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I came home and flipped on the Hot Stove on YouTube. There was a great deal of discussion of the possible return of the Jets to Winnipeg. Glenn Healy weighed in on the possibility with this: “I don’t think that you can cover the National Hockey League’s losses, Glendale, and I don’t think you can cover Ice Edge’s losses. I think that is not an eligible use of that money. I think it’s against the law and I think it’s against the Constitution of Arizona, in my opinion. So if, in fact, it does go that way, I smell a lawsuit.”

To his credit, Mike Milbury promptly mocked Healy, saying he was amazed by the depth of his knowledge and the fact that Healy is a constitutional expert. Healy’s a bit aggravating in that he has a tendency to talk about stuff he doesn’t understand. If he’s read the Constitution of Arizona as well as the relevant authorities, I’m shocked. He sort of redeemed himself by at least identifying the Goldwater Institute as part the problem but he went on to express the view that the lawsuit (presumably to stop the guarantee of funds) would be winnable, which sure sounds like a legal opinion to me. I’m not sure what qualifies him to express legal opinions but it’s a tremendous waste of time on what is an otherwise excellent part of the Saturday night show.

Those of you who follow my twitter feed will be aware that I had some trouble in getting a car from Avis to head down to this game. I ultimately had to go to two locations in order to get one. The entire process took about two hours. Having put 1100 km on the vehicle, I can at least console myself with the certainty that they must have lost money on the rental - surely their overhead and the depreciation on the vehicle (I was driving a reasonably expensive Jeep) will eat up the $49.99 that they collected from me.

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I only saw the last half of last night’s Oilers game, as I had tickets to the Leafs-Sharks game. All sorts of interesting stuff happened but one of the things that caught my attention was the length of Phil Kessel’s shifts. I don’t watch a ton of Maple Leaf games, but I’m familiar with beer league hockey players who stay on the ice too long and I recognize the signs - standing away from the scrum for the puck and just sort of hoping that it will pop out in your direction, resulting in a scoring chance. It’s not a great tactic, as if the other team has fresh legs out there, you end up with the opposition winning more pucks.

I went and looked after the game and, sure enough, Kessel is amongst the league leaders in shift length for forwards, with an average length of 52 seconds. Then I noticed something weird: the list is decidedly skewed in favour of the Eastern Conference. So far this year (min. 40 GP), the Eastern Conference has 26 of the top 30. Only Brad Richards, Corey Perry, Ryan Getzlaf and Jarome Iginla prevent the sweep. Lots of guys who aren’t stars take long shifts too - Doug Weight, Kyle Okposo, Brendan Morrison and Brooks Laich are all taking long shifts.

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Just a quick chart here, looking at how coaches used their defencemen for faceoffs.

What I did was look at each team’s defencemen who were on the ice for at least 500 draws and pull the defenceman with the highest ratio of defensive to offensive draws, relative to the team, and those with the lowest ratio of defensive to offensive draws, relative to the team. I used numbers relative to the team ratio rather than absolute numbers in order to be making an apples to apples comparison. What I’m interested in seeing is how different coaches handled the issue. As you’ll see, some coaches (Jacques Lemaire and Wayne Gretzky) were quite aggressive in pursuing this, while others (notably Craig MacTavish) weren’t.

I wouldn’t cross the street to listen to Mike Keenan talk about his strategies as a general manager but I’d go a long way to hear him talk about this strategy and why some coaches pursue it while others don’t. I think that you can make a little bit of sense from it, although it’s not as cut and dry as “We think this guy sucks in the defensive zone.” It’s going to depend on the specific mix of talent a coach has. In any event, it’s interesting stuff. I continue to think that if you were really crazy for line matching and you went and got a smart techie to break down the data, you could probably know who the opposing coach was going to put on the ice at any given moment before he does.

I wasn’t all that impressed with the banal Pat Quinn/Tom Renney introduction conference today; there just wasn’t a whole lot that interested me in it. The press conference in Calgary though, was a lot more interesting. It featured some of the classy behaviour that characterizes Darryl Sutter’s press conferences (in response to a question about why the Flames waited four days to have a press conference, Sutter responded: “Very simple, I don’t work on your timeline Jock, first. That’s important…”) as well as a lot of discussion about coaching. Sutter went on at some length about the past few years in Calgary:

The year after the lockout, this is how I look at it, I was the general manager and the coach and the team had the best record that they’ve had in the past 15 years. That’s nothing to do with Darryl, right, that was our team and we responded well to the rules and all that stuff everybody talks about, right? I thought our leadership, those top guys, those star players on our team were ready for that, for a coach like Jimmy. And obviously, they weren’t. I thought Jimmy Playfair is an excellent head coach and I still think he’s going to be a head coach in the NHL. That’s why I offered him the position in Abbotsford.

So then we brought in Mike and I thought last year was awesome and it did start to move back towards what it takes to be successful in the playoffs and then I think it slipped this year. Quite honestly, the standards are very simple…I don’t base it on losing in the first round…if we’d have lost in the second round, we were still standing here doing the same thing, alright. It’s about going forward. My goals, our goals are the very same.

The way you get to the top of the heap, the way you stay successful for a long period of time is to be a very well rounded hockey club. Quite honestly, the year after the lockout, we were number one in team defence. The general consensus after the year was, you guys gotta score more goals. Well, that’s not really the case. We went from first in the league in team defence to 23rd and, quite honestly, were quite fortunate to be a playoff team when you look at that we were thirteenth in the conference in goals against and that’s against what I believe in and that’s against what successful organizations do.

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