The Bruins' Magic Number is 9

The Bruins have a magic number of 9 to clinch a playoff spot and 20 to clinch the division.

Games coming up:

71	Sat, Mar 19, 2011	@	Toronto Maple Leafs	.500
72	Tue, Mar 22, 2011	v	New Jersey Devils	.500
73	Thu, Mar 24, 2011	v	Montreal Canadiens	.599
74	Sat, Mar 26, 2011	v	New York Rangers	.549
75	Sun, Mar 27, 2011	@	Philadelphia Flyers	.671
76	Tue, Mar 29, 2011	v	Chicago Blackhawks	.592
77	Thu, Mar 31, 2011	v	Toronto Maple Leafs	.500
78	Sat, Apr 2, 2011	v	Atlanta Thrashers	.507
79	Mon, Apr 4, 2011	@	New York Rangers	.549
80	Wed, Apr 6, 2011	v	New York Islanders	.458
81	Sat, Apr 9, 2011	v	Ottawa Senators	.430
82	Sun, Apr 10, 2011	@	New Jersey Devils	.500

Seems simple enough, right? Right. A combined points percentage of .532 or so for upcoming opponents. Not bad but beatable.

Well except for the Devils x2, Flyers, Blackhawk, and maybe Rangers. I'm pretty sure they'll make it. It's time to bring up Horton and Campbell, who combined for 0 playoff games with Florida, and said this about it back in June when they came to the Bruins:

"I watched the playoffs pretty closely and it's not fun ending your season in April," Campbell said. "I follow it closely and you kind of get a taste of what it's like to play, but it's not close to being in one of those arenas."

"As a player, that's the best part of playing hockey, getting to the playoffs," Horton said. "You don't make them for seven years, it's too long and it can't happen. The Bruins organization [missing the playoffs] just doesn't happen and it's exciting for me to come and be a part of it.

(Both from Joe MacDonald's piece for ESPN back then.)

A quick look back over the last 2 years, the Bruins' 88 points are 11 points behind 08-09. With 2 more wins, the Bruins will pass last year's point total. They're on pace for over 100 points, to boot.

Anyhow, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. There's little better than live playoff hockey.

GO BRUINS!

L10: Game 41-50 (2-7-1) NEW STRATEGY: 2 LOTTERY PICKS

(From sports club stats)

Yeah, we're not doing so hot right now. Let's jump right in because we all have days of watching sports ahead of us. First of all, the Bruins are currently out of the playoffs in terms of total points but if they can win the next three they'll be back to tied with Ottawa. By point percentage, they're in 7th in the east right now. I'm not entertaining dreams of catching Buffalo at this point, especially since we don't have games in hand on them and they're 13 points ahead. Jerks. Ryan Miller better bring his A+ game to Vancouver next month, is all I'm saying.

The losses we've had have been bad losses and as a result I know I've been much more interested in football and the Wild. Whatever, this is part of being a fan. Watching all your hopes and dreams slip away. Like that graph up there, which is the likelihood of the Bruins making the playoffs. Even if they do, I don't see them making it past the first round unless things really turn around. Then again who thought the Carolina Hurricanes would beat two of the best teams in the league last year and end up in the Conference Finals? Not I. Not I. Fuck those guys anyways.

17.18%

That's our powerplay. Not terrible, not great, 20th in the league. Not as good as it was last time around, not as bad as the start of the year. 1718 didn't have a whole lot going on, but Blackbeard the pirate was riding around, and that's pretty slick. Way to go, 1718!

87.71%

PK percentage. The Bruins are back on top of that stat, after dropping to second for a couple days this past week. Well, we're still good at SOMETHING....

126

Goals for AND goals against. The Bruins have scored the fewest goals in the whole league, and the only teams that have fewer goals against are Miller's Buffalo, Brodeur's Jersey, Luongo's Vancouver, and Keith/Seabrook's Chicago. Fortunately if they win today they'll tie or pass the next-lowest team in goals for (Carolina)

4

The number of players that have played in every game for Boston this year: Zdeno Chara, Blake Wheeler, Michael Ryder, and Mark Recchi. Three of these guys follow Patrice in most points for the Bruins. Ryder has 20 points, good for 9th.

