shrader

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.

They were the first band I ever saw live. I was holding out hope recently that somehow I'd get a chance to see them one more time.

You beat me to it. This was the first thing that came to mind when I clicked on the thread.

It's not just a this year thing though. We're talking about a multi-year process and others are now off the books. Botterill has not managed it ideally, but right from day one they knew more flexibility would come in the summer of 2020. If you look at next season's figures, there's really only one significant contract on there that wasn't expected and that's Skinner. Me personally, I don't see anything out of line with that one. He's going to bounce back. He'll probably never live up to a $9 million hit, but that's the life you live with free agents. Completely arbitrary, I know, but if he performs up to say a $7 million level, I can live with that. Every team in the league is going to be relying on some ELC guys to make up for that.

You can't fix a bad contract. You can potentially trade them out, most likely giving away additional assets to do so. That said, no one is taking Okposo off their hands. That's really the only bad Murray contract that remains. The rest have expired.

Nitpick alert: math errors are for the weak. Double check that point projection.? Sorry, it's a slow day for me today.

I hope Frolik can help the PK. If they can get that unit inside the top 20, it should be worth a couple wins. It doesn't sound like much, but that would make a huge difference for any team that is in the middle of the pack.

A 24 year old looking to be around 18 years old? That's really not all that much of a stretch. And what's the deal with that site putting her picture in between a zoomed in shot of her eyes?

You need the same exact thing I did for the annoying kids who cut through my backyard on the way to the school bus: bear trap

It's fitting that a team from a third rate league would paraphrase such a garbage song in a tweet. Come on Cincy, no one deserves the punishment of having Smashmouth pop into their head.

I suppose they left a few threads out there which they could explore if they wanted to, but I really hope this is it. The story feels finished for every character who did appear in this one. I don't want to see the story continued without anyone from the original book, so that really only leaves one more person they can follow. I'll avoid the spoiler just in case, but if you read and watched, you know why I'm talking about.

I love that he actually did the parody version of the song on the Simpsons too. That one was always one of my favorites.

He means Sutton.

You can definitely see that in the link upthread that mentioned his feud with Roger Ebert.

It looks like an incredibly lazy take to me. If making the team is a standard, you can't at the same time crap on Samuelsson. Beyond that, Johnson is significantly younger than the rest of that group. 8 of the 9 d-men were born in 2000. The oonly 2001 was drafted ahead of Johnson., Cam York (1/5/2001). Johnson is 7/24/2001, so he's significantly younger than that group. They're clearly leaning towards experience. He'll get that spot next year. And then there's also the fact that he's crapping on Samuelsson for something that hasn't actually happened yet. Is that just a tweet from some completely random guy?

I wonder if it's a bit of "hey, it worked last time". I think it was the Islanders game where they did the same thing late. Except in that one, they had just kept control of the puck in the offensive zone for somewhere around 1-1.5 minutes. So at that point, they were basically taking a hammer to an exhausted opponent. I'll readily admit that it's easy to say this given the benefit of hindsight, but that was a mistake last night.

Things get much more interesting after taking a look at their payroll. They have a lot of money already committed for next year. If they want to keep Hall around, they're going to need to move out a high end body or two. I can't imagine there's going to be much market for a guy like Derek Stepan at $6.5 million. They pretty much have to move out a goalie. I don't know if I've ever seen a team with two of them both making north of $4 million.