It's the little things that hurt the most

Today I kept trying to get some Canucks stats off NHL.com, but every time I tried nothing showed up. Turns out it was because I had it set for playoff stats instead of regular season. Sigh...

Stat of the day

So far this season only four Canucks players have played every game for the team. Daniel Sedin, Henrik Sedin, Markus Naslund and...Alex Burrows.

Team Values

Just for comparison's sake, here's the most recent Forbes financial data for the 4 major sports.

NFL:
Average team value: $957 million
Average team revenue: $204 million
Average team profit: $17.8 million

MLB:
Average team value: $431 million
Average team revenue: $170 million
Average team profit: $16.5 million

NBA:
Average team value: $372 million
Average team revenue: $119 million
Average team profit: $9.8 million

NHL:
Average team value: $200 million
Average team revenue: $81 million
Average team profit: $3.2 million

Supposedly for stocks the average price/earnings ratio is supposed to hover around 15. For the leagues mentioned here the team value/profit ratios are, respectively 53.7, 26.1, 37.9, 62.5. So either I'm missing something (that's probably it) or sports teams are grossly overvalued.

Short Messages Adressed to Various NHL Players Just in Case They Randomly Stumble Upon This Blog

Markus Naslund: Why do I get the feeling I'll be seeing you in a Ducks uniform next year?

Miika Kiprusoff: Thanks for killing my fantasy teams you Finnish son of a bitch.

Evgeni Nabokov: Are you aware that you've played every single minute for your team this year? That's quite impressive. Well done sir.

Derek Boogard: I know I'm a bit late on this, but "pinky and the two brains"? What does that even mean? Is it supposed to mean they're like pansies or something? Are you saying the Sedins are smarter than Naslund? I just want to know. Everyone else seems to get it but me. It makes me angry and suspicious. Please, I'm begging you, just tell me.

Chris Pronger: I don't care how many cups you win, you're still a douchebag.

Jerome Iginla: Allright, im finally convinced. I will no longer call you overrated, and will stop going out of my way to point out that you were actually born in Edmonton. Tell Kipper to go fuck himself.

George Parros: What's a moustache ride?

NHL Teams and Their Corresponding Teams in Other Sports

Did you ever notice how certain NHL teams seem to have really similar counterparts other sports? Here's some, and their corresponding teams in other leagues.

Ottawa Senators-Indianapolis Colts. Both are extremely good regular season teams defined by their lack of playoff sucess. Both play an offensive, run and gun style that doesn't necessarily translate well in the post season. Both get thoroughly disrespected for their inability to get it done in the playoffs. Yes, I know this comparison stopped applying after the Colts won, but before that the similarities were so strong that I'm still putting it up. Maybe this means good things are coming for the Sens.

NY Rangers-Washington Redskins. Both are teams whose money is their greatest curse. They keep spending more than anyone else in the league attempting to assemble teams entirely out of (usually overpriced) free agents. One of the funniest subplots in the first couple of years after the lockout was that the Rangers weren't able to spend twice as much as anyone else in the league anymore and, ironically enough, that caused them to actually be good for a couple of years. Of course this year they went back to their old ways, overpaying for Gomez and Drury, and look what happerned.

Toronto Maple Leafs-New York Yankees. Well, if the Leafs were actually good.

Detroit Red Wings-San Antonio Spurs. Closest comparison I could think of. Both are venerable teams whose players are older, on average, than almost anyone else in their league and both have been good for as long as anyone can remember. Every year people predict that they can't possibly continue being as good, but every year the drop-off fails to happern. Championships as well as regular season sucess, although neither team won enough in a row to be considered a true dynasty. Both teams remain good even after making large changes to their rosters.

New Jersey Devils-Atlanta Braves. Both teams were among the best in their respective leagues for most of the 90s and the early part of this decade. Both did it by playing a low-scoring, defensive style. Neither team was particularly exciting, and both had a lot less fan support that would be expected for teams that good. Both teams have fallen on hard times recently.

Anyone got more? I'll be adding to this list as I think of more.

Brief Moments in the History of the NHL

And now ladies and gentlemen, because theres nothing else to write about, I present to you the first of the soon to be critically acclaimed series: "Brief Moments in the History of the NHL"

SCENE: The summer of 2007. Brian Burke and Todd Bertuzzi's agent discussing an offer for Bertuzzi.

BURKE: We're willing to go as high as 4 mi-

BERTUZZI'S AGENT: We'll take it.

BURKE: You intrerupted me there. I was hoping to tell you more about the great playing conditions we'll have for Bert here in Anah-

BERTUZZI'S AGENT: That's no need, we'll take it.

BURKE: Don't you want to consult the other teams bidding for him?

BERTUZZI'S AGENT(constraining laughter):No, we'll take it.

BURKE: Allright, well come back in a couple of days and we should have the paperwork ready to sign.

