stormboy

It seems to me that Shanny is a great guy for the job.  I totally agree with the idea of releasing at the very least a statement on every situation that comes before the board, so we as fans can try to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.  Any idea if these videos will be released to the general public or just sent to teams?

I'd get rid of Holland for offering Hudler a $15 million dollar contract and keep both Pavs and Hank.

It's a thought experiment.  It's like when people are given the question, "Would you kill a crying baby to protect a dozen people from a Nazi patrol," and someone answers, "I'd raise a Zombie army and defeat the Nazis -- don't even have to worry about the baby!"  If you don't like the question and its parameters, don't participate.

As for me, the answer is obviously Datsyuk.  That doesn't mean that I don't love Z, or that I don't think he's an amazing combination of shutdown forward + goal scorer, which is rare.  But his health (back) problems always seem to be one check away from sidelining him for a few weeks, and he seems to be slowing down, despite being younger than Dats.  My subjective feeling is that when we're down and need something amazing, Dats is more likely to pull it off than Z.

i love how eager calls out bieksa in the media when it was marleau who challenged bieksa to fight.  meanwhile, he's pulling his typical goonery.  

maybe it's because we just played them, and maybe it's because i feel like they beat us when they didn't really deserve to (flukey OT goal in a series that goes seven games), but the sharks have certainly become my number-one most hated team (replacing anaheim) in recent times.

at first i was all   , but then i realized this thread was started five and a half years ago, and i was all  

daniels going absolutely bonkers.  love it.  

had to listen to the game on the radio at work, but still an amazing game.  can't wait for game seven.


not to be negative after such a great win, but here's something we've all been talking about put into numbers.

Game 1: 4-minutes for high-sticking, 2:43 of OT
Game 4: 2-minutes for cross-checking, 11:35 of period 3
Game 5: 2-minutes for elbowing, 14:55 of period 3
Game 6: 2-minutes for holding, 13:14 of period 3
This series: -3, 16 PIM, no points
This playoffs: -4, 26 PIM, no points

guess whose stats these are!  although, one could make the argument that we've won every game when abdelkader has taken a dumb third-period goal, and lost every one he hasn't (game one obviously being in overtime).  so, if we're up by a goal late in the game on thursday, i'd argue we need to send abby out there and slash people until he takes a penalty.  guaranteed victory.

like others have said, abby's taken some dumb penalties, but fortunately it didn't cost us game five, and it would be really, really tough to take him out of the lineup.  i don't see how you skate franzen at this point.  even if he's feeling better, he has not been himself and we can't risk him getting re-injured in the first period and being down a forward for most of the game.  our PK has been brutal, and miller helps out there a lot.  with how s***ty huds has been, and how s***ty our PK has been, miller's got to stay in.

didn't babs say something in the presser about miller being one of our best PK forwards?  in theory, we have enough scoring depth that losing hudler's offensive potential (which he hasn't even nearly lived up to this series) is well worth the trade-off for an upgrade to the PK.

unless mule is fully one-hundred percent, miller/modano in, hudler/franzen out seems like the only option.

hmmmm i dono how i feel about this yet

Datsyuk.

Helm for the most stupidly overrated player in the game.

really?  i realize he's not alex ovechkin over here.  sure, he's gotten a lot of praise around here (and elsewhere) of late, but the kid always plays with tons of heart and speed, even when he's not chipping in a lot of points, which isn't really his primary role on the team.

  

i'll try to stir up some contributions when i'm a little less intoxicated, but you guys are doing a great job.  

lgw.

listened to the game at work...just got home and have paging through the GDT.  it's only natural, of course, but it's so funny to me to read posts from different times in the game.  knowing that the wings would eventually come back to tie the game, it's funny reading posts from people who were willing to murder every member of the red wings organization when we were down 4-0 only to revel in the joy later on.  i can't say that i don't feel the same way, but it's just interesting to take a step back afterward and see how fickle we all are.  

anyway, glad to get the point, and, IMO more importantly, for the guys to prove to themselves that they can come back no matter what.  yeah, we suck at shootouts (esp. with our third-string goalie in there, though joey has been playing well as of late), but you get the feeling that in a playoff game, with eternal five-on-five overtime, the wings end up winning it.  like we've said before, hopefully the wings can build on the momentum of this game.

even if it's a loss in the standings, it's still, somehow, a win emotionally.  

wish i could have been at the joe for mo's 4rd period goal.  moments like that are why i like sports (magglio's walk-off homer to send the tigers to the series, usa's late goal vs. algeria come to mind.  pure ecstasy.)

