Follow @james_tanner123 "PLUS/MINUS is the NHL's best stat, and the only one I use" - Craig Button* MINUS: The Jets extending Paul Maurice, the worst Coach in the NHL this side of Anaheim.
Cheveldayoff hasn’t been a very good GM either, in my opinion, but at least he’s put together a half-way decent team. With their roster, there is no way they should have missed the Playoffs last year, but their defense and special teams were terrible. (The main things a coach is responsible for).
Maurice is a terrible old-school coach who should never have been re-signed. He’s not a good coach and it’s just lazy to blame their problems on a goalie.
For the Jets, it's now five seasons, one playoff appearance (in which they were swept) and constant under-achieving. The team has some great young players and it would have been the perfect time for a new direction. By extending Maurice, Cheveldayoff shows he shouldn’t have gotten extended either.
MINUS: The NFL season starts and all the fantasy baseball advice dries up as people get obsessed with the NFL just when you need baseball advice the most.
MINUS: The notion that the Leafs are deep at centre. Tyler Bozak is a below average 3rd line centre – can’t play defense, and faceoffs don’t matter just because you still believe they do - and Dominic Moore is 37 and can’t play anymore.
That’s not deep when half your centres shouldn’t be on the roster. Now, if you want to make Nylander a centre and someone plays well enough to turn Moore into a press-box regular, then the Leafs could legitimately be dangerous down the middle.
PLUS: The Coyotes will have Dylan Strome and Clayton Keller, who should be the two front-runners for the Calder Trophy this season. With Stepen, Hjalmmarson and Annti Raanta, the Coyotes should a solid team this season.
They will be the surprise of the NHL and make the Playoffs.
MINUS: I’m picking the Washington Capitals to miss the playoffs.
MINUS: Going into the season everyone is overrating the Penguins and the Lighting. Yes, the Penguins won the Cup and yes, they still have Malkin and Crosby as well as an insane amount of forward depth (might want to look up who the top two P/60 players with over 500 mins were last year).
But I don’t trust their defense, Malkin and Crosby have been recently spotted attending Joffrey Lupul’s random-injury support group, and the odds against a three-peat are super long. As for the Lightning, they have a rookie goalie, a top-heavy defense and I think their forward depth – Palat, Johnson – is somewhat overrated. Both these teams are playoff teams, but I think the two best teams in the East are.......
PLUS: Here are your Eastern Conference Champions: The Toronto Maple Leafs. Everyone’s favorite team is stacked and poised to dominate. Their biggest competition? Not Pittsburgh, Washington or the Lightning: the Carolina Hurricanes.
MINUS: One of my favorite players, Ryan Ellis, is out until January. That sucks.
MINUS: The idea that the Flyers – stuck with a declining Girioux and Voracek – will be any good. Sorry, not happening.
MINUS: The Predators still didn't upgrade their goalie. Once again, this will cost them the Stanley Cup. A trophy they might have won last year had they had a better goalie. (And I know Rinne got extremely hot at one point, but he's still not any good).
PLUS: I don’t usually agree with Steve Simmons on anything, but Marcus Stroman being nominated for an award for sportsmanship is just more proof we’re living in an insano opposite world where up is down, right is wrong and nothing matters.
PLUS: The last six weeks have seen albums released by pretty much all of my favorite bands.
One per week since the end of July has seen us get new records from Arcade Fire, the War on Drugs, LCD Soundsystem, and the National. That is my four favorite (currently active) bands. And since I’m just about the only person who still buys CDs, this has been a great month.
Additionally, 2017 saw great records from Phoenix, Grizzly Bear, Broken Social Scene, Jason Isbell, Fleet Foxes, and Feist.
Not to mention a pretty sweet second tier of records from Run the Jewels, Gorillaz, Grandaddy, Magnetic Fields, Jay Z, Kendrick Lamar and Father John Misty.
2017 is maybe the best year for music ever.
PLUS: I recently decided to pay for Spotify. Despite my love for physical copies and the crap soundquality of listening to streamed music on a garbage speaker, the sheer novelty of having anything I want at my finger tips is overwhelming and amazing. Also, its great for parties.
I love everything.
MINUS: All those extra baseball playoff spots have taken away what was special about baseball and its marathon 162 game season. I wish there was one sport who that would make their regular season matter.
MINUS: The Capitals deserve some love for back-to-back President’s Trophies. It is a mathematically superior accomplishment to what the Penguins have done in the last two years. I know the Cup matters more to people, and don’t want to argue that it shouldn’t.
But people act like the Caps are this huge failure, when they were the best team in hockey over 164 games. That is a huge accomplishment.