42

Mark Recchi's age on February 1st. Mark Recchi is one of the better things going for the Bruins right now. In the last game when the top line was Paille-Bergeron-Recchi that was Claude saying to the rest of the players "These guys. These are the ones I want on the ice more than the rest of you shlubs." Recchi has said that this is his last year.

Fun fact: Mark Recchi is from Kamloops, where Blogger/Leafs beat writer James Mirtle is also from.

TORONTO PICK WATCH

Cam Fowler, according to this mock draft.

Toronto? Still bad. Not as bad as Carolina and Edmonton, but still pretty damn bad. 3rd place in the lottery standings right now. Here's a fun little piece by Ryan Classic about Phil Kessel's performance this year. Fun part: Compared to Alexai Yashin. Look for Brian Burke to be yelling on your TV soon, folks!

Oh, and draft party at my house.
GO BRUINS!

L10: Fourth set: The Winter Classic (5-3-2)

Well, the Winter Classic was great. I was lucky enough to be there for it (and the Legends Classic the next day! Way to go Jay Miller! Nice Hattie!) I could write about either classic, and how the atmosphere of Fenway was a magical thing, and how it was fun chanting LET'S GO BRUINS at the flyers fans, who were out in force and chanting LET'S GO FLYERS right back. It was pretty magical for the coffers as well, pulling a disappearing act on a lot of people's money. Worth it.

This has been bugging me in reading post-classic stuff, so here's my take:
Sweet Caroline is a Fenway tradition, very similar to last year's "Take me out to the hockey game" and Dennis Leary and Lenny Clarke are staples of the "people from Boston who are sorta famous and like sports" list.

Mark "Fire Hydrant" Recchi tied the game and Sturm finished it, on a pass from Bergeron. Way to go, guys!

On to the rest of the last ten games:

TUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUKK

Lookin' good, Mr. Finn. Thomas has been getting the majority of the starts, and has been playing very well in them (except when he, ahem, plays the body) and all of that. Let's look at some stats, though they are through game 41. I've been very busy the last couple of weeks, without much time for blogging. Mostly it's been good to excellent stuff, though, so I'm okay with it.

87.76%

That's the PK, humming along at peak performance (literally, #1 in the league) though they are in the bottom half for short-handed goals. Surprise, surprise! The Bruins aren't that great at scoring.

17.48%

That's the powerplay, all the way up to 18th in the league right now. If Bergeron's hand is broken, I expect this to drop as he plays the point on the PP pretty well. Who knows, though, with this team. In 1748, the ruins of Pompeii were discovered, and mathematician Bernoulli died. Bernoulli contributed to The Calculus and taught Euler, who invented mathematical notation. Without these gents, we might not have things like powerplay percentage or CORSI numbers. Where would the sports nerds go?

Where was I? Oh yes, the Bruins, not math from the 1700s.

5

The place the Bruins are in in the East by points, points percentage, or Simple Rating System. That's 5 more points than they had in 07-08, and 13 fewer than last year. It's also the number of Olympic rings, and if Bergeron's injury is bad will be the amount of Bruins going to the games (Krejci, Chara, Satan, Thomas, Sturm). Please be okay, Bergeron.

If you use the Pythagorean expectation for winning percentage (which I hear is big with Baseball), then the Bruins come in at 10th on that list, 3 spots higher than in the league standings.

I've been playing with a spreadsheet and this Pythagorean thing and Pythagorean points, and I'm still not sure if it's anything useful. If I come up with something or there's a stat-head out there that wants to give me a quick intro on some of this stuff, I'm happy to hear all about it.

Regardless of what the numbers say, we all know where our hearts are. Happy New Year, everyone.

GO BRUINS!

Game 12 and 13 Recaps: BRUINS 2 OIL 0 BRUINS 0 RAGS 1 THE STREAK CONTINUES

Yeah ok so I didn't put anything up post-game on halloween or the morning after but I was not alone in that. Either way, The Bruins played twice over the weekend, both were afternoon games. The Bruins are playing a league-high 19 afternoon games this season, or about %23. This annoys me greatly, it always throws me off when I get out of a game and it's still light out. Thankfully winter and the end of daylight savings time will take care of that whole "daylight" thing.

