Ok so - since nobody else seems curious enough to actually bother doing a serious comparison of Chayka's *total* draft record vs the rest of the NHL for the 4 years from 2016 through 2019, I have gone ahead and done some quick "big picture" analysis.

This is Scott Wedgewood erasure

People say hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in professional sports...yet it isn't even the hardest thing to do in professional baseball! Out-pitching a big league hitter is definitely harder.

Indigenous American and African technology and scientific/medical knowledge were on-par with or superior to the European equivalent at the time of first contact and, in most cases, would continue to be so well into the 19th century.

But they were all deceived for a 5th loco was made

Updated #NHLAnalytics list

* Historian Job Opportunity * Full-Time, Tenure Track Ast. Professor position in History, seeking esp. Latin American and/or Caribbean historians @ Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, MA QCC has prof development funding opps for early career scholars! www.higheredjobs.com/search/detai...

Imagine you're Greg Gilbert, you don't get on a lot of hockey cards, and in 1994 Upper Deck sends you a free copy of yours from the 1993-94 set. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for THAT reveal...

Moving Stanley AND Schenn for any value is good, for Rosen, a 2nd, and Bryson is great. Nice work, Jets.

AP's Baderkhan Ahmad with a picture for our times out of Eastern Syria (taken March 4th). Shepherds and the Bomb:

If THN is right and the Blues were asking for Owen Power (& probably a 1st) in a Robert Thomas trade (thehockeynews.com/news/latest-...), how are you turning that down? Power is never going to have more than 2nd unit value as long as you have Dahlin, and Thomas is the real deal on a great contract.

Kurt Vonnegut, himself a WWII veteran, in his 2004 essay on war in the Middle East, "Cold Turkey" (inthesetimes.com/article/cold...):

John Williams, himself a WWII veteran, in his novel Stoner:

I imagine future archaeologists are going to wonder why our society had so many Allen wrenches.

I'll revise this a bit, after hearing a convincing counter-argument: Love is performing slightly below-average, but could conceivably be average if his receivers didn't exhibit two straight drop-heavy seasons. A bit of it is catchable-ball stuff, but a lot is bad-to-embarrassing butterfingers.

Also one year ago. Look, I do have my suspicions that there is a player or two not on the level* (which has contributed directly to injury/losses), but it's mostly that Love and LaFleur are not what they were hyped up to be. * Based on absolutely baffling plays, beyond just bungling stuff

Me last year, almost to the day:

Jordan Love and Matt Lafleur run the 2-minute drill like a man fighting bees.

The Kyle Farnsworth-Iowa mystery might have been just been solved 🕵️‍♂️

This has to be one of the most "you can't trust ANYbody" goaltending years in recent NHL history. We're on-pace to see Scott Wedgewood (Scott Wedgewood!) snag a Vezina.

Going to be an evergreen skeet

Question for @hockeyviz.com : do any goalies exhibit higher frequency of freezing the puck, & what's more could there be a collaborative value between goalies that freeze pucks & teams w better faceoff-taking talent? It feels low-hanging enough that somebody has looked into it, my apologies if true.

You do, however, have to devise a way to apologize to all your hedge fund friends for coming from Appalachia.

The reason health care fails in this "free market" capitalist idealism is bc it is not a free market for the consumer. You must buy this to be born, to live, even to die in dignity. There's no greater leverage than your life. The wealthy can't imagine a world where you have to budget around this.

Ooh, this is exciting.

I'm here for it. Also, don't sleep on The Money Pit.

It would be kind of hilarious to see the Oilers part with assets to acquire Jarry.

Addendum, having just seen the news on Hellebuyck's surgery: WPG will likely be regressing to the negative, too. As long as Bucky was healthy, he was papering over some troubling numbers (they really miss Ehlers!).

It's that time again! Candidates for positive regression: EDM, STL, NSH. Candidates for negative regression: SEA, WSH, CHI. Most of the anticipated negative regression is probably goaltending; ditto for NSH & maybe EDM on the positive. Though, can we admit that Saros might be lost and gone forever.

Me, 41 years old: "Yeah, I could've made the big leagues." Me, had I made the big leagues:

Who is this? Wrong answers only.

Powdered Toast Man has added a bit of salt and pepper

CALL AN AMBULANCE BUT NOT FOR ME

Envisioning this going like the President's phone call to the Soviet PM in Dr. Strangelove

You know the club goes hard when they have Fast Orange in the bathroom

Skaters play most games with someone getting similar icetime to them, but it's not as tight as we sometimes think. Pinched, though, for sure, along that axis.

Seen in the first issue of The Hockey News (Oct. 1st, 1947), p. 5: "[NHL veteran Bobby] Bauer has left the Bruins to help his father-in-law manage a skate manufacturing business in Kitchener, Ontario..." Wonder how that worked out for him.

Re: Nikolaj Ehlers...the PP1 thing was the most egregious, consistently dumb usage all the Jets coaches were guilty of doing. I think there's a common coach mentality that a player has to "earn" PP1 time through their ES play, but that relies on coaches to be willing to put more faith in the data.

I think, in his minutes, this is true for Ehlers. But I've often wondered if the persistent under-utilization of Ehlers could be because (unlike Marner) he would struggle if pressed to play 21 minutes/game.

Let me tell you something you can't unsee once you start paying attention to it: people barf in movies and TV way more than they used to. And more often than real life. It's become such a weirdly common plot device.

Let me tell you something you can't unsee once you start paying attention to it: people barf in movies and TV way more than they used to. And more often than real life. It's become such a weirdly common plot device.

The Florida Panthers, particularly if they can squeeze in Ekblad and/or Bennett contracts, basically have their core for the next half-decade. Yikes.

Episode 3 of The Rehearsal this year might be the funniest television I've seen in my lifetime.

Tristan Jarry is chaotic

1. Alex Ovechkin, 895 goals in 1,487 games 2. Wayne Gretzky, 894 goals in 1,487 games Take a bow. Especially for doing it while going on a heater.

Ovechkin scored 894 goals in fewer games than Gretzky (by 1!), in a trap league with big butterfly goalies and more season interruptions than an AMC show. He might be the only one among his regular teammates to make the HHOF, unless the voters are unusually kind to either Backstrom or Carlson.

Gutted to hear today's news that the hockey world has lost Bruce McCurdy. A great writer, and a guy whose love of the game bled through all of his work. RIP Bruce.

NHL power plays are the best they've been in 40 years prashanthiyer.substack.com/p/nhl-power-...

There's little reason to think his next four years aren't going to look like his 2016-2020 years, administratively. Which means he will test the courts as much as possible, dismantle and grift and corrupt as much as possible, and the most vulnerable will feel it acutely.