Follow @james_tanner123 What a week! After waiting, and waiting, the NHL season kicked off and it was a great week. The world's best player Sidney Crosby is again a dominant force, the Coyotes were sold and went 1-1, the Kings happily lost their first two games and there is tons to talk about.
The NHL is back.
Since plus/minus is a terrible stat that means nothing, I thought I would appropriate it and make it slightly more useful.
PLUS: The Coyotes beating the Kings and forcing LA to lose their first two games. When your greatest rival wins the Stanley Cup and you don't make the playoffs, you have to take all the little victories you can get.
After starting the game down 2-0 the Coyotes were the better team going forward. Until there was 5 minutes left in the game, the Coyotes were doubling the Kings in shots and dominating the game. After a terrible start to the season vs. Winnipeg, the Coyotes rebounded with a very strong team effort and all-round great game. A perfect distillation of what "Coyotes Hockey" means - aggressive, checking hard, hard to play against, defensively sound and great goal-tending. Nice work too by Dubnyk who played great filling in for Mike Smith who was horrendous in game one.
PLUS: To keith Yandle who skated almost 30 minutes and picked up 3 assists, and to OEL who also skated almost 30 minutes and scored the game winning goal. To have two D capable of being 30 minute (although they won't play that much every game) players, is going to go a long way to making this a playoff team. The team might not score a lot, but they will have a top-ten PP and there just aren't many teams who can match what the Coyotes can throw on the ice at the position of defense.
MINUS: To me for ever suggesting the Coyotes trade Keith Yandle. Live and learn. The ability to have a player like this on your second pair, the unreal combo of him and OEL on the PP and just his underrated all-round game make him an integral part of this team and provide benefits I now believe would be too high a cost to pay even if you got a great return on him.
The idea to trade him for a forward makes a degree of sense, but I retract my previous statements about trading him and am just going to enjoy watching him play for as long as I can.
PLUS: To Darcy Kuemper for shutting out the Avalanche in back-to-back games. For a six round pick to steal the net in a four goalie battle (Harding,Bryzgalov,Backstrom) and then perform flawlessly in back-to-back games against a team that should have one of the best offences in hockey is a great achievement and probably enough to make him player of the week.
MINUS: To Coyotes' Coach Dave Tippett for skating Sam Gagner on a line with Korpikoski and Klinkhammer/Moss. Far for me to question Tippett, but Gagner cannot use his full skill-set skating on this line and I think players ought to be put in places where they can succeed. Gagner has a lot of offensive potential being wasted on a line that will never score much.
Why not move Gagner to the wing and have him replace the invisible Martin Erat on the line with Hanzel? Then promote the surprisingly effective Vitale to play with Korpikoski and Moss on a solid shut-down line? Just a thought.
PLUS: To the HNIC segment about face-offs with Kypreos and Messier during the second period of last night's Leaf game. I think hockey broadcasts ought to have more stuff like this - breaking down the minutia of the game and how it's actually played. The segment was hilarious and informative and I'd like to see more like it.
MINUS: To Leafs coach Randy Carlyle. It's clear to everyone watching that this guy lost the room last year and should have been fired. He fights with his best players in the press, he makes insane in game decisions like having two rookies on the ice in the final minute of a tie game, or playing Kadri 7 minutes less than Bozak on opening night. Kadri is the far superior player and this just seems insane.
The Leafs lack size up front and really need to make some kind of trade. The team as it's constructed does not make any sense. You just need to have watched last night's Kings game to see why. The Leafs lined up Bozak-Kadri-Santorelli-Holland down the middle. The Kings? Kopitar-Carter-Richards- Stoll. It's no coincidence they won 2 Cups recently with that lineup.
At this point, it wouldn't be the worst idea in the world for the Leafs to see what they could get for Kessel, Phaneuf and Lupul and take a shot at Connor McDavid. There is a zero percent chance they win the Cup this year and why not give it the old college try? They have the youth to build around.
PLUS: Shane Doan. He is 38, but apparently does not know it. Word is he bought a lock of Jagr's mullet off e-Bay in the summer to increase his vitality. I believe this as of yet unconfirmed rumour because what else explains his sudden revitalization? For the first two games of the season Doan has looked like Corey Perry. He has been an animal, and by far the Coyotes best forward. Over the first two games he has hit everything that moved, and sure, he only has 1 assist to show for it, but that doesn't matter because he is creating chances and owning the game while on the ice.
Doan is so cool that instead of celebrating the winning goal last night like the rest of his teammates, he tried to fight Jared Stoll instead. Awesome.
MINUS: To anyone who cites single game advanced stats. You must understand that Corsi stats for one game are useless. The whole point of Corsi is that over time, who ever gets the most shots is bound to have had the puck the most - thus it is a proxy possession stat.
Shots are used as the metric instead of goals because there are more of them and you can get a larger sample size. The sample size is the crux of how the whole thing works: over time and with enough data, shots represent possession because most of them are taken when teams have the puck. In a single game, however, an inordinate amount of shots can get taken that are far out, or otherwise weak. Thus a single game Corsi rating is useless and you might as well just revert back to goals.
Advanced stats are a way of finding out who is effective over an extended period of time. They demonstrate things that may not be noticed by the casual observer (e.g the effectiveness of Clarke MacArthur) but they do not make any sense for a single game since a small sample size can be skewed so easily.
Citing a single game Corsi rating makes about as much sense as saying Tyler Bozak is on pace for 82 goals this season.
PLUS: To this David Bowie record I am listening to. The Man Who Sold the World I just bought this one the other day and this is the first time I've heard it. As I slowly make my way through the Bowie library I constantly ask myself how I could have gone so long without hearing whatever record I am on. This one is no different - it's weird and it's great.
MINUS: To Don Cherry. I love Don Cherry and it pains me to give him a minus, but he spent his 4 minutes last night ranting about how the Leafs selected Nylander over Nick Ritchie and how the Leafs don't ever draft Canadian players and blah blah blah..... Don should probably realize that the Leafs drafted Luke Schenn 5th overall in '08, Nazem Kadri in '09, didn't pick in '10, Stuart Percy in '11, Morgan Rielly in '12, and Fredrick Gauthier in '13.
Do you know what all those guys have in common? Yup, they are Canadian. Not that it should even matter, but Don's rant made no sense. So what if the Leafs selected Nylander this year over Nick Ritchie? The hockey world applauds that move because Nylander was one of the most skilled players in the draft.
I have no problem with Don - he's one of my heroes, along with Marin Riggs and Chris Mathews. I usually agree with him, but this was pretty dumb. 5 of the Leafs' last 7 first round picks were Canadian kids and his ill-advised xenophobic rant was ridiculous.
Thanks for Reading.