shrader

Seen I think this may be the one that makes me cringe the most, given that it is never used properly.

Let's face it, the funeral is far more for you and any other family/friends who would be there than it is your father. As taro said, if you want to be there, go. Sorry for your loss.

That would convince me to go.

I'm not sure I want to know how Hannah Davis qualified as pitcher.

I hear that Adam Sandler has a bunch of netflix exclusive movies...

Can we please just cut to the chase already and create the "shoot yourself in the head" challenge? The herd could use a good thinning.

So in his wiki it says he recorded 14.5 sacks in 1980, but the league didn't officially track them until 1982. This is interesting. I kind of want to figure it out, but I'm sure it'll wind up being the typical wikipedia error.

Where's that second season with 14.5 sacks?

Apparently the "Robitalle" picture is not from this season. I did some digging over on sabrespace and the board ads in that picture do not match anything from this season. So someone's being a bit disingenuous trying to pin both of those pictures as one act. The Andreychuk typo is bad, but let's face it, it's not the first or the last time that we'll see a screwed up name plate in any of the pro sports. It's bad, but it's not "this organization is inept" bad. The internet is littered with countless examples from over the years. My guess is the next one we'll see is "they poured me a blue instead of a blue light, this organization sucks!"

I think this is officially the end of the line for me. I don't play enough anymore, there aren't any currently ongoing series that I'm interested, so it's not worth the money to me anymore. The backward compatibility is nice (if they don't drop it last second like they did with the last few), but I have a 2,3 and 4 in my house, so I can already play any of the old stuff.

Without reading the story, I'm just going to assume yes.

How many actually carry the full 23 though? It's always seemed to me like most teams will go with 22, not have a 3rd guy rot away in the pressbox, all while banking a little extra cap space. I would look at rosters right now, but the break makes that pointless. I'd say Ullmark is the kind of guy who could work well in a platoon. Based on his career, Hutton should be too, which is what they were hoping for and it really wasn't all that unreasonable. But why has this guy fallen off a cliff? Maybe it's just age, but there really isn't all that much wear on those tires.

Detroit won the Cup in his second year in their front office. Does he really get all that much credit for that? Holland had been running the show for so long and most of the pieces were already in place. He then joined the Lightning in 2010. They won the Cup in 2004. But yeah, I realize what you're trying to say. He may very well be the guy who can right that ship, but it's not going to happen over night. They're in a far worse position than the team he inherited in Tampa. That team already had many of their key pieces including Stamkos, Hedman, and the older but still useful guys like St. Louis and Lecavalier. He has nothing of the sort in Detroit. I'll also be curious to see if he is able to sign guys to anywhere near as cap friendly contracts now that he has to deal with a state income tax again and a far less desirable location. He may very well get the job done, but I don't think he's the guaranteed home run GM signing that some make him out to be.

They're in pretty rough shape. I'd be worried about that being a team that is two coaching hires away.

I can't imagine there's anything that could stop Seattle from hiring him and putting him on the payroll right now. Also, I don't know how much time was left on his contract, but as of today he's being paid to sit on the couch. He might enjoy the down time and be content with waiting. Hynes and DeBoer didn't, but everyone's different. I guess it depends on which job becomes available. If someone like Ottawa or Detroit comes calling, I'm letting that call go to voice mail.

And now watch as Gallant winds up being the head coach in Seattle.

That's a very common thing in Ullmark starts. It drives me mad.

DeBoer is such an odd case too. If there is such a thing as journeyman coach, he's quickly becoming that. He's had a head coaching job in every single season since his first hire in 2008-09 and he's now off to his 4th team over that time. He gets 3-4 years at each stop, gets fired, and then immediately gets a new job. Outside of his time with perennial contender San Jose, there really isn't much to write about over that time (one cup final run with NJ).

I got a kick out of Eichel's goal. The guy on this team who I least want to see in and odd man rush towards the other team's net is Girgensons. I guess Jack thinks the same exact way.

I've been on board for a while now with making a fight a game misconduct. It isn't removed from the game, but it's saved for the moments where it's truly necessary. Maybe that's too extreme now that we've moved beyond the days of the staged dance fights that were huge in the early 2000s. I could be convinced on increasing it beyond 5 minutes but not getting the full game. As for Tkachuk, he plays on that edge. We've all seen those guys before. But he also knows exactly who he's going after in that Edmonton game. He knows what's coming and Kassian gave him exactly what he wanted. They need to figure out a better response because Calgary is going to take that exchange any day. I'd be curious to look through some of their game tapes to see if he's doing it more often to a guy like Kassian as opposed to an Eichel. Go after Kassian because eventually he'll do something stupid. That sounds like a solid strategy that more than a few teams would take. And then to finally set him off with a perfectly clean hit? All the better. As for Neal's comments, I will dismiss them because they're clearly made by someone in the heat of the battle who hasn't had time to cool down from the game. He's talking about things in that interview that did not happen and if he sat down and actually watched the video, he'd realize as much. He talks about Tkachuk going behind the net and hitting Kassian in the head. That very clearly did not happen.

Ahhh the ever popular "if you ever played the game" defense. Lots of lazy assumptions there. Anyway, you're actually right that not all that many hits look like what Tkachuk did. Hip to hip? So often players tend to attack much higher than that. If Kassian's helmet had stayed on, no one would be questioning that hit one bit. He came about as close to hitting Kassian's head as a Zhitnik slap shot to the net. If Kassian wants to react to a cheap and illegal hit, so be it. He'll accept the consequences of doing so. But when he reacts only the the clean one, he looks bad. And his own teammates stood by because they knew they were about to get a powerplay. They just happened to score the game winning goal on said powerplay. Let's not pretend that we've never seen a mugging where no one intervenes. That's becoming the norm around this league.

My laptop is a once a year for taxes thing. I guess I have something in common with a 92 year old. I'm not even sure why I use it for that, just a force of habit I guess. I just recently backup up all the old files, so maybe it's officially time to move on from that machine.

An Edmonton paper finds comments supporting an oiler. So I guess that means every single player who ever lived supports Kassian. Makes sense. People want to clean up some of the things Tkachuk does, particularly the first hit. That's fine. But that does not excuse the reaction from Kassian. You simply cannot continue to assualt a player once they've made it very clear that they aren't going to respond. There's a point where you need to pull up, but he was too much of a hot headed moron to do so and we went well beyond that line. Some players may want to buy him a beer for doing so, but that doesn't change the fact that the book will be thrown at him each time he does it, as it should be. And by the way, there is no requirement to make a play on the puck. If that was the case, probably 90% of all hits would be penalized.

Kassian has possession of the puck. It doesn't matter whether or not he's engaged with another player. It is not illegal to hit him in that situation. These aren't cut blocks or whatever the NFL rule is, he can be hit in that situation. As for the head hunting claim, we're stretching the definition of that term to incredible lengths. He wants Kassian to feel that hit, I'll give you that. But that's the intention of just about every hit at this point. It's not supposed to be that way, but that's just the way it is. Tkachuk threw that particular hit completely cleanly and they have no ground whatsoever to punish him in any way. I think the linked article takes the exact opposite stance than I would on this one. If anything, the league needs to move beyond this ridiculous mentality where players have to answer to a clean hit.

It would probably make more sense if they showed the other hit. The one with a video in that link, Tkachuk clearly leads with his hip. I just don't see head hunting there. What I see is a guy angry from a previous illegal hit now go crazy over a clean one.