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League leading 10 shutouts. A minuscule goals against average of 1.89. A .931 save percentage. 35 wins. These are just a few of the reasons that Jonathan Quick will find himself a finalist for the Vezina Trophy, awarded annually to the National Hockey League’s best goaltender. While the yearly improvement and mere nomination for the Vezina might

(NOTE: I wrote this article for Crimespree Hockey earlier, cross posting it here) When the Los Angeles Kings acquired Jeff Carter from Columbus for defenseman Jack Johnson and a conditional first round pick, reaction among Kings’ fans was split. Carter’s proven scoring pedigree was something the Kings’ desperately needed, but Johnson was a Kings’ fan

Game changers. There are not many of them in the NHL, and they’re rarely available at the trade deadline. When news of Rick Nash’s availability via trade broke earlier this week, the first thing that popped into my head was “We HAVE to do this. We NEED this guy”. Nash is one of the NHL’s

Dump and chase. Cycle, cycle, cycle. Shot mentality. Compete. Heavy board play. These are all Staples of Kings’ coach Terry Murray’s vocabulary. On the bright side, Murray has taken the Kings’ to the playoffs the past two seasons. But his four seasons as head coach have been marked by long stretches of inconsistent, underachieving play.

A week or two ago I presented a prediction of the eastern conference using a purely statistics based analysis.  There were a number of limitations with the process which I outlined at the beginning of the post but I have fixed some of those so this is version 2.0 of the prediction algorithm.  Let me summarize [...]

Anyone who knows anything about hockey, save for Florida GM Dale Tallon it seems, immediately thought ‘bad contract’ when they heard that the Florida Panthers had signed Tomas Kopecky to a 4 year contract at $3M/year.  But how bad is that contract?  Well, lets take a look. Goal based stats (i.e. any stats that requite [...]

Yeah, I know, it’s a Van Hagar reference. The goal is to be able to use a Queen reference sometime in June, and the way things have gone through 13 games, that would be a plausible prediction to make. The haters can hate, and those who haven’t been paying attention will look at the NHL’s

When Brian Burke makes a trade more often than not he does it by targeting players and going hard after them until he gets them.  He did this with both Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf.  He identified them as players he needs to fill a hole on the roster and went hard after them.  If [...]

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As always, there is a lot of speculation as to what the Maple Leafs will do on July 1st when the NHL free agent season begins.  Some are suggesting they should go big or go home and do whatever it takes to sign Ilya Kovalchuk as the answer to their offensive woes while others believe [...]

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As always, there is a lot of speculation as to what the Maple Leafs will do on July 1st when the NHL free agent season begins.  Some are suggesting they should go big or go home and do whatever it takes to sign Ilya Kovalchuk as the answer to their offensive woes while others believe [...]

Read the rest of the article.