Echolalia

He'll be back. edit: redundant

go vipers!!

Apparently Pronger's family makes up about 10% of nhl.com's current traffic. I tried voting twice, and the first time the vote total was 2093, and the second time it was 2091...

I really don't think Hasek was the problem against the Ducks. However, I do think Hasek was the biggest reason we made it to the second and third rounds. I'm relieved to hear it, but I knew it was coming.

That is a surprisingly intriguing idea, actually. It would eliminate (or at the very least, heavily reduce) the slow pace of games that result from repeated trapping, and increase momentum and therefore offensive opportunities, and hence scoring within a game. A lot of complaints that I get from "outsiders" about hockey is that its uneventful. Of course that opinion is developed from watching the score-marquee during sports center and seeing low scoring games, opposed to actually watching the game to find out for yourself, but I think Olympic sized rinks would increase scoring enough to possibly captivate some "on the fence about being a fan" type people, but still keep us old-time low-scoring hockey lovers into the game. Although kinks may have to be worked out (as all changes usually do), but at the very least I do think its a good idea to widen the rink at least 7-10 more feet.

When I read the title of this thread I thought it was noob talk for "AY (indecipherable) for real?"

Why is every problem that shows up attempted to be solved by expansion? I say we just move LA Kings and Florida Panthers to Las Vegas and Kansas, and try to kill two birds with one stone Maybe Bettman will even be out of ideas, then

I like the idea of being able to choose what stick you want to use. Composite sticks have their obvious advantage of being lighter, faster, and more flexible, but that comes at a heavy price of being substantially less reliable. Either way it increases the excitement for me as a fan. I'm seeing faster and more accurate shots and quicker stick-work, and at the same time its more likely that in a key situation (ie penalty kill or powerplay) a stick could break out there, increasing the tension and intensity of the situation. Even if its the wings on the pk and a stick breaks, I'm definitely more captivated and on the edge of my seat, and I really think that would benefit the league in terms of collecting new fans. Not that I have anything against wood sticks, its really the player's preference. My personal preference would be in forwards having composite and defense (for the most part) having wood, but I really don't want to see that as a rule. More of a "coach's suggestion" kinda thing Also, replace "make the nets larger" with: "even if your name is Giguere, we still don't allow mattresses for pads."

I'd be happier if they decided to lower next year's tickets by a good $20 or so

Illitch for commissioner

Looking back at our post season, I have to say the wings did very little wrong to end up loosing. The biggest factor I can think of is failing to take advantage of power plays, and I'm pretty sure we have 6 forwards that are clearly better and more reliable than Hudler on the PP

http://www.nhl.com/nhl/app/?service=page&a...rticleid=316883 Apparently we're close to signing Chelios and Schneider, and I think its safe to say Hasek will come back too (I cant see him saying hes going to retire this far away from his initial deadline of the drafts). Also, "inside sources" claim that the Wings are indeed aiming for Kozlov, and want to put him on a line with Datsyuk.

Its really tricky to make predictions/recommendations on this, not only because of our current goalie and defense situation, but also because Holland is most famous for what he does in the 4th round, not the first. Hes always had a knack for striking gold on somebody no-ones ever heard of.

I honestly dont know who the media will pick as the favorite, but I personally am picking the wings, and I like to think that opinion is as unbiased as possible. The ducks know we outplayed them cleanly, and they really had luck on their side that series. If they're the favorites next year, you better believe they're going to be scared s***less when it comes time for revenge.

