dobbles

so far, there are 3 reasons  to move the wings to the east that i have seen mentioned:

better for the fans
less travel
less time zone switching

to me, each of those reasons is pretty tertiary. i will explain why:

better for the fans? who cares! its a pretty minor inconvenience. 41 games are at home at whatever time the wings prefer. 10 more a year are already against the east. 10-20 more are in the central time zone which is a whole whopping hour behind. when you consider the wings start lots of home games at 730 eastern, and many teams start at 7pm central, its a whopping half hour difference for the start times. is it really that hard to adjust your tv watching schedule for a half hour later?

less travel. IMO, this holds the most water, but let me play devils advocate as to why its not really an issue. the hardest part of travel is getting on the bus, getting to the airport, getting to the plane, getting loaded, etc. the EASY part of travel is the actual flight. teams in the east still have to deal with the headaches of getting to the airport and all that. the only difference is flight time. let me throw some hypothetical numbers in there... so teams in the east still take an hour or two post game to get to the airport and get loaded. in the east, their flight may only take 30 minutes. they still have to get off the plane, get their crap and get to the hotel or to home depending on the situation. so lets add an hour. so for an east team, it still is going to take almost 4 hours to get home. for a team in the west, they still get 1-2 hours to get to the plane, however their flight is 90 minutes, and then an hour to get home. so instead of 4 hours of travel time, its 5. and once again, the time on the plane is when you can relax, decompress, nap, etc. also, a lot of teams in the east bus around at times. that negates the time gain. is an hour on a bus really better than an hour on a plane?

less time zone changes. this really falls in with the first one for me. sure detroit is in the eastern time zone. but is 1 hour difference really all that much? as i mentioned, teams vary between the on the hour start and the on the half hour start, so that adds to just as much variety. even in the east, there would still probably be 1 west coast trip a year to catch whichever division was on the rotation that year. right now they play about 50 games in the eastern time zone; switching to the east would change that to what? 70? and most of those gains would just be 1 hour difference.



i guess to me i just dont see all the whining about how awful the west is. sorry for being long winded though. at least we arent dallas who has no division rivals within hundreds of miles...

i would think its best for the nhl to be in the west. it leaves 2 original 6 teams in the conference instead of orphaning chicago. it allows the det-chi rivalry to build as both teams are good for the first time in decades. it allows the west to be stronger because of the wings success. it allows western teams to draw better when the wings come to town. i just think there are more quality reasons to stay than to go.

wow, stay classy neal

while it was nothing major, why do something like that in the preseason?

god the penguins are douchey.

how can you be 'defenseless' when you are actively turning your back to the guy?!?!?!?

what a terrible summer for hockey. lets just get some games started and get away from all this tragedy...

while i don't mean to interrupt the awesome hyperbole of lgw, both sides of this are understandable. i could even see babcock being disappointed and making those comments. burns isn't the next lidstrom, but is one of the better realistic options to replace rafalski. many thought he wouldnt be moved, so when he was, and for a pretty reasonable package, it raises eyebrows. i think a lot of people feel like a package built around filppula (or MAYBE hudler) could have been assembled that was similar to what SJ got. personally, i think the wings could have made a similar/better offer. many people are saying we would have to offer franzen, however, i think people that suggest that are over-valuing setoguchi. while goal scorers are a rare commodity, he has pretty pedestrian numbers overall aside from his 30 goal season. if you look at the production the last 2 years, he has been comparable to flip.

for a lot of people this was a big missed opportunity. thats why people are so passionate. we all just want to see the red wings be the best team possible. unfortunately, we all have differing opinions of what that entails.

Yep, you should never try to do anything because it won't work out.  

If the Wings had the same attitude they would have never won anything!

hyperbole ftw!

no one is saying that at all. most people just advocate the solution that makes most sense for the league.

i really have low expectations for this years game. i had taken several years away from nhl in the mid 2000's and ended up playing nhl08 on pc. after finally getting with the program and getting a ps3 and nhl09 i was blown away. i was on a strong and active eashl team that year and logged hundreds of hours playing. i also got a good amount of joy out of gm mode. then nhl10 came out. there were some tweaks and improvements; still being 'new' to the series it held my interest pretty well. played less eashl and more gm mode that year though.

then last years game came out. it was a big disappointment for me. they added lots of cool stuff like chl, better gm features like future draft picks, but the gameplay continued to decline and they continued to turn eashl and HUT mode into giant cash grabs.

each year they add just enough tertiary features to the game to entice people to buy it. yet the soundtrack is stale, the physics are stale (the checking last year actually went backwards IMO. every hit was highlight reel quality) the glitches are too plentiful and never get truly fixed, and the AI continues to be brutal. (they still pass between 2 people in the offensive zone repeatedly)

its great that goalies are actually part of the game. thats been missing. however, i personally have the likelihood that it gets exploited online at 95%. it will take about 5 minutes for the cheesers to figure out how to slide the puck under the goalie as you run him over.

but as long as people keep buying the game, eashl boosts, and hut packs, EA will just continue to laugh all the way to the bank...

remember when leonardsankar never posted and lgw was a better place because of it????

i actually like jack edwards. he was good back in the day on espn. and while he can be a homer, i hear him make fair assessments about bad calls and things that balance him out a bit. he is paid by nesn to be the bruins announcer. not a neutral announcer. with that said, that video makes no freaking sense at all!!!!

I am so ready for this game!

It will be my first ever Wings game in person!!!!!!

i don't buy it. both fights were won by bertuzzi, yet the first one didn't cause the wings to play better. additionally, the wings started the game playing physical so its not as if they needed bertuzzi to step up and keep the preds from dominating physical. i can only assume that it was a very concerted effort to play physical after their last meeting and had nothing to do with bertuzzi's fight. additionally, the second fight was very much about settling the score from their earlier bout. it had nothing to do with defedning teammates or anything team related.

while the fights were enjoyable, i don't see them as related to the game. the wings played very physical before and after the fight. as noted earlier, the wings actually had good jump to start the game. so they had already been playing well.

i am fine that cleary and babcock said the fights pumped them up. thats cool. i still think that means the fights had anything to do with the wings managing to come back.

If our resident Hawk fan is really just here to talk hockey and we all just pick on him, then why isn't he in this thread? Hmm.

i will just post on his behalf:

"hawks looked real good today. it was a tough win and we will have to string more of those together to make the playoffs. this team is amazing, they just can't put it together. if we score more than we give up, we will win.

p.s. - if this team drops below 8th i will eat my own pubes"

it took a lot longer for those last few than we would have thought, but congrats on finally getting 400! way to do it in style with a 46 save effort!

i could care less about people that bang on the glass. maybe they should focus more on banning the people that stand up every 5 seconds and wave to the camera???? thats 10000 times more annoying IMO.

any support for playing macdonald friday against the oilers?

i know howard is young, but i would hate to see him overworked early in the season. the oilers are still one of the worst teams in the league as far as points. however they do have that young talent that can score goals at times.

would it be an opportunity to get macdonald a game and rest howard without giving up 2 points?



regarding the rest of the news, good to hear. gotta get ericsson back in there to see who that 6th dman will be. janik played well while up though. the 3rd line looked better the other night, so hopefully they can keep that going. personally, wouldn't mind seeing modano sit for a game instead of hudler though.