Resigning Matt Carle is a great way to start the Thanksgiving break. Even though he has been in and out of the doghouse this year, Carle and Vlasic are the future of the Sharks blueline, along with Rivet and Ty Wishart. I think Wilson showed Carle a ton of confidence by making this deal and we could see the results immediately on the stat sheet. I know he got four years – and I’m going to guess he got around 14 million – a similar deal that New Jersey Devils defensemen Paul Martin got in the offseason.

Now Doug has to decide who is next on the list – do you extend Pavelski? Bernier? Do you extend Clowe now or wait and see how he comes back from injury? What does this mean for Ehrhoff and Goc? Well you know my opinion – I think all of these players, except Clowe, are available in trade market for an impact veteran. I think you keep Bernier, especially the way he has recently found out that checking people and standing in front of the net is a good thing for someone his size, and see what kind of impact player Ehrhoff and Pavelski can fetch. I think it could net someone pretty good.

Okay. That’s really it from me until after Saturday’s game, barring some major news to discuss. Happy Thanksgiving!

Before now, I used sitemeter to gather statistics for this site (you can still see the little counter all the way at the bottom of the page). But yesterday, I signed up for for Google Analytics, because they will report not just how many views and visitors you have, but pretty charts and maps and referring sites and all the crap a math-loving dork like me loves.

It takes about a day for the first stats to start rolling in, and I just checked it for the first time a minute ago. As expected, we get referrals from chompboard and BoC, but there was another table that reports which keywords the visitors searched for that ended up here. Here it is. I swear to God I did not Photoshop it.

To our wonderful reader that is looking shave his or her <shudder> ass, stay tuned. I’ll try to convince Grier to write it up.

You’ve probably heard about this story already- it’s been around the hockey media pretty quickly. Just watch the video:

So Ohlund gets a 4-game suspension. FOUR GAMES. I’m not exactly sure how far Colin Campbell’s head is up his ass, but I bet his breath smells like shit.

I guess I thought the NHL was interested in cracking down on some of the extraneous dirty stuff in the league. We see Steve Downie get a 20-game suspension, and Jesse Boulerice get 25. Then this, which makes absolutely no sense.

Let’s give Ohlund the benefit of the doubt. Koivu got his elbow up, and probably deserved a penalty, perhaps a major or even a misconduct. But it’s inarguable that happened during the course of play, dirty though it may be. But Ohlund’s chop had nothing to do with the game; it was revenge. Personally, I don’t care if Koivu was anally raping Ohlund’s mother while pouring sugar in his gas tank- Ohlund deserves a 25 or 30 game suspension, at least. He deliberately broke Koivu’s leg from behind with his stick.

To me, this incident is much worse than the Downie hit, and maybe worse than the Boulerice hit. You could at least make a (poor) case that Boulerice didn’t mean to get his stick up so high. But Ohlund did exactly what he intended. Mission accomplished.

The Mercury News had a great article today where Doug Wilson made an interesting statement that I think should not go unnoticed.

The question Wilson asks himself is this: “Are we getting better as a hockey team at the things that will allow us to be successful at the end of the year?” And his answer? “I’ve seen a couple things recently, but we’re certainly not satisfied with where we’re at,” Wilson said.

Here’s the link.

Hmmm…..We have to remember that even with the recent upswing, Thanksgiving is Doug Wilson’s favorite time of year. Two years ago he brought us a giant Holiday surprise in Joe Thornton. While I certainly don’t expect a franchise altering move like that, I think we should take Doug Wilson seriously. He sees what I see. Yes, the Sharks have been playing harder and the result has shown up in the win column, but is this team better than last year, or the year before, when they have come to a dead stop in the 2nd round? The answer is, unfortunately, no. They aren’t better. They are the same, if anything. This current collection of talent won’t beat Detroit in a seven game series. Wilson needs to tweak the roster, not overhaul – and his comments lead me to believe that this could be coming sooner rather than later. An agitator? The number one D-man Wilson has wanted under his tree for years? A power forward to replace Ryane Clowe? A back up goalie? Take your pick – we have the right combo of NHL ready young talent and cap room to get almost any deal done Doug Wilson desires.

