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Jack Layton Wants To Make Sure You See Him Celebrating That Goal! from Torontoist on Vimeo.

H/T: Cosh

One of the great things about the Winter Olympics now is that you can do searches on Google limited to news from specific areas, which lets you get a sense of how they’re reporting stories in other parts of the world. I’ve enjoyed watching the coverage of the men’s moguls and rooting against Dale Begg-Smith, a malware purveying Canadian ex-pat who now skis for Australia, while mostly living in Vancouver. This description of the crowd at Cypress by Greg Baum in The Age is fantastic:

Such nuances appear foreign to Begg-Smith. His contained ways are at perverse odds with the ways of his sport. Last night’s crowd was loud and lusty and red. One fan’s leg was in a cast, bringing to mind Banjo Paterson’s Geebung Polo Club: ‘’And the game was so terrific that ‘ere the half-time bell had gone, a spectator’s leg was broken, just from merely looking on.'’

Entertaining writing. And “Banjo Paterson” is an awesome name - turns out he’s also on their $10 bill.

Another great quote from Bruce Kidd in the Sydney Morning Herald, about “Own the Podium”:

Bruce Kidd, a runner, who won gold for Canada and later ran in the 5000 metres as an Olympian – he is now Dean of physical education at the University of Toronto – went further, saying: “I am embarrassed by ‘Own the Podium’ to this extent: we’re saying, ‘World, come to Canada so we can beat the shit out of you.”

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Gene Principe did a completely ridiculous interview with Steve Tambellini last night on the Oilers-Ducks PPV. I don’t expect it from Principe - he’s an Oilers employee, just like Stauffer - but the softball questions are bad enough without the patented Rexall Sports questioning technique of a) asking a question, b) suggesting an excuse and c) asking if the interviewee agrees with that excuse. It’s terrible. Dan Tencer does it too - I pointed this out after his interview with Gary Bettman, where he asked a question that wasn’t a question but a statement that made the NHL look good and had a flawed factual basis. Tencer’s told me on Twitter that he’s not an Oilers employee. It’d be nice if he took a little pride in his craft, even if Principe and Stauffer have decided that they’re not media guys but PR personnel.

Anyway, Principe’s interview with Tambellini generated virtually nothing interesting. To steal the old David Spade line, I liked it better the first time I heard it, during the press conference that Tambellini did following Craig MacTavish’s firing last spring.

Now as far as the players, one thing I want to make clear is that because we are changing our head coach and moving in a different direction, this does not absolve our players from their performance or lack thereof. The second part of this is: do we need to address some of our personnel? Obviously, we do. When I think about the Oilers and what they represent and the things that are important to the Oilers and why there has been success here at times, lately, it’s because of a passion, because of a commitment, because of a sacrifice to do anything to win. That’s the part that was the hardest to compete against the Oilers was the fact that these players would do anything in order to win. People spoke about the skill, the type of team that we had, but when you played against the Oilers it was a commitment to win at any cost. People said that maybe we weren’t gritty enough as a team; I agree with that. Do we need to get stronger? Yes we do. The job now is to think about how much of that we can get from what we have now, make that assessment and then go on to, if we don’t have that internally, how do we acquire it? We have some good pieces in place here. We have some good young players that I think want to be great players. We have some good veterans that hopefully want to be a part of this going forward but I can tell you, things are going to change as far as expectations and preparation from the players’ standpoint and that’s to get better from the next step.

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If you spend any time reading the Oilogosphere, you’ve probably noticed the development of a delightful new meme during the past few months: ” ________ has pretty much shoved it up the backsides of his critics once and for all as to his ability to be __________.” The meme comes out of a Robin Brownlee piece on JDD that was posted on December 10, 2009 in which Brownlee made the regrettable decision to fill in the blanks with “JDD” and “competent NHL starter.”

How did JDD reward Brownlee’s anointment of him as The Future? With a nifty little 1-6 stretch in which he posted an .876 save percentage. When JDD showed some signs of life in a pair of games against the Leafs (one of the few teams as bad as the Oilers) and the Flames (on the precipice of a 3-8-3 skid), Brownlee made a big deal of restating the truth as he understood it, explaining that what we were seeing was “…Deslauriers emerging as a guy who can be the No. 1 puck-stopper for this franchise for years to come.”

JDD responded to this touching display of faith with an 0-5-1 January in which he posted an .846 save percentage. He looked bad enough doing it that, after JDD’s last start in January, Brownlee expressed some concern, writing: “If Deslauriers doesn’t perform markedly better than Devan Dubnyk in the Oilers remaining games, he’s going to make it impossible to justify keeping him ahead of Dubnyk. I expected him to be better than this.” As is perhaps to be expected, a few people stopped by in the comments to take the piss out of Brownlee - there’s nobody more prone to snarkiness than a critic with an unstuffed backside.

JDD promptly won two in a row, stopping 66 of 68 shots in a pair of wins over Carolina and Philadelphia, and then acquitted himself reasonably well in a pair of losses. Emboldened by JDD’s good looking performances, Brownlee expressed some hope again. Perhaps chastened, he couched his hopes in language about consistency but you could see what he really thought: “Even with those big swings, by the numbers, I’m thinking Deslauriers has probably been better than a lot of his critics thought he projected to, at least if you take into account how bad the Oilers have been.”

JDD and the Oilers then headed off to Phoenix, where they were torn apart by the Coyotes. The Oilers were terrible, as was JDD and it was another 6-1 loss.

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Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 20897

Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 20890

I’m starting to get the sense that the debate about the new arena is going to remind me of one of the great moments in Olympic short track speed skating.

Somebody’s going to win but it’s probably going to have nothing to do with the merits of their performance.

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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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Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 20874

Scoring Chances for NHL Game Number 20868