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The Caps’ loss makes me awfully happy. While I’m sad to lose a team that’s awfully fun to watch, the fanbase is, uh, a little obnoxious. It might just be that their ranks of fans have been swollen with newbies (I’ve never really been irritated by a lot of their bloggers like Eric McErlain and Japers) but I like my fanbases to have an irrational fear of the hockey gods and an expectation that disaster lurks. Leonsis lacks this and his fanbase, by and large, follows it.

Leonsis took some shots at RJ Umberger earlier this year in a blog post after Umberger said that the Caps couldn’t win the Cup with their style of play. I thought that Umberger was wrong then (and I still think that he is now) but I just can’t get enough of Leonsis’ response:

I think this player should be talking to his ownership and coaching staff about their rebuild plan to compete for a Stanley Cup NOT to our fan base and players about ours.

And then I think this player should stand up and communicate to his team’s fan base about their plan to compete for a Cup and how they will qualify for the playoffs year after year. And then back it up. It is a simple formula: Outline a plan - communicate it - back it up.

As I have noted, the best way to compete for a Cup is to qualify for the playoffs which Columbus has done exactly how many times to date?

Why are we even giving this guy airtime?

Let us move on.

This is a pet peeve of mine, guys who have enjoyed extraordinary success and don’t acknowledge the extent to which good fortune played a role in it all. It’s worth pointing out that the Capitals, according to a summary in Wikipedia were tenth in payroll in 2003-04. It appears that they went through a season in which everybody got hurt and they ended up finishing second last. They had finished with 92, 85, 96 and 102 points in the years preceding that. If the plan was to tank and get a shot at Alexander Ovechkin, Leonsis spent a lot of money on guys who weren’t part of Washington’s future.

Even then, it wasn’t quite good enough. Pittsburgh finished a point worse than the Caps and the Caps went into the lottery with 18.8% chance of picking first, a 42% chance of picking second and a 39.2% chance of picking third. Their chances of ending up with one of Cam Barker, Andrew Ladd, Blake Wheeler or Al Montoya were more than twice as good as their chances of ending up with Ovechkin. The hockey gods smiled on Washington, their number came up and they ended up with Alexander Ovechkin. I don’t begrudge the Capitals their good fortune at all, but it’s a little galling to see Leonsis taunt people about his plan (and he does it a lot) when the Caps sucking in 2003-04 was (from their perspective) almost certainly unplanned for and then they got lucky and won the lottery. The biggest piece of the Capitals’ rebuild fell into their lap in a season where they weren’t intending to rebuild. And he talks about his plan.

Tonight, he and his fans got a lesson from the hockey gods. If there’s a little humility in the future, a little acknowledgment of the outrageous good fortune that permitted the Caps to assemble a team like this, it’ll be a lot easier to cheer for them in the future (and I’d love to, because I have no real rooting interest in the East and there isn’t a more fun player, in every sense of the word, than Ovechkin). For the time being though, this is pretty enjoyable. (Particularly because I bet the field to win the Eastern Conference at what seemed to be outrageously good odds.)

My post on Ovechkin attracted a fair amount of consternation from the readers at Japers Rink. As Caps fans faced in the cold reality of another game seven, without the heat from even a single burning police car in Montreal to warm themselves, I thought I’d take a closer look at the question.

(A complete aside: a league with two star players named Nicklas Bäckström and Niklas Bäckström is like having a team named the Ottawa Röugh Riders and the Saskatchewan Röughriders.)

I took another dip into Vic’s bag of tricks at timeonice.com to come up Backstrom’s ES numbers away from Ovechkin. One of the commenters in the Japers Rink thread made the point that Backstrom posted 3 goals and 11 assists in games without Ovechkin this year. The thing is, the numbers don’t look particularly appealing there. His shot spread, as we’d guess from his Corsi, isn’t good - it’s 138 SF and 154 SA. Not terrible but nowhere near the otherworldly numbers he’s posted with Ovechkin.

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From the blog of 630 CHED Inside Sports host Upton Sinclair:

I haven’t been at this gig long (4 seasons on the beat), but this wasn’t handled well by the team. They failed to get out in front of the story and guys like yours truly and Jim Matheson broke it, with nary a comment from Kingsway HQ.

As a sidebar, I found out about the “re-assignment” of Ken Lowe while doing my radio show on Thursday night. I begun to “tease” it prior to the 9pm news and made an error in throwing a generic question about it at President & CEO Patrick LaForge who was on the air with me at the time. I’ve since apologized for the blindside. Anyways, during the 9pm news it was communicated to me that there were at least a couple others involved and that they may not have all had time to inform various family and friends. At that point, I made a decision that since it wasn’t a management or coaching type, I would back off the story out of respect. There’s been a healthy mix of positive reinforcement and criticism for my choice, but I’ve got no issue standing by it.

[spit take]

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I don’t know Natalie Minckler, executive director of the Edmonton Oilers Community Foundation but she gives fantastic quotes. The post title comes from a quote she gave to the Toronto Star in response to a story they were running about the high cost of sports charities. Basically, the premise of the story is that the charitable foundations run by sports teams spend too much money on management and administration. They backed this up with data from the returns that charities are required to file. The EOCF data is here.