So dig in for a potential exciting end of November – we could be seeing a new face or two in Teal Town – but only if Dougie doesn’t overload on too much stuffing and yams.

Happy Holidays everyone.

…You’re the Next Contestant on the Back Up is Right!

I’m not sure I understand Doug Wilson’s reasoning for playing musical back-ups. Whether its Patzold or Greiss, if Nabby goes down with an injury – the Sharks are most likely busted. Nabby hasn’t played more than 50 games in a season since 2003-04 and he missed fifteen games last year due to injuries. I think we have to expect that Nabby isn’t going to be able to handle a Brodeur type load. With Alex Auld being waived by Phoenix today, why not put in a waiver claim on him? Auld won 33 games for Vancouver in 05-06, putting up solid numbers on a decent team. Can we really judge him for his performance on two poor teams in Florida and Phoenix? Weren’t people saying the same about Ozo and Roenick, two of the best players in Teal this season?

I say claim Alex Auld and let him spell Nabby. What’s the risk? We have tons of cap room (9.6 million) so assuming Auld’s 0.5 million is no big deal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not down on Greiss – he could be the future netminder for this organization at age 21 and he showed flashes of excellent play in the preseason – but to put the weight of the season on Patzold/Greiss if Nabby goes down is unfair to the rest of the team. At that point, Doug Wilson will have to overpay for Halak or someone else….

THE DUCKS
On a side note, did the Ducks really dump Breezy so they could deal for Brian Sutherby? Not sure I totally get it – now the Ducks have Marchant, McDonald, Pahlsson, Sutherby and Getzlaf up the middle. Is this only the first of other moves in Disneyland?

I called into Teal Spiel again this past weekend, and spoke a little bit about what I think the Sharks still need. I’ve written about it in this space before, but now you can hear me in my eloquent glory here. Here’s the embedded player again:

Comments welcome.

So you go over to the ESPN stats site right now, and you’ll see that Douglas Murray (can’t I call you Doug?) is tied for the league lead in plus-minus, at +15, tied with Chris Phillips. Holy God! That’s a pretty amazing stat, given that the Sharks are +10 overall (including PP) while the Sens are +20.

I’ve never put a huge amount of stock in plus-minus as a purely defensive measure, because lots of things can skew it. I did an analysis once that showed that teams with a poor power play generally have players with a higher +/- than teams with a good power play. It makes sense. If you don’t score on the PP, that means a higher percentage of your goals must come on even strength (ES), which boosts your +/-. Only ES and short handed goals count as a plus. And only ES and SH goals against count for a minus.

In my view, when you’re rating a defensive defenseman, you really want only half of what the +/- stat give you. You want ES goals against only, because a defenseman’s job is to prevent goals, not score them. If Larry gives up 20 ES goals, but they score 21 when he’s on the ice, he’s +1. And if Pete gives up no goals, and scores 1, he’s +1, just like Larry. But Pete is a much better defensemen than Larry.

So let me start with a little factoid: Douglas Murray has not been on the ice for a even strength goal against since October 18th vs. Detroit. That means, he’s been perfect for 10 games, over a month. Unbelievable.

The NHL doesn’t publish this information exactly (you’d have to pore through the game logs) but luckily there are some good stats sites out there, and I turned to hockeynumbers.com. They have a stat called EH-, which is defined as “Goals against average while on ice @ even strength”. They don’t publish the formula, but I’m assuming it’s goals per 60 minutes of time. Murray is the best on the Sharks, with an EH- of 0.3. If that means what I think it means, that’s pretty astounding. Just for the record, and unsurprisingly, Alexei Semenov is the worst with an EH- of 4.1 (Kaspar is technically worse, but he only played 3 games).

