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.

Well I'll be Jiggered

The Forechecker has taken a look at the goalies doing better when they face more shots issue, and it seems like there isn't too much of an overall trend to speak of. Three other guys (Roloson, Kolzig and Khabibulin) show increases in save percentage when they face more shots, but that's it. Marty Turco shows a downward trend.

Interestingly enough, two years ago when he was in Florida, Luongo showed no increase in his save percentage as he faced more shots. The trend only started occuring when he joined the Canucks. His backups so far on the Canucks also show the same increase when facing more shots. Sabourin last year had a 0.931 save percentage in games where he faced 25 or more shots, and a 0.872 in games where he faced less than 25. Sanford so far this year: 0.927 when facing 25 or more, 0.819 when facing less than 25. So maybe it's the team not the goalie.

You know what's stupid?

Complaining about the quality of play in the all-star game. It's the fucking all-star game! It's not supposed to be real hockey. It's supposed to be a fun little divergence for the ordinary and nothing more. Who cares if there's no hitting? You get 1000 games a year that do have hitting. Do you really need one more that badly? I don't get where this weird consensus comes from that the all-star game is essentially a waste of time because it's not played the same way every single other game of the season is played. Guess what guys, if it was just another game it would be called regular season game number 382 and it would feature two random teams instead of the best players from each team in the league. It's not a regular game. It's a showcase of league talent and it's about everyone getting together and celebrating hockey and all that b.s. So just sit back and enjoy it for what it is.

There, I feel better now.

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?

Something Strange

I don't really know how to preface this right so I'll just say it. If you divide up Luongo's stats last season between games where he faced less than 25 shots and games where he faced more than 25 shots you get something kind of weird:

His save% in games where he faced less than 25 shots: 0.888
His save% in games where he faced more than 25 shots: 0.931

What the fuck, huh? This is probably too big a difference to attribute to chance. It seems like Louongo actually plays better the more shots he faces(In fact, if you just look at games where he faced 40 shots or more, his save% is an even higher 0.941) This is a bit counter-intuitive. I think a lot of people might have guessed that he'd do better with a lighter workload. Then again, we've all heard announcers say that goalies play better when they get a lot of work.

What I really want to know is wether this is just a fluke for Luongo, or wether it's a more general principle that applies to all goalies. If it does actually apply to all goalies, then it's pretty significant. Based on this, teams may want to rethink the belief that getting as many shots on net as possible is a good thing, for example. The problem's that I lack the necessary Excel/data mining skills to approach this in a systematic manner, so I really can't prove anything conclusively. If anyone who does wants to give it a shot, please, be my guest.

Another thing I should mention is that even if it's established that goalies generally have higher save percentages in games where they face a lot of shots, this doesn't prove that facing more shots actually causes them to play better. There's also the possibility that games where they face a lot of shots are fundamentally different(more shots=lower shot quality, perhaps?), and goalies don't actually do better in these games because they face a lot of shots, but for other reasons(again, shot quality). To test which of these posibilities is true, it might be good to divide shots faced by goalies between "early game shots" and "late game shots" and compare their save % between those two shot types(i.e. compare goalies save% for the first 25 shots they faced in every game to their save % in the shots faced after shot 25) . If it's facing lots of shots that makes goalies better, then the "late game shot" save percentage should be significantly higher. Again, I lack the skills to do this myself, but it might be a nice little diversion for someone who knows what they're doing. (Thinking about it more, I guess there's a good chance that someone has already done this and I'm just wasting everyone's time. If anyone's seen anything like this done on another site please let me know in the comments.)

Canucks Points Per 60 Mins Stats

I really, really wish there was some place to find these easily on the net. Anyway, here they are, for 43 games into the season. By the way don't take the pp/60 numbers for Isbister, Cooke or the other guys who don't get a lot of pp time too seriously because of the small sample size.

How not to fix the NHL

Recently the Vancouver Sun ran a column called "12 Ways to Fix the NHL" which listed...12 ways to fix the NHL. Well, it was actually more of a re-hashing of the same old problems that always get thrown around, but anyway, the point is that I'm getting sick of a lot of these complaints about the NHL being repeated over and over. The league definetly has some real problems, but they're not necessarily the ones that get brought up every day in the newspapers and the talk shows. So, every once in a while I'm going to discuss one of these long-hailed suggestions/complaints and point out what I think is wrong with it. (Take that, media establishment!). For today we're gonna start with:

Sugestion #1: Getting rid of the instigator. I don't have anything against fighting and I don't think the league should be trying to discourage it. My problem with this one is the argument that the instigator rule is the reason players don't respect each other anymore, and if we'd just let goons police the game things would magically return to the good old days when nobody ever got hurt playing hockey.

First of all, I doubt there was ever a period in NHL history when the players respected each other to the degree that it's claimed they did. I'm not really sure enforcers ever laid off Bobby Orr or whoever just because he was Bobby Orr. That just smacks of "back in my day...." type bullshit to me. Even if there was smewhat more respect among players back in the day than now, I'm willng to bet it wasn't because of the firm handed yet effective policing of the game by the good squad, but because there were fewer teams, fewer players, and so you ran into the same faces a lot more often back then than you do now.

Second of all, if someone goes after your best player and you want to punish him for it, there's a lot better ways to do it than fighting. It's not necessarily that easy to get someone into a fight. Even without the instigator, guys are still gonna be able to pull a Matt Cooke and avoid fights when challenged. Even if you do manage to get a player into a fight, he can just drop to the ice after one hit and let the linesman clean things up. If you really want to go after someone, a good hit is both more readily available and can do a lot more damadge. It doesn't even have to be a dirty hit. You can lay someone out pretty good with a nice clean check. Just ask Scott Stevens. So if players want to "police the game" there's still ways to do it. (Bonus side point: a hit's a lot more likely to leave a player injured than a fight, but by discouraging fights as a method of retaliation you're encouraging players to retaliate with hits instead. So the instigator rule actually encourages injuries.)

Third of all, why is "letting the players police the game" even considred a good idea? Is it because that's how it allegedly was in the old days, and therefore it must by definition be a better way to do things? Because in the old days we also had goalies playing without facemasks, and I'm not sure that was a good idea. I guess you could argue letting the players sort things out is supposed to reduce violence in the game by threatening players who commit violent acts with the possibility that violence will be done to them in return. At the same time, though, isn't allowing players to violently punish each other for their transgressions as likely to increase violence by creating a never ending cycle of "im fighting you as revenge for that time you fought me as revenge for fighting you"-type things. There's a plausible argument to be made for either one of these interpretations, but everyone out there seems to take the first side of the argument and not even consider the second.

Canucks 21 Game Mark Awards

Biggest Positive Surprise: Alex Burrows. Alex Frigging Burrows. The whole "he's a gritty, hard working player" thing gets thrown around a lot in the NHL. A lot of the time players getting this label don't work any harder than anyone else, but have no other discernible qualities so that's the only nice thing the announcers can think of to say about them. Alex Burrows is not one of those players. Alex Burrows genuinely works harder than everyone else, and that's the only reason he has an NHL career right now. I mean seriously, when Dave Nonis spent the off-season signing grinder/energy type players like he was Brian Burke, leaving the Canucks with approximately 23423 options on the fourth line, would you have predicted that Alex Burrows, who went undrafted and had all of 3 goals and 9 points last season, would have played every single game for the team this season and made a meaningful contribution? That's exactly what he's done, matching his goal total from last season (including 2 game winners) and putting up 8 points. So, you know, well done there.

Biggest Negative Surprise: Kevin Bieksa. Even before the injury. Nothing else to say, really.

Least Surprising Moment of the Season Award:Sami Salo's injury. It's just getting silly at this point. You'd think that eventually, just through the sheer force of probabilities, he'd have a season where he doesn't get injured, the same way normal players have seasons where they do get injured once in a while. Salo's had maybe two seasons without a major injury. In fact here's his games played every for every season of his career before this one: 61, 37, 31, 66, 79, 74, 59, 67. This isn't necessarily meant to be an insult, you can't really blame a guy for getting injured, and he doesn't seem like the type of guy who's always trying to sit games for every little thing. Still, it's just strange to see. And by strange I mean horribly frustrating.

The Ryan Shannon Memorial "Help Me I'm Stuck in the Minors Award"-The first iteration of this award goes to...Ryan Shannon. Two goals in three games! I think whatever point about defensive discipline the coaches were trying to make has been made already. Can we let him back up now? Hell, play him as a defenceman if we've got more room there. You can say it's some kind of ironic punishment for his defensive failings. Have I mentioned he scored two goals in three games?

The "Good Stuff's Happerning, Let's Not Screw it up by Talking About it Award". This award goes to Luc Bourdon. Playing not horribly now that no one's actually paying any attention to him. Let's try to keep it that way. You hear that, Tony Gallagher? That's not Luc Bourdon. That's Ryan Shannon in disguise.

Rookie of the Year Award: Alex Edler. I actually think it's gonna be a sad day when all our defencemen are healed up and back at it, because a lot of the guys who've stepped up right now are going to have to get sent down. Is there any team in the league that has more depth on defense than the Canucks right now? Every move right down to Mike Weaver has worked out well. Good times.

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.

Well, shit

On October 26, with the Canucks floundering, I claimed on this site that "they don't have it this year" and kind of predicted the season was done. Since then they've gone 6-2-1 and looked solid. With that in mind I would like to take this opportunity to make a few aditional predictions.

• We're not going to win the division
• Dane Cook will have a long, distinguished movie career
• The Middle East conflict will remain unsolved for decades to come
• I will not hook up with Jessica Alba

Here's hoping my predictive powers remain the same.