Six hours on Sunday
Another in-game blogIn what was possibly just a mechanism to ensure I stayed awake long enough to watch the game I wanted to watch, I made the rash decision to add to my highly irregular series of posted-after-the-fact in-game blogs.On the slate: CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada doubleheader from last night – or really, Sunday morning for me. (Two games, from midnight to 6am? Not done it for a while, so why not?)First up, Detroit Red Wings @ Toronto Maple Leafs in the Hockey Hall of Fame game, fo

Ow, that really hurts! - an addendum
Further to the October update on CHIP numbers (HERE), I figured it wouldn’t be that difficult to produce some sort of basic analysis on where all these NHLers have been getting hurt. Er, obviously meaning what part of the body, not the location of the game in which the injury occurred (of course, the latter would merely confirm that the vast majority occurred in Philadelphia…)The results (again covering games played through 31 October) are in the table below. I’ve just used the descriptions found in the player profiles on

Ow, that really hurts!
Injury stats update – October 2009This is my first look for the 2009/10 regular season at which teams have been hit hardest by injuries by trying to place a value on the games missed by players due to injury/illness.(My most recent piece on this, for the end of the 2008/09 regular season, can be viewed HERE.)The concept again - multiply each game missed by a player by his 2008/09 cap charge, then take the aggregate of these figures for each team and divide by 82. This indicator of value lost to a team by injury/illness is called CHIP

NHL Premiere 2009 in Stockholm – Day Two
St. Louis Blues 5-3 Detroit Red Wings, 3 October 2009Friday night’s season opener saw the Blues withstand some early dominance by the Wings to overturn a two-goal deficit in the second period with some opportunistic finishing, then hold on with some comfort in a more defensive third period. Game two on Saturday featured…well, pretty much the same thing in the end, strangely enough.As before (see HERE), the following is merely a fairly unfocused stream of observations and highlights plus a fairly unf

NHL Premiere 2009 in Stockholm – Day One
Detroit Red Wings – St. Louis Blues, 2 October 2009 I’m both incapable of and too lazy to (a) do some sort of informative travelogue thing illustrating the delights of Stockholm, or (b) provide an insightful write-up of the game itself, so… The following is merely a fairly unfocused stream of observations and highlights from my attendance at Friday night’s game at Globen Arena in Stockholm, plus a fairly unfocused stream of amateur photographs. (Yes, I wasn’t sat that close. I will see if I can get closer to warmups for game two.) It was probably a mistake to take my chances by waiting to eat