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I’m a big fan of the MacLeans’ blogs, notwithstanding their terrifying commentariat and the fact that Aaron Wherry knows he’s making dishonest arguments and doesn’t care or is the stupidest person in the country. Senator Jacques Demers drew his own post today and the following comment:

I don’t think Demers is illiterate anymore - I could be wrong, but I thought he learned to read.

The best thing about this is that the writer is actually trying to make a legitimate point - no irony, just a presentation of the best information available to him.

I’m not going to judge Demers because he can’t (or couldn’t) read but doesn’t the fact that this is a matter on which there’s some uncertainty seems to suggest to me that maybe he isn’t quite senate material, no matter how popular he is in Quebec. Other factors pointing this way include virtually everything else that we know about him although, as seen below, he is used to heated debates:

I would assume that Demers’ responsibilities will basically include “appealing to blue collar Quebecois”.

Ah well. It’s still a better idea than the Oilers signing Comrie.

One of the constant media lines surrounding the Oilers during 2008-09 seemed to be that they suffered from slow starts, not getting into games until they were down a goal or two. This quote, from Tom Gilbert, is pretty typical:

“Slow starts plagued us a little bit throughout the year,” defenceman Tom Gilbert said. “You know you have to be ready to play with the puck-drop. I think we found ourselves, more often than not, trailing teams. In this league, it’s tough to catch up.”

I think, ultimately, the idea sort of developed that Craig MacTavish and his play it safe coaching were at fault for this. One weird thing. The Oilers scored 68 goals and allowed 74 in the first periods of games in 2008-09, a ratio of 0.92. In the latter two periods, they scored 160 and allowed 170, a ratio of 0.94. For all intents and purposes, it’s precisely the same. The starts sucked but the forty minutes afterward weren’t anything to tell the grandkids you witnessed either.

Further to my post below, I went and put together a chart of OHL forwards who were drafted in 2004, provided that 2004 was their first year of eligiblity.

It’s pretty obvious how weird Schremp’s year was. He was the second OHL forward drafted that year. Every player who has gone on to have a better career than him (to date, that’s Wolski, Bolland, Kennedy, Kaleta and Reddox) scored more ES points than him with the exception of Kaleta.

An interesting question that the Pipeline Show guys might ask of Kevin Predergast or Stu MacGregor the next time they speak to them is what they make of such a weird split in a guy’s numbers. I would guess that the answer is that they don’t really pay attention to that sort of stuff. It’s a necessary question though, because Schremp was presumably highly ranked because of his work on the PP as opposed to his work at ES and I would further assume that that was the basis for the organization betting $800K or so on him in the form of a signing bonus.

I haven’t shown nearly enough here to support an argument that there’s anything to this but a) it makes sense to me that there would be and b) the two rocks that I’ve looked under so far haven’t dissuaded me. If anyone would care to do other years or leagues on their own, I encourage it and would be happy to provide space for reporting of results.

Update: I inadvertently included another Morrison with Jordan Morrison’s numbers. Morrison should be 11-8-8-27 at ES. A ranking of OHL forwards done purely on the basis of ES scoring would have had a top six of Wolski, McGrath, Garlock, Reddox, Bolland, Kennedy. The NHL saw the top six as Wolski, Schremp, Bolland, Bickell, Garlock and Berti. Bickell and Berti are reported as 6′4″ and 6′3″ in height by hockeydb.com.

Sometime in the next month or so, Rob Schremp’s time as an Edmonton Oiler is likely to come to an end. I have no particular feeling about that - while I’ve never really been a fan of the guy, I like the Oilers, so if he turned into Brett Hull, that would have been cool with me. Like a lot of the statzis, I’ve had feelings about the hype surrounding the guy that have ranged from bemusement to outright irritation (I suspect that the late MacT shared those feelings). When that day comes to pass, there’s going to be a healthy chunk of the fanbase and the media who will blame the organization for Schremp’s failure to be well on his way to 600 goals at this point in his career.

I’ve been working on stripping the junior sites to put together a database lately and have come across something interesting about Rob Schremp’s draft year - he had an utterly bizarre mix of ES/PP scoring in his draft year. Schremp scored 30-45-75 in 63 games in his draft year, split between Mississauga and London.

I’m missing one of his points but, of the 74 I was able to track down, Schremp scored 14-6-7-27 at ES and 15-13-18-46 on the PP. That’s an unusual split that you won’t see in the NHL - you don’t find any useful forwards scoring 63% of their points on the PP in the NHL.

