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I went out and wandered around during the G20 yesterday. Here’s what I saw

This is a view onto Yonge and Wellington at around 2PM yesterday afternoon:

At the intersection of Yonge and Wellington, this fellow told me that there was no access to Wellington unless you had ID permitting you to be there:

It became very clear after a few minutes of talking to him that this wasn’t the case at all. The police do not seem to have been particularly well co-ordinated yesterday - it was very easy to just walk around individual barricades. I walked north one block to King Street, which doesn’t usually look like this on a Saturday:

A block down Bay Street and I was on Wellington. That’s the controversial fence there in the background:

Here’s the sign on the fence. I went to the Jays-Cards game on Thursday night and none of these signs were up. One of my biggest complaints about the whole thing is the law that was passed quietly. I assume the reason that these signs weren’t up then was that the police and the government were trying to keep the law quiet:

This is looking north, up University Avenue. The police were setting shifting perimeters to try and keep the protestors away from the fence. If the cops didn’t identify you as a potential threat, you were able to move around pretty freely. It was kind of reminiscent of what you read about how hard it is to fight guerilla wars if you’re the superior power. The protestors made it sort of easy for the police by approaching downtown in a large group. If they had moved in in small groups of two or three, keeping some of the more obvious signs that they were protestors hidden, I don’t know how the police could have stopped them from making it to the fence.

Soldiers on the streets of our cities. In Canada:

Looking west on King, just east of Yonge. This is while the cop cars were on fire:

While the police were adamant that I couldn’t walk west on King on that point, they weren’t really securing things. I walked half a block south to Colborne Street, where there were no police, and walked west:

The police shut down this woman’s hair appointment and closed the salon:

Two Russian tourists out walking around Toronto with a bottle of tequila. Good guys, who figure that they’re going to get arrested:

The most intimidating thing I saw from the police was when the riot police advanced. They would beat on their shields with their batons in unison. Definitely not something I’d want to be on the other side of:

At the intersection of Bay and King:

CIBC’s unfortunate new motto:

Arrests on King Street. The girls being arrested said that they were arrested because they refused an order to move.

I zoomed in on the placard in the back of the unmarked police van. It looks to me like it’s a statement of rights of persons arrested, I guess to make it easier for the police to advise them of their rights?

After going home to watch the Ghana-USA game and charge my camera battery, I went out again. We quickly happened across a deserted Terroni, which has good food. So we stopped and ate.

These people had umbrellas in a convertible. They don’t seem to get how convertibles work:

The police were using Greyhounds to shuttle the riot crews around. I observed a lot of unmarked, unlighted police cars running red lights, which struck me as awfully dangerous:

It’s hard to tell what this vehicle is but it has mesh wire for windows and is completely unmarked. I’ve never seen anything like it:

This fellow, who I think was OPP, was taking pictures of people observing the police. I’m a little troubled by this - he clearly wasn’t filming any trouble, just taking pictures of people who happened to be there observing. One wonders what sort of files the police build and whether the pictures that they take will be shared with other police forces outside of Canada:

The police have rented a lot of vehicles for this. Judging by the driving I’ve seen, if you rented a vehicle to the police, they probably took at least that much value out of it. Lots of vehicles getting driven very hard. Also, the location of stickers has been unfortunate:

I have to admit, as someone with a UofT Scotiabank loan, I’m sympathetic to these people:

But then the bastards went too far:

One other point - I’ll probably write a longer point about this at some point but the police pretty obviously infiltrated what was going on. I observed some persons who I can only assume were police, at the northeast corner of Bay and King, stowing protest flags in a police van. They were dressed like protestors and had nothing on them to indicate that they were police, something that everyone else I saw had.

It’s a fascist kind of day today - laws suspending civil liberties are passed in secret, Chile’s playing Spain in the World Cup, Strasburg’s in the majors (strikeouts are fascist) but at 7:00 PM EST, communism takes the stage as the Oilers will draft one of Taylor Hall or Tyler Seguin. Live chat starts around 6:45 p.m.

After four years of supporting a team that’s currently saddled with a GM who uses “words” like “re-meet” and decides to spin an epic disaster by announcing that he intends to advance the plan (I guess the Oilers will become defunct a year earlier now), I’m quite enjoying the slipstream jingoism that one can bask in by rooting for the English at the World Cup. Do I smirk a bit at the deification of John Terry for diving towards a kicked ball? Well, the last time my hockey team was worth watching, one of the guys dove face first at a puck in G5 against Detroit and he didn’t even need to redeem himself for sleeping with one of his teammate’s wives and attempting to lead an insurrection against the coach, so of course I do. Do I laugh at Landon Donovan’s asinine interview (watch the whole thing)?

Yes, for obvious reasons, although I’m still pulling for the USA against Ghana.