I could recap the two excellent goals between Vladimir Sobotka and Blake Wheeler, where Sobotka fought behind the net for about a million years until popping it out for Wheeler to tap it in, or the one where Wheeler set Sobotka up nicely, or I could talk about how the Bruins-Rangers game would still be going on if this were the playoffs and Gaborik wasn't on the Rangers or I could look at some statistics, which is probably much* more interesting.

*slightly

So lets look at some thing then, shall we?

12.24

First up: Our powerplay. It stinks out loud. The year 1224 was a pretty boring year, history-wise. A Brother Leo happened to witness St. Francis of Assisi have a vision and get stigmata. Maybe that would help things, Lucic was out with a hand thing anyhow. And Savard with a foot thing. HMMMMMMMMMMMM

In case you were wondering, it's not the worst powerplay in the league. It's just the second-worst. The panthers are worse but they're the panthers, not last year's 4th-best PP. (Note: last year's worst PP was the Columbus Bluejackets and they made the playoffs anyways) Of course the fact that we're missing Savard and Kessel hurts in that respect, so there you go.

Yeesh, time flies when you're having fun. I will be using historical events to explain the Bruins PP% for a while I think. For example, the league-leading Flyers have a 28.07% PP, or FLYING CARS MOTHERFUCKERS in historical reference.

Here's to flying cars on the powerplay.
GO BRUINS!

L10: First ten games (5-4-1) A LITTLE BETTER ALL THE TIME (Can't get much worse!)

Well, hmmm.

Rk	Team	GP	W	L	OL	PTS	PTS%	GF	GA	SRS	TG/G	PPG	PPO	PP%	PPGA	PPOA	PK%	SHG	SHGA
17	Boston Bruins	10	5	4	1	11	.550	30	32	-0.42	6.20	6	40	15.00	10	41	75.61	0	3

The Bruins have had an interesting start to their season. They started off losing, we lost Lucic and Savard to LTIR for a broken finger and broken foot. We traded Kobasew to Minnesota and picked up Daniel Paille from Buffalo, marking the first time Boston and Buffalo had ever made a trade that wasn't for ufa bargaining rights. On top of that, we're about 1/8th through the season and the Bruins have just put together their first consecutive, uh...point-getting games. Going by point percentage, the Bruins are 9th in the east. They have the 4th-worst powerplay in the league right now, converting 6 out of 40 chances or at a 15% clip.

That's terrible. So is letting in 10 powerplay goals over 41 chances, or a 75.61% success rate. This pretty much sucks too. Oh look, another fun fact: The Bruins tie the Tampa Bay Lightning for the league lead in short-handed goals against with three. Not too surprising, since the Bruins powerplay managed to get an icing call against it once recently. Basically that needs to get a lot better.

However, last years Bruins had a bit of rust too and I remember watching the PK and PP numbers continuously get better last year. Here's to that happening again, especially after Savard and Lucic come back. Last year around this time the Bruins were 30th in PK with 70%, and ended up 12th with 82.35%. Last year's powerplay was only bested by San Jose, Washington, and Detroit over the regular season.

Bergeron now has his chance to live up to his 5 million dollar contract. You can do it, Patrice!

How's our draft pick doing? (Toronto update)
Current Status: TAYLOR HALL
Toronto hasn't yet won a game, and only forced overtime once. They're 0-7-1, and have spent more time this season down by 5 than up by anything. Combined.

I think the next 10 games are going to be better than the last as people get more used to playing with the new folks. I think the Kobasew trade shook them up a bit. Lucic and Savard are still out, and that will make things...interesting. Let's hope the rookies play well. They've done okay so far. And the Revolution just made the playoffs! Awesome!

GO BRUINS!

Couple of game recaps; Numbas

and Savard makes three...

Well, the Saturday game kinda sucked from a caring-about-the-bruins-winning perspective. However, Savard got a good goal and had a couple breakaways that he turned into drop-passes.

5-2, Arniel was the other Boston scorer. Whatever. The Bruins vets looked good, Thomas needs to shake off some rest, and Chara is an important part of our defense. Other than that, not much was going on.

The Bruins also beat the Habs in Quebec City in front of 40 of Patrice Bergeron's closest friends on Sunday (and they didn't even have to wear those puke-green shirts!).

And then Chemmy over on PensionPlanPuppets pointed out to me that Phil Kessel scored 13% of the Bruins' goals last year, and hahaha how did I feel about that, chump?

So here's my response:

Kessel was the highest-goal-scorer for the Bruins, yes. However, the second through twelfth player in goals scored are still there. Sorting the table by points, he’s the only one in the top ten missing.

We’ve lost 0 Short-handed goals, and 8 powerplay goals. Ryder, Savard, Wideman, and Chara all had more powerplay goals than Kessel.

Leaving him with 28 ESG last year. 6 other bruins had more than half that: Wheeler, Kobasew, Krejci, Lucic, Savard, Ryder. All of them are staying. Of course, none of them have over 10 percent of the Bruins even-strength scoring.

However, I think Ryder-Savard will be a good matchup, and if Sturm can stay healthy (every finger and toe on my body is crossed on this one) then we won’t be missing out too much.
Plus we’ll have Tuukka to push Thomas to be as good a goalie as possible, that will help on the other end of things. I think that puts the Bruins in contention for another Jennings trophy, which was a huge help last year.

Even without 36 goals, the Bruins would be 238-196, or up 42 goals over the season. The only teams with 42 more goals for than goals against last year were Detroit, San Jose, and Chicago. 42 is still good enough for best GF-GA in the whole Eastern Conference.

One more thing to look at: Assuming Kessel (whose production drops 40% when he's not with Savard) scores 36 goals again this year, that leaves Toronto with a -7 goal differential, still nearly 50 less than the Bruins'.

Eat it, Toronto.
GO BRUINS!

Brudeur is a Fraud On the Vezina

One blog I really like is Brodeur is a Fraud. They do a lot with goalie stats.

Recently they weighed in on The Vezina from a statistical standpoint. It will be given out Thursday. Some think that Steve Mason should get it, because he played more games than Thomas. Here's what BiaF had to say about that:

"If Tim Thomas played in 11 extra games and faced his usual shot rate, he could have allowed 5 goals against and lost every single one of them, and he still would have a better winning percentage and save percentage than Steve Mason."

Burn.

It's a great article, instead of copying and pasting everything here, I'll just point you at it: Brodeur is a Fraud.

Good luck to all the bruins in contention for awards on Thursday night (I think it will be shown on either Versus or NHLNetwork), and all the ones playing in the celebrity poker tourney Thursday morning.

Oh and this saturday the NHL Network will be showing a marathon of all of the Stanley Cup Final games, starting at 8am. Game 7 will be shown at 8pm. Conversely, you can watch them now on hulu. Game 7 was the most-watched NHL game in the US in 36 years.

GO BRUINS!

Lazy Links: It's almost game 6 edition

I feel much better after that last post, and sorry to all who had to witness it. Sports fandom isn't always the prettiest thing, but it's a ton of fun and what's why we're here. Anyhow, here's some lazy links to wet your mouth before game 6:

• Puck Prospectus: Is David Krejci the next Adam Oates, Mark Taylor, or Jason Allison?
• Stanley Cup of Chowder: Reminds us its Milan Lucic's 21st birthday.
  
• Here Comes the Bruins: It's a couple days old, but the Star Wars/Stanley Cup comparison still rings true. (and is super-nerdy.)
• Matt Kalman points out that the Bruins have a grand total of 4 (5 if Alberts signs with the Flyers) draft picks this year. Might be time to cancel that trip.

Game six is tuesday night, party at your house! Go Pens. Check out thepensblog and Puck Huffers for that stuff.

Can't sign off without a little

GO BRUINS!

Lazy Links: hitting, etc, blah blah blah ARE THEY BACK YET?

Because Cal Clutterbuck just set an NHL record for most hits in a season (317 and counting), I decided I'd take a look at the hitting totals of the Bruins. The top ten is pretty predictable: Lucic, Chara, Ward, Thornton, Recchi, Yelle..... Those are the top six. And your number 7 most-hittingest Bruin?

MICHAEL RYDER!

Which is kinda crazy, since he has an unreal shot and doesn't look like much of a hitter. Unfortunately, nhl.tv doesn't have videos of his hits neatly lined up like they do his goals. Still better than any other league's video site, though. Back to what I was saying, whenever he doesn't score goals, you can always say "he's doing the right things everywhere else." I guess someone needs to check on the Wheeler-Krejci-Ryder line. Solid play from him. Thanks, Claude.