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I’ve made fun of Joffrey Lupul and Todd Bertuzzi in the past for some comments that indicate something less than perfect self-awareness. Denny McLain makes them look like post-therapy Metallica.

H/T: The excellent Craig Calcaterra.

From Bruce Dowbiggin:

Blogs get Kaned: The question of whether independent bloggers should have equal status with mainstream media is a hot topic in the industry. But the alleged Patrick Kane robbery and battery of a cabby was not exactly a shining moment for the integrity of bloggers. The release of the police charges Monday morning brought an immediate torrent of abuse in the blogosphere for Kane, who was accused of beating a hapless Buffalo cabby for a 20-cent tip. Before Kane could explain his side, sites were saying “How could Kane be this stupid?…

Patrick Kane is a stuck-up, rich, spoiled, bratty punk… this punk kid needs a ass beating… The best possible light for Kane is that he is a mean drunk, a guy who is not above physically abusing a 62 year old man after a stupid prank went awry.” You get the flavour.

As far as I can tell “Patrick Kane is a stuck-up, rich, spoiled, bratty punk” is a comment on a thread at Operation Sports, which I’ve never heard of, “this punk kid needs a ass beating” is from the comments on a Yahoo story and “The best possible light for Kane is that he is a mean drunk, a guy who is not above physically abusing a 62 year old man after a stupid prank went awry” comes from Tom Benjamin.

I tend to agree with Dowbiggin’s broader point (I’ve told Mirtle that I thought his post on the subject was absurdly over the top) and think that people should take a wide view in situations like this - very few people look good when judged by the stupidest things that they’ve done. I’m still more than a little unimpressed that a guy bagging on the lack of integrity amongst bloggers managed to do only by padding his list of examples with a comment from a news story and a comment from a forum that I’ve never heard of.

I don’t like the Red Wings. The deification of Steve Yzerman late in his career just irritated me. I was thrilled that his last shift in the NHL featured a weak hook to Ales Hemsky’s waist as Hemsky blew by him on his way to the series winning goal. The Hockeytown schtick is lame. It makes me crazy that they managed to avoid taking a salary cap induced beating for a couple of years because they managed to pull Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg out of the late rounds of the draft. Worst of all are their fans, who receive it all with a sense of entitlement that disappears only when they need to express outrage at how the league has somehow wronged them. I’ve been eagerly awaiting their fall, which led to me being pretty happy to see this quote from Jimmy Devellano:

…up front, we’ve lost 82 goals, between Samuelsson, Hudler, and Hossa, we’ve lost 82 goals. There aren’t many hockey teams that can afford that, us included, so we’re a little bit, um, concerned, to put it mildly, but we’re going to try to be active and try to get it at least half figured out, but, Roger, the salary cap has caught up to us.

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that the Wings are going to be considerably worse. They haven’t actually lost 82 goals. Those goals required the consumption of at-bats, in the form of ice time, to get there. If you add everything up, the Wings have lost 2903.32 minutes of 1.20 ESG/60 goal scoring and 695.85 minutes of 1.98 PPG/60 goal scoring. If you assume that the Wings get fiftieth percentile scoring from the replacements, you’re talking about a net loss of more like 31 goals or so. That doesn’t consider the ripple effect, if any, down the lineup and, really, there’s no reason for me to assume that they’ll get fiftieth percentile scoring other than it just being a number.

31 goals is a lot of goals though. Five wins. With that said, if you’re trying to figure out how things changed from the previous season (I would assume that some smart guy could come up with a pretty decent modelling system that would beat the “experts” more often than not), you need to consider more than just the changes; you need to look at the things that are unlikely to repeat.

In the Wings’ case, that’s probably the goaltending. Detroit had an .894 save percentage last year. The Wings allowed about 2300 shots last year. If they bump it up to a .905 next year - which isn’t unreasonble, given how save percentage swings and is nothing special - they’ve made up most of the decline that they’d suffer in goals for.

I’ve got no doubt that the Wings have gotten worse this year - they were good enough to excel last year despite real difficulties stopping the puck. They’ve undoubtedly had a slice of goal differential lopped off as a result of the salary cap. At the start of the season though, there is a range of goal differentials, each with different probabilities, that a team can achieve. If you think that Detroit was probably at the low end last year - and I do - it’s entirely reasonable to think that they might be a worse team this year but post a similar record because the randomness doesn’t bite them as bad in goal.