Having taken a look at the data, I’m inclined to think that this might be a bit of a silly story. Looking at the Oilers website, I see that EOCF is responsible for the 50/50 draws that the Oilers run. The EOCF reports the following fundraising:

2000 - $860,747
2001 - $772,802
2002 - $1,097,166
2003 - $1,208,175
2004 - $1,145,567
2005 - $250,327
2006 - $2,731,192
2007 - $2,690,326
2008 - $10,801,010
2009 - $9,512,771

If I were to guess, I would guess that 50/50 tickets were sold for a dollar prior to the lockout. You see that in 2005 the ECOF revenues were way down - this presumably reflects the loss of 50/50 sales (this is for the year ending June 30). They come back from the lockout and I would guess that they bumped the price for 50/50 tickets up to $2.00. In the 2007-08 season, they obvious introduced other fundraising initiatives.

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Prompted by a dispute in the comments to my Horcoff post below (and because it’s pretty easy to do with Vic’s new toy on timeonice.com), I did a Corsi WOWY for Ovechkin. It’s pretty cool, I think.

Let’s look at Ovechkin and the forwards with whom he has at least 100 Corsi events first.

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I’m just going to excerpt a quote from the story on the Oilers website:

“However, at the end of the season and for some time now I have been communicating our plan for the future. Part of that plan is to change the culture in our dressing room, and this is the right moment to bring a fresh energy to the medical, training and equipment area and Ken, Barrie and Sparky understand that. This has nothing to do with their work, their effort, their passion, or their dedication. We all know you couldn’t find three more hard working, dedicated or passionate people in this industry. I know that because I was a part of Hockey Canada’s efforts when we won World Hockey Championships and an Olympic Medal together with Kenny and Barrie.”

I’m like a lot of people in that I have some difficulty in understanding why Ken Lowe was fired (although I thought it might be telling that Terry Jones got quotes from Ryan Smyth and Matt Greene for his piece trashing the move, but not Jarret Stoll, who was permitted to play very shortly after he received a concussion and then suffered another one) and I cannot for the life of me imagine why the equipment people needed to be replaced.

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There was a thread on Lowetide’s site the other day in which how players performed with and without Shawn Horcoff came up. With the help of Vic Ferrari’s excellent timeonice.com, I was able to take a quick look how players did Corsi-wise, with and without him.

I’m not going to say all that much - people can read - but if you’re hoping that the Oilers get some value out of Horcoff, it’s promising that most players saw their Corsi get better with him than it was when he wasn’t on the ice, particularly if you make the assumption that most players probably saw more of the other team’s best players.

“It was under the old rules and we’d scouted Parise every game from February on. All the clutching and grabbing wore him out. He couldn’t play in the (college) playoffs,” said Prendergast.

Not to re-open old wounds but the second best part of Kevin Prendergast’s dismissal is that we’re getting a little insight into how the scouting people made decisions. The quote above is Prendergast’s explanation for why they made the fateful decision to select Marc Pouliot instead of Zach Parise.

For what it’s worth, Parise went 1-3-4 in 5 playoff games that year. I don’t know the extent to which the Oilers weighted the playoff games in making their decision but they’re right that he did fall apart down the stretch. By the end of January in his draft year (2002-03), he’d scored 20-29-49 in just 23 games. From there to the end of the season, he scored 6-6-12 in 16 games. Not so good.

What interests me about this is the narrative that they came up with to explain it. The clutching and grabbing wore him out. He couldn’t play in the playoffs. It strikes me that that was one possible explanation for his season but not all of the possible explanations. The funny thing is that the following year, Parise started slowly and then maintained a torrid pace down the stretch, scoring 16-19-35 in his final 21 games - so much for getting worn out.

Prendergast and his staff didn’t have the benefit of seeing Parise’s final 21 games the following season but it strikes me that they would have been well advised to look into whether or not the split in his draft year meant anything. I’d bet a lot of money on the answer being “no.” One wonders if teams sit down and re-visit what they were thinking five or ten years after the fact to try and learn from their decisions. I’d put a lot of money on the answer to that being no as well.

1. Jonas Gustavsson
2. Carey Price
3. Tuukka Rask

I don’t have a Vezina ballot - the trophy is voted on by NHL general managers - but if I was an NHL GM, that’s how I’d vote. I suspect that this is a little different than the consensus. Reasoning after the jump.

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I’m doing a series of playoff previews with Gabe Desjardins, Sunny Mehta and Olivier Bouchard. You may notice that the playoffs have already started but, due to a series of events beyond my control, I’m posting my previews over the weekend. C’est la vie (what with a guy who lives in the bayou, Desjardins and Olivier, I assume I need to bring some french.)

You have to feel for Predators’ fans. This is their fifth appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs and, for the fifth time in a row, they’ve gotten stuck facing a powerhouse in the first round. The Preds’ playoff history consists of a pair of 4-2 series losses to the Red Wings and a pair of 4-1 series losses to the Sharks. This time will be different in that it is the Blackhawks on the other side of the ice but (in all likelihood) the same in that at the end of the day, the Preds are going to suffer a swift elimination.

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