The rest of the top ten are Kobasew, Montador, Stuart. Those make a lot of sense. I find it interesting that our two deadline acquisitions both land in the top ten. Byron Bitz would be tearing up the charts in a hits/games category - he's got 60 in 28 games.

The problem with this stat is "What is the definition of hit?" Home statkeepers may keep it differently than away stat keepers. It's a stat that's only been around for a few years, and as far as I know it doesn't have a real definition. I also don't know if they count penalized hits as hits, per se. Even with all that, it was interesting especially when Lucic was at the top of the list for the league (injuries have brought him down).

Oh, and Chara's hits should count double. He tosses people aside like ragdolls. Ragdolls? That reminds me...

With that mini-rant out of the way, here are your lazy links:

• There's still time to join the WCHB NCAA Tourney pick 'em before the first game today (3pm eastern, I believe). If your -other- tourney pick 'em bracket is shot (like mine) you should give it a go!
• Thornton has been rocking the vlog near-daily during this week.
• The Bear Cave lets us know about the P-bruins. They are doing well, even with the loss of Coach Gordon.
• Wil Wheaton is a kings fan. That team's got a lot of young promise. Unlike Wesley Crusher.
• nhlplayoffrace.com added a president's trophy tracker.

Everyone at work has gone down to florida.

GO BRUINS!

In Defense of Manny Fernandez

I'll be the first to admit, Manny had a shitty game sunday. He directed in most of the goals against him one way or another, and managed to lose against the Rangers despite 3 very nice goals.

So all of boston wants his head, or for him to retire, or some other tired bullshit. Here's the deal with Manny:

He's a very good goalie. He's coming back from injury. He's only losing games by one goal.

Taking a look at the last 5 games Manny played, we've got:

• PHI@BOS: 3-4 overtime loss. The winning goal was a deflection off Andrew Ference's skate.
• BOS@NAS: 2-3 shootout loss. Wheeler was the only bruin to score in the 4-round shootout.
• BOS@TBL: 3-4 regulation loss. Kari Ramo made 40 saves, Manny made 14.
• PHI@BOS: 2-4 regulation loss. Terrible game for the Bruins as a whole. Manny
• BOS@NYR: 4-3 regulation loss. Terrible game for Manny.

And even with all of those, Manny is still a good goalie and needs to play his way back to early-season form:

• He's 11th in Points/game of goalies that have more than 5 games played right now.
• He's 9th in GAA with 2.39
• He's 15th in save percentage with .915
• He beats or ties "King" Henrik Lundqvist in all of these categories.

So lay off the man while he's getting his game back. The Bruins need to play him to give Thomas some rest, for sure. He'll catch a break, though not if he plays like shit again like he did on Sunday.

GO BRUINS!

Everybody hurts sometimes

As if enough of the team wasn't hurt yet this year, looks like Manny isn't feeling well.  The Bruins have called up P-Bruins backup goalie Kevin Regan to backup Thomas.  Tukka Rask is back in providence after being the backup yesterday.

Kevin Paul Dupont of boston.com likens the Bruins injury reports to the KGB.

Luckily, the this week's P-Bruins game is @Lowell, then one at home and then one @Hartford.  So they can juggle lines across two teams if they want to all week long.

When Patrice Bergeron says he'll be back this year, I'm a fan of that.  But I do think he'll be out at least until February, if not beyond.  Losing Sturm is a huge blow, though.

Is a trade in the works?  Is the flu going around?  The bruins are starting to get hit pretty bad by the injury bug.  With the Habs tomorrow, this isn't exactly ideal.

The Red wings are looking to top the Bruins for longest winning streak this year pretty soon - they've got 6 in a row right now.

At halfway through the season, there are a lot of injuries but a lot of plusses, as well.  The Bruins schedule isn't going to get any easier (far fewer games against southeast teams, etc) and with the injuries plaguing the team, I wouldn't be surprised if the Bruins come back down to earth a bit, so to speak.

I'd like to say again that I liked seeing Byron Bitz play with the big club.  Thornton-St. Pierre-Bitz is an acceptable 4th line.

