JR Ewing

One offer which has been made public, at any rate. JR

I always watched the Olympic tournament before NHL players were involved, but it's gotten so much better that it's not even close. JR

I'd love that. HIs skating really helps him, and it creates utter panic from opposing defensemen, since there's not a ton of them who can fend off that kind of speed. What struck me was the collective "Wow!" from the Toronto crowd after the first goal. Serious wheels. There's plenty of guys that fast without the puck, not a whole lot of them can do it with the puck and get away a shot like that. JR

Most interesting is that Brown negotiated the contract himself: no player agent. According to articles I've found around on the internets, the average commission is 4%, so he saved himself a little under $2M. Not so bad. Oh, and the term is almost assuredly too long for the Kings, but GMs will always do this: 8 years is probably longer than you'll have the job, so the contract will most likely be the next guy's problem. JR

Great book, though it's been over 20 years since I've read it... Guess it's time to do that again. JR

From the standpoint of seeing the absolute best hockey, I badly want NHL players at the Olympics. I'm not bothered by the pro/amateur thing, as the Games largely lost that amateur thing a very long time ago. Would that it were true, but it's not. JR

After the Leafs paid Grabovski to leave, I thought the Wings would be right after him, especially with losing Filppula. Certainly, the Wings have never had a bias against this type of player. Must have wanted more than they could pay. JR

I made sure to get tickets to Oilers games whenever the Pens came to town. I was already spoiled by seeing a lot of high end talent close up, but Mario blew me away every time. What I could never get over was how soft his hands were. It was really something: you couldn't hear the puck hit his stick, no matter how hard the pass. That wasn't picked up on TV or by any mircrophones, and you had to be among the lucky who personally attended games in which he played to really catch something like that. Astonishing hockey player. JR

Taylor Hall? -Three-zone hockey player who, from day one, had the puck moving north. CorsiRel has only gotten better every year: +10 (21st), +15 (12th), +20(6th) from 2011 thru this past year. -Has been playing tough competition since about game 10 of his career and was able to keep his head above water immediately. -This past season he really pulled in on the more reckless side of his behaviour, spent less time spinning around on his butt and belly after trying to do too much. -Backs off defenders and creates huge amounts of room for his linemates, and he really used it this year, when he made a purposeful point at trying to fill out his passing game. Went from 34 assists per 82 GP up to 62. Has really made strides from being that kid who tried to do too much on his own. -Lost in the shuffle of him finishing 9th in NHL scoring was that he finished 2nd in the West. 22 years old, and was the second best scorer in his league. -Underused. Was neck and neck with Toews for Pts/60: 3.15 (6th NHL, 2nd West), and with tougher minutes than many around him. -If he was playing for the Leafs, Ranger, Bruins, etc, we'd be hearing about him ALL THE TIME. Wonderful young player. JR

I remember this one. Short of kicking Mario in the nuts, Fortier tried everything he could do to stop him. JR

I'd like it to be addressed, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. We've all been saying this for at least ten years. JR

I think that Eakins seems like the right guy to bring in, and now we have to wait for the returns. What we know about him: -The Marlies experienced big improvements in W/L, goal differential, and shot differential. -The Marlies got WAY better at even strength. The Oilers only line with real success in this regard is whichever one Taylor Hall is playing one. -Eakins developed a large number of young players during his time as Marlies coach. -Quite a large number of Leafs fans with brains are upset that he's gone. I like that, too. I don't know what it is, but I get the warm and fuzzies when I read an NHL coach who has this kind of approach. No offense against RFK, but I think he got the job based, more than a little bit, on his abilities as a motivational speaker and not so much on his abilities to run the Xs-and-Os of a hockey club. JR

I think the Leafs are going to be regretting that deal a few years in, when they see so much money going towards a player who won't really score that much. Not saying Clarkson's a bad player, but he's going to be making more than Taylor Hall in a couple of years, and I know who I (and almost anybody else) would rather have for that kind of dough. I have to admit that I don't really get it either. He was compeltely mismanaged last year in Toronto, had a good year, and his name was still dragged in the mud. Quality hockey player who routinely has the puck moving the right way and under difficult circumstances. My guess is that if were willing to sign a 1-year, $2MM deal, he'd already be signed. He's worth more than that, I think, but GMs don't seem to see it that way. Probably a combination of his lack of size being held against him (which I don't get; he's good despite not being big) and the idea of being bad in the locker room (which I can't personally talk about at all) JR