BERTUZZI'S AGENT: Is it allright if we speed up the process? We'd like to get this finished by the end of the night if at all possible.

This has been a "Brief Moment in the History of the NHL".

Yet Another Random Thoughts Post

• Does anyone else get the impression that the whole point of those "after hours" interviews at the end of Hockey Night in Canada is to dig up as many embarrassing pieces of information from the past of the person being interviewed as possible? Last night it was Willie Mitchell and they had: a picture of him as a wrestler when he was like 11 years old, the revelation that he used to take figure skating (complete with his former instructor calling in), Roberto Luongo noting how he actually has more points than Mitchell right now (he picked up an assist on friday), and like 3 other things I can't recall off the top of my head. Why do the players even subject themselves to such shabby treatment?
  


• Speaking of Hockey Night in Canada, it's good to see Sean Burke working again.
  


• That shift the Sedins had midway through the second Edmonton game, where they kept the puck in the Edmonton zone for the entire powerplay before finally scoring after 2 mins and 15 seconds, was probably the coolest moment of the season so far.
  


• Is it just me or does Roberto Luongo look kind of tentative/twitchy in net? He's getting the job done for now, but something seemed a bit off about him the past two games. I blame Aaron Miller. And society. Always good to blame society.
  


• The strangest sub-plot of the season so far? Minnesota bringing all the players moms to their games. I could actually research why this happerned and maybe find out that it's a moving and heartwarming story. Or I could just point and laugh. Hmm.
  


• As of this writing, the Canucks have the 6th best powerplay in the league. By the way, the worst pp in the league, at a woeful 4%, is Edmonton. Considering a lot of people's reaction after they brought in Pitkanen, Souray and Tarnstrom was probably "Well, at least their powerplay will be good", this is not a good sign for them.
  


• I still expect great things from the LA Kings. (Hey cool that rhymes) Just wait till they get the kinks out. Every year there's one or two teams that go insane after the All-Star Break, and this year the Kings will be one of them. This will happern. It will. I keep telling myself this.
  


• One of my favourite things about the first few weeks of the season is the yearly ritual that is the "so and so is on pace for 234 goals right now " jokes. By the way, Brendan Morrison is on pace for a 50 goal season. Just saying.
  


• Everyone who took Markus Naslund in their pool is feeling pretty smart right now.
  


• Overall for some reason I just don't feel as good about this year's team as last years. Whenever they score too many goals they make me uncofortable. That's just not the Canuck way.
  


• By the way, did you hear that Minnesota's players brought all their moms to a game? HAHAHAAHAHA.

Random thoughts

Twenty-five posts in 2 and a half months isn't that good is it? Time for some filler.

If I ran the NHL my first act would be to decree that all rookies are to be reffered to only as noobs.

Second act: the game will now be played in a completely dark arena with a glow-in-the-dark puck.

As you may have heard, the New England Patriots got into a lot of shit this week for taping their opponents' signals from their own sideline. Why exactly is it illegal to do this? If they just had a guy with binoculars writing everything the other team did down instead of taping it would that be illegal too? How about just casually looking over at the other team's sidelines? Where do you draw the line?

It appears that the whole "Let's make a drinking-related joke whenever one of the Staal brothers comes up" thing has really taken off throughout the blogs/newspaper columns (I will never, ever in my life use the phrases "blogosphere" or "mainstream media"). My personal message to those making these jokes: Where the fuck were you people when Keith Tkachuck showed up for camp 30 pounds overweight a couple years ago? That was supposed to be a source of comedy gold for years and years. Instead here we are three years later and most people have forgotten that even happerned. There need to be some strict guidlines for what is and isn't made fun of so this kind of thing never happerns again.

Remember when I used to actually talk about the Canucks on this blog? Those were the days...

With that in mind, Luongo took a shot in the neck today at practice, and didn't come back to the ice. The guy needs to start wearing a neck protector. Remeber in Montreal last year when he spent the night in the hospital for the same reason? I know he finds them uncomfortable, but getting hit in a neck by a puck going 100 mph is uncomfortable too.

Also, get this, Sami Salo is injured. His wrist is apparently in a cast right now, and they don't know if it's broken or not. I know, I know, I never saw something like this coming either. It's like Jan Bulis trying a spin move. (I know I've used that before, I'm trying to get all the mileage I can out of this joke before people forget who he is) Also, sorry Sami, you're actually one of my favourite players, that's why I want to see you play a full season one of these years.

I think this post officially makes "random crap" the second most used tag on this blog. I'm trying to decide wether this is a good or a bad thing.

Shoot'Em Up Review

Hockey blog or not, just for the hell of it here's my review of Shoot'Em Up:

The depiction of violence on film presents a constant struggle for filmmakers. They must balance the audience's desire for more with the constraints of moderation and good taste, which prevent them from providing excessive displays of carnage in their films. Thankfully, the arrival of Shoot'Em Up has provided audiences, and indeed filmmakers the world over, with an excellent example of how to walk this fine line. Seldom has a film breached the subject of violence in such a nuanced and thoughtful manner, evidencing such grace and concern for its subtleties.

I'm just fucking with you, of course.

The only things you really need to know about this movie are that it's called Shoot'Em Up, and it's the most blatantly, wonderfully ridiculous thing to come out in a long, long time. This becomes readily apparent from the opening sequence: The movie opens with our hero "Mr. Smith" (like all good anti-heroes, we never know his real name), sitting on a bench on a deserted city street munching on a (soon to be very lethal) carrot. A preagnant woman then walks by in front of him, followed by an armed thug who chases her into an abandoned building screaming that he's going to kill her. Mr. Smith, completely unphased by this entire scene, lets out a "I gotta do this now?" sigh, and follows the armed thug into the building, quickly dispatching him (using that same carrot..don't ask) and saving the preagnant lady. At this point, around 20 anonymous henchemen inexplicably appear out of absolutely nowhere, guns ablazing. Mr. Smith, without missing a beat, as if this was the most natural thing in the world, gets to work dispatching them. Compounding his problems, the woman he saved decides to go into labor. So now Mr. Smith is heroically dispatching anonymous henchmen with one hand, while helping this woman give birth with the other. The baby is finally delivered, although his mother doesn't survive, and Mr. Smith spends the rest of the movie running and trying to protect him from yet more anonymous henchmen, led by the always enjoyable Paul Giamatti.

Yup, it's that ridiculous. Halfway through this first scene I actually turned to my friend and said "this has to be a dream sequence or something"'. I thought it was too over the top, and that the real movie would start as soon as this sequence was over, answering all our questions. Questions like: Why is Mr. Smith risking his life to save these this baby from all these henchmen without even pausing to consider it? Why doesn't he look even a bit surprised by everything that's going on? Where did he learn to dispatch anonymous henchmen so effieciently? Alas, these questions are left unanswered. The movie keeps right on going the way it began, with little time spent on such petty details as why exactly any of this is happerning. Oh there's a plot, of sorts, but the whole thing smacks of the writers going "OK this movie's going to have a lot of action scenes. It's going to start with a random guy deciding to be a hero and save a preagnant lady he doesn't even know. We'll figure out the rest as we go along."

Generally being light in the plot department isn't a fatal flaw for an action movie. They're action movies first and foremost, and that's fine. As long as the plots provide some explaination for why one group of guys is shooting at the other group of guys, there's usually no problem. But there's a line, damnit! And this movie crosses it. It doesn't as much ignore the idea of a plot as it actively disdains it. It's as if the filmmakers felt insulted by the fact that they had to fit all the awesome action scenes they came up with into some sort of story, and so spent as little time and energy on it as possible. Yeah, yeah, i know... "To hell with the plot, nobody's watching for that anyway". Even if they aren't, this move ignores its plot so thoroughly that it's actually hurt by its absence. The whole thing seems too sudden and unexplained, and the action scenes lose some of their entertainment value because you've always got that little voice in the back of your mind saying "wait, why is this stuff happerning?"

Now that we got that out of the way, though, the action sequences themselves are as ridiculous and entertaining as you'd expect. Aside from the aforementioned scene where our hero helps with the birth of a baby while partaking in a shootout, we also have what may be the first free-falling-from-a-plane shootout in movie history and a hilarious combination of a love scene and action scene(our hero's having such a good time that he continues his tyrst with his love interest even as armed henchmen burst into the room and he has to fight them off). The movie makes a point of trying to give each scene its own little twist to mix things up (sometimes our guy gets to set up traps for the anonymous henchmen, sometimes he's out of bullets so he has to throw carrots at them, etc.) keeping things fresher than they would otherwise be. Aside from the whole "Look, now he's shooting people while doing (such-and-such) at the same time" gimmick, and the general over-the-topness of everything, though, there's nothing really that groundbreaking about the way in which the action scenes are shot. You've seen most of this stuff before. Nonetheless, everything is so well executed, and done with such glee, that you can't help but be entertained even as you wonder what's going on.

As much as I hate this movie for bringing us closer to the day when Hollywood releases a movie that's literally two hours of people shooting at eachother without any context whatsoever, it was still a good time. As long as you go in knowing what you're getting yourself into, there's worse ways to spend two hours.

I demand a recount!

Well it seems I lost the canucks blogger contest thing. So instead of voting for me this round I'm gonna ask you all to vote against the guy that beat me. Vengeance will be mine.
At least this time around they're asking people to submit their email every time they vote (last round you could vote as many times as you wanted) therefore hopefully preventing a scandal of "vote for Rory"-like proportions.

UPDATE
Since I took the time to write it I might as well get something out of it so here's what my post would have been if I'd gone through:

I have to say that I came down with a bit of writer's block trying to come up with a post about the Canucks' prospects. So after seriously considering putting up a post titled "Harold Druken: The Man, The Legend"(I'm not joking), I've instead decided to rip off ESPN's Bill Simmons and write a post based on quotes from the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa and Bart are on different hockey teams. Why? Why the hell not. Each notable Canucks prospect gets a quote from the show and an explaination.

Homer [upon seeing Uter the German kid]: "Look, that kid's got bosoms! Who's got a wet towel?"
This one goes to Michael Grabner. Based on everything the Canucks are saying, Grabner better start putting on weight if he wants a shot at making the team. There's a small chance that the Canucks may know more about this stuff than me, but count me among the people who don't get the whole "this guy's too small to play, he's not getting ice time unless he bulks up" approach to prospects. It just seems like a lot of the time it does more harm than good.

Apu[after shooting a puck at Lisa]: "The goalie of my dreams!...Now let's try a hard one to make sure it wasn't a fluke."
He may not be a goalie but this quote goes to Janik Hansen. He played surprisingly well during his short call-up in the playoffs last year, but a lot of young players play above their normal level their first few games in the league purely because of the andrenaline (look at how Alex Edler's play worsened later into his stint with the team last year). Hopefully he gets more of a long-term shot this year and we find out if that was the real Janik Hansen we saw in the playoffs.

Homer: "Oh my God Marge. A penalty shot with only four seconds left. It's your child versus mine. The winner will be showered with praise. The loser will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore"
This one goes to Luc Bourdon and Alex Edler. Based on our current defence situation, there's only really room for one young defenceman to earn himself a regular spot on the team in the next couple of years. Wether they like it or not, those two have a bit of a competition on their hands. It would also make for a great running sub-plot for this season if these two played equally well and the town split into "pro-Edler" and "pro-Bourdon" camps that reularly duked it out on sports radio and message boards and such. Seriously, this needs to happern.

Marge: "I don't know how you two can sit here laughing at poor Lisa while she's out there probably scared to death."
Luc Bourdon gets himself an additional quote here. All reports during his 9-game stint at the start of last season indicated that the problem was not lack of talent but mental. And you know what, I actually feel pretty bad for him. It would probably suck to know that you've missed your chance chance at an NHL career not because you didn't have enough skill but because you couldn't get it together confidence-wise. Here's hoping that he pulls it together this year.

Milhouse[playing goalie for Apu's team]: "I could have been equipment manager, but noooooo."
To Cory Schneider. I don't know why it was just a great quote.

And now for another exciting edition of "people who look like things"

Staal brothers arrested for steroids, illegal dogfighting and tampering with the refereeing of NHL games

Just kidding, it was for getting rowdy at a bachelor party. Doesn't it make you love the NHL when this is the worst we can come up with? Seriously.

The full police report:

On 07/21/07 at approximately 12:30 a.m. the Cook County Sheriff's Office received several complaints in the area of Lutsen Resort and Sea Villas. All complaints were similar in nature, and reporting the same incident; a group of approximately 20 people screaming, yelling, and playing loud music.

At approximately 12:50 a.m. Cook County Sheriff's Office deputies arrived at the Lutsen Resort and Sea Villas. The suspects were warned multiple times to be quiet or they may be removed from the property, issued citations, arrested, and/or deported from the country.

At approximately 3:00 a.m. staff at Lutsen Resort and Sea Villas ordered the group to leave the property, as they were not obeying the warnings they had been given. Cook County Sheriff Deputies, a Minnesota State Patrol Trooper, and a United States Border Patrol agent assisted with the removal of the suspects.

After leaving the property, the group gathered on Highway 61 and began harassing passing motorists. At approximately 4:00 a.m. the suspects were placed under arrest for disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process. Some of the suspects fled in to the nearby woods.

I mean, really, we've all been there. Who hasn't put back a few with his buddies and decided "Hey, let's go harass some passing motorists". My favourite quote of this whole ordeal, though, comes from the Staals' agent. Apparently "this is what can happern when you get any group of 15-20 people together and there's loud noise." Oh no it's... loud noise. Loud noise make Staal want smash!

By the way here's the Staals' wildly dissapointing mug shots. Apparently these guys look clean cut even after a long night of drinking and harrassing motorists. Their faces aren't even red!!! God bless the NHL...



All in all, the older Staal spent a day in jail, his brother was released after a few hours, the Canes apparently decided to chalk this one up to "boys will be boys", and a good time was had by all. I would like to personally extend my thanks to the Staal brothers and suggest that all future NHL bachelor parties be held in July and August when there's not much else to write about.

(police report and mug shots shamelessly ripped off from Eric McErlan at AOL Fanhouse)