Drew Doughty

That's what happens when your luck-ridden goalie comes back to Earth. Bobrovsky is good, but that team behind him is still a mess. Don't lose patience though...I like what Kekalainen has done so far. If he can great a real top-pairing d-man (maybe he could trade Jack Johnson and a draft pick for a 40-goal scorer too...) it would go a long way to making that team better right now. Also, for anyone interested in the subject, if you ever wanted to get into hockey's "advanced" stats, www.extraskater.com is a tremendous site. It's an extremely complete site.

they pretty much gave up a 1st and a 2nd round pick for nothing. it's not so much about losing moulson as it's about not making an upgrade at all. on top of that, the picks are assets they could use to trade for something they need (like, say, i dunno, any goalie that isn't evgeni nabokov) and they sacrificed them to not upgrade a position that didn't need upgrading in the first place. just a weird trade. maybe garth snow thinks that tavares has gotten complacent while playing with his best buddy in matt moulson? tavares has been pretty weak so far this year. not sure that giving up a 1st and 2nd round pick to rectify that problem (or more likely, non-problem) makes much sense. moulson and vanek are both 29 year old one-dimensional forwards on UFA deals. they've scored at a nearly identical rate since moulson became a regular in the Isles' lineup. they're probably a legit contender with a goalie and they blew those assets on thomas vanek. mind-boggling move from garth snow given how good his moves have looked in the past few seasons.

Probably is but the Hawks are still on pace for 112 points this season which would tie the highest point total for a "Cup Hangover" team since the 05 lockout (I get the goal differential thing and the easy schedule thing). Here is what I pulled together for the post lockout cup winners. Carolina - 112 pts vs 88 points (DNQ) Anaheim - 110 pts vs. 102 points (L 1st) Detroit - 115 pts vs. 112 pts (L SCF) Pittsburgh - 99 pts vs. 101 pts (L 2nd) Chicago - 112 pts vs. 97 pts (L 1st) Boston - 103 pts vs. 102 pts (L 1st) Los Angeles - 95 pts vs. 101 pts (proj) (L 3rd) Chicago - 132 pts vs 112 pts (both proj) i can't tell if this makes me believe more in the hangover effect or just that the nhl playoffs are more of a crapshoot than we admit. I think it makes me believe less in the hangover effect. Carolina got worse because the game shifted away from the hilarious 800 PPs a game we saw the year after the lockout and they had awful defense. Anaheim...not really sure. Detroit and Pittsburgh stayed identical. Chicago's cap problems are well-known. Boston stayed identical. Kings stayed about at their season-ending pace from the year before. Chicago wouldn't have come near 132 points last year in a full season (not slighting the team, it's just extraordinarily unlikely that they would've stayed healthy/consistent enough over an 82 game season to keep up the pace). 112 points would still be a great season, and it's probably about in line with last year's team's true talent level.

He was. In fact, he showed that he can maybe be more than a 4th line energy guy. So for the sake of his development, it's better for him to play 15-18 min a night for the Hogs than not even crack 8 for the Hawks (not to mention being 1 missed play away from the press box). Ok, kinda unrelated, but this made me think back to a question I had the other night.... I'm still a relative newbie fan. I don't know as much about hockey as I'd like to. I know Quenneville is big on shuffling lines mid game, and changing what players are active and which aren't game to game. Is that pretty normal for hockey coaches to do, or is that a quirk of coach Q? Depends on the coach. Some coaches match lines really hard. I don't know Quenneville's tendencies off the top of my head (though I want to say he's a match-up coach), but that could be why. I haven't followed the Hawks closely, but a lot of likes to reward perceived effort and probably scratches/dresses players -- depth players in particular -- based on that. Sometimes a line can be getting beat up by a particular match-up and the coach will change the lines up to try and create a better match-up there. It's fairly common for coaches to shake things up at least a little bit mid-game and game-to-game. After all, it's a long season and you want to keep all of your players as game-ready as possible. I just wrote a little about this for the Kings/Lightning game the other day. http://www.jewelsfromthecrown.com/2013/10/16/4846256/kings-lightning-grades-and-analysis Look at the breakdowns for the 3rd and 4th lines to see an instance where a coach shuffled his lines to shake up a match-up that was not working for his team. A lot of it is overblown, because usually the level of skill in the players you're shuffling around won't differ very much. Sometimes the particular makeup of a line might not work for a match-up that the opposing coach wants and that's often when you'll see a line change for tactical reasons. Other times and more often a coach shuffles things up because he doesn't like what he sees from a particular player. A final reason coaches could shuffle lines is to make it very hard for the opposing coach to match-up at all. Darryl Sutter likes to do this on the road against coaches that really strive to match lines. He'll start working his forwards in pairs and just throw a 3rd forward out there almost at random.

