A Cut Above

Craig Anderson cuts his hand making dinner after last night's whooping of the Washington Capitals.

...you can't make this stuff up, can you.

The team has been pretty lucky, injury-wise, so far this season. Michalek was out with a concussion, and both Phillips and Gonchar spent some time on the injury list. But if there is one player who has been single-handedly carrying this team so far this season, it's Erik Karlsson. No wait, I mean Craig Anderson.

Look at last night. Craig Anderson stopped 33 of 35 shots on goal. The two Washington goalies combined to stop 19 of 25 (with one empty-netter at the end of the game). So yes, "Mister" Anderson was the man last night. But let's review: Ottawa gave up 35 shots on goal. Unless the goalie is the man, the end result could have been much, much uglier.

With all respect to Alex "back from the goalie graveyard" Auld*, the problem in Ottawa has not yet settled down to something you could call weak goaltending. Even if Auld is only average, it is going to get ugly. If he's merely human, we'll probably get the opportunity to watch "Goalie Of The Future" Lehner get lit up like a pinball machine a couple of times again.

This team has got to play better in front of their goalies. Only then can we start appreciating** how good the goaltending we have actually is.

As far as the standings go, however, I feel pretty good. The only teams with genuine chances to catch Ottawa are Toronto, Winnipeg, and Washington, and I think the gap that Ottawa has now will permit them to retain a place in the playoffs by playing only .500 hockey through Anderson's absence. It pains me to say it, but Toronto isn't as bad as the last-10 makes them look, while I think Winnipeg's last-10 numbers of 5-4-1 are probably a bit above where they should be.

---
* = stupid nickname, I know, but what you going to do?

** = although it is nice to watch Toronto demonstrate that they are no better than Ottawa at refraining from fitting goalies under the bus at the first sign of trouble.

Fan Tab III

So I have to say, FanTab is pretty amazing as a website.

After my last post, and the re-tweeting of my pointer to them complaining, I got an email from one of the guys at FanTab. I sent him my tale of woe, and he figured out that my account was on hold. He undid the hold, and my access was immediately reinstated.

Gotta love that.

He asked for some feedback on the site, and so I thought I'd write up my thoughts, brief as they are, here.

I do enjoy playing with FanTab. I think the main problem is: there's no community surrounding the hockey clubs -- or at least, the hockey team I follow (and those other teams in the East that the Senators end up interacting with). Right now it is just me talking to myself. Which is kinda weird because I found the link to FanTab on another 'blog, and assumed that its presence meant that at least the site admins participated.

I notice that the published web gadget has changed -- it just shows the slider, rather than the graph. Personally I thought the graph was the hook, that you could see how confidence changed up and down over time. Having the slider under the graph that anyone could grab, and then get directed into creating a site account, was the gateway into getting a participant to sign up. (Disclaimer: I'm a sysadmin and so am unreasonably fixated on graphs.)

One thing which might be nice is a RSS feed for individual users, something I can throw into the planet. But that is just my desire to aggregate all my personal content generated into a single place.

Beyond that I think that one would have to be careful what one did to FanTab -- it would be too easy to add too many knobs and bells and whistles. You'd end up with people getting fixated on the mechanics of the thing, rather than just using it as a fun gauge to stimulate conversation.

Growing the community around the hockey teams, though, I'm not sure how to go about doing that. I'm not exactly an opinion leader here. (See also Sturgeon's Law.) A healthy community is key to getting, and keeping, things going, even if it does mean it will grow to the point that community management will become a problem. But that's the cart before the horse.

FanTab is fun, and I'll keep playing with it while it (and hockey) continues to be fun.

Anyway Rob, thanks for listening.

Fan Tab, Again

So irony of ironies, as soon as I mention Fan Tab, it takes a dump on me.

Not content to merely lock me out of my up-until-then-working account -- and I know the values I am logging in with were correct because A) LastPass had them saved and B) the web site had accepted them before -- it's crapped on my attempts to create a new account.

Memo to FanTab, if you are listening: something's broken. If your site is dumping users, no wonder nobody sticks with it.

Update, 11 February 2012: ..and then this happened:

RT @xdroop: @fan_tab : something's broken healthy-scratch.blogspot.com/2012/02/fan-ta…

— FanTab (@fantab) February 11, 2012

They re-tweeted my tweet telling them they had a problem, by pointing to a link that only criticized them. That's deeply ironic.