I'm glad the Bruins aren't in the same situation as the Wild right now.  Same with the St. Louis Blues, who could set a record for most GP lost to injury this season.  Oh, and it looks like Rick Nash is on Injured reserve for Columbus.  Luckily, they've got this Steve Mason goalie who is so on fire he's melting the ice around the net.

Interesting stuff from the hockey nerds at Objective NHL about how the bruins will have to come back to earth.  It's coming, folks, get ready.

I was a bit miffed at how quickly the Garden empties out when the Bruins lose a game (or two in a row!).  The Bruins have a ton of bandwagon fans right now, and I'm starting to understand why people don't like bandwagon fans.  Even so, I like talking about hockey and it's always good to see people excited about it.

Oh, and on top of all of that, some guy on the internet is saying that Tim Thomas's contract negotiations are starting to go sour.  If true, I blame his agent.

L10: A Look Back at the first ten games

In between the recap and the next preview (phew) I wanted to take a look at what people have been doing so far this year before games no longer count into the Last 10 Record and what they are on pace for:

Ok, for laughs the "on pace" is really what they should be doing for a full 82 games based on what they've done so far.  So, Kobasew is on pace for a killer season, assist-wise. Silly Cornelius, stats do not work like that. So what else can we learn from the table?

• Kessel is like my NHL09 offline be a pro - He gets all his points from goals.
• Only players that have been in all 10 games have had penalties scored on them.
• Ference and Ryder have the best +/- right now, Chara is a measly -3.
• Kessel's 37 shots tie him for 7th in the league and 6 goals tie him at 6th.
  
• Savard's 34 shots tie him for 20th and 5 goals tie him for 16th. Savard also has 8 assists, good for a tie for 12th. Together, he is tied for 3rd in scoring with Mikko Koivu and Sidney Crosby with 13. Only Alexander Semin and Evgeni Malkin have scored more.
  
• Tim Thomas has tied Martin Brodeur for shutouts on the season, though Brodeur is chasing history and Thomas just wants to keep the puck out of the net. Tim Thomas is also second behind only Ryan Miller with a 1.77 GAA and barely beats out (by .001) Tampa Bay's Mike Smith for highest save percentage with .943
  
• Blake Wheeler has the most Games Played of any player debuting this year.
• I am obsessed.

Notable Events from the last ten games:

• Lucic puts Van Ryn through the glass:

• Lucic! Lucic! Lucic!

• In the immortal words of Jack Edwards, SAVE! AFTER! SAVE! BY! THOMAS!
  

• Shootouts are terrifying now. I was honestly more happy that the game ended in an OT win when Wideman scored than anything else.
• Some other stuff probably happened, check in the archives for what I missed here.
  

L10: 5-2-3
Overall: 5-2-3
Difference: (Same)
GO BRUINS!

Game 9: Bruins @ Edmonton ROAD TRIP

Oct 27, 2008, 9:00 PM ET
On TV: NESN (HD)
On the Radio: WBZ 1030
vs. Edmonton Oilers (4-3-0)

Notes

• This is the first of three road games in Western Canada this week, and the 3rd of our 5-game road trip through the whole Northwest division.
  
• I saw the Oilers lose in Minnesota after being up 4 goals last year.
• The Oilers kicked a guy out of the press box for liveblogging.
• We're getting closer and closer to the point when the last ten games will be a different record than the total record.
• As the 29th largest team in the league (only Detroit is lighter), The Bruins are not the Big Bad Bruins anymore, we're going to have to settle for the small bad bruins. We also have the smallest offense at 192.9 avg lbs, and even with Chara's 255 lbs, we've got 16th largest with 208 avg lbs. I always like it when Mirtle does these statistical looks.
• In that same post, we find that the Oilers have the 2nd largest offense, and 5th youngest.
• Johnny "Chief" Bucyk won't eat on Bear Force One until after Christmas.
• The Jumbotron loves the Oiler's Fernando Pisani.
• Coach thinks the road trip will be a good thing.
• Here Comes the Bruins! tackles the schedule.
  

Other Previews

• bruins.nhl.com is first on the scene again, pointing out that the Oilers have lost their last 3 after winning their first four.
• Stanley Cup of Chowder gives us a good rundown.
• Lowetide looks at some young players.