But before we get to that, we have the resolution of the tiresome Taylor/Tyler debate on Friday. A couple of people have asked, so I figured I’d post a note - I’l do a chat here. While it doesn’t have quite the drama that we can expect this weekend, hopes will still be dashed:

mc79hockey: I think that as people who blog/comment on the Oil online, we should all be hoping that they don’t get Pääjärvi-Svensson

there will presumably be news about the sale of the Coyotes:

mirtle: From The Globe’s Paul Waldie: “Jerry Reinsdorf has made an offer worth roughly $130 million for the Phoenix Coyotes.”

Geography will be discussed:

mc79hockey: The guy at the podium referenced western florida for some reason.

OilW30: they’re in southeast florida, but he said west florida

OilW30: panhandle is north florida

Derek: You guys are donkeys

Derek: he said “Weston Florida”

Derek: As in the city of Weston

Don’t miss it!

I was googling for Khabibulin news today and couldn’t help but be astounded at how ugly the options that Google gives you when you type his name in are:

Yikes. I also learned that his constitutional argument has been rejected. As I say every time I write about this, I don’t practice DUI law in Arizona but this strikes me as pretty bad for Khabibulin. A lot of the practice of law is looking for opportunities for leverage over the other side to force an agreement that your client can live with. As I’ve discussed from time to time here, it seems possible that any agreement that sees him convicted could impact on Khabby’s ability to enter Canada.

If there was a plea bargain to be had here, I would have thought that it would have been made by now. Khabibulin’s hand is weaker now than it was before he went to court today. The prosecution’s hand is stronger because it now knows that the evidence it has was constitutionally obtained. I would think that the trial now would come down to whether Khabby’s lawyer can convince the jury that the cops screwed up in handling the evidence and that they can’t rely on it. Again, while I can’t emphasize enough that I don’t practice criminal law, it seems to me that this whole motion is the sort of thing you bring when you’ve got no good option, because it didn’t seem like a good one.

If I were betting, I’d guess that he’s going to get convicted of extreme DUI, assuming that the police haven’t mishandled the evidence. Qualifying offers are due one week from today; as I’ve said before, if the Oilers qualify both JDD and DD, they’re worried. And, given the glut of goalies who are less bad than JDD available, dumb, although we’ve already got ample evidence of that. Like the fact that Khabibulin is an Oiler on a four year $15MM deal.

It’s all very circular.

I’m surfing through some salary information at the moment and came across a couple of interesting things. The two teams that spent the most money on salary this year in the NHL? Philadelphia and Chicago. This is actual dollars, not cap hits. The Hawks spent $64.5MM - in a league with a $56.8MM cap and Philly spent $62MM.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Islanders spent only $38MM, plus whatever bonuses Tavares hit. I’d think that he, at most, hit his “A” schedule bonuses of $850K. The three hockey players who took the most money out of the Islanders this year? Rick DiPietro, Mark Streit and Alexei Yashin. Ouch. You’d have to think that Sheldon Souray might be attractive to them, because you can pay him less than his cap hit. In a related story, the Islanders are picking fifth in the draft.

I’ve got escrow on the mind at the moment - I’m working on something longer that talks about the NHLPA and escrow - but if I endured the waking hell that must be playing for the New York Islanders (all forms of waking hell are relative, obviously), it would drive me completely insane that I was paying part of my salary back to the NHL so that the Blackhawks and Flyers can spend far more money than they’re ostensibly permitted to. At the very least, I’d hope that the Hawks would reward me with a Stanley Cup ring - if they’re giving them out to people who carefully built explosives set for July 1 into the foundation of the Hawks, they really ought to give them to people who’ve done nothing to hurt them and actually took money from their own pockets to pay the league back for the Hawks’ and Flyers’ profligacy.

Jim Matheson takes a look at the work that the Oilers have to get through during the off-season:

Ethan Moreau is on the clock, starting Tuesday. It may be the same story with Patrick O’Sullivan and Robert Nilsson.

National Hockey League teams have a two-week window from June 15-30 to buy out players, but the Edmonton Oilers aren’t going to rush into anything.

They will try to trade their captain first, just as they tried at the deadline in early March. A contending team may be interested in Moreau for a draft pick.

O’Sullivan and Nilsson, while 10 years younger, will almost surely be shopped first, as well, off their lukewarm stats last season, and with one year left on contracts that pay them $2.9 million and $2 million, respectively.

If trades can’t be worked out, Moreau would be bought out at two-thirds because he’s over 26; the other two at one-third.

I will believe that there’s a trade market for Ethan Moreau if and when I see it. The only teams I could plausibly see being willing to trade something for Moreau are those teams which were out of the race in 2009-10 and think that they’ll be in it next year. Otherwise, why not acquire Moreau a few months ago and get the bonus of an extra playoff run? I don’t see how there might be a market for him.

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David Shoalts, March 11, 2010:

Their plan – pipedream, the realists say – to buy the Phoenix Coyotes from the NHL is reminiscent of another audacious play hatched over a few drinks after a beer-league hockey game. Bruce Firestone and his pals did land the Ottawa Senators expansion franchise with no real money, but they crashed and burned.