At first, Roy was yelling at Corey Perry which was just awesome. Someone should be paid to walk around all day and yell at Corey Perry.

It was amazing until a pointless fight in the 3rd sucked the life out of the game and the arena because they had to cart Parros off the ice.

We can try it again next year and try to get it going a bit earlier. Yeah sounds good. maybe try a midseason start? We'll try to reach an agreement in January and play 48. We could start a week late or something. It wouldn't be a huge deal.

yes

good thing they don't play any preseason hockey this year. apparently it's nashville/florida. even worse.

i'm not sure you could pay me to sit through 2 1/2 hours of florida/new jersey pre-season hockey.

Well, right now you have Lundqvist (who will absolutely not make it to free agency), Miller, Hiller, Halak, Dubnyk, Vokoun and Elliott slated to hit free agency and there's a pretty good chance that all of them except Dubnyk actually hit the market. StL could even let both Halak and Elliott walk since they have Jake Allen coming up. At least one off that list will likely sign a contract worth about half of Crawford's. There won't be that many jobs available. If you honestly prefer Crawford to all of those guys then that's one thing. I don't know if I do, but I could see the argument for most of them except Lundqvist. I guess my problem is that I'm not sure they're allocating all that money to something that's very valuable. I don't think Crawford will be worth much more than your run of the mill .905-.910 sv% goalie over the next few years when he's supposed to actually be worth his contract. An average, run of the mill goalie fitting that description is likely a backup making under 1m. SO I guess I just don't understand why teams continue to pay so, so much for so, so little. Not just the Hawks, but everyone. I think I would rather a Turco or Emery starter than Crawford. Well, maybe not Turco who was pretty much toast by the time he got to Chicago, but Emery I didn't mind. Emery was only 30 heading into the year (as opposed to Turco's 35 at the time the Hawks brought him in). He's always been pretty inconsistent but never as truly terrible as Turco when healthy. He had some actual decent stretches of hockey in his recent history. Honestly, when healthy and in North America, him and Crawford haven't been terribly different goaltenders, which would terrify me as a Blackhawks fan. A couple of Emery-esque options that could be available in 2014: Emery himself, Jason Labarbera, Anton Khudobin and Ben Scrivens. On top of that we've seen good young goalies like Cory Schneider and Jonathan Bernier get moved lately. I think there are often decent guys available. There aren't enough goalie jobs available. Bernier or James Reimer will probably be available either during this season or after it depending on who wins the job in Toronto. Michal Neuvirth can probably be had from Washington. I don't buy that Bowman didn't have options. He has to think that Crawford's season is repeatable and we haven't really seen any goalie repeat his success in the past few years. Is Crawford in that elite class with Lundqvist? Because that's the only reason you should be giving him that money. I just have trouble seeing why Bowman is concerned with it this time. He's won two cups while completely gambling on his goaltenders being good. It's a formula that's worked for him. He has plenty of gambles that he could make next year. However, he decided that he'd rather spend a bunch of money and lock himself into a guy that he was gambling on just a year prior. I don't see a good justification for that.

