I haven’t written anything about the Canucks for a while, so here are a few thoughts on the draft, recent free agency activity and the rest of the summer:
In the first round of the draft, the Canucks selected Jordan Schroeder, a 5′8″ American forward from the University of Minnesota. College players usually take longer to development, and enter the NHL later, so don’t plan on seeing him in a Canucks uniform any time too soon. He led the US team in scoring at the World Juniors last winter, so that’s encouraging. Hopefully he’s the second coming of Cliff Ronning. Here’s a two-minute video profile of him.
Credit Canucks GM with re-signing the Sedins. I hoped and expected this to happen, but I think it’s an excellent deal. $6.1 million a year is, to my thinking, a little below market value for these guys. That money makes them the 34th and 35th best-paid players in the league (great looking salary site there, by the way). If you check out some of those players (Jovanovski, Stastny, Gaborik, Gomez, among others) ahead of them on the list, that money looks well spent.
The team lost Mattias Ohlund, which was almost a certainty. Ohlund is never a player who’s seemed comfortable in the limelight, so I suspect he’ll be quite happy being more anonymous in Tampa Bay.
Maintaining the Canucks’ Swede quotient, Gillis signed Mikael Samuelsson. The 32-year-old winner scored 19 goals and added 21 assists last season. He’ll make a decent replacement for Taylor Pyatt, who I expect to be signed by another team over the coming weeks. Well, a decent replacement on the ice. Samuelsson’s eyes are decidedly less dreamy than Pyatt’s. More importantly, Samuelsson has a ton of playoff experience and even played with the Sedins for a bit back in Sweden.
The team extended restricted free agent Kyle Wellwood a qualifying offer, which I imagine he’ll sign. He was kind of a revelation this year, and an excellent reclamation project. They same goes for another RFA, Jannik Hansen.
I’m optimistic that the team won’t re-sign Mats Sundin. He’s done, and looked it in the playoffs.
The Canucks’ most urgent need is on the blue line. Even with Ohlund, the defence looked decidedly creaky against Chicago in the playoffs. They urgently need to get younger and faster. I’ve read some rumours about signing Francois Beauchemin, who would be a great addition. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anybody on the farm team who can step up, and the team doesn’t have a lot of spare assets with which to make a trade.
So, what will the line-up look like come the opening night of the 2009-2010 season? Here’s my best guess:
Sedin - Sedin - Burrows
Samuelsson - Kessler - Demitra
Raymond - Wellwood - Bernier
Hordichuk - Johnson - Rypien
There’s a back lane behind our house. It’s an unusual feature on the west coast, and presumably it’s a reflection of the neighbourhood being at least a hundred years old. As children have done for at least that long, there’s a couple of kids who haul nets, sticks and a tennis ball into the lane to play hockey. They’ve even chalked out a little ice rink, with faceoff circles and a centre ice line.
As you probably know, the NHL playoffs are winding down. In fact, if Detroit beats the Pittsburgh Penguins tomorrow night, they’ll hold aloft their fifth Stanley Cup in 12 years–a remarkable feat.
The lane is sloped, so you pay a price when you miss the more southerly net. I instantly recognized this as a kid’s decent interpretation of the Penguins’ logo, which appears at centre ice in Pittsburgh’s Mellon Arena:
Here’s another view, for some perspective. Clearly the kids are pretending to be Crosby and Malkin, not Zetterberg and Datsyuk.
I was a pretty solitary kid growing up. I preferred to tape out a goal on one wall of our two-car carport, and shoot tennis balls at it from the far side. If a ball took a particularly bad bounce, it ended up on the steep, wooded slope between our house and the neighbours. I had to psych myself up to retrieve those wayward balls. The neighbours had a surly Doberman named Sasha, and she didn’t care for children.
I’m a longtime player of sports games on the PC, and a recovering technical writer. So I take an interest in the manuals that accompany the games I play. As most gamers will attest, game manuals are usually awful. They’re under-written, incomplete and, for narrative games, spend too much time on useless back story.
This problem is usually solved by the far-superior in-game tutorial. Learning by playing is much more effective than learning by reading. There are few tutorials, however, in sports games. That’s fine, because usually gamers know how to play the sport in question, but not always.
When I worked in Ireland, we often played PlayStation games around the office at lunch time (or, you know, other times). A favourite game (and I don’t think it was my Canadian influence) was EA Sports NHL 2002. Most of the Irish guys playing the game had never actually seen a hockey game, either live or on TV. Their understanding of the term “hockey” was strictly verbal. They had a vague idea what offside was from football (i.e. soccer), but no sense of what the icing rule was about. In any case, they mostly played with those rules turned off.