Stats

Record: 3-2-3
Away Record: 2-1-2
GO BRUINS!

Owen Nolan WILL NOT DIE

Thanks to the NHL Frozen Moment, which needs it's own RSS feed, I was reminded of the most exciting pickup by the Minnesota Wild this offseason - Owen Nolan.

Here's the thing about Owen Nolan: He's a Brit. Not only that, he's one of two active British players. The other one? Daniel Taylor, who has played all of 20 minutes backstopping the Kings last year, letting in 2 goals on ten shots (including letting in the first shot) in the third period, letting Dallas turn a 5-1 steamroll into a 7-2 blowout and giving himself a career GAA of 6.

With so few British players in the NHL, and Owen Nolan having had a long and illustrious career, you'd think that he is one of the best british players ever. You would be correct. He's second best in Games Played, Goals, and Points behind Steve Thomas. Nolan is also second overall British player in Penalties in Minutes, to another Steve - this one's Smith.

Steve Thomas played with Toronto, Chicago, NY Islanders, New Jersey, Toronto, Chicago, Anaheim, and Detroit between 1984 and 2004, when he retired at the age of 40. Nolan? He's only 36 this year, and just signed for 2 years. He's gotta get 40+1 goals in 167+1 games to best those totals...and he's also 124 assists behind Thomas.

As for national team aspirations? Both Thomas and Nolan have played for the Canadian National team, but not at the same time. Also, no mention of Owen Nolan is complete without this:



It would of course be wrong to mention British players without mentioning Ken Hodge, who won two Stanley cups with the Boston Bruins after coming over as a part of the deal for Phil Esposito. Remember when that used to happen? Me either - it was over 10 years before I was born.

Longest Playing Goalies

I was browsing Hockey-Reference.com today, and I thought to myself, what's the longest amount of time anyone's played in goal? As the fine folks at hockey-reference.com keep track of playing time in minutes, I'd figure I'd just look it up. Unfortunately, they didn't have a page set up with that information already, so I looked at who had played the most time and then add it up myself. I included regular season and playoff minutes, so let's take a look:

Name	Season	Playoffs	Total time played
Patrick Roy	60,235	15,209	52 days, 9 hours, 24 minutes
Martin Brodeur:	57 208	10 522	47 days, 50 minutes
Ed Belfour	55 695	9 945	45 days, 14 hours
Terry Sawchuck	57 194	6 290	44 days, 2 hours, 4 minutes
Curtis Joseph	53 213	8 106	42 days, 13 hours, 59 minutes

So there you have it, folks: Patrick Roy is the longest-playing Goalie in the NHL, ever. Also, HR doesn't sort by minutes played.

Also, the draft is happening this weekend...Neither the Bruins or Wild had very good picks (I care a lot about that division title now...vomit.) I didn't watch it last night, and I'll be reading other blog's coverage, but the whole thing doesn't have me refreshing NHL.com every minute for updates. Besides, Netherlands plays Russia at 2:45!

American Hockey Players face off in Conference Semis

In the Western 2-5 Matchup of the Dallas Stars and San Jose Sharks, we have two of the oldest American-born hockey players squaring off in the playoffs. Or at least, their respective teams are. I think they should play some bumper-walkers, but that's because I like to poke fun at my elders.

From a numbers perspective, here's how they match up:

Mike Modano: In 1320 Games in the NHL, he has 528 goals and 755 Assists for a total of 1283 points. He is the leading goal scorer for American-born players. 854 PIM and a lifetime 137+/- rating.

Jeremy Roenick: In 1321 games in the NHL, he has 509 goals and 694 assists for a total of 1203 points. 1439 PIM and a lifetime 154 +/- rating.

Looks like Modano just edges Roenick in nearly all categories. The interesting thing is that even with over 500 more PIM, Jeremy's +/- is still better. Coach trusts Modano more, though: 20:51 Average TOI for his career, a whole 2:45 better than Roenick's 18:06.

Well, this promises (with the rest of the Second Round) to be an interesting little matchup here. I'm rooting for San Jose, myself, though I do hear American Hockey Fan's complaint about seeing another former Bruins' Captain raising the cup in a different jersey.