I participated in a playoff pool draft tonight, so I had to map out my predictions of who would make it to the finals. As you might imagine, it’s as much about picking the teams as it is the players. A mediocre player who plays 22 post-season games is more valuable than a great player who only plays seven:
Yes, I think the Canucks will beat St. Louis and fall to Detroit in the second round.
Of course, these things are all about probabilities and mitigating risk. It’s likely that a dark horse will emerge and unpredictably make its well deep into the playoffs. But that’s difficult to guess correctly, so I went with likely outcomes and I’m hoping for the best. Here are the players I ended up with:
ZETTERBERG
MALKIN
SEMIN
M. GREEN
HAVLAT
CHARA
KRONWALL
RYDER
BURROWS
HOLMSTROM
GUERIN
GETZLAF
UPDATE: Had I known about Rinkology’s fancy bracket creator (thanks to James for the pointer), I would have used that yesterday instead of plain old pen and paper. Here’s a more legible edition (click for a larger version):
Broadly speaking, Vancouverites (and, really, people everywhere) feel one of two ways about the Olympics:
They’re a huge, heinous waste of taxpayer dollars.
They’re a celebration of the city, province and nation which, through infrastructure investment and international exposure, brings new wealth to the region.
The more left of centre you are, the likelier you are to be in Camp #1. I like to think of myself as near the centre, and this conversation highlights that position. I haven’t done enough reading. However, looking at previous Olympics in North America, it seems that both outcomes are true, depending on who you ask. The key facts that I wrestle with are:
The money available for the Olympics wouldn’t necessarily be available to house the homeless or increase the police force.
It’s incredibly difficult to accurately measure the benefits of an event this big, which impacts so many sectors in the short, medium and long term.
We can see this discussion on a simpler, smaller scale in the current grumblings by the BC NDP about BC Place’s new roof. The roof will apparently cost CAN $365 million, and the NDP is running a marketing campaign against the expenditure. It’s worth noting, of course, that neither party are strangers to absurd over-spending (how now, PacificCat Explorer).
Here’s the NDP’s position, and here’s the BC Liberal’s response (I note that the NDP is winning the search engine optimization battle). To be honest, I can’t even grok this simpler issue. What’s the value of the roof’s refurbishment? How long will it extend the life of BC Place, and much event-related and spin-off revenue will that generate? How many jobs does the project and the subsequent expansion create? What’s the value of an MLS franchise to the city?
On the other hand, what would $365 million mean to the Downtown Eastside? Knowing that $1.4 billion over the past nine years has barely made a dent in that neighbourhood’s problems isn’t particularly encouraging.
It’s easy to say “I like sports, and therefore the Olympics and the roof replacement are a good thing”. It’s much, much harder to be a good citizen and dig up the empirical data that makes an unbiased case one way or another. I’m sorry that I haven’t done that in this blog post, but time marches ever onward and all that.
What do you think? Should BC Place get a new roof?
I’m in Winnipeg for a speaking gig, so posting will be light for the next couple of days. I spotted this charming story in the paper (I forget which one) this morning:
As the global economic downturn begins to impact on the world of sport, one French athlete has come up with an unusual way to try to secure a new sponsorship deal. Pole-vaulting champion Romain Mesnil, whose contract with the sports brand Nike was not renewed when it expired last year, has run naked with his pole through the streets of Paris and posted a video of his caper online.
Mon dieu! Here’s the video. It’s safe for work, as there’s a little hovering black box over his viande et deux légumes:
I hope that he doesn’t already have a sponsor, and this isn’t just some clever reverse-viral-video campaign to ‘find’ the sponsor.
Yesterday Julie wrote about the Skate Bug, a kind of auditory aid for getting from (to borrow Lee and Sachi’s metaphor again) A to G:
At the Four Continents Championship in Vancouver last month I saw the ‘Skate Bug’ for the first time. It’s a radio device that connects listeners with live event commentary. One part fits in your ear; the other part is hand held. With the Skate Bug, listeners can get real-time event commentary–even more detailed than those watching the event on TV at home–and can even ask questions about elements or scoring via text message during the event. The device is meant to make figure skating more understandable and fan friendly, according to this article in the Vancouver Sun.
It’s kind of like a real-time tutorial in your ear. I remember watching figure skating on the BBC during the 2002 Olympics. The eloquent commentators did an astonishingly good job of articulating the nuances of the sport and the judging system. This was critical, as the Beeb’s audience probably only sees figure skating once every four years. I often feel that this is an explanation failure of North American coverage of the sport–the hosts assume that their audience know more than they do.
Apparently Skate Canada is offering this device directly, as a means of recruiting new fans to the sport. In their press release, they say they’re introducing “a new multimedia tool at Skate Canada events”. That’s a misnomer, isn’t it? I mean, it only offers the one media.
The next step would be to offer the feed in stream audio, so that neophyte fans at home could tune in. And it’s easy to imagine that these could be offered for other sports, too. The first time I go to a cricket game, for example, I could seriously benefit from one of these.
