AJgoal

Well, there's also the fact that Briere and Giroux/Couturier are teammates, while Lemieux was the owner of the Pens and therefore Crosby's boss. If Giroux or Couturier moved in with Snider, it would have been concerning to me. Not so with another player, especially a team leader.

Playing Devil's advocate here cause I think the Atlantic and Central are the two toughest, but:

Maybe the Atlantic teams are doing so well because the other two divisions in the East are poor.

While I would love to see Read get the Calder, Landeskog should probably win it at this point. Not only is he leading in goals and points, he's come on at the right time (21 of his 48 points in the last two months) and has helped Colorado climb back into the Playoff picture.

He is second among rookies in +/- {Interesting note, Flyers have 4 of the top 10 - Couturier (3rd), Gustafsson (t-5th), Wellwood (7th in 17 games!), and Read (t-8th)}, plays in all situations, leads all rookie forwards in ice time, and is fourth among qualified rookies in points per game. The only thing that might propel Nugent-Hopkins over him is that he has one fewer point at this stage over 22 fewer games.

Read, unfortunately, just won't get the consideration he deserves, even though he's second in goals and 4th in points. Writers are going to forget that unlike the other three of the top four, Read spent the majority of the season on the third line - yet, despite this, he only has 5 points less than Landeskog in 5 fewer games. Henrique has 4 more points than him, but is playing between Parise and Kovalchuk. If he didn't have more points than Read, it would be surprising.

It's amazing, isn't it? Before the season started, I thought the team was a 4-6 seed, and maybe a round one win in the playoffs. But the way the new guys and kids are playing, it's not hard to see them competing for the cup. A bit of a long shot, maybe, but within the realm of possibility, especially if everyone maintains their current level of play and playoff Briere shows up. In a few years, if the team is held together, could be a really strong group.

@Bertmega - I like those lines, but you left Read out. Read-Couturier-Welly might make a heck of a fourth line. I'm not sure if Rinaldo brings enough to the table to bench Wellwood in favor of him at this point, and I'm actually pretty alright with Rinaldo's game.

@Jack - That's kind of what I was thinking. JVR did pretty well on Giroux's wing last year. Maybe take Bert's lines and put Voracek with Schenn, JVR with Giroux, and Jagr with Briere? The talent is definitely there, just need to tweak it to get the best out of every line.

@Bertmega. I somewhat agree with Briere. He's working hard, getting to and controlling the puck, but he's not finishing. He's been getting helpers, but it seems they're more "luck" (bad word for it, but the best I can come up with) than due to chemistry with any particular player like he had with Leino and Hartnell in 2010.

This is not to say I think he's playing poorly, just that he seems like he's not really clicking with anyone on the team, except maybe Jagr when they're together in 4-on-4 situations. And I'm loathe to split up Jagr and Giroux. I think Danny needs a banger on his line to give him some space, but he maybe needs someone to control the puck like Leino did to give him a little extra time to get to open areas when he doesn't have the puck as well? I dunno.

They need to get 6 points vs. the Rags and Pens to have a shot. I don't have time to look at the Pens and Rangers' schedules, But with both ahead of the Flyers in the standings and the Pens having a game in hand, strength of schedule is going to be important. Looking at the schedule, I'd say the Flyers have a good chance to go 7-3 or 8-2.

I saved the best for last: As well as Bryzgalov is playing right now, it is still hard to imagine him being productive until he's 39. Even if he's great until he's 37, he'll still have a couple of years left at that point and his cap hit will be the same then as it is now. It is also hard to believe that the going rate for a back up goaltender in 6 years will be $6MM so on the surface, this signing doesn't make any sense, even though we're talking about a goaltender. The only plausible explanation I come up with is that Flyers sign these contracts with the CBA in mind: they figure they'll have a buy out opportunity every 5 years. They sign now and figure they can clean it up later if things don't work out. Put another way, it is another method of gaming the cap and spending above it. This is great until the small market teams revolt and punish teams like the Flyers by refusing to permit one time buy outs.

There's another out in the CBA which was brought up in the offseason, that is often overlooked: The cap floor. Now, let's assume that Bryzgalov is an average goaltender at 37. His contract is actually quite tradeable. Why? Say you're Columbus, or Florida. A team with an internal budget that doesn't come close to the cap. You can pick up Bryzgalov for an actual monetary cost of 2.25 million dollars, but he gives you 5.67 million, more than double his actual salary, towards the cap floor. That can be invaluable to a franchise with a thin wallet.

The CBA expires on September 15. It's expected that as a part of the new CBA, the owners will want to roll back players' salary percentages.

Jmdodgesrt4, on Mar 11, 2012 - 04:27 PM, said:

Next year as it stands now the cap is expected to rise to 72 mil from 64 right now. Then expected to fall close to 20 percent once the new cba is signed. Questions or comments.

20 percent of 72 million is roughly 14 million, or a drop to 58 million. Since the new CBA would have to be signed this offseason, it creates a cap rollercoaster. Spending to the cap this offseason is not advisable.

Edit: To clarify, the drop from 72 to 58 is expected to be THIS summer. That is, it's expected to go up to 72 until the CBA expires on September 15, then drop to whatever the new number is once the new CBA goes into effect.

Good news for us, Snider likes to spend money..

Not really. Say Holmgren spends to the 72 million dollar offseason cap. If the cap then falls to 58 million, the Flyers would be forced to shed a ton of salary, and not necesarily in players they want to get rid of.

