It’s not often that I run a bunch of sports links in one of my linkdumps but it’s not often that a new NHL season starts. It only comes around once per year and it gets pretty close to a national festival in Canada. Basically, it’s the Canadian equivalent to the start of the NFL or EPL seasons.
So let’s start this post off with a good Canadian girl. Here’s Nina Dobrev.
The story of the 2014 NHL offseason was the analytics boom. While fancy stats are common place in baseball and pretty common in basketball and soccer, hockey lagged behind those sports until now. (MacLean’s) I told my Leafs loving associates about things like Corsi, Fenwick and PDO last year and they ignored me right until the point where the Leafs crashed out of playoff contention and realized I explained what would happen all along.
The NHL’s move to Sportsnet has seen many changes. The biggest change is in the host’s chair which see Strombo replace Ron MacLean whose contentious relationship with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman has seen him pushed aside. (The Globe and Mail)
For all the talk that fighting needs to be legislated out of hockey, it appears that the three minutes of ice time per game enforcer may be going the way of the dodo. Less than half the teams will open with an enforcer on their 23-man rosters. (CBC Sports)
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Since the introduction of the fantasy draft format in the NHL All-Star Game, we’ve been having fun with the format by drafting our own teams. Let’s cap off our coverage with a statistical analysis of who would have won if our two teams had actually faced off. Our readers were pretty split as to whether Jackie or Steve had selected the superior group of All-Stars. But let’s dissect the teams with some fancy maths to find out whose team was most likely to win the big game.
The Lowdown 