Stanley Cup Finals Prediction 2010!

The Chicago Blackhawks will win.

Stop it. Just Stop it.

- photoshop courtesy of Ben.

What's even more amazing (perhaps a better word would be "dumbfounding") than the cancer and madness that is the London Games Mascots is the utterly nonsensical bullshit being proffered in the wake of their recent unveiling.

"The games have got a few stupendous assets – the mascot, tickets, the volunteers, the torch relay – and you have got to really use those to bring home your key messages," said Locog's chief executive, Paul Deighton.

"If you link them together you begin to have a really powerful story that people will respond to."

This is an almost meaningless jumble of buzzwords. Or, to be more specific, it's a packaging of disparate things in order to equate the terrible (the mascots) with the good (volunteers!). Meaning, if you link them together, you can slide out of the press conference relatively unscathed.

The real key message was delivered by the eloquent first commenter to the linked story -

I think I speak for everyone when I say:

Jesus Fucking Christ

Indeed.

Ville Leino and Why Chance and Circumstance Matter

Up until, well...this past week or so, Ville Leino had been seen as a bust. An overaged free agent from the Finnish elite league signed by Detroit, Leino spent a season putting up just okay results in the AHL before making the leap for the injury plagued parent club this year. He didn't do much. All of his stats were mediocre or worse across the board (11 points in 55 games between DEt and PHI) . He looked for all the world like a replacement level NHLer and not much else.

Lo and behold, he's a better than PPG player in the post season! What happened? Well, for one, his PP ice time per game has increased from 29 seconds in the regular season to just under 3 minutes in the playoffs. He's also probably most coddled Flyer at even strength - in the first 9 games played, the former healthy scratch has started more than 70% of his shifts has a zone start ratio of 70+%(!). Compare that to Mike Richards at 49% and poor ol' Blair Betts at 25%.

Of course, the real culprit behind his explosion is the bounces. His PDO, before tonight's performance, was a shade above 106. I'm sure that'll go up after this evening. (PDO during the regular season = 96.4).

The truth of Ville Leino is probably somewhere in between the two extremes of his regular season and playoff results. Luckily for the Flyers, Leino is signed through next season so they won't be forced to overpay for his string of luck and unrealistically easy circumstances come July.

Down to the Semis - Picking Winners 2010

The wacky East keeps making me look like a fool while the steady West, a genius. So after going 0 for 2 and 2 for 2, here are my picks for the East and West finals.

East

MTL vs PHI

I don't know why I bother, but I'm going to pick against the Canadiens again. Nothing I've seen out of them makes me think they're good enough to sustain this level of finishing/stopping, although I said the same thing about the Avs in the regular season and they stuck around for months, so who knows.

It's also immensely ironic to see the Flyers make it to the third round (in history making fashion, no less) with the likes of Michael Leighton and Brian Boucher in net. Obviously the Habs have the edge in goal with Halak playing out of his mind, but that's been true of Flyers other two opponents and it hasn't mattered much*.

Philadelphia in 7

*related - Aside from Halak, none of the NHL's top goalies made it into the third round. Rask, Brodeur, Kipper, Hiller, Lundqvist, Anderson, Miller, Luongo, Bryzgalov...all done for the year.

West

CHI vs SJS

The winner of this series will be the unofficial champion before the finals even start in my opinion. Both are quality teams with Chicago having the edge in depth at both forward and defense. As such, I'm picking them to win both this round and the finals over whatever sucker makes it out of the East.

Chicago in 6.

A Note on Scoring Chances

I have one more Flames game left to score before collating the material, which will be done at some point this summer. Frankly, I'm saving the work for the mid-summer doldrums when nothing in particular is happening. At that point, we'll be able to do all the fun correlating stuff and see how the Flames season shook our in aggregate and on an individual level.

If anyone has a question or suggestion for the scoring chance data, feel free to email me.

Exposing Nonsense

Historically, I have been a Doug Wilson fan. He seemed to understand the importance of chemistry and the need to acquire players who value the crest on the front of their sweater more than the name on the back.

...

For a group that appears to need more leadership, grit and mental toughness how is Heatley the answer?

Most of all, it's validation of their resiliency, after bounding back from the Boyle Goal in Round 1 and then from the 7-1 curb-stomping in Game 4 against Detroit. The team has more backbone than every previous San Jose playoff team combined, minus the one with Irbe between the irons.

The first bit is from Jay Feaster, when he condemned the Heatley trade last summer. The second bit is Greg Wyshynski talking about the Sharks after their relatively easy dismissal of the Detroit Red Wings in round two.

The Feaster claims struck me as ridiculous the day they were written and it's somewhat fortunate that the Sharks post-season success has fully exposed them as such some eight months later.

My purpose, however, isn't (merely) to write a mocking send-up of a former NHL general manager who should know better. It's to once again highlight the scourge of the fundamental attribution error in hockey writing and analysis.

It's actually quite remarkable the degree to which both fans and analysts alike attribute success or failure in sports to the supposed psychological qualities or failings of a given player (or group of players). The overarching assumption I suppose is "winners win" and, of course, it's corollary, "losers lose". Which is why clubs that defy expectations in either direction are often met with well-worn but plausible sounding bromides about how they "wanted it more" or "have lost confidence in X" or "don't have enough character in the dressing room" etc etc. What's especially amusing about these stories is they are often proffered by people who have little to no idea about the inner workings of the dressing room in question. Just take a stroll through your local messageboard and marvel at the number of fans who seem to know who is (or isn't) inspiring confidence, being passionate about winning, (insert cliche about winners and losers here), despite never even once passing within spitting distance of the guys whose character they are praising or condemning.

In one way, this speaks to the intractability of an observers expectations wherein the disparity of an assumed level of performance and the actual level is explained away by some innate quality of the actor(s) involved. It couldn't be that one misjudged the potential for success or failure of a team or that chance skewed the results to "n" degree - it's that all the guys in the room came together and played for each other. Or there was more (or less) confidence suddenly. Also, passion, heart, grit. And so forth.

Of course, what's obviously clear over a long enough time line is that folks are just chasing results around and attaching labels to them in the aftermath. Joe Thornton is a poor leader and a choke artist right up until the point where he isn't. Pavel Datsyuk was a soft, fancy-pants Euro dangler a few short years ago. A guy who could put up points in the regular season but disappeared in the play-offs. Dany Heatley's selfishness was going to sink the San Jose dressing room. And the Colorado Avalanche were a plucky group of fresh-faced, exuberant underdogs who battled against all the odds - until they started losing, of course:

I don’t think this team wants it bad enough. That may sound harsh, but I think it’s the truth. I just don’t think they have the drive to be, nor the confidence that they are a playoff team anymore.

That's Adrian Dater back on April 1, when the percentages were finally starting to regress to the mean for Colorado.

We still don't fully have a handle on what moderates success in the NHL. A large portion of it is talent of the skaters. Another is coaching. Then there's quality of goaltending, injuries, organizational depth, officiating, quality of conference/division, difficulty of schedule and, of course, that fickle mistress, variance. If there's a thimble sized amount of explanatory power left over for "leadership, grit, poise, pluckiness, passion" etc. after all that, well...I'd be surprised.

Housekeeping

For those wondering what happened to the scoring chances project, it's still ongoing. I have one more game from the regular season to count before collating all the data, which will be done at some point this summer.

As for my season reviews, they've all appeared at Flamesnation. I looked at Darryl Sutter, Brent Sutter and had a three part series on Jarome Iginla (1, 2, 3).

I still have stuff appearing at rototimes.com once a week and Hockey's Future every so often as well.

Some other things may be in the offering this summer. Announcements will be made if they come to pass.