Evernote was packed! Here's the latest in thought-provoking stuff you may have missed:
We'll start off with the story of Brian Burke and the work he's doing for his son, Brendan. Sean Leahy at Puck Daddy has a nice recap of what Burke has done and plans to do since Brendan passed. Burke has become the face of an organization dedicated to making schools safe for everyone. He's planning on marching in the Pride Parade in Toronto because he promised his son he would. In the world of hockey, Burke isn't held in the highest regard by a number of fanbases, but his reaction his son coming out of the closet and carrying on in his name is commendable. With the position that Burke holds, maybe he'll finally be able to drag the hockey world into the 21st century where hockey fans already reside.
Chappy from This Is Not A Love Song takes on Gary Bettman's fuzzy attendance math and turns it into a Winnipeg Jets pitch.
My best friend Gary Bettman takes crazy to a whole 'nother level...
The Contrarian Goaltender takes a look at regular season save percentage streaks from the four playoff teams remaining:
Over a short sample the skill element of goaltending can be completely lost in the noise of whether the opposing shooters are missing, the puck is hitting him through screens and traffic, or whether he happens to be in peak form or not.
Doogie2k, an excellent contributor here, takes on the concept of luck and why the average fan recoils in horror at the thought of luck, at his own site -- Stillnoname.
I think part of the problem is simple semantics: replace "luck" with "bounces," and I think a lot more people would understand and appreciate that perspective. It lines up with what we see, and it lines up with what coaches and players and talking heads say after the game. "The effort was there, we played our game well, we just didn’t get the bounces tonight."
By the way Doogie, solid mention of the Kansas City Scouts. Logo time!
B.C.B. at Bringing Back The Glory continues his breakdown of the 2009-2010 penalty stats from the Oilers, this time by looking at PM/60.
Like the beating that occurred in medieval festivals, the 'hockey fight' shares another characteristic: that of both death and regeneration. The blood and pain very much symbolize the death of the fighter, while the ability to regenerate your team (bring them back to life) is inherent in the 'hockey fight' as well. Bakhtin links this to the fact that beatings where attached to the fertility of the marriage beating and intercourse: I am just going to let you use your own imagination and the image of grown men wresting around on the ice. While this is not an rigorous examination of the beatings of the carnival and the 'hockey fight' I think we can see the continuity of the festival in the sporting event.
In looking at the World Championship box scores, I noticed that Nino Niederreiter played sparingly early on against Latvia and Italy and then didn't play a single minute against Canada or the Czech Republic, even though he was on the bench. He took a healthy scratch against Norway and then again against Sweden. Niederreiter has two penalties and zero points in 20:10 over four games.
It will be interesting to see if this has any effect on his draft stock.
Like me, David Staples sees Taylor Hall's recklessness as a drawback to drafting him first. I've watched Hall live seven times now and he's been absolutely demolished in four of those games. I know the sample size is atrocious, but what stuck with me is the brutality of the hits and the way he put himself in the position to get hit hard. Staples gets the reference wrong (Achilles was cautious), but the idea right. Hall plays like a kid that's going to have his bell rung on a regular basis:
As much as I love Hall's daring game, if Seguin is the smarter of the two players, he might well be the wiser choice. If Hall can't avoid this kind of hit, and if Seguin is almost as skilled and dynamic, this is a simple decision for the Oilers.
Mats Zuccarello-Aasen has three goals in six games and is Norway's leading goal-scorer. I've talked about Zuccarello-Aasen previously:
If Zuccarello-Aasen is able to make the transition to the North American game and handle the more physical play here, his scouting report reads like a scout's dream:
- High-end skills, including incredible passing ability
- Hard, accurate shot, though not top-level
- Able to play the point on the power play
- Outstanding playmaker
- World-class speed
Patrick Thoresen is Norway's leading scorer with six points in six games. The Oilers are in desperate need of real NHL forwards at a bargain price. There's no reason they shouldn't at least offer Thoresen a deal this summer.
Mike and Matt from The Jackets' Cannon have an excellent series of fifteen draft prospect profiles on their site.
I give you Tab Benoit and Jimmy Thackery performing the second-best rendition of "These Arms Of Mine"
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