At this point, it looks as if Anthony LeBlanc, Daryl Jones and the rest of the Ice Edge group will not even get off the runway. Too many problems are coming up, almost all of them because no one in the group appears to have the substantial personal fortune needed to convince a banker or bankers to lend Ice Edge enough money to pull it off.

…

- The Ice Edge principals will not discuss their finances in detail, but a banking source says they have only a relatively small amount to put into the proposed deal. As a result, bankers are not queuing up to lend money.

Darryl Jones, front man of the Ice Edge operation since joining Twitter on April 10, 2010:

Shoalts is just sad.

At least for my Man U joke, Shoalts had a source. The big boy is now just grasping at straws. Sad day for the globe and mail.

Ice Edge has just nominated Shoalts for the Pulitzer Prize … In Fiction. Another non-fact based fantasy article by the big boy today.

Ice Edge congratulates Don Maloney on GM of the Year. A no brainer that even Shoalts could have picked.

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On my list of things to do is to go to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference. It’s a shame it’s not a month or two later or I’d tie it into a Red Sox road trip without difficulty. Anyway, they’ve posted the videos of this year’s conference on their site. Brian Burke appeared on the Next Generation Sports Management and Ownership panel and offered this:

“Our talent evaluation system doesn’t lend itself to statistical analysis as much as it does in other sports. Film doesn’t have the same value in our sports as much as it does in other sports because the game is so much less predictable…Every year I get probably five papers from kids at MIT, Harvard and Duke and they say that they’ve come up with a new system for evaluating players. You go through it and you realize that it doesn’t lend itself to the analysis of what we need to do to pick a player, when we draft a player. We try to identify a lot of things that don’t lend themselves to statistical analysis and they’re very team related. So someone’ll say ‘Well this guy has the best +/- in the league’; well, if you’re on a good team, you’re going to have a positive +/-. It’s a meaningless statistic, unless you’re on a horseshit team and you have a decent +/-, then it might mean something. We don’t do as much statistical analysis as they do in baseball, for example.”

Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, chimed in with: “I detect opportunity. The first person to convince Brian Burke will be the next big thing in hockey on the analytics side.”

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Janice Johnston of CBC has more on Khabibulin’s upcoming hearing:

According to a police report, an officer stopped Khabibulin after he was found driving at a high rate of speed. The goalie was clocked as driving as fast as 70 mph in a 45 mph zone.

The officer smelled alcohol and thought he had watery eyes. Khabibulin admitted drinking one glass of wine.

The officer conducted a field sobriety test even though Khabibulin told him he’d just had back surgery in January.

Court documents obtained by CBC News show a defence expert is prepared to testify that studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the U.S. say standard field sobriety tests should not be given to people with back problems.

These tests — known as the walk and turn, one leg stand and finger to nose — cannot be performed correctly by people with back problems. The results would be no indication of impairment, and therefore meaningless, Khabibulin’s lawyer Mark Dubiel states in the document.
Back surgery in January

Dubiel also argues the officer had no legal right to test Khabibulin, as he did not have probable grounds to make him take the sobriety test.

Khabibulin did not “exhibit any reasonably trustworthy signs of impairment.” His face wasn’t flushed, nor did he slur his speech. He was polite and co-operative with police, the document states.

Since taking the test violated the hockey player’s constitutional rights, all evidence that came out of the seizure should not be allowed, including results from a blood alcohol test police said was over the legal limit of 0.08.

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One of the (many) things that drives me nuts about the Oilers’ philosophy is their seeming inability to mesh a number of different approaches to acquiring talent. They’re either in build through free agency/big trade mode or they’re in build through the draft mode. There’s a cost to this singlemindedness and rigid adherence to some sort of a grand plan, as it prevents you from taking advantage of opportunities that might crop up. Lowe made the following comments the other day:

“We’ve got to get back to what we did for a lot of years,” said Lowe, who was promoted in 2008 after eight seasons as general manager. “We’ve got to get back to our basic principles of drafting and development, get out of the free agent business.”

…

“It just seems to be in recent NHL history that the only way you become a contender is you have to go to the back of the bus for a while and regroup,” Lowe said. “We had a pile of injuries this year to key players and in some respects — having been at this for 10 years now — it’s a blessing in disguise.

“It’s almost like something hit us in the side of the head and said, ‘OK, if you guys can’t figure this out yourself, then we’re going to do it for you.’”

This, along with quotes from Steve Tambellini, have kind of suggested to me that the Oilers are out of the business of trying to plug holes on the team by acquiring top of the roster players from other teams. There seems to be a fair amount of support for this from people who were disappointed when Nikolai Khabibulin, Dustin Penner and Sheldon Souray didn’t put the Oilers over the top. The ill-fated wooing of Dany Heatley and unfortunate Michael Nylander incident, along with a lot of people rejecting the Oilers’ money along the way, hasn’t done much to convince fans of the Oilers of the value in trying to acquire players this way.

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