Echolalia

The dress isn't what caught my attention. The person below me will inadvertently answer the person below them's question.

The guy just to the right of Lids looks a lot like Brad Stuart

Being a defensman for the Wings has got to be a cursed position.

yeah I'm not sure how I feel about that. I was never into the teen-aimed comedy films and he was a staple of them for the past decade. I'm willing to give him a chance, though. Maybe it was a move on Smith's part to maximize viewers who might be interested in hockey (young adult males)?

I just did a quick search and there weren't any actual threads on Smith's movie, although it was talked about here and there. The movie that 95% of people are against was the hockey musical.

No kidding. If I could handpick a director to make a gritty hockey film and pick where he shoots it, it would be Kevin Smith and Detroit.

please please please someone photoshop Waldo into that pic. Also Franzen looks like the Terminator in the group pic (on the far right).

Crosby's gotta be lying. There's no way Bettman likes doing that to all the Stanley Cup winning captains.

Words can't describe the mess that's over there. Every time I think, "nah, its being exaggerated a bit, they'll be fine," Chicago pulls another desperation deal to free up seemingly irrelevant slivers of cap space. Had they not won the Cup I would feel sorry for them.

Him and Abby have to wait until Modanno decides whether to sign with the Wings or not, so we won't hear any real news until sometime in August. Holland has repeatedly expressed that both Helm and Abdelkader will be Wings next year, though, so no worries.

How does it fall apart? Hopefully GMs won't be stupid enough to continue 12+ year contracts with a hard cap, thus an injury related retirement shouldn't cripple a team for a decade. Overall we'll see much shorter contracts that are closer to the actual value of a player and not predicted or expected values, more exciting trade deadlines/FA opening days, and heck, if injury related retirements are still an issue we can have a league analysis case-by-case for injuries, not unlike what we have now for long-term front loaded contracts that circumvent the cap. The only difference is the league will have past evidence when determining whether a retirement was injury-related, whereas now they can only speculate on when a player might retire. Or maybe even issue a secondary cap that's designed for IR.

Or you could just say that all salaries count fully against the cap for their signed duration regardless of when a player retires.

They won the Cup in 04, but I agree with you. They're becoming a much different team than last year, and you have to imagine that their mindset will be different as well.

I don't know about that. I mean the guy is a career Star and practically had the storybook ending to that saga last season which segued perfectly into retirement. I don't know that he was expecting a Stanley Cup competing team to offer him a solid role, and when the first one came in, two more popped up. I don't think the delayed decision speaks at all to his hunger to win should he come back.

I'm glad he's staying in the East. The West is tough enough as it is, and the East is too watered down.

I know of one that doesn't wonder.

This isn't the era of goalies that it was a decade or so ago. Its weird seeing some of those names in a top 10 list and not being able to come up with anything better.

Tatar still has to adjust to the length and grind of an American hockey season. Its apparent that he has the skill to be phenomenal: look at the first half of the season last year when he was outscoring everybody. Once the second half hit, though, Tatar burned out and couldn't keep up. That's what this year in Grand Rapids is all about for him: enduring the full season without burning out. He's had a taste of what to expect, now he just needs to execute. If he can show some consistency this year, maybe we'll see him called up for a couple games next year, and the year after that the sky is the limit.

It will be soon enough. Anyway, this is actually the first I've heard of this kid outside of "there's a person who's involved in hockey and his name is Mitchel Callahan". Its cool to see a gritty aspect working its way up through our system. With guys like him and Abby and Helm we should have a very legit bottom six over the next decade. Its our future top-six that I'm a bit concerned about.

I was waiting to see something about getting sandwiches ready too, but I was let down.

Datsyuk is posting again How did he get the password back from his wife?

Drop-in, beer-leagues, and the stresses of application season have me quite dealt.

When did Justin Abdelkader and Darren Helm copyright their names

19 really is a legendary number in hockey.

Seeing goalies get paid less pleases me because it allows more cap space for talent on the ice, where its typically more entertaining. I've believed for a while that the differential between an elite goalie and an average goalie isn't accurately represented by the salary differences between the two, and with the success of low-salary goalies in the playoffs since the lockout, it seems GMs are starting to realize this too. Otherwise Nabby would have scored that 6M/year deal somewhere on this side of the planet.