with the PP. Mule's been good there. He doesn't have to skate much. It sounds odd but I'd put Abby up there and tell him to park his ass. I think it's just the type of thing he'd be good at. Minimal dangling, minimal puck movement, just sitting on the crease.

What's there to know? Exactly. We wouldn't know everything, we don't see everything Holland sees and we sure as hell don't take everything into account when we overreact to something our entitled asses don't agree with. All we see is HAHA LOGO KILLER and we love that, so we lean towards it. We don't bother to think about the fact that we just lost Jiri Hudler and Brunner wasn't a sure thing at all. Not to mention Sammy doesn't take bad penalties, he's pretty disciplined. He also can put up 40-50 points, work the PP, and has experience. He's proven himself, on a team where we were about to bring up a lot of kids who haven't yet. Better to sign Sammy and let them work their way up gradually. What if they didn't work out? There's also the intangibles that we pretend to care about in other scenarios but really don't when it denies us our new toy-how he works with the team, how good it makes the team look that we'll take a guy back, etc. If we traded for him, that'd be one thing. But we signed him. All it did was deny one AHL kid a spot for the majority of one season, maybe two. What it got us was a proven smart, good player with experience who can score well and plays better in the playoffs. And it's 3 mil, it's not a lot. Look at some other players making that much (I don't mean young underpaid guys due a raise). Joel Ward. Nah no thanks. Chris Kelly, Tomas Kopecky, and a few others. Then you have some decent guys like Dustin Brown, Radim Vrbata, Weiss, Jokinen, etc. You can debate who is better but none of them are leaps above Sammy. We just can't admit that part of the hate came from his undeserved status as whipping boy. And we don't like ex players coming back who we didn't like before, that's boring. You combine those two things and Sammy didn't stand a chance. But it's not a bad deal.

If we don't see a reason, it must not exist. It can't be that there are things we just don't know. That's not possible.

Franzen for Volchenkov? Yeah, done. I really don't like trading roster players and would hardly ever do it but not only would it be a massive weight off of our back cap-wise but we'd be losing a guy who more often than not plays like he doesn't give a s***. It'd be easier to find another top 6 guy than it would be to find a top defender with Volchenkov's defensive acumen.

This could be why the league is so desperate to keep the Yotes in PHO. They'd rather expand to somewhere like QC or Seattle rather than move PHO. Because then you don't get the fat expansion fee and you still have an uneven league if you want 4 conferences. But it's obviously a bandaid that has to be ripped off eventually. May as well move the Yotes now and start looking at expansion in two new cities.

Looks familiar...anyone else play NHL 13 online? Specifically, OTP?

Well said. I was trying to find a way to say exactly this without going on too long. You can't quantify the effects of loyalty without verbal confirmations.