UMFan83

The Jets and Pats are in an arms race to sign former Bears. Who will win??

Beautiful. I might even switch from the tourney for a bit to watch.

Well over the last 6 months my teams are 2-0 in play-in games

1 win in our last 6 games, yuck

Yep. I'm the biggest spring training is meaningless guy and the combination of how terrible he's been plus the high leverage innings he'll be getting has me worried. *cough*plexiglassprinciple*cough* I kid

I don't necessarily fault the White Sox here, but any day the White Sox and Cardinals look like bad guys in the media is a good day.

Sounds like the White Sox didn't want his kid in the locker room anymore. Guess he had him around all the time with his own locker and stuff. He's 14. [tweet] [/tweet] Boom, NSBB'd

Hmm, I was assuming that the NMC players would count towards the players you can protect, not as additional keepers

Should be fun to speculate: [tweet] [/tweet]

http://deadspin.com/an-nhl-expansion-draft-could-be-pretty-fun-1765254501 Thought this was interesting. If there is an expansion draft for 1 new team after next year, the rules for protecting players would be either: a) 1 goalie, 7 forwards, 3 defensemen b) 1 goalie, any 8 skaters This is a little hard to do because we only know about 16 skaters and 2 goalies that will be on the roster at the end of next year but if the Hawks had to protect their guys who would they protect. My guess: Goalie - Crawford (assuming he can justify his $6m cap hit next season) Forwards - Kane, Toews, Anisimov, Teravainen, Panarin (if resigned), Kruger D - Keith, Hjalmarsson This leaves one forward and one blue liner available to protect Choices for forwards - Hossa, Desjardins, Kyle Baun? (do you have to protect players in Rockford?) Choices for defensemen - Seabrook, Gustafsson, TVR? I think the obvious choice is to expose Hossa, but I highly doubt an expansion team is going to pick up his deal at his age. But still it doesn't make sense to protect him. And on the blue line, Seabrook has a cap hit of nearly $7m. Perhaps he's coasting to the playoffs but he's been really poor defensively (look at his terrible possession numbers!). If he doesn't step it up it might make sense to protect a young defenseman and hope someone takes Seabs contract. Agree? Disagree?

Casual fans see it as Blue blood vs. play-in winner and pick accordingly. I have Arizona winning it but it was more of a toss up for me...haven't really liked how Arizona has played the last 6 weeks or so.

Not sure who will be broadcasting but it will be a Cubs broadcast on CSN today and it's being billed as "commercial free" so that sounds cool. 11 of the Cubs 17 remaining Spring Games will be broadcast in Chicago, 9 of those being Cubs broadcasts on CSN or WGN.

As a kid of the 90's I got a few chuckles out of this: [bbvideo=560,315] [/bbvideo]

Why do they need giant graphics that take up a chunk of the screen?

Some guys on Twitter were speculating 92-94 but not really sure how credible that is.

Heyward with a bases clearing double, Cubs up 8-0 now. I'm loving the bats coming alive.

thats insane

[tweet] [/tweet]

[tweet] [/tweet] Have they tried having him recite Playboy articles as hes making the throws?

I honestly can't even wrap my head around whatever it is you're trying to say here. If the foundation of the argument rests on the win gap between 2015 and 2014, it is already extremely specious. That is literally the foundation of Sheehan citing the plexiglas principle. Did you read the article? If so send it to me please. The argument was that teams that improve by 20+ games often do so because they get both great improvements from their roster and benefit from good fortune. Some of the specific reasons he mentioned are: outlier seasons, injury luck (and specifically mentioned how durable the Cubs rotation was last year), Pythagorean variance (the Cubs were +7 there), and bullpen variance (which he said applies to the Cubs..not so sure but he said something about Grimm, strop and rondon having outlier years). There were some others too.

They are independent events. Luck doesn't really "even out". Whether we were lucky last season or not, we are equally likely to have good and bad luck in 2016. Correct. But many if not most of the teams that improve by 20 games get a boost from luck. And they could get the same or even better luck the next year maybe they will not follow the principle (1 of the 18 teams they looked at from recent years didn't follow this principle).

