djohns74

Stefan Liv As far as I know, he's not with the organization any longer anyway.

Todd Bertuzzi is on his fifth team in four seasons. Played 2005-2006 in Vancouver, traded to Florida just before the 2006-2007 season as part of the Luongo deal (I think?), traded to Detroit at the deadline of that season, not resigned (thankfully) and went to Anaheim for 2007-2008, again not resigned and moved to Calgary for 2008-2009. What's happended with Hossa is going to be somewhat common for a player in his situation. Final year of a contract, big money expected in his next contract, current team not going anywhere, traded away at the deadline, then doesn't resign with the team he got traded too. I think most people pretty much expected the same thing to happen with Stuart, that he wouldn't resign here, and would be with yet another team this year. Guess Detroit's just a more enticing place to stay than Pittsburgh.

Under the classic definition of "dynasty", no. However, I agree with many of the quotes in the article that the term may need to be revised to fit the modern NHL, or else the Oilers in the 80s will go down as the last true dynasty. I personally like Larry Murphy's description, that the Wings having a legitimate shot at the Cup basically every year (along with winning several of them) makes them a modern dynasty. At the very least, if you're going to consider calling ANY team in the last 10 years a dynasty, the Wings would literally be the only candidate, so that counts for something in my mind.

Hey guys, I'm putting together another video for Easton featuring Hank, this one focusing on their new helmet. Finding game footage that illustrates the benefits of the helmet is, of course, not easy, so I'm just trying to mix it up a bit. I'll use some close-ups of it that I've found of course and hopefully I can dig up a few plays that I didn't already use in the first video. At one point in his interview, he mentions the protection that a helmet has to offer and with a smile suggests that you can sometimes get some heavy hits out on the ice. I think this would be a perfect lead-in to a clip of a nice big hit. Here's where you guys come in. My memory for specific plays is not nearly as good as many of the guys here, so I'm hoping you can help me find some good Hank plays to use in the video. I'm not too worried about goals and assists since I can get the exact time of each of those from a box score. Big hits and other great moves are another matter, however. For example, I could swear I remember seeing Hank throw a hit on a Penguin player right near the benches at one point, but I have no idea when this occurred and can't really afford to spend the time to watch through all the games to find it, if it even happened. Although, I will admit that it's neat to get paid to watch hockey games for a couple of days. I have some footage of the playoffs I can use, specifically all of the Colorado series and games 1, 2 and 6 of the Finals, possibly game 3 of the Finals as well, I don't remember. I should be able to get my hands on any other playoff game if it has something I can use. If you can remember any hits or other noteworthy plays and very roughly when they occurred, I'd sure appreciate it if you could post them here. No need for video links or anything like that, just looking for a discussion of what you guys remember. Thanks in advance!

It'll be another Hives tune, that's all I can say for now. We'll probably do at least one more video beyond this one for the Hank site too, Easton seems really interested in pushing him as one of their premiere endorsees. And why wouldn't they?

Yes, that was the first video I worked on, the one mentioned here will be a second video for that site, assuming it ever gets approved. The footage is compiled now, just waiting for approval before I add music to it and post it up.

I just can't help thinking about the Tigers at times like this. After their offseason, they were obviously expected to steamroll through everyone this year. And that, ah, hasn't exactly happened. Now, the difference there is that they had a glaring flaw that people were willing to overlook, and that is pitching. I think everyone just assumed that since we were going to score 10 or 12 runs a game, giving up 8 wouldn't be that big of a deal. The situation may be similar for the Wings in a sense. As great as he was last year, and as much as I'm a newly converted fan of his, Chris Osgood is still a potential question mark for me. I think the Wings' success in the regular and post season hinges largely on how he reacts to once again being the number 1 guy in net. If he plays as he did last year, there's clearly no issue, but will he? I mean, as good as the forwards will likely be, we're not going to get a ton of goals every single game, to expect otherwise is to set yourself up for disappointment. As such, the goalie has to step up and steal a game now and then, especially in the playoffs where the Wings inevitably run into at least one hot goalie. All that being said, I have to believe that the regular season is likely to be smooth sailing, but then again, it usually is when taken as a whole. I mean, the Wings' February in '08 was almost a total loss and yet they still coasted to a league-best record with only one team even within 10 points of them! And can anyone deny that the team is better on paper this coming season than they were last year? I agree with others that any loss prior to the Conference Finals would certainly be considered a failure, no doubt about it. But here's another spin on it. Let's say we make the Cup Finals again. I don't see a team in the East that should be remotely capable of beating the Wings in a 7 game series. Sure, Pittsburgh is likely to be a good team again despite their roster changes, but we already beat them once and the talent gap between the two teams is growing, not shrinking. As such, I'd have to say it would be a failure to lose to any Eastern Conference team.

Nice, you hit that one right on the head, thanks for that! No need to worry too much about helmet-related material if you come up with anything else, just looking for anything Zetterberg-related, really.

His cap hit would most certainly go along with him. Which makes him essentially untradable after the first few years of the contract.

My company interviewed him this morning on behalf of an equipment vendor and I'll be working on a website featuring him and using video from the interview in the near future. I met him briefly, shook his hand, congratulated him on the win and the MVP and got a puck signed. He just looks like a normal guy when he's standing right in front of you, especially in his Cubs t-shirt and Tigers hat! He's a lot smaller in person than you'd expect, but I guess that's true of a lot of hockey players what with all the equipment you normally see them in. I wasn't in the interview itself, but I guess it went very well and he appeared to have fun with it from the handful of stills I've seen so far. The vendor requested that he bring the Conn Smythe trophy with him, but he unfortunately doesn't have it. Apparently, the actual trophy goes back to the league pretty quick and the winner gets a replica to keep, but of course it's too soon for him to have that at this point. Obviously, I couldn't mention this or give any details in advance (I found out about it over the weekend), but I just felt like I *had* to say something here.