I think it's a reaction to the state of flux the Hawks' net wound up in after letting Niemi get away. Not the right decision to me, but I imagine that's his reasoning. I don't think any goalie should get a big contract unless he's, I dunno, Henrik Lundqvist or Roberto Luongo (and even his deal has turned into a trainwreck). Goalies vary too much year to year based on too many things (talent of team in front of them, luck, tactical changes to penalty kills, random variance, injury, luck, and more luck) to be counted on. How many goalies are in the conversation for Vezina every single season? Lundqvist. Anyone else? Tuukka Rask will probably wind up in that conversation at some point (especially if he stays behind a Claude Julien defense). I'm struggling to think of anyone else. Carey Price has some of the best technical skill I've seen in the entire league, but he's had back to back pedestrian seasons. Braden Holtby is another guy with big technical skill and he had an awful save percentage through half the season. I think that's what's frightening. Even these guys that LOOK great have really mediocre seasons for no reason visible reason from their end. As in, there isn't an obvious reason why suddenly these goals are trickling through them as opposed to sticking in their pads or jerseys or rolling just wide. It happens to every goalie in the league except for 2 or 3 per generation. I LOVE Jon Quick, guy makes some tremendous saves. I hated his contract from day 1 (I do think he's much better than his 2013 though) and I think the Kings have made an enormous mistake in letting Bernier go to Toronto in order to let Quick be "the guy" for the next decade. That's a guy that had a season pretty similar to what Crawford just went through. I think Ken Holland said that, basically, you only pay for a top 5 goalie in the league (which really makes you wonder about signing Jimmy Howard). The gap from the 6th best goalie in the game to the 15th best goalie in the game is always marginal and the players move around all the time. Unless you're buying Dominik Hasek, you're almost better just taking a bunch of fliers on guys with raw skill (like the Hawks did with Emery which worked out really well for them).

I don't want to sound like I'm defending this deal, because I'm not, but don't goalies typically age slower than skill players? Him being 34 years old at the end of the contract doesn't seem like a big deal. http://www.mc79hockey.com/?p=6252

I'll disagree with this. I've always liked baseball, but didn't really get fully into it until more of the stats stuff became mainstream and it really appealed to the scientific side of my brain. I think it does take a certain mindset to enjoy it though, especially if you didn't play a lot growing up. Baseball is really the one true team sport that lends itself well to advanced individual analysis, since so little of a player's game is really other- or team-dependent (R, RBI, E). this is kind of false. every team sport is made up of individual plays that can be broken down statistically. everything is just much more... organized in baseball. it happens slower and there are far fewer events than in other sports, so the analysis was always bound to arrive there first. it inspired movements in the other major north american sports. there are accurate measures of individual performance in every sport that extend beyond the traditional box score. although i suppose the team dependent thing is pretty true, people are figuring out how to account for such things (at least in hockey, so i assume the other sports have caught on as well because hockey is pretty far behind the curve statistically speaking). i think baseball is an extraordinarily tough sport to get into on your own NOW. when we were growing up, it was still america's pastime. kids have football now. baseball is slow. it's not the heavily publicized theater that football is. i agree with kyle (kill me). if a parent or close peer or some other influence isn't a guiding factor, kids have sexier picks.

it seems bad now, and it probably (i do mean probably, as there's a reasonable chance they wind up a decent team anyway) has a pretty serious adverse affect on the team next year. however, a paltry cap penalty for a long time, a first round pick, and whatever salary he earned the past 3 years is a pretty great deal to get an elite scorer in his prime and then not have to worry about the backside of the contract. the good news for the devils is that they were an awesome puck possession team and kovalchuk didn't help drive that. their biggest problem last season was goaltending, and assuming cory schneider gets the bulk of the starts, that's a problem that won't repeat itself. IF they make smart moves over the next two weeks (like...sign mikhail grabovski and dustin penner, for instance), they could sneak in the back end of the playoffs. they're likely set up for a much better future than they would've had with kovalchuk. lou's a pretty smart guy and i think he just wiggled out of a mistake.