Thus Spake Darth Buddha

The previews are coming out thick and fast for this play-in series and here and there you see looks at the likely match-ups. Nobody much seems to be looking at who got what match-ups in the past though. So here it is, all thanks to NaturalStatTrick. The Sid Match-Up It's a little hard to draw hard conclusions from a season in which Sid only played one game against the Habs , but the outcome was pretty clear. He got 65.7% of his time vs Petry (who was with Kulak) and 49.3% of his time vs Gallagher and Tatar (with Danault a little behind). Apart from a couple of outliers in Kovalchuk (4:02) and Mete (1:22), the rest of the Habs got somewhere between 3:18 and 1:42 vs Sid, a pattern that suggests it didn't really matter to either coach what happened when that match-up wasn't there. Sid's line of Zucker and Simon had a hard time of it scoring chance wise against their primary match-up, with xGF% scores between 30.54 to 18.08, but still came away from it 1-0. He also scor...

With the Kraken's expansion draft (theoretically) little more than a year away, everybody's having a shout about who'll get selected. Virtually all of them have Seattle picking Matt Murray from the Penguins and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a waste of everyone's time. And this is my shout on why, and the alternatives. Let's break down the Penguins' exposed list shall we? Goaltenders Eligible: Matt Murray, Tristan Jarry, Casey DeSmith Exempt: Emil Larmi, Alex D'Orio Minimum requirement: A goaltender under contract for the 21-22 season (met by DeSmith, presumably by Murray and Jarry too) Right now the assumption everyone's making - admittedly frequently with the proviso that they expect a change - is that this will be the Penguins' goaltenders, Murray will be exposed as the more expensive player, and that Murray will be selected. Here's a logic tree of how this goes. Q1: Will Murray and Jarry both be on the Penguins by the expan...

Things to do in lockdown. Watch a lot of TV. Start new blogs. Promise yourself you'll start exercising again tomorrow. Make a lot of slow cooker recipes. Remember you've got a Kongregate account. Kongregate, for those who don't know, is a site full of browser games. It's a good outlet for my probable ADD as I can just switch to something different while I waste my life on my computer. My game of choice there had been Retro Bowl, a genuinely good American Football game, but when my cat deleted my save data I got sad and tried something else.  That something else was New Star Soccer, a football game from the same developer, and it is genuinely bad and I can't stop playing it. There's three categories of bad here 1. Comically Bad This stuff sometimes makes the game more enjoyable than not, but reading reports about Liverpool fans laughing at my shooting after my L2 Torquay side just beat them in the League Cup semi-finals thanks to my brilliant playmaking...

It is May 10th, 2016. A Penguins zone entry has resulted in Carl Hagelin skating into the corner. He's got two Capitals on him but nobody's cutting off a pass behind the net. Nick Bonino leaves the puck and it goes all the way through to Phil Kessel with time and space. TJ Oshie is the nearest Capital but he moves to take away the lane back to the points and points for Backstrom to challenge Kessel and take away the pass to the net front. Slightly impeded by Bonino going to the net front, Backstrom is a step too late to stop the pass. All the Capitals are a step too late. Niskanen isn't in time to stop Hagelin from getting a shot off from the slot. Taylor Chorney is a step too late to impede Bonino. The Capitals go off to the golf course. The Penguins go on to party with Lord Stanley. It was a fitting crowning moment for Washington's tormentors in chief. The HBK line had six unanswered goals over the series. The Capitals can beat the Penguins' first line, they can...

In order to test the rating system I was making up off the top of my head in terms of what made sense to me, I decided to do the smallest pool first - right wing. That is Patrick Kane, Bryan Rust, Blake Wheeler, Brock Boeser, Kyle Palmieri, and Blake Coleman. First off, let me quickly explain what this system is trying to measure and the methodology. The system is trying to measure performance this season based on how they did in 5v5 units. There is no predictive quality nor am I using isolates. To do so, it measures stats for the three main areas - 5v5 goal scoring, 5v5 playmaking/puck movement, and 5v5 defence - and for three supplementary areas in 5v4 PP, 4v5 PK, and Burden - and spits out scores out of 10 (except for burden). The first three stats go into the players' stats, the supplementary stats are mainly used for added context and potential tiebreakers. Note that where possible, players who split seasons use whole season stats rather than one team or the other. 5v5...

The best thing about the new CBA? The lure of best on best hockey at the Olympics. It's not a guarantee but dear gods I want it to happen. I started thinking about the US forwards in particular when I was using Bryce Chevallier's site and noticed he had Malkin's closest comparable as Eichel. That got me thinking about how sick a Guentzel-Eichel pairing could be (this was also motivated by seeing some people putting Matthews and Guentzel on the same line and thinking that's a waste of two triggermen). As a result, I decided to put together an ideal US forwards roster based solely on data for this season. Note the words this season. This isn't a projection and it isn't taking past seasons into account. I picked my initial pool to concentrate on by going to the NHL site and looking at every US forward with thirteen and a half minutes of ES time a night this season. To this list I added four forwards who I thought interesting to include for various reasons - J...