mc79hockey.com

I was playing around with the numbers from the CBA today. I’ve always been interested by the break points. The way that the CBA is set up, there are certain breakpoints that affect the player’s share of revenues. These breakpoints are $2.2B, $2.4B and $2.7B.

If league revenues are below $2.2B, the player’s share of revenues is 54%. If they’re between $2.2B and $2.4B, the player’s share of revenues is between 55 and 56%, as it moves proportionately from 55% to 56% as revenues increase. It then does the same from 56 to 57% as league revenues move from $2.4B to $2.7B.

Read the rest of this entry »

John MacKinnon’s column from the other day has stirred up a bit of noise chez Staples and elsewhere. The jab at people talking hockey in July doesn’t really warrant a response but this passage caught my eye:

Back in the day, New York Daily News sports columnist Dick Young opined that memories of the Stanley Cup playoffs melted away with the ice.

Hockey was a seasonal thing, body- checked aside by baseball, football, golf, tennis and other warm-weather diversions. Ah, the happy past — a simpler, less cluttered time.

Young was a tough ol’ buzzard who never took guff from anybody. But, then, he never had to contend with the web, the blogosphere, 24-hour sports talk radio, dedicated sports TV channels, podcasts, “citizen journalists,” live streaming, on and on.

Young shuffled off this coil long before YouTube. And lucky for YouTube.

I don’t get it. Would YouTube have attempted to give Dick Young guff? Would the consequences for YouTube have been dire? The whole thing is puzzling. Feel free to take a shot at explaining this in the comments.

* * *

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across an interesting post that Dirk Hoag wrote last September. I’d quote a chunk of it but it seems to screw up the formatting of my site, so I’ll just mention his key point. There appears to be something of a platoon advantage in the shootout. Through two years, right handed shooting players were shooting 29.7% against left handed catching goalies and 36.4% against right handed catching goalies. Left handed shooting players were shooting 36.0% against left handed catching goalies and just 24.8% against right handed catching goalies.

Read the rest of this entry »

By all accounts, yesterday’s Darryl Katz press conference went well. That said, having seen his hair and knowing his fealty to the Boys on the Bus, I’m disappointed that he didn’t open with “Well, welcome to the 1980’s!”

* * *

I think I’m missing something on the concern about giving Jaromir Jagr a two year deal to come to Edmonton. As I understand it, the worry is that he’ll retire after year one. As he’s 36 years old, if he retires, his salary would stay on the cap. What baffles me is why the Oilers wouldn’t just trade him in that situation. The team acquiring him would be under no obligation to actually pay him anything - they’d just get some help in reaching the salary floor. Toss in a third round pick and you’re set.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to revisit the Staples series once the excitement from the past few days dies down but there are a couple of quotes I can’t resist throwing up now.

“He [Pronger] never made a statement or issued anything other than ‘for my family and myself, I want to live somewhere else,’ ” LaForge says. “It never got any finality to it, no logic to it, so the bloggers and the phone-in radio shows and the fringe players in the printed press across Canada just kept making it up and making it up and making it up.”

I actually thought that the bloggers were relatively decent about the whole thing - everyone who said that he should have just got a divorce raise your hand - but I’m wondering if “bloggers and the phone-in radio shows and the fringe players in the printed press” is code for “the media we don’t control.” The guys that they do have brag about knowing the real story but explain that they can’t share it with us or they’d lose access, which would prevent them from learning other things that they can’t share with us. In any event, I searched the usual suspects for references to the rumours and didn’t find anything too bad.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at the Rangers roster with the signings of Michal Roszival and Wade Redden. If they went minimum wage for their fourth line and two press box forwards, their seventh defenceman and backup goalie, they’d have $8.6MM for Hossa. I can’t see how that gets it done unless he really wants to be there; the Rangers would end up being very shallow up front and I don’t really see who they can move to fix things. If TSN is to be believed, that leaves the Oilers, Canadiens and Penguins. Montreal would be risking the creation of a cap nightmare long-term or the loss of a bunch of guys already on their roster, given the presence of Carey Price, Tomas Plekanec and Mike Komisarek and the Penguins are already in a position where they can’t do it.

If TSN is right about who’s in it, I’d think that the Oilers are better positioned than anyone, provided that they can find somewhere to get rid of the excess salary. Maybe this was Kevin Lowe’s master plan - let Bob Gainey bog himself down with salaries for guys who earn their money and it would hurt the team to lose; the Oilers will go with a bunch of high priced guys who can be moved without a second thought.

Chicago suddenly looks very legitimate. They scored 234 goals last year and allowed 231. Their team save percentage last year was .902, good for 22nd in the NHL. Cristobal Huet has a post-lockout save percentage of .921. Subbing him in for could be worth as much as three or four wins for the Blackhawks, who missed the playoffs by three points and have a ton of young talent that’s moving in the right direction. I haven’t considered the impact of Brian Campbell in any detail but they’re heading in the right direction.

A request to the Team 1260 - as soon as a guy phones in and asks about what kind of stats Lubomir Visnovsky puts up, just cut him off. You get the guys before that mocking the internet nerds and then you’ve got people who don’t know how to use Google phoning in to ask questions that are easily answered through the magic of the internets.

As for the guy after that…wow - you’d almost think that the money Mats Sundin might get from the Canucks is coming out of his pocket.

A quick look at the Oilers salary chart:

(Those are notional numbers for Pouliot, Stortini and Reasoner.)

Read the rest of this entry »

I have no idea whether this is true or not - Mirtle is citing Bruce Garrioch - but this would be a fascinating acquisition. The ideas of replacement level have been kicked around a ton on this site and the idea that teams with specific abject weaknesses find it easier to improve than those with a sort of low level mediocrity. The Canucks have been putrid offensively for two years now. Adding Mats Sundin would give them a real jolt. I haven’t looked at the numbers to see what else it would do but I like the idea of paying more in the short term too. This Gillis is an interesting fellow.

Old enemy Erik Cole comes to town in the deal that was seemingly Dopita-like in terms of how everyone knew that it was going to happen. Whenever the Oilers acquire anyone of any significance, I like to look back through the archives to see what I’ve said about him in the past. I believe this to be a useful practice mostly because my review after the Lupul trade confirmed that my previous impression was that a) he was gutless, b) his scoring rates sucked and c) it looked like he was riding the coattails of his betters. Here’s what I’ve got on Cole:

Read the rest of this entry »