shrader

They should have put Olofsson with Eichel-Rodrigues. I'd be comfortable calling that the BU line since that's probably the closest name to Oksanen.

Poor choice, maybe. But worthy of a firing? That's just plain ridiculous. Chz already talked about there being a massive highlight package. That will cover more than enough of what people want to see. I can't see too many people being interested in the large number of shifts that will include the likes of Justin Kea and Josh Sterk. The game is fun for what it is, but we're really not missing much here.

I assume that now that Eichel has picked a number this is the new topic to over-react over?

I feel like that needs to be typed out as RHINEHART, or whatever the occasional misspelling is.

I was scanning through the summary of free agent signings on TSN and just noticed that Gragnani signed with the Devils last week. How did no one pounce on that one?

Thanks to the stats deflation, we have no idea of how to really compare today's elite to those guys. The numbers will never match up to most of those guys, but it doesn't mean that certain players today aren't as dominant as some of those guy were.

Three more BU guys on that list. I'm going to have to watch a few more of their games over the next couple years.

I would watch a team named after inkman. Just think of the promotional ideas he'd come up with.

I'm pretty sure he would just snap the bar in half so as not to be bothered by such a menial task.

I think just about anyone would be exhausted after a 22.5 hour work day.

I really wish I could go to the scrimmage. I'm going through a bit of a hockey withdrawal right now. That and I kind of like to see how some of the college kids stack up against the other prospects. And I don't mean guys like Eichel or even Fasching, I mean the lower tier guys who are a bit off the radar. I like to see how these guys will wind up impacting their college teams.

Their system is pure stupidity. They're lucky they haven't had more problems like this.

I still think that Nik Lidstrom belongs in the defensemen conversation.

Back on Memorial Day weekend we bought a 4 piece sectional couch and scheduled a delivery for 6/21. About a week before that date we got a call saying that one of the 4 pieces was on back order and couldn't be delivered until 7/4. Instead of getting a couch with one piece missing, we re-scheduled the full delivery to 7/7. Fastforward to this week, when the delivery truck showed up, all they had for us was that one single piece that was originally on back order. Throughout this entire process, their customer service has been next to impossible to get in touch with. They have incredibly long periods where you're placed on hold, and then when you do get through, you wind up getting disconnected. After a ton of waiting, they eventually told my wife that the other pieces are now on back order. Hmmmm, maybe you should have called to inform us of that instead of delivering the single piece. We do eventually need more furniture for the house, but it's safe to say we will be dealing with a different store when that time comes.

We got the better (and more entertaining) Biron.

They were the top 3 teams that missed out on the playoffs and he mentioned them immediately after last year's top 8. Read his quote again, there's nothing nefarious there.

There's a whole clan of Biegas that have gone through Harvard. Ours probably won't wind up as the best of a group of mediocre pros. Then there was Andrew Orpik. Can we branch off to crappy offspring? Dylan Hunter springs to mind. (Paging LGR) Hopefully Reinhart rescues us from this one. edit: Oh, and the lesser Pandolfo brother, Mike.

At least it opens up with a nice long gap between those first two games. That's at least something. They're going to be very well rested headed into New England.

You won't find anyone who is more in awe of Gretzky's number than me. No one will ever be able to convince me that he wasn't the greatest of all time (whatever that means). But I do think that the best players of today are facing a much more balanced field of contemporaries than Wayne ever did. There are more good hockey players today than there were back then. What's going to make this McEichel thing so special (if they pan out) is that they came in together and will forever be compared (again, if they pan out). Gretzky didn't really have that. Hopefully this thing winds up being like if Gretzky and Lemieux were the same exact age and had entered the league together (and stayed healthy). It would be a great time for the game of hockey. Did they have development camps back then? http://www.hockeydb.com/ihdb/stats/pdisplay.php?pid=2034

Is it 40 days until easter already?

I'd also be curious to see just how different the gap between Gretzky and the next couple guys was compared to Crosby today, percentage-wise, or even something more technical than that. I'd mess around with it if I had the time. I'm looking at this completely blind right now and have no good feel for how it would look. Personally though, I hate all of these comparisons across eras. There are way too many differences for it to have any meaning. I'm at the point where I think that players can only be compared against others from their same time. Everything else is just pointless speculation to me.

What about a robot Joan Rivers? Yes, all of you now know what I watched this weekend.

They'll sort that stuff out as it approaches.

You're right smell (oh wait, I thought o was going to start calling you The). There's a whole lot of stupid going on in that video.

Whether that was a man or a woman in that video, it is no different to me (go ahead and watch it, it's tame). Either way, both people are in the wrong. In this day in age where everyone is pushing for equality, these things can be judged selectively. We all need to live by the same standards. And as for the earlier stuff about how we don't quite know how to handle situations where it isn't a man hitting a woman, public opinion is also going to have to figure out how to deal male on male and female on female domestic abuse. I know there's currently a WNBA domestic abuse story out there that most probably aren't even aware of since it isn't a ratings driving scenario.