Eyes Water

Pittsburgh and Sidney Crosby conspired to make eyes water today as they came to terms on a 12-year, $104.4 million dollar contract extension.  This sees the Penguin superstar on the books somewhere until 2024, when he'll be 36.

For Pittsburgh, this is possibly a can't lose proposition:

• There's always the chance that the CBA being negotiated this summer will exclude ridiculous, cap-circumventing terms like this, with some kind of retroactive clauses to get owners out of the deep holes they happily dug (see also: Luongo, Kovalchuk, et al);
• If the CBA deals with both the salary cap and floor, there's a good chance that it will include a haircut on existing contracts the way the previous did -- my guess is that the haircut is priced into this contract and the cap hit for Crosby will be less than what's indicated here;
•  If Crosby plays well, it keeps the asset safe in Pittsburgh;
• If Crosby doesn't play well, he'll probably be on the injury reserve with another concussion or similar condition -- where the team doesn't have to pay his salary

The possibility that he stays healthy but doesn't play well doesn't seem likely with this player.

Personally though if I was a GM, I wouldn't be signing such contracts before I knew what the CBA was going to do them.  Similarly, if I was a player, I'd want to know if I needed to price in a haircut into my contract.

Isn't hockey fun!

Colloquialisms

I hate to go all grammar nazi on you, but dammit:

Perhaps most importantly, he's been nominated five times and won once, giving him the history that voters sometimes expect from winners. He's "paid his due," so to speak.

No, it isn't so to speak. You would speak: "paid his dues".

Cue the oxford dictionary: Phrases: pay one's dues

• fulfill one’s obligations: he had paid his dues to society for his previous convictions
• experience difficulties before achieving success: this drummer has paid his dues with the best

You'd say you'd paid him his due if you wanted to use the singular; but that means a payment to him, not from.

I know, it is hilarious that this bugs me, of all people, but it does.

Cool Story, Bro

So unless you've been dead, you've probably both A) have seen this and B) know the back-story behind it:

Basically Brian Burke used the above quote to justify not selling* the Maple Leaf's future in a bid to buy additional short-term talent in order to make the playoffs in the East this year.  And as we all know, the 8th seeded Los Angeles Kings are now Your Stanley Cup Champions For 2012.

And probably for the next three years as the Maple Leafs continue their graceful slide in irrelevance, this image will be dragged out as a rebuttal to any hint of patience or conservative trading.

What those in Toronto tend to overlook are the differences between the 2011-2012 Kings and the 2011-2012 Maple Leafs.

One of these teams has a recent track record of success in the regular season.  One of these teams has a roster which had people complaining all year that they were underachieving.  And one of these teams had the fundamentals in place so that it could all come together with a bit of luck to win it all.

The Leafs are not the one team.  The Leaf's "success" in the regular season was A) a symptom of other teams not taking them seriously; and B) over in February.  Not even firing their coach could turn the team around from its nose-dive.  Their success was due to hard work and luck, but not due to any qualities one could point to as them actually being an underachieving hockey team.  No, it was pretty obvious that they were overachievers.  And while it isn't impossible that they might have continued to overachieve, they would have required sharply more luck than... well... they'd need a lot.

If you have an underachieving team that has responded positively to a coaching change, then trading away some future for the present might make sense.  But the Leafs are, let's be honest here, a couple of years away from being any kind of serious contender -- longer if Mr. Burke is shown the door over the next six months, which isn't an impossibility itself.

But to claim that all you need to do is get in -- and then hope for luck -- is stupid.

Get in with a legitimate chance to win.  Don't lunge and then hope.

---
* = what little was left of

How To Tell It Is Summer

Slow days make for silly hockey article titles:

Now while they both might be true, their juxtaposition is rather amusing to me.

Bad Officiating

Can I get a hell yes?

NHL Officials Need to be More Accountable

As fans, we should care less about this or that call against our team and instead unite in our anger about the standards of accountability and consistency in NHL officiating in general. These guys can and should be a lot better.

Consorting With The Enemy

In which I help out some Leafs fans.

What happened was that they had a server problem and lost a bunch of posts. I read their site using RSS through Google Reader, and one of the "features" of Google Reader is that it remembers posts that it has seen before in the feed -- even if those posts are no longer in the feed. So the take-away from this is: Google Reader remembers posts which are deleted.

This could be considered an epic backup backup strategy, in that your reader pool is now acting as a backup of your blog posts -- but it means if you retract something, the retraction doesn't make it to Google Reader.  I have observed this before, where people have published posts and then removed them (either because they wanted to delay the posting or because they had second thoughts) but I still got to read them.

Moral of the story: think carefully before you hit on your blog post.  The internet remembers.

Er, no, I mean the moral of this story is: your backups are good, right?

Parity

Backhand Shelf's Ellen Etchingham muses on what the drive towards parity means for the NHL:

Parity favors some elements of hockey over others. It does not, for example, favor the work of general management. The more all teams are inevitably equal, the less influence good management has on outcomes. Even now, the best GM in the NHL using all the most sophisticated technologies and advanced metrics available has only a small edge of the competition. The more parity increases, the less far behind the stupid franchises can fall, and an incompetent manager riding a lucky season has more and more of a chance of snatching the Cup away from the shrewd builder of a vastly superior team.

Super.