From the Power Band website: "Power Balance is based on the idea of optimizing the body’s natural  energy flow, similar to concepts behind many Eastern philosophies."

Ahahaha...because anything foreign is MAGICAL.

hah.  right, exactly.   s*** like this is stupid and relatively harmless, but ideas like this can be quite nefarious.  a friend's dad was dying of cancer a while ago and this dude fleeced them of a bunch of money by convincing to use stuff basically like this -- that he could realign his "frequencies" and his body would heal itself.  

anyway, i should give myself a stay-on-topic emoticon.  maybe i'll go start a pseudoscience thread in the watercooler...

Looks like a power balance bracelet

My link

If you go to the testimony page you will find Mr. Teemu Selanne. Too bad it didn't help him when he got Kronwalled!

it didn't help him with anything else, either.  i would think someone as seemingly-intelligent as lids would buy in to crap like that.  though, i guess when you make millions of dollars a year you can afford a thirty dollar bracelet that doesn't do anything.

there's something about brawls like this (or that UK one somebody posted the other day) that always make me a little queezy.  i'm not sure what it is -- something about the unbridled chaos just rubs me the wrong way.  i'm all for fighting in certain circumstances, and i wish the wings would do it more.  i was stoked when pavs dropped the gloves early in the year.  but, i don't know, there's something about stuff like this that i really don't like.  especially the way it was so obviously planned that all five starters just friggin jumped the other players like they were in a dark ally.  

call me a ***** if you want, but i'm just not into this at all.

Hey everyone.  I was browsing stats this morning when I noticed how huge of a percentage Crosby had of his teams goals and points (Crosby has 24 goals, second place guy has eight).  I thought I'd dig a little deeper and compare him and the Pens to the other top teams in the league.  I looked at the top two teams in each conference (Washington and Pitt in the east; Detroit and Dallas in the west), and looked at their top goal/assist/point producers and what percentage of their team's total they owned in each category.  I also looked at the top three players as a combined total.

In some cases, the individual with, say, the most goals was not the one with the most assists.  In such cases, I have included full lines for each player, bolding the category in which they lead the team.

Same goes for the player triplets.  For example, two of Detroit's top three goal-scorers are not among their top-three point producers, so I included multiple combinations.

Note that the sets of three are not necessarily an actual line, just the top three producers in each category.  Make sense?

Here's what I came up with:

Pittsburgh Penguins
Crosby: 27% goals, 15% assists, 20% points
Crosty Kunits Malkin: 45% goals, 30% assists, 36% points
Crosby Letang Malkin:  42% goals, 38% assists, 39% points

Washington Capitals
Semin: 19% goals, 10% assists, 13% points
Ovechkin: 13% goals, 15% assists, 14% points
Semin Ovechkin Backstrom: 44% goals, 38% assists, 40% points

Dallas Stars
Richards: 16% goals, 15% assists, 15% points
Richards Neal Eriksson: 43% goals, 38% assists, 40% points

Detroit Red Wings
Franzen: 14% goals, 5% assists, 8% points
Datsyuk: 9% goals, 13% assists, 12% points
Cleary Franzen Zetterberg: 38% goals, 19% assists, 26% points
Datsyuk Lidstrom Zetterberg:  23% goals, 35% assists, 31% points

So.  What do you think?  It seems obvious that of the top four, Pittsburgh is the most imbalanced team, while the Wings are the most balanced.  Does this matter?  My gut is to say that we're in the best position because we would be the most resilient to injury (if Crosby goes down the Pens lose a quarter of their current goal production), but could it mean that no Wing is really playing a dominant game this season?  Does it not really matter?  Is there a better way to look at team scoring balance (I'd thought about doing it by actual lines, but that's problematic too because lines don't always play together)?  Also, this is not a Crosby thread -- that's just what drew my attention to this whole issue.

tl;dr -- discuss team scoring balance.

i'll accept this thread simply because if quincey was third in defense points right now, there would be threads about how bad the management had f***ed up letting him go.  you can't judge the quality of a decision like this until further down the road.  obviously, this isn't the end of the story, but i think it's an important plot point as we weigh the decision as it happened.