A big part of the plexiglass principle absolutely is variance due to luck. I get your argument that the 2014-2015 teams are vastly different. but my sleep deprived brain reminds me that he is talking about teams winning 20+ games over the previous year losing 5+ more games the next year. I think luck could easily account for all of that.

Meh, Bernstein basically read the entire article on the Score yesterday. I don't think the plexiglas principle is a terrible argument, when you look at it historically its been very accurate. It doesn't mean the Cubs are guaranteed to take a step back just that we can't necessarily count on being as healthy as we were last year (particularly with our starters), can't count on leading baseball in walk off wins, can't count on our young players not having sophomore slumps (which tbh is a dumber principle than plexiglas), can't count on the back end of the bullpen being as good and (relatively) consistent, etc. A lot can go wrong in a season, and the fact that Sheehan, who is a strong believer of the plexiglass principle, is still picking the Cubs to win the division and 90 games tells you a lot about how good and deep the Cubs are. It's a terrible argument. Anthony Rizzo is the only position player from the entirety of 2014 still on the team (sans late season callups for Baez and Soler). Our lineup we trotted out most days was Bonifacio/Lake/Rizzo/Castro/Olt/Schierholtz Castillo/Barney. With deadline fire sales. If you can convince me why that team should have any bearing on projecting the 2016 Cubs, then I salute you. Edit: David beat me. Yes, but the principle is not just players overperforming, it has a lot to do with luck evening out. The cubs played the 3rd most 1 run games last year and won 62% of them, they led the MLB in walk off wins, they went 13-5 in extra innings, their pythag was 90-72, their ace went 3.5 months giving up 4 ER total, they were slightly luckier than the average MLB team with regards to injuries, above average with regards to 'cluster luck' I don't claim to be a baseball savant at all and im sure my devil's advocate argument (yeah I actually don't believe the Cubs will suffer from much of a 'plexiglass principle') will be torn apart, but the argument (which is essentially 'i dont think the plexiglass principle is terrible) makes sense to me.

Meh, Bernstein basically read the entire article on the Score yesterday. I don't think the plexiglas principle is a terrible argument, when you look at it historically its been very accurate. It doesn't mean the Cubs are guaranteed to take a step back just that we can't necessarily count on being as healthy as we were last year (particularly with our starters), can't count on leading baseball in walk off wins, can't count on our young players not having sophomore slumps (which tbh is a dumber principle than plexiglas), can't count on the back end of the bullpen being as good and (relatively) consistent, etc. A lot can go wrong in a season, and the fact that Sheehan, who is a strong believer of the plexiglass principle, is still picking the Cubs to win the division and 90 games tells you a lot about how good and deep the Cubs are.

There really weren't any defensemen that were available that could be had for what the Hawks would be able/ willing to pay. I feel like Bowman went and got the best available players even if they didn't exactly fit their biggest single need. I expect the Hawks to be better 5 on 5 moving forward. Part of the problem their was they had a revolving door of not quite ready young guys mixed in with castoffs. The blue line is a real concern not only now but moving forward. Obviously the big name was Hamhuis. Not sure if Vancouver just didn't want to pull the trigger, because he should have been dealt somewhere, but their dumb FO didn't do it, but if they were willing to trade him, the Hawks certainly had enough pieces to pull the trigger. I would have been fine with either the Ladd or the MTL trade, and instead of the other one got some sort of piece on the blue line. I seriously have no idea how we got it done last year, other than Keith playing a billion minutes and some luck, but I know last year was probably the exception historically in terms of winning a cup with very little defensive depth. This year Seabrook has regressed quite a bit defensively, TVR has been a disappointment, Rozival is as bad as we expected, and none of the other rotating group of prospects and old guys has been able to establish themselves except to an extent Gustafsson. Obviously Bowman knows much more about hockey and building winning hockey teams more than I ever will, so maybe the issues are overstated or they believe someone will step up...but if we fail to win a cup because of the blue line, I will have to wonder why the Hawks made multiple 'mortgaging the future to win now" type of trades for rentals and not put a priority on defense.