So your new angle is basically as the baseball fan that screams "THEY LOWERED THE MOUND AND MADE THE BALLPARKS SMALLER!" type of old guy that yells at clouds.

Sports change. Stats change.
Good teams vs bad teams - never, ever changes.


Nobody on this board is a bigger Selanne fan, especially on the Jets, than me. I LOVED Teemu. Maybe the best regular (offensive) line of my lifetime for that year. Hell, that line helped to send the Hawks into the dark ages for a little while.
But the game has changed, my man. Move on.

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Damnit.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

The Oilers are always trouble. I am resigned to this.

The Hawks are built for three-on-three, but the Oilers might have a claim with an RNH-Hall-Sekera first unit and Draisaitl-Eberle-Nurse second.

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good save

Oh good.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Hossa's too old to win this game, gonna lose

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You know what that save on Hall was? HORSE THEFT.

Nice breakaway goal from Hossa. I still think three-on-three is silly, but the Hawks sure kick ass at it.

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Hossa GWG, doing the postgame interview, with 'Dream On' in the background ... methinks Mac couldn't be happier.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I get it, the bottom of the roster is better than ever, systems are tighter. But I'm not asking for 200-point seasons or anything here. Ideally, you have two to five guys over 100 points on the year and a handful more at point-per-game, which the league has generally had even in this dead-puck era and the one before it.

If anything, I think there's just a bit more NHL talent than roster slots right now, so the expansion to 32 teams cannot come fast enough. You can bring in guys who should be in the league but aren't and a few guys who maybe shouldn't, and that might help loosen up some of this clenched-asshole tightness the league has going right now. Unfortunately, the league is being retarded about expansion because Seattle didn't apply and they don't want to have to let Quebec City in.

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This seems like a 120-mph head on car crash in the face of what you usually say, IMO.

Unless you are ultimately saying that you want to dilute the bottom 25% of the league, maybe more, in the hopes of making the current league stars stand out even more, even though the level of play clearly will not improve.

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Well, I've always maintained that today's fourth-liner thoroughly outclasses the fourth-liners of the past, but that has its pros and cons. I think it's great that there's more elite talent in the world than there's ever been. I don't think it's good when it manifests itself in overcoached grinding games that come down to funny bounces in scrums. The fact is that the game's best of the best have to shine, but overcoming this doesn't have so much to do with schemes or good grinders in and of themselves so much as it does hockey's very Nordic culture of "don't get any ideas that you're any better than anyone else." What gives Alex Ovechkin the right to make guys look foolish, huh? Last I checked, there were 20 players on a team. "Good two-way play" and "contributions up and down the roster" are things you want to have, but are sometimes fetishized in a way that would sound preposterous in any other sport. Imagine an era of the NBA where there were no superstars on the level of Durant, Curry, et al, and NBA dorkwads brushed it off with "well, what are you going to do, 12th men today are better than 12th men have ever been. Do you have some sort of problem with 12th men? People still put the ball in the hoop. The game changes." Be that as it may, there's still a stratification that feels comfortable.

From a business standpoint, I think the NHL can support 32 teams, but not in the 32 places they want: the 30 we have now plus Las Vegas plus Seattle. I know this because Seattle doesn't fucking want a team in the first place. Numerous Seattle-based interests were asked to apply for a team and they all said no. In terms of filling a roster, I think you can find about 30 guys who should be in the NHL right now but aren't, whether they're in the AHL or the dying star of the KHL. I'd worry about the necessity of filling out the corresponding AHL rosters and maintaining 32 solvent AHL teams.

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After reading up on it for five minutes, I kinda like the idea of Houston being the second new franchise along with Vegas. It would keep the league from having to send Detroit back to the Western Conference...at least until Arizona moved to Quebec City.

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Rockets ownership controls the Toyota Center and does not want a hockey team gobbling up dates that could be used on shit people in Houston actually care about. That's why they evicted the Aeros a few years ago. It's the same situation as Atlanta.

Detroit might just have to nut up and play divisional games against Chicago and Minneapolis like they do in other sports leagues.

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There are a lot of reasons for that.

Defensive systems are better, just about every forward is all-in on defense (wasn't the case 25 years ago), goalies are bigger, the butterfly has been perfected, and defensemen are more willing to block shots. All of those factors have led to the decrease in scoring. DownGoesBrown had a great piece on this 2-3 years ago.