FanTab

Frankly that FanTab thing to the right there would be more fun if more people participated.

The way it is, it's just me talking to myself and moving a slider up and down.

Ladies, Gentlemen, and Leafs Fans...

Your most over-rated NHL player is: Mr Dion Phaneuf. Apparently as voted by his peers.

Man, that photo is priceless. I can't get enough of it.

The list is interesting, Dany Heatley is #5 (no argument here) and Kolvalchuk is #6.

Also interesting is the list of under-rated players, former Senator Chris Kelly is number 5 on that list.

(Title shamelessly ripped from The Battle Of Ontario.)

Realignment Dead?

The news on Friday night was brief -- a press release from the NHL saying that the NHLPA had exercised their privileges under the CBA to block the proposed realignment for next year.

In some ways this looks bad for hockey. The proposed realignment had much in favor for it. Making two seven-team divisions in the east and two eight-team divisions in the west made things as balanced as they could be, and left room for Phoenix to be dropped into either Markham or Quebec City, leaving fifteen teams in the east and the west.

Playoff wise there would still be an issue where teams in the short divisions would end up with a better chance of making post-season play, but if we did end up with a seven- and eight-team division in both the east and west, that could be mitigated by permitting the fifth-place team in the eight-team division to steal the fourth playoff slot from the smaller division if they had a better regular season record.

So, lots in favor of this plan.

Unfortunately the NHLPA decided to block the realignment, claiming that the league didn't address their concerns about travel or playoff eligibility. Which is probably their right, considering that the NHL has acknowledged that the alignment plan won't happen for next season.

For the NHLPA there are bigger concerns in play here. The league basically owned them through the lockout last time around, with the NHLPA getting only face-saving gains. The players don't want a repeat this time around, so want the realignment discussions to take place in the context of the collective bargaining agreement negotiations which will start shortly. The thinking is that realignment will have effects on the player's working conditions (with regard to travel) and so they want a say in the plan as it is put together.

Which means they have to reject this plan, even if it would have been good for the show.

I've long thought that the whole argument about cost-containment was a bit of a stupid issue for the owners to hang their hats on. Basically they ended up saying that they had no self-control and needed protection from themselves. Of course letting the owners spend the league into oblivion wasn't going to be in the show's long-term interest either, so as distasteful as it was, some kind of cost-containment was probably necessary.

But at the end of the day, the guys on the ice are what we all come to see, and making sure that they get a fair share of the revenues yielded is only right.

To do that, the NHLPA has to have respect around the bargaining table. And by blocking the alignment for next year, they are letting the league know that they are to be taken seriously.

I can get behind that.

I don't think this means the proposed realignment is permanently dead, it just won't happen next season. Some kind of realignment is necessary, and likely it will be worked out as part of the CBA negotiations.

Rule Enforcement

On Cheering For The Refs:

I never knew the rules. I used common sense. It’s really the only way to run a game. If officials called every penalty they saw, there would be no players on the ice and no one in the rink.
- Hall of Fame NHL Referee Bill Chadwick

This highlights the strength of, and the weakness in, the game of hockey as played in the NHL.

The problem is that many of the activities in hockey which are prohibited by the rule book turn out to be not that bad when they happen in moderation. The job of the referee is to then control that moderation and to not permit the game to turn into some kind of uncontrolled brawl. This puts the onus on the referee to use his judgement as to what constitutes an "ok" violation of the rules, and what is over the line. Different refs on different days will have different opinions as to whether a particular play is OK or not.

The problem is this variability, where certain plays are considered by the refs to be OK, but not considered OK by the players themselves. This leads directly to the problem of fighting, where players enforce their own ideas of what is acceptable or not by engaging in fights or after-the-whistle pushing and shoving -- even after perfectly legal plays being made.

The quote at the top of the article is true. If every rule infraction was called, there'd be a lot of games with nobody on the ice or perhaps the goalies playing tennis (at least until one let the puck slide into the trapezoid). But in the long run, if the rules were called, they wouldn't get violated.

The real question is, would the resulting game of hockey be worth watching?

I think it might be.