hockey

Increasing the size of the net is insanely stupid
I would reduce the size of goalies' equipment instead, and allow them to be hit (and to hit back) outside of the crease.
Brian Burke and Gordon Campbell unveil World Championship banner

Vancouver is hosting the 2006 junior world championships, and the former general manager of the Vancouver Canucks (whom I cheered for) and the Premier of British Columbia (for whom I did not cheer) were the honoured guests.

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sillygwailo added a note: Gordon Campbell, premier of British Columbia

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sillygwailo added a note: Brian Burke is obscured by the netting that protects fans from flying pucks.

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sillygwailo added a note: Kamloops Blazer goalie who was unfairly taunted. He was competent in net. A lot more so than the Vancouver goalie, who misplayed a puck floating to him in the air that hit the crossbar.

The World Champtionship 2006 Host Venue banner is hoisted

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sillygwailo added a note: All hail the 2006 World Junior Championship Host Venue banner.

Vancouver Giants celebrate overtime win

All the players in the corner as the dejected opponents, the Kamloops Blazers, look on.

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sillygwailo added a note: Triumphant Vancouver Giants player celebrate Gilbert Brule's overtime-winning goal.

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sillygwailo added a note: Dejected Kamloops Blazers can only look on and wonder what could have been if they'd actually put a man on Brule during the overtime period.

Deliberately

Tom on post-Bertuzzi violence in the NHL: “Are these guys deliberately trying to make the league look bad? It's working.”

Toxic To Begin With

Julia on Wade Belak's slash to the head of Ossi Vaananen last night in Toronto: “As I've indicated, the Maple Leafs are my team of choice, but I will not tolerate this from any player on any team. Belak should be suspended for at least as long as Bertuzzi, and in my opinion longer. While Bertuzzi sucker-punched a player and injured him severely, and Belak didn't seriously injure Vaananen, to me, the degree of injury is irrelevant, it's the potential for injury that matters. Slashing at someone's neck with your stick is never acceptable.”

The Belak incident is a little strange, since the intent seems to be there, but he wasn't looking at the player he ended up slashing. The Toronto-Colorado game wasn't the only one on the CBC last night that had a serious incident of violence in it, though. Well, the other game didn't have a serious single violent episode, but the refs in that game needed the authority to end the game with less than 2 seconds remaining on the clock. One of the linesmen stepped in between Krzysztof Oliwa and the player(s) he wanted to fight, but the refs and linesmen should have been able to tell the coaches to get their players off the ice because everybody in the building knew that a brawl was about to erupt. (The fans were even chanting Oliwa's name, egging him on to fight. Tthe Calgary coaches were unaware of this.) Fortunately nobody was injured in the brawl—even the two European (!) goalies (!!) fought in the brawl too—nor was the brawl the result of an incident causing serious injury, but when the atmosphere is toxic like that—and it's increasingly clear that many games—and the Calgary-Colorado game, just like the Vancouver-Colorado game earlier this month—are atmostpheres that are toxic to begin with.

Full Of Mafioso Laws

Joel Stein: “If hockey were a normal sport, a fight would get you ejected, suspended and fined. In the NFL, just being too happy about your touchdown costs you money. But the NHL, despite an influx of European players, is still a sport born of parts of Canada that most people don't own enough Gore-Tex to visit. It's full of mafioso laws about protection and honor. And while it would seem sensible for the NHL to eliminate fighting altogether, it can't. [...] The NHL is in the worst shape of its history, having suffered from overexpansion in the past decade. The game itself has been dulled by a suffocating defensive style of play. Fights and hard hits are all the sport has to promote itself with in the U.S., as it does in commercials and widely sold videos of fights set to music.”

Too Tolerant?

Mike Bossy: “Let's forget about hockey careers for an instant and think of a human life. Let's forget about professional sports for a minute and think of human compassion. Our tolerance for illegal acts on the playing field is astounding, and our acceptance of them unacceptable.”

Bossy says that zero-tolerance is the only answer, but he's wrong. It's one of the answers, and it's not the best one. Ken Dryden has called for a holistic approach, although he admits to not having the solution.

Tom is skeptical as to whether getting rid of the instigator rule would have done anything. Same here.

Most People Like Bunk!

Tom Benjamin had a revelation: “Frankly, I was shocked. Everywhere I looked I found bunk. Not only did I find bunk everywhere as a result of reading Bill James, I discovered something else that was every bit as disturbing to me. Most people like bunk! They love it! Most people hate debunkers. James was very obviously right about almost everything and hardly anybody in baseball or the baseball media liked him or believed him or listened to him! They often attacked him! Nothing changed.”

Last month I read Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and it fits very nicely into the minority opinion category (it only now occurs to me to create a category in my weblog content management tool of choice). It's a book almost solely about baseball: for about one paragraph Lewis talks about the implications outside baseball. A weblog comparing baseball to the business world does so far more explicitly, but Moneyball is a book about how the conventional wisdom usually isn't very wise and that how one can profit from being correct but in the minority, and it is in my current list of all-time desert island top five non-fiction books.

(Some time passes and Jeff of Management By Baseball writes in to say that "A weblog comparing baseball to the business world" is not an adequately accurate phrase to describe it, and says that it would be more accurate to say it is about the lessons managers—in the public, private and military sectors—can learn from baseball. Moneyball by Michael Lewis, Jeff says, has a similar subject theme, except it looks at the subject the other way around: baseball managers can learn lessons in terms of human capital from the business world as well.)

Bill James belongs in the Minority Opinion Hall of Fame.

Part Of A System With A Human Being At One End

Colby Cosh: “It's because a player can't easily tell when a composite stick has been damaged. If your wooden stick develops a fatal structural flaw, you become aware of it the first time you bang it on the ice: It notifies you that something is wrong by sound and feel, and you discard it at a convenient moment. The composite stick doesn't transmit the same information into a player's hands when it develops a crack, so he keeps using it on the ice until a catastrophic failure occurs. The composite is, really and truly, a "better" stick: but it's also part of a system with a human being at one end, and because it lacks an information-feedback component, it may be less appropriate to that system. Players like Jason Spezza who have persisted in using wood seem to understand this, but they probably wouldn't put it quite that way, not being dorks who write newspaper columns.”

This has implications, surely, in other areas where automation removes humans from a system, and when the system fails, we only have the automation to blame and not a human. A pressing concern of mine—naturally, having been a political science major in college—is automated voting systems.

Cosh continues on a different interpretation of why sticks are breaking: “The Sundin incident came in the midst of an apparent rash of game-deciding, highlight-reel sticksplosions. Since then, newspapers have been offering unsourced reports that some players are taking deliberate advantage of the vulnerability of the new technology. They're going after the opponent's stars and taking surreptitious whacks at their artificial lumber. Keep chipping away at Flash Funderchuk's shillelagh, and you might leave him with a failure-prone tool when he's facing an open net or breaking up an odd-man rush. [...] In a competitive environment, it is hard to foresee what kinds of sly, venal behaviours might develop, and sometimes we simply prefer not to foresee them. Lesson two: Human deviltry is something you can't lab-test for.”

Players, Cosh is arguing, have gamed the system. They found a weak spot in the system and exploit it—and it's detectable until it's too late. Cosh notes the larger implications: “When you look at the worlds of business and government policy, how often do you see failures resulting from a lack of two-way information transfer, or from a failure to anticipate various species of moral hazard? Quite, that's how often. And a conservative might add a third lesson: that trying to improve too fast on the arrangements made by Mother Nature can lead to disaster and embarrassment.”

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