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The news that Vesa Toskala has signed in San Jose for another two years seems quite surprising. A review of message boards and commentators like Spector suggests that there is a significant minority opinion that he’s signed a contract to facilitate a trade. This simply can’t be correct.

If Doug Wilson approached Toskala saying “We can trade you but only if you sign for $1.375MM over two years”, why in the name of God would Toskala sign that contract? Wilson would have effectively confirmed for Toskala that there’s a market for his services this summer. Toskala going to a team at a cost of some player or draft picks would reduce the amount of money that team was willing to pay him. Toskala at no cost, as he would have come this summer, should attract a higher paycheque.

If you actually take a look at the 2006 free agent list, you see that there is a glut of goalies listed. A guy like Toskala, with no real credentials as a starting goalie coming off a poor year (.883 save percentage to this point) is going to be competing against “proven” number ones like Dwayne Roloson, Martin Gerber, Manny Fernandez, Curtis Joseph, Chris Osgood, Martin Biron, Dominik Hasek, Patrick Lalime, John Grahame, and Ed Belfour. There’s also a glut of second tier guys who maybe haven’t proven themselves as starters but who have longer track records than Toskala-Manny Legace, Mike Dunham, Johan Hedberg, Jamie McLennan, Cristobal Huet in addition to the usual flotsam and jetsam (read “Ty Conklin”) that one finds on the free agent market.

Now none of this is to say that Toskala isn’t one of the top goalies of the names I’ve listed-he may well be. His save percentage for the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons was a stellar .929, which puts him well above the league average over that time period. His AHL save percentages were never overwhelming though. When you look at the obvious comparator for him in Miikka Kiprusoff, it’s clear which goalie was better in the AHL. At age 23, Kiprusoff posted a 1019 relative save percentage to Toskala’s 1005. At age 24, Kiprusoff posted a 1021 relative save percentage to Toskala’s 1000. At age 25, it was 1040 for Kipper (on only 137 shots) to Toskala’s 992. With the exception of his limited NHL exposure, Toskala does not have a track record that screams out “This is a potential elite goalie.” As mentioned above, this year hasn’t been particularly stellar either.

Taking the $1.375MM now means that he doesn’t have to worry about the glut of competition for jobs as a goalie in the market this summer or rely on finding an unusually risk friendly NHL GM. If he puts up two more seasons like 2002-03 and 2003-04, he’ll be more firmly established and well placed to find a team more willing to roll the dice on him. If he goes to free agency, I have a hard time seeing how he gets more than Joseph’s one year, 900K deal from last summer and he runs the risk of getting frozen out entirely if the market view of him is less than expected. The decision that he’s made is clearly the risk averse one but I don’t think that it allows us to infer anything about how the Sharks plan to proceed. I definitely don’t see it as a sign that a trade is in the works.

The seeming glut of goalies about to enter the market should increase the pressure on GM’s with a goalie to trade one of them. The value of Martin Biron to the Buffalo Sabres at this point is essentially limited to insurance against an injury to Miller. If Regier sits on him, he loses him this summer. If he looks to trade him, he’s limited to those teams who think that they have a shot at it this year and for whom Martin Biron represents a marked upgrade in goal. I’d submit that there are fewer of those teams than people think-if Lowe decides to move on the goaltending (as he should), there’s no excuse for overpaying for one of the available options. Here’s hoping that Ryan Miller and Manny Fernandez are lights out from here to the trade deadline (I want the Wild to lose every game 1-0).

A brief digression from talking about hockey. I really like the information provided by the company that provides my webhosting, particularly the stuff about the links that people click on to get here or what they were actually searching for that led them here. My favourite search engine strings include “andy moog 2006 salary hockey”, “bob essensa contract”, “gretzky and the bad picks”, “gretzky janet jones lied about age”, “jarome iginla significant quotes” and “did greg millen go to italy olympics”. The most common referring sites aren’t as interesting: the top four unique referrers are Tom Benjamin, Battle of Alberta, Sisu Hockey, and Oilfan’s poster Loxy’s blog, which features an increasingly arty series of pictures, for those interested in that stuff. The bottom of that list is way more interesting: 5 people have made their way here through what was apparently a link in a forum devoted to the Smashing Pumpkins. I had no idea that there was a crossover between those interested enough in the Smashing Pumpkins to discuss them online and those interested enough in hockey to read posts based on numbers that are anathema to a large part of the online hockey world. Live and learn, I guess.

In the comments for the previous post, PhantomJoe1920 pointed me to a site I had overlooked in my search for a list of the top rookie scorers of all time: www.bov.ch. It’s a personal page for a Swiss guy name Phillipe who is interested in hockey, chess, whisky, and beer. Amazingly, it also apparently one of the better hockey resource sites for NHL rookie scoring. The mind boggles.

I grabbed the thirty names off his list and have presented them along with Gretzky and projected numbers for Ovechkin and Crosby, sorted by points adjusted for scoring context and season length. Not surprisingly, this list is dominated by guys who played in the 1980’s-if I had the lists of rookie leading scorers each year, I could probably put together a better list.

A couple of interesting things jump out at you. The placement of Crosby and Ovechkin is an obvious huge credit to them. Their ages speak quite well for them as well-lots of guys on this list aged 21+. The top 13 on this list is simply incredible-of the 9 who are retired, 7 of them are Hall of Famers. Rick Martin quite possibly would have been (Lowetide of Hockey’s Future, an expert on Hockey’s Past, informs me that Martin destroyed his knee in 1980; something that’s very clear from his hockeydb profile as his career just comes to a complete halt that year) and Joey Juneau who was 24 when he had his rookie season. Of the four who have yet to retire, Selanne and Nieuwendyk are sure thing Hall of Famers in my eyes. AO and Crosby are in a pretty elite class of players.

One other point-note where Eric Lindros sits. He’s 30th on my list, which is very respectable, but what that doesn’t tell you is that almost every one of these guys played nearly every game their team took part in. Lindros, in what is retrospectively an obvious piece of foreshadowing (referring to something as retrospective foreshadowing may be the ultimate in bad writing), missed 23 games. Had he played in those games, he was on pace for 80ish points. If someone ever made a list of hockey players whose promise was negated by injury, he’d probably sit second only to Bobby Orr. If I ever have a kid who looks like a talented hockey player, there’s no way in hell I’m letting him suit up for the Oshawa Generals.

Japers wrote something a few weeks back about the Top 11 rookie seasons of all time. Coincidentally (?), CNN/SI had something a few weeks later on the same subject. Both sites picked Tony O as having the best rookie season ever. Oddly, they had nearly identical facts in their first sentence about Esposito, as they both mentioned that he had just been claimed from Montreal in the Intra-League Draft, a pretty arcane fact for them both to lead off with. Both stories make the much more obvious point that in many ways, 2005-06 has been the season of the rookie-I’d say that as many as 4 guys have put up seasons that would have won them the Calder more years than not (Crosby, Ovechkin, Phaneuf and Lundqvist). As of right now, Ovechkin looks like the clear favourite to win to me.

Neither site considered Gretzky to have been a rookie, as they both fell in line with the NHL policy; personally, I have to question the deference to an organization that concluded that Gretzky’s age 17 season in the 6 team WHA excluded him from Calder eligibility while the 11 seasons that Sergei Makarov spent with CSKA Moscow prior to joining the Calgary Flames in 1989-90 at the age of 31 didn’t exclude him from Calder eligibility. It is absurd that the NHL still maintains this distinction and it’s something that they should address-Gretzky, not Teemu Selanne, is the rightful holder of the record for points as a rookie.

With the seasons put up by Ovechkin and Crosby this year, I was curious to check out the top rookie scoring seasons of all time and see how they looked once you accounted for the scoring context of the seasons that they played in. As an aside, NHL.com is woefully lacking in failing to provide this information-it’s like the league doesn’t want to acknowledge that it has a history extending from 1917 until today.

In any event, I was able to find a listing of the top 5 rookie scoring seasons of all time at a site called rauzulusstreet.com. Surprisingly, not even hockeydb.com has this information. Anyway, those 5, plus Gretzky and projected numbers for Ovechkin and Crosby gives me 8 players to look at.

Not surprisingly, Gretzky sits atop the list, even after you adjust for the fact that the 80’s were all about scoring. It’s also not suprising that most of the players on this were older than 18-it’s obviously a huge advantage to come to the NHL in your early 20’s as opposed to being 18 years old.

I figure that Ovechkin is probably going to win the Calder this season, as he should-the trophy is “…an annual award given to the player selected as the most proficient in his first year of competition in the National Hockey League.” This definition implies that the voters shouldn’t considering things such as age, except insofar as the NHL limits the award to players under the age of 26 (the Makarov rule). Oddly, the league also limits the award to those who have not played “…in six or more games in each of any two preceding seasons in any major professional league.”

The term “major professional league” appears to be an undefined one. Ovechkin started playing in the Russian Elite League at the age of 16, scoring 2 goals and 2 assists in 21 games. At the age of 17, he scored 8 goals and 7 assists in 40 games. At age 18, he scored 13 goals and 10 assists in 53 games and in his age 19 season, he scored 13 goals and 14 assists in 37 games. I don’t have a handle on how good the Russian Elite League is but I’d imagine that it has to be at least as good as the AHL. We know that players who’ve played more than 6 games in the AHL are eligible for the Calder so I’m not sure who exactly this rule is supposed to catch.

Is Ovechkin’s season more impressive than the season that Crosby is having? It’s tough to say. Neither team really has much offensive support for their young star-Pittsburgh has 165 goals in 59 games, while the Caps have scored 156 in 56 games. Crosby has three factors working in favour of the argument that his season is more impressive, as far as I can see. First, the fact that he’s almost two years younger than Ovechkin is a big one. Second, even if the Russian Elite League is only AHL quality, it’s still a hell of a lot better than the QMJHL. Finally, it can’t be denied that Pittsburgh is a gong show. They’ve had two major player retirements, concerns about the team leaving town, a coach fired…it’s an absolute circus. The Caps, as much as they’re a bad team, haven’t had the constant sideshow. Ovechkin has had had one real disadvantage in comparison to Crosby that I can see- the adjustment to living in North America that Crosby didn’t have to make.

It’s close, but I’d probably give the edge to Crosby for having had the more impressive rookie season despite the projected 11 point rookie scoring edge for Ovechkin. The age and experience factors outweigh the adjustment to North America in my mind. I’d expect Crosby to be blowing by the numbers that Ovechkin has put up this season in 2007-08, when he’s 20. For the sake of comparison, when Gretzky was 20, he scored 212 points, a 75 point improvement on his rookie season. Crosby doesn’t look like he’s going to be THAT good but he definitely looks like he’s going to be impressive. It’s quite likely that his age 18 season is second offensively only to that of Gretzky in NHL history, as prior to 1979-80, 18 year olds didn’t play in the NHL. He’s on pace to surpass the season that Lemieux put up age 19, something that can’t be overloooked. Impressive company.

If anyone knows of a more complete list of rookie scorers, or where I could find the top rookie scorers year by year so that I could expand this comparison (I’d like to see if there really is a solid argument that these are the two best offensive seasons put up by players entering the NHL in the same season ever), leave a note in the comments and I’ll follow up on this.

I got curious so I went and checked. Here’s how Crosby’s and Ovechkin’s seasons stack up against the best seasons put up by 18 and 20 year olds leaguewide when you account for league scoring context and schedule length over the past 50 years. The names on the lists and where Crosby and Ovechkin are projected to end up sitting really says it all-I doubt that two such gifted offensive players have ever entered the league at the same time. I’m going to be very interested to see how Crosby in particular progresses. He’s not Gretzky’s level but he’s significantly better than anyone else at that age. His age 19 and age 20 seasons will be very interesting. Ovechkin is pretty amazing too-I’d probably rate his season ahead of Kovalchuk’s, as Kovalchuk was into his third season at the time and Atlanta had more weapons than the Caps did. Kovalchuk was also playing an extra 2:20 nightly, of which 0:30 was PP time. That adds up.

So there it is. It’s probably fair to say that Crosby is having the second best offensive season enjoyed by an 18 year old in the NHL in the past 50 years and Ovechkin is posting the third best offensive season posted by a 20 year old in the past 50 years. I’m personally more excited to see how Crosby develops because he’s so young but to have both of these guys drop into the league as they try and recover from the lost season is a serious bit of good luck.

I think my view of hockey, at least of making big decisions based on the outcome of one game has a lot in common with Matt’s at Battle of Alberta and with Tom Benjamin’s at Canucks Corner. In a tournament like this anything can and will happen and to treat whatever result we achieve as telling of the state of the sport in Canada is simply over the top. Coincidentally, I’m not employed in the Canadian media. Even a guy like the generally stoic and rational Bob McKenzie reacts to this tournament with phrases like “collossal failure” and “epic disaster”. I wouldn’t go that far-to a certain extent, shit just happened. There’s nothing to indicate that Canadian hockey isn’t strong or that we can’t compete at the international level.

Although I look at these things as a series of dice rolls, you can still weight the dice. The questions that I think this tournament should leave us wondering about relate to how we went about building our dice and if they had the proper weights. The coaches are going to take a lot of heat coming out of this and I wonder if it’s time to reconsider how we choose a coach for this tournament. This country is overrun with people who are competent to coach the team and I wonder if someone with closer ties to the international hockey scene and in particular, more experience with the game as it’s played on the big ice wouldn’t be a more appropriate leader of Team Canada. With the exception of the United States, all of the other countries there are led by coaches who have spent their professional careers coaching teams playing on international sized ice and I think it’s something that we should look it. I think very highly of both Ken Hitchcock and Jacques Martin as coaches (more highly than I do of Quinn, who exudes an old boy nature that puts me off) but it’s an awful lot to expect of them to be focused on the Olympics while their NHL teams are in play. A coaching staff hired by Hockey Canada during Olympic years might put the Canadian team on a more solid footing during the Olympics. I believe that there was someone kicking around who was supposed to be the backup Olympic coach if the lockout was still on and NHL personnel didn’t take part but I can’t remember who that was. Dave King is another name that comes to mind.

I mention the coaching only because so many of the plays that Team Canada was making, particularly on the power play, were small ice plays. One moment in particular stood out to me. Canada was on the power play late in the game and they were still trying to set up shots from the blue line or shots off of the halfboards. With the wider ice, these shots become even more low percentage than they are in the NHL.

I’m less concerned about the inability to score than I think a lot of other people are-we know that these guys can score goals. There is reams and reams of evidence of this. Translating that to the Olympic stage is the problem that has to be addressed. Puck support was a huge issue for Canada in these Games; again, I think that this comes back to playing on the big ice. There seemed to be countless instances where Canada would dump the puck in, a guy would skate for the corner where it should be, and it would be cut off before it got there. The team never changed it’s tactics; this simply wasn’t addressed.

The roster selection is another area of controversy. Although I think that Canada was good enough to win this tournament, I do think that a better team could have been put together. I was critical of this when Gretzky put the team together-there seemed to be a premium on having played on the 2004 World Cup team or the 2002 Olympic team as opposed to playing well now. I’m mystified by Gretzky’s fascination with Todd Bertuzzi-he wasn’t playing all that well in 2003-04 prior to assaulting Steve Moore and he hasn’t played particularly well this year. He takes a boatload of stupid penalties which is fine if he’s a 35-40 goal scorer but he seems to have quietly returned to being a 25 goal scorer-his pace this year is close to 2003-04 if you consider that scoring is way up this season. Martin St. Louis is another guy who sticks out in this regard. The list of Canadian players who make this team because of what they’ve done and been part of in the past needs to get a lot shorter than it was prior to this tournament: I would have had it at Iginla, Sakic, Thornton, Blake, Niedermayer and Pronger and then weighted performance in this season a lot more heavily.

What’s really funny about this is that if you look at the team who won in 2001-02, there were several key players there who didn’t have Olympic experience, most notably Iginla who rode an incredibly hot start to a spot on the team and two goals in the gold medal game. Prior to that tournament, Iginla had all of two playoff games to his credit and he’d never played in the Olympics.

I’d like to see Gretzky kept around for the 2010 Olympics-hopefully he’s there to light the Olympic flame anyway, so we might as well have him running the team. He’s an incredibly impressive guy in terms of taking responsibility for this (kudos to Pronger and Sakic for coming out to face the media after the game) and I think he’s smart enough to learn from his mistakes here. The guy just has a certain gravitas about him too, which may not matter all that much in the long run but certainly adds to the experience. Pair him with a staff of coaches who understand the differences in the international game and have the time to devote to preparing the team during the 2009-2010 season and pay attention to the guys who are having big years and Canada should be favoured to make up for this loss.

In the comments for ““Changes in Save Percentage As Time Elapses From Past Shot”, Earl Sleek asked how the conventional wisdom that it’s tough not to see shots for a lengthy period holds up. As the numbers show, it isn’t holding up particularly well this season. This data table comes with a few caveats though. First, I just looked at ES shots. Second, the particularly lengthy periods would seem to be probably disproportionately likely to have occurred for the goalies playing behind better teams-their save percentage may be higher (or lower) than the league average. Nevertheless, I’d say that this season at least, if someone were to tell me that he’s detected with the naked eye a difference when the goalie has an extended period without a shot, I’d have serious doubts. There’s the odd dip in there but they seem to be by and large for shots occuring in the smaller samples. Personally, I don’t think I could identify the difference between a .928
save percentage and a .925 or a .921 just by looking. If this breakdown holds up historically, I’d suspect that this is an instance where the goals on the first shot in a while are just glaringly obvious.

There’s a guy who’s a very well respected sabrmetrician who goes by the name Tangotiger. He’s got his own site with some baseball stuff at tangotiger.net and has recently written a book with some other heavy hitting sabrmetricians (MGL and Dolphin) on baseball strategy. He’s got an interesting piece up at the Hardball Times looking at “his” forecasting system (his in quotes because he refers to himself as the system’s trustee as opposed to owner), the Marcels, which is a reasonably simple method of producing player forecasts for the coming season. The idea is that it’s so simple a monkey could do it (a bit of an overstatement, I think, but certainly it’s not as complex some other systems like PECOTA).

The piece I’ve linked too is an interesting piece looking back at the 2005 season. He compares groups of players who were projected to achieve at a similar level (say between 28 and 30 home runs) and then checks how they ended up doing. Although they ended up with huge spreads and variation from their forecasts, as groups they pretty much did what they were projected to do.

I’m not really too sure that there’s a lot of value in a forecasting system that gets more complex than what he’s done. Tango ran a forecasting contest a few years back and concluded that:

All the individual forecasters did a good job, and there’s really not much to pick between them. Individual readers should not be trusted, though as a group, they are very intuitive. Go with the monkey. There’s little accuracy to be gained beyond that.

Tying this into hockey (and the Oilers), I have a hard time blaming Lowe for the problems with Conklin and Markkanen this season. Both of them had reasonable track records of success at the NHL level (Jussi moreso than Conklin) and the odds of both of them being as bad as they’ve been were low. Throw them into a group with a bunch of other guys with similar track records who might have had similar projections-I’m thinking Alexander Auld (maybe Tim Thomas and Cristobal Huet as well) as an example, although I don’t even think he has Conklin’s track record and you end up with one season performances that are all over the map. It’s unfortunte for the Oilers that Lowe struck out with Conklin and Markkanen (Morrison is a waste of time too, delightful accent be damned). Personally, I don’t blame him for how things worked out-at the time, there was nothing to suggest that things would be as bad as they’ve been.