This is problematic since the CBA expires with only a couple weeks to go until the season starts. Teams may put off signing free agents until the new cap is in place, but those players will miss training camp and most of the offseason, unless they come in on "tryout" contracts. The best solution may be to keep the cap for the season, then lower it next offseason, allowing teams to buy out players at that time. Small market teams may not like it very much, but I can see the way the cap is anticipated to behave this summer playing hell with just about everyone.

It's a function of the current CBA. The big jump is probably at least partially related to the loss of Atlanta in favor of Winnipeg. However, the prevailing conventional wisdom is that the owners will want to cut back on the percantage that the players get, and decrease the cap in the new CBA.

Classic Philly-Boston game on the comcast network. Macleish just scored to make it 1-0.

One of the other benchmarks used for charging that seems to have been forgotten in recent years was always the number of strides taken into a hit. That is, if you kept skating into a hit, rather than gliding and letting your momentum carry you into it, it was a charge. The definition of charging has always been fairly open to interpretation.

Honestly, I thought he'd do a lot better than he did this season. But he was a victim of the play of the rooks as much as anything else. And going to Carolina isn't going to be really good for anyone's point totals.

@ Aziz - everyone's allowed to make a mistake every once in a while. Even if they are pretty big. -ducks-

Guesswork. It's a crappy way to do it, and I'm sure they'll push to get it installed sooner rather than later. Just not sure how far apart the groups are. I doubt anyone wants a stoppage like a few years ago.

@Vanflyer:

The cap is expected to rise over the summer, HOWEVER, it's expected to go way down once the new CBA is in place. I posted a link about a month ago about how teams are trying to come up with "internal budgets" for this offseason to try to compensate for not knowing what the cap will be once the CBA goes into effect.

Edit:

""Temporary salary cap

In what has been a vastly under-the-radar story, a buzz item among NHL GMs these days is how they’re going to approach this summer with what will be a higher but temporary salary cap number.

Confused?

The collective bargaining agreement doesn’t expire until Sept. 15 at midnight ET.

But NHL teams have to conduct business under this current CBA until then. As per the current system, the salary cap is once again expected to rise as of June 30 from the current $64.3 million upper limit to as high as $68 million to $69 million, according to guesstimates from some team executives.

That new cap number will exist only from June 30 to whenever a new CBA comes into effect.

The obvious issue is that most teams believe the cap will go down in the new CBA as owners try to scale back the players’ percentage of revenues (the players will have a mighty say in that, however).

So, you could have a situation where the cap is around $69 million for the summer and then much lower come the fall with a new CBA (again, the players will have a say in that).

This will force teams to come up with their own internal cap number based solely on guesswork this summer, because the last thing a team wants is to have a $69 million payroll on Aug. 30 and then be told it needs to shed a chunk of it come the new CBA in the fall.

Either way, just another wrinkle for this summer’s free-agent market."

right. my point is that "in contention" doesn't mean a whole lot, as regards the games being particularly difficult or not. toronto is one of the teams in contention, and i expect the flyer to light them up. just saying that the fact most of the games are againt playoff aspirants doesn't really scare me all that much. there are some pretty crappy teams that fit that description.

See: Florida Panthers?

The play of the new folks. Bundy and Saunders trotted out a stat during the Washington game that nearly 50% of the Flyers goals have been scored by first-time Flyers. Not necessarily rookies, just guys who haven't played in a game for the team before this year.

60 minutes in, still waiting. Great game.

Seems doubtful, based on the article. I'd want to have him back at least a week before, preferably two, to get his conditioning back. But if he sits out 10 more games, it may work in our favor.

No, he probably would have waffleboarded his face.

Briere's comments indicated that there was a problem with Bryzgalov that required the intervention of the team's leadership group. He wasn't being a good teammate. While Briere suggested there had been improvement, it is reasonable to wonder if this incident represents a relapse. If he slammed his stick because he was mad about the turnover, that doesn't qualify as a healthy display of emotion. He could take some lessons from Ron Hextall in that regard.

And crack one of the Wings behind the knees, instead of wasting his energy hitting the ice?

@aziz - Exactly. Players won't protect themselves if they don't have to. And I hate the calls the way they've become, but if you're going to call them, you have to call them all the time. Because the hitters won't learn not to make that hit if they're not penalized. At the same time, the hittees are learning that the hitter can't make that hit. So when a hitter and a hittee meet who have learned the opposite lesson, someone's career will end.

And as for the explanation, how can the head be the primary point of contact, yet it still be a "full body on body hit?"

Here's the problem though. I think a lot of us would be fine with the hit...If the NHL hadn't suspended other players for similar and even less violent hits that hit the head. But the NHL has put out that if the head is the primary point of impact, it doesn't matter if the cause is the hitter leaping into the guy's head, throwing an elbow at it, the hittee ducking his head into the hit, or the hitter being a foot taller than the person being hit, making it impossible NOT to hit him in the head. If that's the way the NHL wants to treat hits to the head, they need to suspend Kronwall. Period. If they don't want to, then don't suspend him. But don't suspend other players for doing the same thing. As before, it's a problem of consistency.

@canoli - I'm with you on players needing to protect themselves. Jake shouldn't have lowered his head with Kronwall that close. But like I said, it's the treatment of prior, similar hits by other players that have set the bar for this. If the league's not going to be consistent on head hits, then they shouldn't have added a rule to protect players from head hits.