So I went overboard, as I usually do, and made a spreadsheet. Here’s the list of the top 10 defensemen in the NHL this year (who have played over 10 games) in EH- (and I have no idea why there’s a big gap here):

Murray leads the league. Chris Phillips, the man who is tied with Murray at +15, is not in the top 20 (1.6). There are other factors that can skew this stat, like strength of linemates and strength of opposition, but this is a better raw stat than regular +/-. Douglas Murray has been one of the best two or three defensive defenseman in the NHL this year.

Like last year, the Sharks-Ducks matchup seems to have a little extra ‘oomph’ than many of the other regular season games. These teams are clearly measuring themselves against each other, and like the other meeting between the two this season, they came out pretty even. I’m sure it was frustrating for the Sharks during the first half of that game because for the most part, the Ducks were shutting the Sharks down defensively.

But the Sharks didn’t panic, and this is where I think the last four wins came in handy. They continued to press, didn’t overskate or overpursue, and got a nice little redirect from Torrey Mitchell to tie the game at 1. Other than a couple of heart-dropping giveaways by the Sharks, it stayed pretty deadlocked. And the shootout is the shootout- the Sharks suck compared to everybody else.

So what did we learn? Not much. The Sharks and Ducks are pretty closely matched, which is what most (reasonable) people expected. When (I no longer say ‘if’) Niedermayer and Selanne re-join the team, that may no longer be the case. However, although both teams are a little banged up, I’d say the Sharks were more so than the Ducks, with Rivet, Michalek, and Clowe out. Ducks were missing Schnieder and Bertuzzi. Schneider hurts, but Bertuzzi is a 3rd or 4th liner now, and of limited utility.

quoting myself:

Speaking of the Ducks, they waived their backup, Ilya Bryzgalov, this morning. Grier and I agree that this is definitely a cap-clearing move for them. Given the number of other teams with goalie issues (the Coyotes among them)...

Ok, maybe it wasn’t a cap-clearing move, but I love it when I’m right. And I have to point it out, since it happens so infrequently.

Y’know when you get into a new relationship, pretty soon you have to have that, “so what the hell are we doing?” talk. I call it the “state of the relationship” address, or SOR for short. I’m an tech guy, and three letter acronyms (TLAs, of course) dominate my daylight conversations in my corner of the cube farm.

I’m not gonna get all ‘feely’ with you about the blog or anything, but Girl with a Puck just did a long post about the state of hockey blogs in the raging sea of hockey journalism. And Sleek at BoC had a post on it as well. Since we at Shaved Ice are just a dingleberry on the ass of the hockey world, I figured I’d throw in my 2 cents, especially since we weren’t asked.

First of all, I think hockey journalism is about informing people, and hockey blogs are about (or should be about) entertaining people. C’mon, are you going to find a dingleberry reference on tsn.ca? I’m sure that my obsession with reading hockey blogs and news does occasionally yield a post where a few of our readers learn about some story or another, but that’s just luck. Largely, blogs are about analysis and opinion. Regurgitiating news is boring, and that’s what RSS feeds are for.

So why the hell are you here? Most probably because you know me or Grier personally, or through some other blog. Maybe you even read us a lot, because it’s pretty obvious that we both care a lot about hockey, and we care about the Sharks. I’d like to think we both have more hockey knowledge than the casual fan, and can level a critical eye at the team and the sport. We’re fanboys in that we want the Sharks to do well, but we’re not in that we don’t mindlessly support everything the Sharks do or don’t do.

And we take your crap. Journalism is inching slowly towards a more interactive model (like David Pollak’s blog), but here we say what we think, and you can blast us in the comments. We always read them, and 9 times out of 10 respond back to you. If you want to click back to the go-go days of the Detroit series last year, it got a bit heated. But that’s what sports fandom is all about- arguing.

To me, hockey blogs provide a jumping off point for further hockey discussion, because it’s often a matter of opinion or analysis. That kind of stimulation doesn’t spring from your regular hockey articles, like “Team x beat team y”, or “so and so got traded”. Good hockey blogs have good writing and insightful points. They make you question your assumptions about teams, players, and the game.

Or they just make you laugh through strategic use of profanity.