comfortfablyHABS

This topic is very entertaining, some of you come here to talk about racism and the elephant in the room. Yet I see comments that clearly correlate conservatives (not the party please) to racism. Comments such as Canada is not racist because "We are talking about (...) A liberal, progressive country." have as much prejudice as any possible racism bias in the NHL. Many abolitionists around the world were conservatives. Anyway, this is not about politics.. Back to the topic. I think the idea of subliminal racism can be partially blamed for PK's treatment by the media in general. IMO, an overwhelming majority of the NHL people (players, owners and so forth) are not racist but, some of them, there must be something working in the back of their minds that might trigger some sort of racial bias. I personally struggled to accept this idea of subliminal racism but after seeing all the praises that Doughty gets and the repeating mantra that Subban is high risk, high reward leaves me no room to conclude otherwise. I also believe that the fact that Subban is outspoken, he will generate more discussion around him as dlbalr said. I think these two things together help to explain much of the discussion around Subban.

That's it guys. No matter how hard I try to stay positive, I think we are done for the series. Looking at the positive side, we had an amazing run... This team will get better and better. Tinordi is coming and so Pateryn. We hope next season is Chucky breakout season.

Sorry for the pessimistic energy but I guess this series is over with Price hurt. There is no confirmation on his knee injury but the silent is a strong indication that he is hurt. Without Price, we have no chance. The Boston series drained the team and it seems that we have achieved enough. I really hope I am wrong tho.Looking at my collegue's profile picture, the only thing I can think of is that maybe Pope Francis can help us out! Let us pray...

I just hope Price is not hurt. It is hard not to believe the boys will be more focused next game. However, history is past and nothing else, clearly does not affect the outcome of this game. We were stunned by the Rangers. Besides the emotional side today, I guess some changes must be made and MT will do it for sure. He knows this is a completely different type of game. Make this team more skilled and faster and the Ranger will have a lot of work.

Better bring Galchenyuk whenever he is ready. We are not playing the bruins anymore. This is skill, playmaking and speed.

I don't know about you guys but the rags were our toughest opponent in the eastern conference during the regular season in my opinion. I was surprised to see people giving the edge to the habs... This is gonna be tough. Better win game two...

Kinda disappointed with the game today. It seems like our boys were not focused, the habs x bruins series sucked up a lot of energy. Let's wait for game 2, we must get game 2 and go to MSG and win. We can definitely win at MSG. I feel we have a better roster and maybe shuffle the lines, bring Galchenyuk because he's needed for the style of play the Rangers play.

Really awful game. We were playing better until that bogus call on Callahan, after that things changed. The team looked dead. our first line didn't show up. Only Price showed up tonight. Murray will get a couple games... If we want to beat Tampa in the first round, we better make sure they don't get any space to feel confident.. We have to put them in their place from the very get go otherwise we will have an ottawa-like disappointment...

Im so proud of my team. These guys deserve many kudos!

I don't care if we get a point. We should have won this game in regulation if the refs were a bit more reasonable. The Bruins were done in the third period before those ridiculous calls...

Joke, I want to see our players more pissed off. The refs are robbing us, someone needs to approach the refs and put them in their place. Assholes.

These refs must be joking!

We are going to have to suck it up for a while until Beaulieu, Tinordi and Patteryn(hopefully) mature. We have to be patient, no choice.

Terrible period. I felt we're in serious trouble since the first face off. The players seem to be distracted, they are not trying hard enough. And MT should have done the OBVIOUS, put gally - pleks - vanek and briere - eller - gionta. Do the obvious!

Man, Subban is such a gem. What a great player...

Please, someone trade Eller... No matter what he does, he's just not good enough. Get rid of him before it is too late...

Respecting those who've been watching Hockey for many years, IMO this Olympic team was one of the most dominant groups in team sports' history. Coming from a totally different background, my views might have a vanishingly small value. But I must say this team is up there with the Basketball Dream Team in the Summer Olympics in 92 and the Brazilian national soccer team of 1958 and 1970. And I am not comparing on how skilled Team Canada was - I'm pretty confident Canada assembled many highly, comparable skilled groups before. But, oh boy, how they dominated the competition... It was just complete , crunching domination, all the time. As a group, they played as good as a group could do. I've always felt kinda sad because I didn't see these great squads play in loco. But finally I got to see one of the great ones live.

IMO, Eller needs to be traded ASAP before it is too late. People are saying that he would be traded in a low, completely disagree. Due to his age and a general perspective among hockey people the he will be a good 2nd liner or so, I think we can get more than we should for Eller TODAY. Will Eller be a useful NHLer? Absolutely YES. But the question is: as of now, is he graded above his real value? I think so! For this reason, it would be a great opportunity to get something more valuable than his intrinsic value. Because we are not contenders, Bergevin should take advantage on this situation. Ship Eller plus someone else and get some real value for the coming years.

OK, Diaz moved (finally). Now I am waiting for Eller. Please, pleeaase Bergevin, move Eller before everyone else realizes he is not what they think he is. Eller will never complete his fate, he's so overvalued and I like that. If we trade him today, we'll probably get more than we should. And GMs like that. Bourque is another one that needs to be moved. However, I must point out, all the GMs know exactly what Bourque can produce se if we move him, we won't likely get anything special. Eller+Bourque for an interesting scorer would seem fine to me.

You absolutely right about Bergevin. He's playing safe as of now. But being safe won't get you too far. There is something though, if he is a GM that likes to build a contender through drafting, we'll have to sit and wait for a while to rate him as a great GM or an average one.

I said maybe it is the other way around or both corsi/winnings are produced by other factors. It is not hard to imagine that. But to make a case that Corsi may be a product of a successful team and not the other way around think about it: if this was true, all I would have to do as a coach is to say "look, whenever you guys have a chance, just shoot, this will increase the Corsi and our likelihood to win will increase!". Does it make sense? I don't think so. About the graph you've said. I can assure you, this is one of the most common mistakes people make when analyzing "stats". This is Stats 101. But Stats 101 cannot deal with the complexity of hockey. Things can trend together and have no causality at all. There are so many examples out there but one that is very well known is the ice cream causing drowning example. In the beginning of the past century, some stats "experts" came with this conclusion after extensively observation (the rest is from wikipedia in quote marks): "- As ice cream sales increase, the rate of drowning deaths increases sharply. - Therefore, ice cream consumption causes drowning. The aforementioned example fails to recognize the importance of time and temperature in relationship to ice cream sales. Ice cream is sold during the hot summer months at a much greater rate than during colder times, and it is during these hot summer months that people are more likely to engage in activities involving water, such as swimming. The increased drowning deaths are simply caused by more exposure to water-based activities, not ice cream. The stated conclusion is false." See? Now put this in a graph and you'll see them trending together, but this does not mean anything. Worse than that, make a regression with this two variables and the R-squared will be huge. The same thing is happening in these NHL stats blogs. People are starting to predict based on on or two factors that may be not causing one or the other at all. They make nice regressions, put some graphs, show the R-squared (goodness of fit). This is just so bad. But you believe me if you want, bud. I might be wrong but with the current set of information I can read, I don't think so. As Corsi and other stats get more sophisticated, as you said, this will only demand more sophisticated models. Again, because hockey is very dynamic, it is almost impossible to enlist all the factors that affect a play, a game or a successful team. I see guys modifying Corsis and Fenwicks, trying to clean from the noise. But still, this will only provide ONE part of the puzzle. Basketball is easier to analyze than Hockey too ( not as easy as baseball). Basketball is a fast paced game where points are scored frequently. This makes much easier to analyze since the whole goal of the game is to see whoever finish with the most. But Hockey is a long game and points are SCARCE. It is a bit like soccer (I believe soccer is even harder because there are only 3 substitutions, "2 periods" for an extensive period of time, small sample (only a couple games per tournament if compared to Hockey... anyway, the randomness is huge). Because to score is so hard in hockey and the dynamics are huge, I can assure that hockey is behind basketball in stats term because it is much harder.

I'm a stats guy, I really enjoy the subject but I have a lot of problems with Fenwick/Corsi and how people handle them. To single out one aspect and to go all the way as the reason why a team is successful or not is recipe for disaster (in stats analysis). People rarely think about that correlation does not mean causation (in fact, it rarely does). Any serious statistic work will be very careful to handle these two words and they are very often separated by many paragraphs. I believe most of the successful teams have a higher corsi/fenwick as a consequence not as cause per se. Corsi might be a product of a successful team and not the other way around. It could also be the case that something (or many) else produces successful teams and corsi. So let's be careful with the stats here. I've been reading many NHL-stats blogs and I must say that most of the things they discuss there, from a stat point of view, are meaningless. There are guys that run simple regressions OLS and think they can explain many things with it. 99% of the people that deal with regression think that R-squared is a good indicator of explanation which is often not. There's a reason why many GMs are not using advanced stats yet. The reason is that the number crunchers are not quite there yet. Of course it's not entirely their fault. Hockey is so much harder to analyze from a statistic point of view compared to Baseball. Baseball is really, really, easy because is a static sport whereas hockey is dynamic. Actions taken by each player affect the dynamics of the game and this makes really difficult to work with. I personally believe that people should forget about this moneyball idea and realize that the task is huge. A good way to start is to actually try to capture small things in the aspect of the game. Instead of trying to explain why a team is successful or not, why not starting at a small scale? With that said, I must emphasize that it's a hard task to do but one day I think we'll have some real progress.

I think Briere was neutered before coming to MTL.

Weber is a beast on the ice. Defensively, better than Subban. But PK gets the best grade overall in my view.

I don't think race is an issue, not at all. In the past, maybe not so distant, for sure it was. But today, no. I believe the opposite is more likely to happen. We have an army of political correctness in the media. It is far easier to push for a roster that reflects diversity than the other way around.