toby91_ca

I have no problem with it whatsoever. I don't want to get hit at all and I don't want my teammates to get hit, clean or dirty. If we are getting hammered with clean hits all night long, we aren't going to be doing very well. If you can make the other team think twice about going for a hit, gives you a pretty cool advantage.

Are we reading the same stuff???? Where do you get the impression, in any way, shape or form, that Crosby is upset about not being selected? Looks like your massive hate on is blinding you from the facts. In terms of all the attention his injury is getting, it should....head shots are bad and they'd like to remove them, but it's a tricky subject. The league went nuclear and actually came up with a rule change on the spot after the Cooke hit on Savard.....league hasn't done anything about the Crosby hit, so not sure what you are all worked up about. I can just imagine the whining we'd be subjected to here if it was Crosby that got hit last year and not Savard and the rule change came because of that....it would be whining of epic proportions. But of course it wasn't him, so no big deal right?

I was wondering about this, I have seen the summaries that suggest the captains (with their assistants) will pick the rosters, but I haven't seen anything regarding how the assistants will be selected. You seem to suggest the captains will pick their assistants, do you know this for sure?

Is there anyway you can actually substantiate that comment? How many polls have you seen that Crosby tops the list for biggest whiner? I have to believe that the whiner tag is slowly evaporating. There are some players that hate him, sure, but he's pretty well respected around the league. If you ever watch a Pittsburgh vs. Philly game (I'm thinking back to the 2009 playoffs), the games are pretty heated and it certainly looks like Richards and Crosby hate each other, but from what I understand, they are actually pretty good friends off the ice. Comments from Shanahan, for what it's worth:

Has anyone ever seen this report before? Apparently it's done every year, but this is the first I've seen of it. It is put together statistically, which is probably somewhat flawed because it's hard to argue who is the best defensively based on stats. Anyway, I looked at last year's list and the list for top defensive forwards as well. These lists don't seem to correlate at all to who the voters end up voting for at the end of the year. Of course, when it comes to Norris, you have to consider all around play, but for Selke, you'd think defense should be all that matters (which of course we all know that's not true). Lidstrom 30th? http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hockey/globe-on-hockey/the-nhls-top-defensive-defencemen-at-midseason/article1867013/

http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=348348

From a Wings perspective, the only disagreement I would have is not selecting Zetterberg, but I think I'd have to believe the notion that a specific request was made by Holland not to pick him. Someone on here actually suggested Howard should have been "automatic"....really? Why? I think that is probably the biggest joke, not the players selected. Someone also mentioned no Kovy...assuming he/she was referring to Kovalchuk and if that's the case, not sure why they are thinking, he's been absolutely terrible this year. Looks like they did try to get as many teams represented as possible, which explains guys like Kessel getting picked, but they still didn't get every team represented, I don't see anyone from Phoenix, Buffalo, Florida or NYI, but I could have missed them.

Crosby quote from last year after the Cooke hit:

Didn't his name come up with the Tampa job as well?

- Pet peave of mine (mentioning since I saw it in this thread about 10 times) - players do not get nominated for the awards, the voters (which are not necessarily the same group of people for each award) simply vote for who they think should win (they normally vote their 1st through 5th place). The thought that a top scoring defenseman would get "nominated" simply because of pts, but probably not win is not true. The 3 guys you see up for the awards are simply those that finished top 3 in voting. No one gives the voters a pool of players to vote from, they vote for whoever they want. - the league really has no influence over who wins the awards, so saying that the NHL only cares about this or that doesn't make sense and a list compiled by the NHL really doesn't matter when it comes to who will actually win. - a comment was made about how the top 3 vote getters for the all star game where penguins. Again, the NHL has nothing to do with this. I agree, having Fleury there is stupid, but what are you going do, who cares. Obviously Crosby makes sense and Letang being the top vote getter for defensemen is not unreasonable, he is in the top 4 in scoring (those 4 having pretty similar pt. totals) and he blows everyone else out of the water with +/-. Do I think he's better than Lidstrom? No, but based on those stats, pretty understandable why he'd have a lot of votes.

If it was on purpose, yes, the Steckel hit deserves a suspension, probably pretty lengthy. Problem is, you can't really tell if it was on purpose or not and the league determined it to be accidental. Personally, I don't think it was on purpose, but he probably could have done more to get out of the way. It's not like the Cooke and Richard's hits where it was pretty obvious that they were trying to go for the hit, so the only person that really knows is Steckel. I'm actually a little disgusted with a lot of people on here loving Steckel now because of the hit. I probably would have been the same way several years ago, but after learning what we now konw about head injuries, there's nothing to like about a hit like that and nothing to laugh about in terms of concussions, I don't care who the player is.

He took a pretty hard shot to the head there, so it would be tough to argue why that didn't cause this. I've heard people say that Crosby didn't seem all there when commenting after the game. I didn't see that, so I can't really comment personally.