Gabe Desjardins has a fine WOWY analysis up at Puck Prospectus, looking at Saku Koivu’s fifteen years with the Habs (en francais, mes amis Albertan). Gabe concludes that Koivu was worth about 2.5 wins/82 games for the Habs during that time and (if I still know how to read French), mentions that Koivu was worth about five wins annually prior to his cancer.

The size of the impact is interesting to me - five wins above replacement is a pretty huge impact; in today’s NHL, a player like that would be worth about $9.5MM if the amount of money that a player earned was calculated on the basis of marginal standings points/total marginal standings points in NHL*player’s share of revenues. Given that there is only one guy in the league making that kind of money (Ovechkin) and that he’s likely a much bigger difference maker than Koivu, I’m reasonably confident that a lot of the really high-end guys are underpaid.

H/T: Tom Tango.

I was watching the Les Dales Hawerchuk video for Dale Hawerchuk today (above - the credits are thirty seconds long and stupid, but the chorus is pretty catchy - “Car je ne suis plus Sylvain Seguin / moi je suis Dale Hawerchuk”). Part of what I like about it is that it’s so delightfully random - a Quebecois band named after Dale Hawerchuk? Of course they are.

I was then discussing this with a friend, who told me about a song I’d never heard of that includes a pretty cool Oilers reference - pay attention at 31 seconds:

Don’t wanna be the Steve Smith of the revolution / Do you see the analogy / We’re the Oilers, the World Bank the Flames / And just two minutes remain in the seventh game of a best of seven series / Jesus saves, Gretzky scores / The workers slave, the rich get more / One wrong move and you’ll miss the Cup / So play the man, not the puck

I have no idea what their point is but it just sounds cool. The Oilers, of course are referenced in a bunch of other songs - Gretzky Rocks, that creepy song by the drummer from Goldfinger and You Get the Dough, I Get The Glory.

So there’s two of your three prairie teams covered. Calgary…as far as I’m aware, there’s absolutely no songs referencing the Flames other than in the context of a reference to the Oilres. I’m not quite sure why this is. The closest thing I can find to any sort of a reference to the Flames in pop culture is a kid in Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’ video wearing a Flames hat which, while pretty random, doesn’t really tie into the song.

It’s hard to tie up a post with something coherent when it never really had much of a point, but I’d like to think that the reason we don’t hear any songs referencing the Flames is that the team and the city don’t evoke any memories or sentiment. They’re just kind of there, not really mattering.

Am I missing any here? For obvious reasons, I’m only considering songs by artists who don’t just have careers based on hockey songs; admittedly, I might be pushing it with Les Dales Hawerchuk.

From NHL.com:

“We went from first in the League (in goals-against during the 2005-06 season) to 23rd (in 2008-09),” Darryl Sutter said, “and were, quite honestly, fortunate to be a playoff team.”

The GM has been at it with a vengeance this summer in an effort to restore the Flames’ reputation as defenders of the faith. And landing the cream of the free-agency crop, blue-chip blueliner Jay Bouwmeester, was the biggest piece of the puzzle.

“We want to get better defensively. It’s obviously something Darryl and I stress, and something that I believe in as a coach,” Brent Sutter told NHL.com. “You need to play well defensively, and that involves more than how you play in your own zone. It’s also puck-possession time. It’s about how you forecheck. It’s about the things you do as a group. It’s about getting the puck back as quickly as you can.

“Yeah, defense is how you play without the puck, but good defense also means having the puck a lot, too, because that means less time chasing the other team.”

…

Up front, the Flames — who have made four consecutive first-round playoff exits — were unable to make major changes, partially due to salary-cap constraints.

Brian McGrattan was signed as the club’s enforcer and Nigel Dawes was plucked off waivers from Phoenix, but there was no replacement for Michael Cammalleri, last season’s 39-goal scorer who left for Montreal.

Sutter isn’t concerned with filling that hole, pointing to forwards Rene Bourque, Curtis Glencross and David Moss, who all blossomed in the scoring department last winter.

“(Scoring) will take care of itself,” he said. “You’ll always score enough goals … you’ve just got to make sure you don’t give up as many.”

Memo to NHL writers: You’re not going to be able to quote both Darryl and Brent in a story this winter and then refer to “Sutter” saying something, particularly if Brett Sutter has a big night or something. Two fun points in an otherwise dreary summer for Oilers fans from this.

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