Holy cow. Well, here goes... So what does it matter that a team who comes from a non-traditional hockey market won the cup? I'm pretty confident that anyone on this board would be ecstatic if ever city was as passionate (or probably slightly less passionate ) as Detroit was over hockey, but America simply isn't interested (or more appropriately, educated) on hockey. If anything comes out of this victory, we're all leaning on increased tv ratings, including you, I'm sure. To be quite honest, I think Anaheim is a fairly decent hockey city. They're playoffs sold out much more efficiently than ours did, and I remember a couple years ago when we swept them how unbelievably energized their crowd was. Go take a look at some Stanley cup videos, you'll see what I mean. The point is they earned it, and even if they come from Mars, they deserve to enjoy the cup this summer. Honestly, if we eliminated all the 'bad hockey market teams' we would probably end up with the original 6 teams, and probably 5 or 6 others, which would definitely decrease ratings, as the season would get repetitive and old, and the finals would only be like 2 rounds. Are you suggesting we rig the nhl? And lets just entertain this conspiracy idea of Bettmann pulling some strings to get his favorites into the finals. Detroit definitely wouldn't have gotten as far as we did, seeing as how poorly we represented our team by failing to buy tickets (no matter what the reason was that we didn't do it, the point remains that our upper bowl was empty and that wouldn't give a good message to the uneducated media.) Detroit wouldn't have made it 6 games into the Calgary series. The officiating has always been bad in the nhl. Mickey Redmond makes it a priority to point out referee flaws, and hes been doing it since he began helping out with commentating. The fact remains that refs are human, and they will miss calls, look too much into a play and call something that shouldn'tve been, even bias comes into play, I'm sure. But that happens in every sport, and hockey is MUCH faster paced than ANY sport, and if you've ever tried reffing (as I have done for intermural college teams), you'll realize exactly how hard it is to make sure you keep track of every offsides, icing, roughing, tripping, high sticking, boarding, elbowing, and the countless other calls that can happen anywhere on the ice at any time. Do they suck sometimes? Completely. Is their job easy? Not at all. So calm down a little on the refs, especially this and last year of all years. I couldn't agree more, but for different reasons than you mention. I'm disappointed with his failure to prevent lockouts, his weakness in taking advantage of media outlets (although nbc was a positive turn, and I hear its supposed to be even better next year), his unbelievable ability to turn blind eyes to apparent problems, as well as his persistent meddling in things that seemed perfectly fine before he screwed around with them. NOT for allegedly pulling strings so an ignorant hockey city can win the cup. They're an official nhl team despite what you think of them, and its quite appalling how bias you seem to be against them. And for what reason? The only one you've mentioned as of yet is the fact that their fans aren't as intense as ours, which last time I checked has very little, if anything at all to do with how good a team plays. And apparently their team plays very well, as they did just win the stanley cup. He definitely is a hated man, and he really has a lot of guts presenting the cup each year. However, like I've already argued, I believe he has very little with Anaheim actually winning the cup. They have been around for a good 10-15 years (I'm sorry I don't know the exact number), and they've been a pretty good team since the start. It was only a matter of time before they finally won. And like I said, if you're going to base a city's fanbase with how well their arena sells out each night, you should be placing the Wings fans at the bottom of the barrel. I believe we failed to sell out a single playoff game. One of the main points of having an "nhl commissioner' is to increase ratings and to popularize hockey. If you decide to not put new teams anywhere in America, you honestly need to be fired, because that shows me you don't care about the ratings, or popularizing hockey. Most of the cities that have had teams for a while are fairly content and educated with hockey. Why not try to spread that to other cities? How could that possibly be a bad idea? Sure there are cities that aren't going to accept hockey no matter what, but you need to take those chances to get to the cities that would embrace a new team like a new baby. I'm not going to deny that hockey is in bad shape, and I'm not going to deny that alot of the blame rests on his shoulders. But that really has nothing to do with Anaheim winning the Stanley cup, or the Wings not winning the Stanley cup. So as I agree with your statement that Bettman sucks as an nhl commissioner, I unfortunately see absolutely no real support for your claim in your long winded argument edit: quote coding error

I highly doubt the slap shot to Niedermayer was intentional. Thats incredibly not in his personality, especially because hes captain. And if you look, the closer defense man closed in on him and took away the center ice, and as you're supposed to shoot the puck into the corners when you dump, it happened to be generally where Niedermayer was skating. Hes not going to try to shoot it off the far boards, because thats the bench and it risks really injuring someone. In addition to that, shooting the puck where you didn't intend to aim it is pretty common, and pretty easy to do if you aren't concentrating. yes, even for the pros. EDIT: Besides, its Niedermayer's job to get in front of pucks, as he is a defenseman, so he needs to stop bitching and play some hockey

lets hope the sens keep playing like this for the next two periods (and also next two games)

I would like to see the wings target Drury in the off season.

The results of the SCF game 1 have been put up on yahoo sports homepage- and get this- not just the nhl homepage. Usually (always) its nba nfl mlb stuff, and with nba playoffs also going on, and the nfl player's death this weekend (apparently he drowned) i was incredibly shocked to see hockey on their main page. But just to keep this thread from dying in 10 minutes and give it actual discussion meaning, what do you guys think of how the media exposes nhl to us. I'm sure the topics been beaten to death already, but i really am excited about yahoo sports finally caving in (if just this once) so i had to spread the news http://sports.yahoo.com/

Johan Ryno or Ritola? We just signed them for 3 years They're pretty big guys, especially Ryno, so obviously power forward comes to mind first, but does anyone have any stats on these guys, are they any good? Is there any chance these guys will be wearing winged wheels in the next 2 years is really what I want to know... edit link: http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl;_ylt=Ahg.3GZF6...JAUPnmc.to5nYcB under transactions 2nd edit: http://blog.mlive.com/snapshots/2007/06/wi...no_release.html it seems they will both be in the training camp this summer, and Jim Nill says they're "two highly skilled young players"

Kindly explain how that has anything to do with this topic

speaking of drafts (and I know this is getting of topic, but i honestly dont think it merits an entire thread devoted to it), Edmonton and St. Louis did pretty well for themselves, having landed 3 first round picks this year.

Seriously, the nhl really needs to do something about him. Hes obviously going to keep playing the way he's been playing, regardless of whether he gets a game suspension or not. Unfortunately its not realistic to suspend him for the remainder of the playoffs because that would be incentive for the nhl to loose a large part of the already weak California fanbase. Fines always end up being chump-change to these players, making millions each year anyway. I think in addition to the one game suspension, there should be a probation, where if he is put in this situation again over the next season + playoffs, hes going to be doing a large amount of time (on the scale of months) as well as sacrifice any money that he would be earning in that time to the nhl. This has really been going on for too long and the nhl has the health of the players to keep in mind.

tsn.ca

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/rumors/post/Fe...a?urn=nhl,35127 It was posted in the rumors section but it seems pretty likely that Fernandez will be up for grabs this summer. Although I don't really support the idea of having him on the team (he never seemed like a solid 1) I wouldn't mind so much having him to back up Osgood (unfortunately I dont see Osgood as a solid 1 either...) if Hasek were to leave