Jeez, I thought the Oilers were pretty actively on free agent day, actually. They identified weaknesses (top 4 defense, top tier 3rd line tough minutes centre, and backup goaltender) and aggressively went after them. They've since added a good top 6 forward and more depth to their defense than the club has seen since Opening Day 2007. Big game hunting and overpaying for Clarkson (which they attempted to do) doesn't really help them very much anyway. Seems like the furthest thing from accepting losing. I'll admit that I wanted nothing to do with Hordichuk (can't take or make a pass), but am happy with the additions you mention for this year. The issue with the team is depth, and they've gone some ways to address it. I would DEFINITELY be happier if they improved: 3LW 4C 4RW I would be a much happier man. -I don't want Ryan Jones anywhere near tough minutes or tough zone starts -Getting an actual NHL centreman to play 4th line minutes would be good, as I'm not convinced Lander is that guy. -I want nothing to do with Mike Brown. I was pretty happy when the trade for Cory Schneider didn't pan out. Dubnyk is, at worst, a league average goalie, and not really their biggest fish to fry. JR

Yeah, it's just about always the case, and for good reason. I wasn't totally stunned (or unhappy) when Krueger was let go, for the very reason you mention. Still, it stood in contrast to what MacTavish had publicly just a couple of weeks earlier: I'm guessing that after MacTavish interviewed Eakins for the associate position, he came away very impressed by him and decided to change course, because what happened is pretty far from how the week started out. Just days before he was let go, Krueger was involved in finding his associate. JR

You've known me long enough to figure I'm not opposed to this at all. The first ten years are what makes a player's real HOF case. The rest of his caeer are just padding the numbers. JR

How about Dan Cleary? Had the 2nd lowest zone starts on DET, was a possession positive player last year, has an established history of playing tough comp, and could probably be had on the cheap. No. Stay away. I want him in EDM. JR

As ever, I see it as only being reasonable to suggest that, at some point, goalie pads exceeded their use for protection and entered the realm of performance enhancement. A change would good so long as it doesn't impact player safety. JR

And here everybody was saying that the Oilers would have to pay a whack of Horcoff's salary just to find a team to take him. JR

Old thread, but you can see why MacTavish made the change, even after saying that he didn't think Krueger was a big problem. There's things that RFK did that I was happy with. He didn't over-start Nik Khabibulin the way that Tom Renney did. That alone was nice to see. I think his downfall came from certain key things: a] RFK refused to line match, giving us situations where his worst players would often find themselves on the ice against the Datsyuk-types. b] Gave 4th line players like Mike Brown, Ben Eager and Lennart Petrell way too many minutes. c] Gave those guys extremely tough Zone Starts. d] Tended to put them out after TV timeouts or right after Oilers PP events, when they'd be facing the best opposition scorers. The biggest mistake seems to have been in employing a defensive system which left the Oilers constantly defending odd-man situations where the wingers were forced to only play certain areas. I'm not saying that those things necessarily cost him his job, but all of us who watched Craig MacTavish coach know there isn't a way in hell that he would have made those decisions. After awhile, if you're looking for an associate coach who sees the game your way, then you might as well just put him in as head coach if you think he's better than the guy you already have. JR

How I see it (in point form) -Paajarvi is a decent possession player (started well last year, and slipped as the year went on, but wasn't bad at all), but Perron is better at this, has been for longer, and has a much better established level of offense. Additionally, Perron did it playing the 4th toughest minutes among forwards, with middling zone starts. Good player. -My concern with Paajarvi was always the offense. He showed signs, last year, of being willing to move into tough scoring areas. Hopefully for his sake he continues to, because he has kind of a muffin of a shot. -David Perron is a better hockey player than Magnus Paajarvi. Right now, and most likely for the foreseeable future. The fact is that, unless you've had a good offensive year by 21, you're most likely never going to have a big offensive year. Players don't usually just "figure out" how to score points. -The draft pick represents about a 25% chance to get a real NHL player, who would be well down the road even if he does work out. Don't throw them away, but I have no problem with using them to improve your team right now. Right now is what the Oilers need. The clock (Taylor Hall's 6 year deal) is ticking as we speak. -I'd have preferred it if the Oilers signed Grabovski, played him at 2C, moved Gagner to 2LW, and played PRV at 3LW. He's a natural fit there, and I have problems with making Ryan Jones a tough minute winger. -It's easy to look at PRV and say he turned the corner offensively, but look at that shooting percentage: 12%, which is twice his career average coming into last season. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect him to repeat that performance, particularly when he was never a real shooter at any level. The old adage stands that the team who got the best player wins, and my honest opinion is that it was the Oilers who got that player here. JR

