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Per Warren Kinsella:

WINNER: The latest Liberal ad is, again, a good one. I don’t get the “Harpernomics” tag - “Reaganomics” was a generation ago, and in another country - but the Libs, again, have the best spots:

Let’s consider the mistakes/truth stretching in the first nine seconds of this ad:

1. The reference to the story in the Scotsman is a reference to an opinion piece that was written by an environmental consultant and doesn’t say anything about government investment in “green jobs”.

2. The story in the Sunday Times has nothing to do with Germany. Unless I’m really out of the political loop, the German flag doesn’t fly over London. They actually edited the headline here - presumably the name “John Hutton”, which appears in the headline of the Times story doesn’t sound German enough. The story is about a Labour plan to put 150 million pounds into green jobs, which the story implies is inadequate and quotes a CEO as saying will have little effect. Again, no idea why this English story is paired with the German flag.

3. The California Progress Report is a website published by a California Democrat. The story that they’re citing doesn’t say anything about government funding of new jobs; rather, it’s a story about some lefty think tank issuing a report purporting to show that with just $100 billion dollars in government investment, two million new green jobs would be created.

All of this appears while the narrator says: “Forward looking governments are creating jobs in the new, green economy, investing in their people today and tomorrow. Not Harper.” So really, it’s all a lie - the only story that even appears to suggest that the government is investing in green collar jobs is the German one in the Sunday Times about the English Labour party and even then, the money is basically nothing and CEO types don’t think it will work.

Oh, and the earth is either spinning the wrong way or, for reasons I don’t understand, depicted with south being up, at odds with cartographical convention. Top notch stuff.

There’s a great story in the New York Times today from Alan Schwartz about a New York sportswriter by the name of Leonard Schecter breaking the code of silence amongst reporters covering the Yankees about off-field indiscretions. He reported on some sort of a scuffle on the team train involving Ralph Houk and Ryne Duren (I assume Lowetide could tell us something about these people) and the fact of the reporting was as big as the story itself.

I wanted to contrast that with Brownlee’s comments about his knowledge of the Pronger deal, but The OilersNation Experience Featuring Robin Brownlee, Lowetide and Jonathan Willis, Presented By Hudson’s, OmegaCell Communications, IgnitionMedia.ca, Oodle Noodle, Blue Sky Limos and Crimson Empire Tattoo Piercing somehow doesn’t have a search function. You know, I wonder sometimes if those guys are really about the free exchange of ideas and information or if it’s about something else entirely. Suffice it to say that the media somehow still manages to cover the Yankees and report all sorts of inside stuff despite having reported this story. With whispers from media guys that the Oilers are getting a lot tighter with information, I wonder if we’ll start to see the chummy relationship between the media and the Oilers fall apart a bit.

Update: As it so happens, it’s entirely possible for there to be too much access. See this blog post from Redskins tight end Chris Cooley. It scores fairly high on the NSFW scale, so consider yourselves forewarned. Hilarious if it was unintentional; I’m betting against it. Hat tip to Deadspin.

Further Update: Well, apparently it wasn’t intentional and Cooley is extremely upset about the whole thing. Deadspin has the story.

The chart below is kind of a junk stat (ok, it’s very much a junk stat) but it’s kind of a fun one and there are a couple of neat things. What it’s showing is shot rates and goal rates relative to positional averages, allowing for a player’s minute breakdown at ES/PP/SH (F or D; I should probably split it for centres/wingers too). Shorties, penalty shots and empty netters are excluded.

I’ll use Ovechkin to explain how it’s calculated. He played 1415.98 ES minutes and scored 40 goals on 318 ES shots. Forwards averaged 7.3 shots and 0.7 goals per 60. So the average forward would take 177 shots and score 16.5 goals. So Ovechkin is 141 shots and 24.5 goals above average there. Repeat for PP and SH, add it up and that’s how many shots and goals above (or below) average they are. In the chart below, SAA means Shots Above Average and GAA means Goals Above Average.

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Good news for Oilers fans with the story that Minnesota is having a hard time signing Gaborik.

Told that sounds like he has decided to play out the final year of his contract and leave as a free agent, Gaborik said, “I’m not saying I’m leaving. I’m not saying I’m staying. I’m saying I have one year left on my contract. I’m leaving it up to the Wild and my agent to discuss it. But I want to be left out of it.
…
The Wild is offering Gaborik the richest, longest contract in franchise history, so Lynn said negotiations are “complicated” because the sides are trying to agree on salary, term and what the future market is for star players.

No player averages more than Alex Ovechkin’s $9.538 million cap hit. The max for an individual player is $11.26 million, a number GM Doug Risebrough has said he’s not willing to approach. Gaborik declined to identify how much money or how long a contract he’s seeking.

But…

“I’m willing to stay, but it depends on what kind of deal they’re going to propose,” Gaborik said. “I had a good discussion with Doug and Tom [last month in Slovakia]. They explained how they want to go forward. Of course, I want to win. If it’s here, I would love that, but who knows what’s going to happen.”

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Per Fenwick at the start of last season:

There’s a lot to love about Phaneuf. He has a hard shot that he can get off. He hits hard. He infuriates opposing players, and Oiler fans. He makes plays — right from his rookie debut, he was one of the best defensemen I’ve ever seen at keeping the puck in at the blueline. He’s extremely fit: he led the Flames in ice time last year, playing tons of PP minutes, plenty of EV minutes, and even 1:58/gm on the PK.

It’s almost unfair. He set the bar very, very high from Day One; he’s already a nice NHL defenseman. And there is progress: in Year 2, he went from 21:43/gm to 25:39/Gm, all due to a big increase in EV icetime (14:12 to 18:05). Though the toughest assignments will continue to go to Regehr, the remainder of Dion’s Handle With Care label will be pretty much removed this year.

There’s a lot that’s right here. The part that looks wrong? “Though the toughest assignments will continue to go to Regehr…” As it so happens, Phaneuf got a pretty hard push from Mike Keenan last year and what I think was the big objection a lot of people had to his Norris candidacy, that he didn’t play enough high calibre opposition, is probably no longer a meritorious objection. Horrifying evidence after the jump.

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One of the contributors to the Hockey Analysis Group has posted the 2007-08 PBP files in text form, which has enabled me to dump them into Excel and find out all sorts of interesting things.

I’ve compiled the EV/PP/SH/PS/EN shooting percentages of every player in a spreadsheet at Google Docs that can be found here for anyone interested. Some highlights:

*Forwards shot 9.3%/15.3%/9.7%/35.8%/100.0% at EV/PP/SH/PS/EN respectively, for an overall average of 10.8%. Defencemen shot 4.2%/8.8%/3.6%/0.0%/100.0% at EV/PP/SH/PS/EN respectively, for an overall average of 10.8%.

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