Time	Shots	Goals	Sv%

0	3	0	1.000
1	442	142	0.679
2	581	207	0.644
3	425	103	0.758
4	440	57	0.870
5	443	33	0.926
6	504	38	0.925
7	415	26	0.937
8	427	21	0.951
9	349	22	0.937
10	334	30	0.910
11	273	20	0.927
12	291	15	0.948
13	251	13	0.948
14	267	14	0.948
15	258	23	0.911
16	249	19	0.924
17	231	24	0.896
18	228	23	0.899
19	231	18	0.922
20	206	17	0.917
21	211	15	0.929
22	201	17	0.915
23	218	16	0.927
24	220	18	0.918
25	201	10	0.950
26	189	17	0.910
27	186	12	0.935
28	200	9	0.955
29	173	14	0.919
30	167	6	0.964
31	208	15	0.928
32	196	10	0.949
33	188	12	0.936
34	172	11	0.936
35	199	19	0.905
36	177	18	0.898
37	185	18	0.903
38	170	13	0.924
39	172	11	0.936
40	181	10	0.945
41	173	12	0.931
42	163	13	0.920
43	171	10	0.942
44	163	10	0.939
45	171	7	0.959
46	170	8	0.953
47	136	10	0.926
48	146	11	0.925
49	156	14	0.910
50	127	10	0.921
51	149	8	0.946
52	123	9	0.927
53	137	7	0.949
54	139	9	0.935
55	149	8	0.946
56	132	7	0.947
57	148	7	0.953
58	143	10	0.930
59	142	7	0.951
60	149	13	0.913

Time is in seconds. My idea in defining a rebound is to capture those shots that are more difficult than regular shots because the goalie has little time to get set. I draw the line at three seconds.

The stats update continues (most of it is actually finished now, including the playoff odds which is one of the more visited pages around here) and I wanted to highlight something on the rebound page. I recently had an email from someone highlighting a post in a thread at Calgary Puck that reminded me of one of the reasons I first started looking at the volumes of data that the NHL has stated to compile. A poster there who goes by the handle of Lanny_MacDonald, stated as follows:

I think we’re being sucked in by the Edmonton media machine and the fans. Their goaltending has NOT been that bad. In fact, I’d say its overachieved just like the rest of the team. Blame the fans and media for having way too high expectations, but there were lots of “experts” who said the Oilers were in for a rough year because of their goaltending and defense. Surprisingly, the Oilers are still there and their goaltending and defense has played much BETTER than thought.

Think about it for a minute. If the Flames had to reach down into the ECHL to grab a goaltender, do we think he would have any hope of having decent numbers behind a defense like the Oilers? They Not a chance in hell. Yes, the Oilers have won inspite of their “starting” goaltending on some nights, but they have won many games because of their “relief pitcher” coming in and shutting the door. The goaltending has not been as big a problem in Edmonton as some would like to make you believe. have got a surprising performance out of a career minor leaguer, a very respectable performance out of Jussi Rebound-and-in, and got what many expected out of Carnival Boy. A different goaltender is not going to make a huge difference. Unless that guy is a Shooter Tutor or a 4×6 foot sheet of playwood, the goaltender is still in for a rough go. The problems in Edmonton are still defense related more than they are goaltender related.

Until the Oilers stop giving the puck away, stop allowing quality second shots on goal, nothing is going to change in Edmonton. Edmonton does a great job lying on the ice blocking shots, but they also are really good at releasing their man to do so. When the forwards and defense go down to block a shot, and the shot gets through, the free man is usuall there to jump on a rebound. Any goaltender will tell you that when a guy goes down to block a shot that he acts as a screen and it makes controlling that puck extremely difficult, and that leads to juicy rebounds. The Oilers LOVE to try and make the glory play of blocking the shot (ever listen to Rod Black when TWO Oilers go down to block one shot, I swear he’s going to blow his load), and they are successful quite often, but its those ones they miss that usually end up in the net. Their defensive scheme contributes to the number of rebounds they give and the number of rebound goals that take place. They screen their own goaltender and allow a free man around the net way too often.

