It’s that time , folks. We know you’ve been waiting for it. So have we, and so have our friends who are tired of us bothering them constantly because we’ve had nothing to do. Yes, the Hawks don’t start training camp for another 10 days or so, but that’s not going to stop us from kicking off our season preview for the ’14-’15 campaign.
Nationals Park: Chicago Tribune
Led Pipe Preview: CSN AP
Depth: NHL.com
A view from the top: HockeeNight
Captain America: SN
Happy to move on: CH
A reminder of just how far we’ve come: Blackhawks
Kaner: CSN
Well that’s over: PD
Sadly also over, though he doesn’t realize it: NHL
Much like quarterbacks and pitchers, goaltenders often have a rough go of it in Chicago, Corey Crawford is quite familiar with this fact. While he is not one of the elite goalies in the league, he has gotten the job done for the Blackhawks. Last season’s playoff performance left a bit to be desired, but there is more to it than just Crawford’s save percentage.
With the launch of the new stats site war-on-ice.com, comes the availability of newer breakdowns in goaltender statistics that may allow us to look more closely at just how Crawford has performed with Chicago and determine the effect the defense has on his numbers.
Ops Changes: TMI
Our Bad: TSN
SPITTAKE: Sportsnet.CA
Not so fast: CSN AP
But will the team be there for his bridge deal: GnM
Hello all. We’re turning on all the lights and our machines here at the Lab to get ready for the new hockey season. We’re even trying to dry out Killion, but that’s not going so well. Training camp is only two weeks away, after all.
With that in mind, we need some help. Our Hogs correspondent, Kim Wrona, who did excellent work for us for two seasons, will no longer be able to be our Hogs’ expert due to school commitments. She’ll still be around to comment and chip in when she can/wants, and we thank her for all she’s done.
So we need a new Hogs’ person. Preferably we are looking for someone who lives in or near Rockford (god help you) and gets to all or most of the Hogs home games and follows them pretty closely on the road. If you think you’re the person, or you know someone, please email me at committedindian@gmail.com. If you’re lucky, you can be attacked on Twitter too for nothing you had anything to do with, just like Jen LC!
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.
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.