I think he's saying that he thinks Crosby's an asshat, therefore he hopes he's injured all season, I don't think he's really predicting injury. It's strange, before the Finals this year, I had no particular problem with Crosby. I still certainly respect his talent at the game of hockey (how could you not?), but as far as Crosby the person..... well, I don't know. Hopefully he matures somewhat over the next few years, he's still just a kid after all.

There's actually a seperate discussion that started about that at My Name is Hank. Now the two threads link to each other, awesome.

That was a little odd. What was perhaps a little more odd was that another one of our developers was also wearing a Cubs shirt that day along with the exact same Tigers hat, right down to the orange logo. I think Z became his favorite hockey player on the spot. As he was leaving, somebody made a joking comment about the shirt and he gestured to the hat too and said "hey, gotta support both my teams". I'd be curious to know how and why he became a Cubs fan, not that there's anything wrong with that of course.

You never know, I kind of got lucky to be where I am. I have no formal training, just a logical mind and an appreciation for simplicity and order, two things which are generally key to successful software development. From there it was just experience and constantly trying new things then waiting for the right opportunity with a real software firm to come along. That the one that came along had Easton for one of their big clients was a nice bonus for sure. The video editing thing was kind of an accident, strangely enough. I did a series of videos for Easton's S17 stick launch because the guy that was originally going to work on them got slammed with another high-priority project. With some tweaking, the client was pleased with the result and now I'm kind of the go-to guy for these things. Weird how things work out.

Actually, this is the site that I mentioned working on a few weeks ago when Hank was in my office being interviewed. His comments during the video are taken from that interview. I put together the video myself, though the remainder of the site was handled by one of my co-workers. I'm a bit dismayed to learn of the errors that made it past all the layers of testing we went through before launch. However, I would like to point out, for those not familiar with programming, that the software used to write programs generally does not have a spellchecker built into it. The errors you're seeing, particularly "seepstakes", are not precisely spelling errors but are actually just typos. Meaning that the programmer certainly knows how to spell sweepstakes but made a typo in the source code and didn't have a spellchecker to catch it. Someone testing the site prior to launch should have caught that, but we were pretty rushed with this one. We're planning to do a few more videos for the site eventually, probably using more footage from our interview. Easton was concerned that the delivery of his answers comes off as a bit flat, but he's just a low-key guy. His answers are straightforward and honest, sometimes a bit too much so. For example, when asked about the new Easton helmet, he first said "well, the first time I wore it, nobody really noticed that it was new..." then he kind of stopped himself, looked over at the Easton rep standing nearby, started to laugh and said "I guess I probably shouldn't say that, huh?" It was neat to have a chance to see him in a candid situation like that, but it wasn't really something we could use on the site. By the way, the jersey you guys are signing up to win is downstairs at my office right now. Pretty sweet stuff. Too bad I'm ineligible.

Yeah, meeting him was pretty cool for sure, but my boss got to actually interview him! If we'd done this on Sunday as we'd planned originally, there would have been fewer people around and I probably would have gotten to work with him directly, but our conference room was pretty packed as it was and I had no reasonable excuse to be in there (I was trying to come up with one!). Still, it was neat to see him just walking around our office. We're talking about getting a couple more players in here at some point, but I have no idea when and I don't think the names will get any bigger than Hank, to be honest.

Yeah, downtown Royal Oak was super crazy too, I was in the middle of that. There's a couple of YouTube clips of that mess out there, and a few pictures made the list at CBS Sportsline the day after the game. They were apparently showing the game on the side of a building behind Starbucks too.

How's that?

Filppula should be a restricted free agent, I'm certain the team will at least lob him a qualifying offer to make sure they hold on to him. From there, I don't see any reason why he wouldn't resign eventually.

1997 - Has to go at the top for me, I was a relatively new hockey fan at the time and remembered clearly the disappointments of the previous two seasons. I was developing into a big Steve Yzerman fan too and seeing him lift the cup and listening to that crowd go completely berserk was just awesome, a great feeling. I made a comment to some coworkers early in the season when we acquired Shanahan that I really felt he would be the guy to get us over the hump to a championship, so seeing my instincts proven right was a neat feeling, from a completely selfish perspective. 2008 - Watching the team dominate basically the entire season, save for one month, in a time when they were supposed to be "rebuilding" and then go on to play extraordinarily well throughout the playoffs while finding new star players that no one outside Detroit even realized we had has been very sweet. Seeing Hasek, one of my least favorite players ever, get yanked permanently and have to watch the team go on to win without him was also fantastic. That, along with his excellent play, has finally made an Osgood fan out of me. Were I already a big Osgood fan going into this season, this championship may well top '97 in my mind. 2002 - This is tough for me thanks to my hatred for Hasek, but I really had fun watching this future wing of the Hall of Fame coast to the title that everyone was willing to hand them before the season even started. Making this one extra sweet was the end of the Colorado series, with the blunder by Roy in game 6 followed by the Wings' utter dismantling of him in game 7. I'll never forget watching game 7 of the Western Finals and knowing without a doubt, less than 10 minutes into it, that the Cup was ours again. That, more than anything else, overcomes the presence of Hasek for me. 1998 - This one is last for me for the simple reason that sitting here now, I just don't find it as memorable. Winning back-to-back titles was great, and the Believe theme carried a lot of emotional weight, but I just don't recall that many great moments in this one, particularly in the finals. Yzerman getting the Smythe was a great bonus in my mind.