When you are talking about best on best, Canada leads the way by quite a bit. It's only be recently that Canada has been able to send it's best players to the Olympics, while Russia/USSR has pretty much always done so, other than perhaps for the 1994 Olympics (Russia didn't medal, Canada won silver). This was Team Canada's 1994 Olympic roster: Mark Astley Adrian Aucoin David Harlock Corey Hirsch Todd Hlushko Greg Johnson Fabian Joseph Paul Kariya - 19 years old, before he made the NHL Chris Kontos Manny Legacé Ken Lovsin Derek Mayer Petr Nedvěd Dwayne Norris Greg Parks Allain Roy Jean-Yves Roy Brian Savage Brad Schlegel Wally Schreiber Chris Therien Todd Warriner Brad Werenka Same goes for the World Championships.

Not Toronto's fault, they probably did review and it and probably would have made the call to the ref, but they didn't have time. After the puck is dropped, there's nothing they can do.

The only thing Florida really should have done is take a time out, to give the video goal judge time to let the ref know that there was a goal. I think what happened here is that the play happened and then they dropped the puck pretty quickly after that. Once the puck is dropped, regardless of what the video shows, you can't go back and award a goal. The ref doesn't need to request video review for it to happen, the video review judge should be reviewing for this anyway and let the ref know if something is missed, but he can only do so before the puck is dropped after the stoppage in play. Had the play continued on, there probably would have been more time to communicate as well. Part of me feels for the ref in this case in that you can't go review every play to see if a puck went in the net and this particular play didn't look like anything really. The other part of me thinks he should have gone to review simply because some of the Panther players appeared pretty adament that the puck went in the net (that doesn't happen too often, so why not go spend a couple minutes checking).

The Brad May one was the whole intent to blow crap, that's not an issue here. So what I don't understand is why Toronto didn't call down and inform them that the puck was in thet net. The ref doesn't need to request a review for this to happen. I think what the ref was thinking was that even if it made it's way into the net, it shouldn't count because the Panther player was jabbing at the goalie's pads while he had it covered. Of course, the puck was already in the net at that point (went in off the initial shot). So, I can kinda see why the ref didn't go to review, but I still don't understand why the war room didn't call down to say it was a goal, I'm confused. Yeah, the video here is bad, but I have to imagine Toronto has an angle that shows it more clearly.

In all seriousness, I think there would be a legitimate question. Not whether it counts as 2 goals of course, but whether a goal should be awarded or not. If the puck breaks in two before entering the net and then both pieces happen to end up in the net, I think it would likely be ruled no goal because the play should be dead the instant the puck breaks, but if that actually happened, I bet the refs would have no clue what to do.

I've noticed a big increase in penalty shots since the lockout. It used to be very rare, now it seems like it happens as often as a fight. This was clearly a penalty shot situation, but I highly doubt he would have been awarded a penalty shot of this was 1998. Confusing description in the video though "couldn't get any closer to not scoring" that doesn't make sense.

When you say it's disappointing to see them struggle, I'm assuming you were talking about last night's game and not in general because they have been playing realy well this year, currently one of the best team's in the league. I think they sit in 2nd place in the East and 4th overall (only Vancouver has been better over the past 10 games or so).

I saw all that, I just didn't see when he came back into the game and if there were any comments at that point. I agree, they focused on his head because the Cdn player's skate appear to get him, but watching the play, he got his hands up and his head was untouched, didn't look like much of anything at all.

I've seen it before. Funny though, the announcers were talking about the shot being so hard and it hitting the pipe so hard that it split in two. That is obviously not what caused the pick to split in two. The shot wasn't actually that hard. It's like when the glass shatters, it's not because someone shot the puck so hard at the glass, it's just that sometimes when you hit a certain spot or there is integrity issues with the glass, in this case, the puck. Edit: also, I'm not an expert, but wondering if maybe the puck could have been too cold.

Warm temparatures aren't really the problem. You could probably play an outdoor game in 100 degrees F, which I think it was for the Las Vegas game. It would probably be uncomfortable for the players, but the ice woudl hold up. The problem at this year's Winter Classic wasn't the warm weather, it was the rain. They can keep the ice cold, even during warm weather.

Can someone help me out here and tell me if I'm way off base? I saw a few dives by the Russians in the second period and then Tarasenko gets hit and was on the ice for a little while. When they were showing the replays, I was telling my wife that he is faking, you watch, he'll be back. He was almost carried off the ice by 2 or 3 guys, looked like he should have been headed straight to the hospital. Anyway, I was surfing between different thihgs last night so I changed the channel after the intermission for a bit and got back to the game a little late. I noticed that Tarasenko was back playign again....of course....but I didn't hear anything about it. Did I miss anything from the first part of the 3rd period? Maybe I made a bigger deal about it and perhaps he was indeed hurt and simply played hurt the rest of the game, but the way he looked getting carried off, not sure how he could have come back unless he was indeed faking.

Really??? You've always wondered if that's real? Come on! Anyway, it's funny, if you talk to Pens fans, they complain about Pierre as well and suggest he hates Crosby and loves Richards and loves the Red Wings. Weird how different people can have completely different perspectives.

I can't remember the last time I even accessed ESPN.com, for any sport. Maybe that's simply because I'm Canadian and I use TSN more often than not for most (whether it's good or not). For hockey, I actually go to NHL.com mostly for live game stats, etc., but not really for articles.