Hagman gets accidentally (and firmly) checked by a referee, gets kneed in the head and then almost gets the puck in the mouth. And then he scores a great goal. Good Canadian boy. Except, of course, that he’s Finnish.
I know I’m late to this ballgame, but I just saw this and it struck me as pretty amusing:
This isn’t the first of these remixes that I’ve seen using this snippet from the exceptionally good German film Der Untergang. Is there a Hitler video generator out there on the web somewhere?
Since most NHL players switched to graphite sticks, there’s been a bit of a plague of broken sticks. Rarely do I watch a game where at least one stick isn’t broken.
Here’s a simple idea for a charity campaign: every time an NHL player breaks his stick in a game, he donates the value of that stick to a particular charity. Maybe a group of charities get together, and the player can choose the one he wants to support.
How often does a given player break a stick in a game? It feels like there’s, maybe, two broken sticks a game. There’s 40 players in a game, so the odds of breaking a stick are 1 in 20. So does the average player break four sticks a year? If so, that’s $1200 a year. Multiply that by roughly 600 active players, and you get $720,000. Not an insignificant sum.
But the real money would be if they promoted and extended the program into recreational hockey. Maybe beer league players each agree to donate $20 per broken stick. According to Wikipedia, there are a million registered players in North America. That’s a lot of potential cash.
Actually, I take back the ‘player chooses the charity’ model. Using the Nothing But Nets model, I’d pick a very specific charity, something that I could clearly associate with the whole stick thing. Maybe something around planting trees? Of course, 95% of professional players use sticks made out of graphite, not wood, but the gist is there.
We had a couple of no-shows at the planned post-BarCamp hockey pool, so we weren’t quite quorate. I thought I’d take one more kick at this particular can and suggest a virtual pool, run in real-time over Skype.
I was thinking next Monday, October 6 between 5:30pm and 7:30pm. I know four games will have been played by then, but I don’t think that particularly matters.
I figure Skype is probably the most ubiquitous, simplest tool in which to run the draft. If you’ve got another suggestion–I guess Twitter would be a possibility–fire away.
If you’re interested in joining said, uh, Automagical Virtual Hockey Pool, leave a comment.
If we get enough, I’ll run it. If not, I’ll watch the 2008-09 season with a stake in only one, meagre, non-playoff team. And if there’s a torrent of interest, the maximum number of participants is 15. All other rules are as on the BarCamp wiki.
Because I’ve been thinking about this weekend’s hockey pool, and the forthcoming season. Heck, I even caved and ordered cable so I could watch some Canucks games at home.
The Red Wings will repeat as Stanley Cup winners, beating out the Habs in the finals.
Sidney Crosby and Evgeny Malkin will finish one-two in the scoring race, but a lack of healthy defencemen will prevent Pittsburgh from reaching the finals.
Los Angeles and the New York Islanders will battle it out for worst in the league (and thus the best shot at drafting phenom John Tavares). I’m giving it to the Kings (despite Barry Melrose’s presence in Tampa Bay).
Mats Sundin will bide his time until December and sign with a team that promises to make a playoff run. That won’t be the Canucks because…
The Canucks won’t score enough goals to make the playoffs.
The Sedin brothers will give up hockey and become Mormons. Doesn’t this photo scream “we’re wearing temple garments under our golf shirts”?
I guess those are all pretty safe bets. What are your predictions?
Every August or September, I buy one to three hockey pool magazines. These feature in-depth previews and predictions about the year to come, ostensibly compiled by experts. As magazines go, they’re fairly hefty and not cheap. I paid $10 for the Score’sSports Forecaster, which runs to 162 pages.
There are four or five publications that come out, all more or less covering the same ground. I usually read The Score’s because there’s the most analysis on individual players. These magazines have a peculiarity–each city or region gets its own cover. This no doubt makes the hometown buyer feel good about seeing a familiar face (or eyes in the case of my issue–a masked Luongo is on the cover).
It must be a considerable undertaking to assemble one of these magazines. There’s probably 900 players to report on (NHLers plus prospects) and 30 teams, plus a huge schwack of statistics to massage and display accurately. It’s really a big technical writing job, with a little hockey insight thrown in. There’s a good newspaper feature in visiting one of these publishers to report on how the process works.
Few Ads in Sight
Here’s the shocking thing about these magazines: they hardly have any ads. The Score’s edition has just seven full page ads for non-Score properties, from four companies. Any Cosmo reader will tell you that the average ratio of ads to editorial is more like, what, 60-40? 70-30?
The hockey magazines are, like a few others (National Geographic? What else?), about selling content and not about selling you ads wrapped around a few articles. This despite the fact that one can find all of the stats and most (if not more) of the analysis online.
Hockey magazines seem to fly in the face of contemporary attitudes about publishing. Of course, they could be on their last legs, financially, but they don’t seem to be.
This reminds me of what I recently read (and wrote) about Consumer Reports. They have three million paying online subscribers, and don’t rely on ad revenue.
The lesson? There’s still hope for curators and creators of really useful content.
