Friday, March 18, 2011

 

Friday Baseball Standings

**Whoops: that should say Thru Mar.17, but I'm too lazy to fix it.

**If the Canucks can beat Phoenix tonight, it'll still be a 2-game spread between 4th and 10th; five get in and two do not. I'm petrified about this California trip that could obviously sink the Flames' season for good, but most of the other teams have some challenges in their schedule as well. I think if the Flames can even go 3/6 in Cali plus a win in Edmonton, then they're in OK shape. More than one reg.L vs ANA/LA/SJ, or (god forbid) a loss to the Oil next week, and they're in pretty terrible shape.

**Rick Nash this season is the same age as Jarome Iginla was in 2004. It's a serious bloody waste that Howson & friends haven't been able to build a decent group around him (yet) to take a couple runs. I know the hockey gods have frowned on the BJs for a few years now, but at the same time, they've done some pretty indefensible things with their money.

**I'm not sure what the proper order is, but Ottawa, Colorado, and Edmonton are definitely the three worst teams in the league. I hope the Islanders win the lottery as a reward for resembling an NHL team the past 2-3 months.

Go Flames.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

 

Face: red

So one of these days, I have a rant I need to post reminding the statzis that what they don't know could fill a warehouse, but the fact remains that if you just looked at Corsi numbers to predict a particular player's performance next month, you'd win a lot more than you lost.

I tweeted on December 24th (@FenwickMatt btw) the following:
How bad are the #Devils? The *best* of 1000 'simulations of remainder of season' gives them 70 points (worst = 34). http://bit.ly/5LHWmc

That projection/simulation is at Hockey-Reference.com, and with due congratulations to the man behind it for winning the TrueHoop Stat Geek Smackdown in both 2007 and 2008, it's useless. Ultra-useless. Somehow, a mathematical(?) model of an NHL team produced a result saying that the best of 1000 scenarios for the upcoming 48 games is that they would be 4 games over .500.

This shouldn't even pass the smell test for this year's post-apocalyptic version of the Oilers, let alone mine or anyone's smell test for the team that had the lowest SA/gm in the league. And yet it's on a really good hockey website. Puck Daddy is the most indispensable hockey blog, period, and yet they run an article every 2nd Thursday recommending someone who had a good +/- the last two weeks as the possible solution to your fantasy hockey +/- problems.

You can ignore the shot differential stuff if you like, but if you're actually interested in who's going to help your team tomorrow, ignore it at your peril. Unrelated, I hope Tambellini agrees with Jim Matheson that the Oilers need to find money for Ryan Jones, because this is totally different than Brule at the end of last year. Just because it's easy to like a player who's scoring goals doesn't mean that you won't like him when he's scoring fewer goals.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

 

Thursday Baseball Standings

**It was with their win over Nashville on Sunday night that the Flames finally moved into a WC playoff spot by this measure. With a win tonight in Phoenix, they move into a tie for 4th. BONKERS. On the other hand, if they lose tonight and the Wild beat Nashville, they're back into 9th on tiebreakers.

**Would you say that the Toronto Maple Leafs are pretty close to being the best team in the league? No, not really? Me neither. I have nothing against the Maples per se, I just bring this up because they are 13 games behind the Canucks for best record in the NHL, and this 13 game spread is the same as the gulf between the Oilers and the Flames. So, naturally, the first random Oilers conversation I overheard after the Penner trade included the phrase, "Now we just need to get rid of Horcoff".

**Flames president Ken King is not perfect, and lord knows that the whole push for a new arena is headed to Calgary in short order, but I still like to think that he would die of shame before publishing a letter with an opening sentence like the one from Pat "Patrick" LaForge yesterday.

**Is someone going to stop Vancouver from winning the Stanley Cup? Please? This run the Flames have been on has been a lot of fun, but the stature of the Canucks is really casting a dark shadow over the season.

**"...Gordie Howe's professional career spanned 34 years, just 4 more than Hasek's to date." Wow.

**Go Flames. Watch out for Hanzal and Whitney.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?