Everything Else

New Statistics Sites Unveiled

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Over the past few weeks, hockey loving nerds everywhere have scrambled to discover a replacement for ExtraSkater after the site went dark upon the hiring of its creator, Darryl Metcalf, by the Toronto Maple Leafs. Several sites have been in existence for quite some time that have a wealth of information in this regard; however, ExtraSkater was very user friendly and that means a lot for people who may not be as familiar with the expanded set of metrics currently being used to evaluate hockey.

Over the past several days, two new sites have been unveiled that promise to be user friendly and offer new features for the stats hungry hockey fan. The first is war-on-ice.com (@war_on_ice on Twitter) which was created by A.C. Thomas (@acthomasca) and Sam Ventura (@stat_sam). The second is progressivehockey.blogspot.ca (@ProgressiveHKY) which was created by Matt Pfeffer (@MattyPfeffer), who is the resident analytics guru for the Ottawa 67’s of the OHL.

Both of these new sites are in the beta stage of their development but the raw materials are excellent. The user interface and available features are being improved upon daily. I’ll have some posts coming up in the next few days and weeks that use some of the features from these new sites, but I encourage you to check them out as well.

Everything Else

For Those Scoring At Home

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These days, I’m basically piggy-backing off the better hockey writers around because it’s late August and I can’t be bothered to think of anything myself. That will change next week when the calendar flips to September and we can really start to preview the upcoming season. It doesn’t feel like the season is about to start until the NFL starts, at least to me. But nothing gets you ready for the start of hockey season like Kaner in a Bears jersey, right?

So today, it’s basically a reaction to Down Goes Brown’s study of why scoring was so batshit crazy in the 80’s and then by the mid-90’s had completely arrested. Sean provides a multitude of reasons, from the difference in goalies, expansion, rules-relaxations, defensive systems that became successful, and all of these are correct in their own way.

That’s not really why I’m here today though, as I’d more like to look at whether or not there needs to be a clamoring for something of a return to those free-scoring ways.

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Diamonds And Dust?

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By now you’ve seen the report from Tony Gallagher in The Province about NHL expansion to Vegas being “a done deal” and that by 2017 Seattle, Quebec, and a second Toronto team will have joined the league.

Let’s pull this rig over to the soft shoulder. As Wyshynski pointed out on Puck Daddy (and everything he writes from now on I’m calling “Mooney avoidance”), one of the reasons this is getting such play is it’s the end of August. We couldn’t be farther from the free agent signing extravaganza, and training camp is still a blip on the ever stretching horizon. We need something to talk about… or at least something that isn’t Baez or Soler-related (sorry Sox fans, I just can’t contain it).

Everything Else

The Forward Jam

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You may have missed it today, so if you did our compatriot Chris Block did some excellent work on Teuvo Teravainen today and a few other things.

What Block concludes is kind of what I’ve always thought, that Teuvo is going to have to go out of his way to not be on the team by the holidays. He very well may start in Rockford, but he certainly isn’t going to finish there. As we’ve said all along, you can always tell when Q and Stan really like a player in the system, and those players always tend to find their way onto the roster.