I was just glancing through the manual of a reasonably new soccer (i.e. football) game, and encountered this section:
These are team-wide tactics which you, as their godly overseer, can instruct them to execute. Though I’ve casually watched soccer for years, I only have the vaguest idea of what these are. Wing Play? Flat back? And ‘3rd Man Release’ sounds downright dirty. The manual doesn’t include an explanation of what these tactics are for, how they work or when you might use them. It assumes, like icing and offside, that I already understand them.
From talking to educators and influencers, we’ve learned that our videos are often used to introduce a subject - to get everyone on the same page at the beginning of a class, workshop, etc. Recently, as part of our planning for 2009, we came up with a model that helps tell this story. We call it the A-to-Z Scale.
The scale represents the path to learning a subject. On the left side are the basic, fundamental ideas. On the right, the details and applications of the ideas.
Thinking about sports games manuals, they’re really missing the Gs and the Hs of the games they’re simulating. Most players will understand that you throw the ball in the basket, or hit the ball into the hole with the stick. However, many casual players may not understand the nuances of the neutral-zone trap or the dreaded third man release.
Do we need to grasp these details to enjoy the game? Probably not (though the jargon in an American football game is pretty thick and commonplace), but all it would take is an extra couple of pages in the manual or a game tutorial to explain these concepts. I’d imagine that the developer looks at both of those as cost centres, though, so I’d expect they feel that less is more. What do you think?
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.
We currently don’t have cable. I’ve been putting the decision off to the fall, when I’d judge how much I was missing regularly watching the Canucks. At the moment, I’m thinking Shaw will go without our $50/month. It’s hard to be hopeful at the moment
He was inactive on draft day, but I was willing to give new Canucks GM Mike Gillis the benefit of the doubt. Then he turns around and offers a Mats Sundin an absurd amount of money–at least $3 million over market value (it feels to me like Sundin is done with the NHL). And before that he makes a cheap, ineffectual play for a restricted free agent.
In short, unless Mr. Gillis has some brilliant strategy that none of us can see (and that’s definitely a possibility), it’s going to be a rough year at GM Place.
That’s no big deal. The team has been quite good for nearly a decade, and you can’t go to the playoffs every year. The organization ought to embrace the idea that this is a rebuilding year. They should give as many young players as much playing time as possible, and try to trade some veteran assets while they’re still desirable. Roberto Luongo isn’t going to win a cup in this town in the next two years, and he could bring serious value in a trade.
The Canucks likely won’t make such changes in 2008, but assuming the team tanks, look for a fire sale on veterans at the trading deadline next spring. And I think that would be terrific. The current crop of players was good, but rarely great.
I didn’t hear until late last night (ferry trip plus Mark Knopfler concert kept me away from sports news), but yesterday longtime Canuck Markus Naslund signed a two-year deal with the New York Rangers for what works out to $4 million a year:
“It wasn’t hard to keep playing because I knew a few weeks after the season I wanted the chance to play again and maybe redeem myself and play the way I know I can play,” Naslund said last night from his home in Ornskoldsvik.
I’m glad to see the backside of Naslund (as, I’m sure, were many Vancouverites when he was walking around town). Don’t get me wrong–he could play. In his prime he had a Brett Hullesque release from the slot, cunning hands around the net and terrific outside speed. Also like Hull, he has that ability to sneak into the bare patches of defensive coverage to make room for a shot. He had three forty-goal seasons here in Vancouver, and was obviously a key component to the team’s success during his tenure. For a couple years, the West Coast Express line of Naslund, Morrison and Bertuzzi was the best in the league.
Still, his production has been systematically tailing off in recent years. He may enjoy a boost with a more attacking-style team and a more capable centre, but that was never going to happen in Vancouver. The team hasn’t had the personnel for the past two or three years. Last year the Canucks paid Naslund $6 million for 25 goals from Naslund last year, which was about 15 goals too few.
Naslund was never the kind of player I really admired. His commitment to defense was, at best, spotty and he was reasonably timid on the ice. Mike Keenan’s decision to hand Naslund the captaincy after Messier left was a brilliant tactical decision, but I think its effectiveness has long been exhausted. Naslund always struck me as too cool to be captain. It was hard to imagine him getting angry at his teammates for underperforming, or standing up for them physically on the ice.
It’s a common pattern as players age: they don’t necessarily want to decline in the same city where they rose to prominence. I’ve enjoyed watching Naslund over the years in Vancouver, but his expiry date had, for me, already passed.
If I have the Swedish correct, the title of this post means “we’ll miss you, Naslund”, “I love you, Markus”. Cue the cheesy tribute video:
