THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I agree wholeheartedly.
My only concern was that the Pens were going to let the goal take them out of the game mentally, because they seemed a little more tentative after Detroit cut their lead to one, but fortunately they held it together for the rest of the game.

I’ve said it before, but I can’t wait for triple-header hockey with the 2010 Olympics.  They don’t d-ck around there.  Commercial breaks are very small.  You get a whole game in, in 2 hours.  So, you can watch 3 games in 6 hours.  That’s like a regular ESPN Yanks/Sox game.

My brother and I were waiting for a replay of Fleury’s jaw-dropping save at the ~12 minute mark of the third. There wasn’t another stoppage until the clock read 6:37. Six minutes of continuous action, with fast skating, crisp passing, great saves, and a 15-second video game shift from Brooks Orpik during which I think he leveled every Red Wing that took the ice. Amazing.

I have zero emotional attachment to either team, but that game was incredible. I hope the talent on display in this series can further deter other GMs from trying to copy the Ducks, because this is hockey at its best.

I had the same feeling about waiting (and waiting and waiting) for the Fleury save because I couldn’t believe it.

And Versus (which has done such a 180 from when they first came out to this year), waited until a stoppage in play, and, instead of cutting to commercial, realized we ALL wanted to see that replay once before cutting away… and they did.  Huge kudos to Versus for understanding their target audience.

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I think they hired an ex-CBC Hockey Night In Canada producer as a consultant, and if that’s the case, it completely shows.

Compare that to the All-Star skills competition fiasco, which was the worst-directed hockey I’ve ever seen.  MTV was probably in charge of that one.

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I also have no emotional attachment to either team.  I just want all the star players to excel.  Clutching and grabbing, which was so prevalent years ago, is virtually gone from the game today.  It’s the equivalent of having eliminated the IBB if Bonds were came to bat in the 2002 playoffs.  Exposing your players to the action, and not the tactics of trying to smother the best players from the game, is what sports is all about.

Crosby, Malkin, Lidston, Zetterberg (man he’s good), Fleury, Osgood (man, whodathunk)… that’s what we want to see.

We were thinking it would be funny if, after the ~6 minutes of continuous play, they reviewed the save and saw the puck cross the line, thereby negating all the action afterward. Couldn’t believe Fleury got his stick over there in time. Shades of Ryan Miller in Game 5 against Ottawa last May.

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Versus now is light years ahead of what it was, and what I feared it would continue to be. I’m still not a big fan of Joe Beninati saying “manpower advantage” ten times a game during the season, but the production is excellent, and they completely won me over when they started showing the CBC broadcast of playoff games. Like you said, they really do understand their market. It’s not big, but it’s demanding, and they’ve pulled through with flying colors.

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I wouldn’t go so far as to say that clutch-n-grab is “virtually gone from the game today” - I really couldn’t stomach a lot of the Western Conference games during the year for that very reason - but it’s definitely been reduced, and here in the finals it’s almost non-existent. Right now it’s all flow and all talent, and what do you know? It’s a lot more fun to watch. The passes. Oh, the passes.

Good point about the potential callback.  The most time I’ve seen on an actual callback was some 90 seconds, between the Devils and Rangers last year.  If you look at the PBP of that game, you’ll see they didn’t completely fix it, so you have 22 guys on the ice at some point (since the guys who actually played shouldn’t have been credited with playing because the clock was set back).  Calling back 6 minutes would have been… wow.

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The clutch/grab I was refering mostly for the playoffs.  It’s a different game in the playoffs, as teams sit their goons. 

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People may be surprised to learn that the goal review is done in the operations office in Toronto.  They are the ones who get the call, not like what the NFL does (making the ump huddle under that blanket).  There’s a handful of guys in there, so you are getting several camera angles and several people all looking at the goal, and they review every single one.

Some baseball fans are so scared of trying something new (I blame James Earl Jones).  If you were to create hockey from scratch, I don’t know that I’d be able to change many rules that would have much impact (I’d get rid of allowing the p.k. team in icing the puck) to the pace of the game or exposing the talented players from playing (I’d limit the number of goons/fights). 

In baseball, if starting from scratch, there’s alot of pace issues I’ve got.  A 9-inning game should be played in 2 hours, 2.5 tops.  I remember it was a big treat when I was a kid about seeing a double-header.  We’d look for those.  Now?  The idea of a double-header is nauseating.

Funny you mention this.  I live in Boston, and Celtics fever is taking over.  They were in the midst of a crucial game 5 in the Eastern Finals, and I flipped to the hockey game with about 15:00 left in the third period.  Now I should say, I have played hockey all my life and normally do enjoy watching.

But that was insane.

I never went back to basketball, and just stuck with the hockey game.  I actually hit Record on my DVR around 10:00 (it preserves what you’ve watched so far as well) so that I could show it to my non-hockey-loving friends and show them how awesome the game is.  Unbelievable.

Closest thing to that action was a few years ago in college, when the national championship game was a 1-0 game late in the third, and the team that was ahead got two penalties in the final minutes, leading to a 90-second SIX-ON-THREE with the national championship on the line.  I would have paid $10,000 to play that shift.

Incidentally, the goalie that lost that 1-0 national championship (Jimmy Howard) is currently a Red Wing. Of sorts.