I only wish the Oilers would sign him to a contract... In a better world, they'd have signed Grabovski, moved Sam Gagner to LW, and not traded PRV to St. Louis... What happened with Grabovski is pretty silly, imo. He took the tough draws in his own end (36.7% zone start) against the toughs, with weak teammates, and STILL had the puck moving the right way the majority of the time; but is then chided for seeing his scoring numbers take a hit. Kadri had a very nice season, but he also did it by standing on Grabovski's shoulders: somebody had to take all of the draws in their own end against the toughs and move the puck out of the Leafs end so the kid could take the majority of the offensive zone faceoffs and get the best kick at the can, offensively. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's smart to shelter kids when there's another who can do it and do it well. The problem is that Grabovski ended up being treated like a disappointment, Bozak like a hero, and Kadri like a wunderkind. The other thing which grabs me is a table of the 18 players who played at least 200 minutes with Bozak or Grabovski: 17 of the 18 had a better GF/GA% with Grabovski than with Bozak, and all 18 had a better CorsiFor% with Grabovski than with Bozak. I have no idea what Grabovski wants for money, but it seems odd that not a single GM has been able to sign him. He's a good player run off by a team that really made a mistake. JR

So long as we choose one answer to each of the questions, we run into this problem. If we arrive at relative rankings for each question, we have a way of sorting through issues like the one you raise. It doesn't even have to be complex. You could ask 1. Which goalie had the best career numbers? answer: A, B, C, D & E A gets 5 points, B gets 4, C gets 3... You get the idea. You move on to the next question, do the same thing and move on to the next until you've asked all of the relevant questions which come to mind. The guy with the most points in the aggregate is probably your best guy, and so on. It allows you to wrangle topics like this without too much fuss. Or, another different way could be the way I always do things like Hall of Fame topics: a Keltner List re-done for hockey and, in this case, specifically for goaltending: 1. Was he ever regarded as the best player in hockey while he played? 2. Was he ever regarded as the best goalie while he played? 3. Did he have an impact on a number of playoff runs? 4. Was he good enough to play a lot after he passed his prime? And so on. You can gather a set of players you feel are qualified to belong in a topic like this, and ask those questions and more, and you'll probably do a really fair job of coming up with solid answers. JR

I think that consistency over a long time is A yardstick, but not necessarily THE yardstick. When it comes to something like "who are the 5 best goalies ever?", I think the best approach is one which looks at the question from as many angles as possible. We could ask people which of two men is bigger. One person could say that man #1 is bigger because he's taller. Another person could say that #2 is bigger because he's heavier. Yet another person could point back at man #1 and say that he's biggest because he's wider around the middle (AKA fat). You could give any of those answers, and with respect to which aspect you're speaking of, you'd be correct. The problem, of course, is that you could be incorrect about the others. For my part, I've always favored an approach which attempts to answer big questions like "Who are your top 5 goalies ever?" by breaking it down into a number of smaller questions. Who had the best career value? Who had the best peak value? Who had the best collection of prime years? Who had the best playoff runs? And so on and so on. There's a lot of questions we could ask, and the more questions we ask which are relevant, the closer we get to a better answer. Asking one of them only gets us one step closer to the answer, imho. JR

I disagree, but that's fine. I just always have a hard time getting over: a] Dryden himself said that his function wasn't so much to win as not to lose. ****ling point, for sure., and the most minor of my three here. b] The Habs continued to have an excellent record after Dryden left, even though the goaltending duties fell to Bunny Larocque and Denis Herron. The bigger issue, imo, is that the Islanders entered their start of their dynasty. c] Competitive balance was so screwed up in the 1970s (thanks to expansion but also the league handing the reigns to Sam Pollock, who created rules to benefit the Habs more than anybody else) that it's not always easy to know how to look at some of the players. JR