Now in fairness to this guy, I’m sure that he’s looking at the whole thing through red and yellow glasses. By message board standards this is a quality post-it’s well spelled, the grammar mostly works and it’s pretty free of ad hominems. (In a later post in the same thread, he regressed, stating “Speaking of a strawman, if you only had a brain.”) It sounds like a reasonably compelling argument. It just doesn’t work though.

The comment on the goaltending being alright is patently unreasonable-Conklin and Markkanen both put up better than league average save percentages in 2003-04. To say that there were people expecting them to put together the horror show…I don’t know any rational people who expected that. I’d be surprised if there are more than a few examples of goalies with comparable track records having this happen-for two of them to have it happen, to have them be as historically bad as the Oilers goaltending has done-there’s just no reasonable way in which this could be expected.

Now, “Lanny” has linked his statement that the Oilers goalies have done as well as can be expected to his belief that the Oilers are allowing quality second shots on goal. He specifically argues that the Oilers try to block so many shots that when they do get through, it leads to pucks ending up in the net that otherwise would not. I can’t buy this, for a number of reasons.

The first ties into the number of expected goals against per 60 minutes of ES play that the Oilers put up. Their number there is 2.32 xGA/60, which is good for third in the NHL. I’m the first to ackowledge that this is not based on as finely grained data as it needs to be but it provides some solid suggestion that the Oilers are a very good defensive team at ES.

More specifically, he can be shown to be just entirely wrong on the rebound issue, one on which he hangs his entire argument. Through the Olympic break, the Oilers have given up 49 ES shots on rebounds (a shot taken within 3 seconds of another, by my definition) to the 40 given up by the Flames. For every 26 shots the Flames give up at ES, one of them is a rebound. For the Oilers it’s 22. The Oilers sit in the middle of the league in this regard-I’ve added a team report to the individual one, to make it easier to see where various teams fall in terms of rebounds allowed.

Even if one argues with my definition of rebound as being overly liberal, the Oilers have allowed only five more goals than the Flames on shots taken more than three seconds after another shot at ES. They’ve allowed 30 more goals at ES than the Flames-I’m fairly comfortable in saying that the rebound thing isn’t the problem. While the Flames look to be very good at preventing rebounds, the Oilers are still average. Their problems lie elsewhere-my belief is that they lie in just stopping the fucking puck.

I recall reading something about the impact that Ozzie Smith had on the Cardinals defence after he was acquired. (I’m pretty sure that Bill James wrote it, but can’t find it in any of the Abstracts that I have). People speculated that Ozzie was worth as many as 100 runs on defence to the Cards and the author said that if someone was worth that many runs, there’d be ways to shake that out; tracks in the snow, as he put it. For all the trouble that the Oilers have had keeping the puck out of their net this year, it’s pretty damn difficult to find anything statistically to suggest that they should have a .879 team save percentage, “good” for second worst in the NHL. All of the tracks lead directly to Messrs. Conklin, Markkanen and Morrison.

It’s a great day for women’s hockey. I’m shocked at the American loss, to be honest and kind of disappointed that we won’t get to watch a great Canada-USA final but this is huge for women’s hockey.

I ripped Michael Farber for his lack of historical awareness of how long it took the men’s game to reach the level of competitive balance that it evenutally achieved. Hopefully he’s man enough to acknowledge that he was wrong and that the competitiveness in women’s hockey is continuing to increase.

I’m too parochial to hope that the Finns beat the Canadians but hopefully they beat the USA in the bronze medal game.

Edit: I haven’t seen the game so I have no idea who had the balance of the play but the shots were USA 39 Sweden 18. I’m guessing that the Americans really carried the play and Kim Martin was able to keep the Swedes hanging around long enough to put the game into the shootout. For Canadian fans who remember Nagano, I’m sure that there’s a sense of deja vu. Even though it appears that the Americans carried the play, the fact remains that Sweden has now improved to the point where they have a shot to win if they catch some breaks (as I imagine that they did). In 1998, the Swedes finished fifth, ahead of only the host Japanese. In 2002 they won bronze. Simply huge strides in an eight year period.