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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 [...]

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I am planning that over the course of the summer and into next season I will get back into analyzing hockey statistics more in depth again.  Over the past couple of seasons Corsi numbers have become much more prevalent so I thought I would start off by discussing what they are and my thoughts on them.
Corsi numbers [...]

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Their is not a huge list to chose from but in my mind these are the 3 best Centre’s in this years UFA class.
1. Patrick Marleau – Due to Sharks limited cap space the Sharks have and the playoff performance by Patrick Marleau the Sharks will have a very tough time retaining his services and he could find himself in the open market come July 1st. Patrick would be a great add for any team looking for a #1 Centre as he can skate, score and will take pride is his defensive game.
Approximate

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Their are many defenseman who I expect to break out next season, but these select few I expect to make the biggest jump from this season.
Erik Karlsson – Karlsson  had a terrible start to the season for the Ottawa Senators and found himself in the minors because of it. However, when he was down there he immensely improved his game on both sides of the ice but his offense is what stands out the most. He ended up the season with 26 points in 60 games but he scored most of his points

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