Kramerica Industries

On YouTube, there's several of those NHL-produced VHS recordings from postseasons back in the late '80s and early '90s, and last well, a couple of July's ago now, I was watching the 1990 edition and, during their brief recap of the Whalers-Bruins first round meeting, I heard a voice I didn't expect to hear - Rick Peckham. Turns out he did the Whalers from '83-'95 before coming to Tampa, where he's been ever since. I was surprised, because I can't really remember ever hearing Peckham talk much about the Whalers. Not even recently after the Hurricanes did their Whalers Night promotion (incidentally, Carolina is Tampa Bay's next opponent; off chance there might be some talk only because that promotional event was still a pretty short time ago). If I hadn't stumbled across that video I might've never realized that part of his background. I guess there was something marginally appropriate about that the Lightning were the last team to play the Whalers in Hartford, meaning Peckham would've been in the building for that game, assuming that the Lightning's television partner(s) - the main one of which, it appears, has remained a constant throughout seeing as how Sun Sports, nee Sunshine Network, was their partner in the link above - aired the game to begin with. John Kelly, huh? Looks like even I can figure out some of the dominoes here. Kelly left Tampa to go to Denver when the Nords moved, and Peckham moved from Hartford to fill Kelly's vacancy. Thus creating an opportunity for John Forslund to enter the ranks. On a non-Lightning note - I came across the CBC broadcast in Windsor and Western Canada of the final original Winnipeg Jets game. Apparently Brian Heyward did color commentary for CBC once upon a time. Who knew? EDIT: Not 11 individual games on 11 individual Sundays, but 11 games in regional coverage beginning in April. And while I know this was the 48-game season, I'm assuming based on how every other broadcast schedule that this was based on an 82-game season, so, yeah. This was a national television partner 25 years ago. That package sure feels pathetically weak.

I really don't like people physically abusing other people. What I really don't like almost as much is this mentality that has overtaken sports in that if someone makes the worth-strong-punishment mistake of physically abusing other people, that they deserve to be tarred and feathered and kicked out of the sport forever. You don't have to like people who do something disgusting like that but jeezus mother Christ the idea of anyone ever getting a second chance might as well not even exist anymore. One strike (pun not intended) and that's it. And I hate that I have to write this paragraph I'm writing right now because I know if I didn't there would be some moron(s) out there who would interpret this as if I don't think domestic abuse is a problem. Which it is! Of course it is. And serial abusers absolutely deserve to be kicked out of their leagues. But, my g-d, we get the pitchforks out and want these people gone when they've committed one mistake and I just think it's absurd, gross overreacting. We can want these people to get duly punished without stripping them of their livelihoods. At least, I would think we could.

2009: Saints 2010: Packers 2011: Giants 2012: Ravens bonus points for the Packers beating the Eagles in the Week 1 season opener and then beating them again in the first round of the playoffs.

you tell me which one is Rick Tocchet and which one is the PTSD-laced veteran from a Seinfeld episode.

About two years ago, ESPN changed the look of their scoreboard pages; you can click on MLB or NBA or whatever. Two years later, the NHL scores page remains unchanged. Pretty much tells me all I needed to know.

I forget just which company ran these ads, but last season, there was a company that ran commercials on Sportsnet that had the slogan "the 5th season", obviously hockey being that "5th" season, and I wanted to shoot myself after hearing those ads multiple times over during games.

I'll edit more later, but in the cases of Nill and Yzerman, I'm sure some of that is coming from Detroit's front office. You know, before we started treating Holland and Detroit like morons.

This was clearly a Lambert article, which made looking it up real easy for me, and I'll bring up a different part of it: Just what is the determining line for this, exactly? I think very highly of Bill Peters as a head coach, but that part focuses on their front office and just what has Carolina's front office done to establish their intelligence? Draft Noah Hanifin and Sebastian Aho in the first five picks of the draft? , I could've done that. Pick up Teravainen by swallowing Bickell's contract (before realizing Bickell's career was basically over)? Ok, I guess; call that the benefit of keeping cap space available, but using a desperate team cap-wise and leveraging a bad contract against them to pick up an out-of-favor prospect isn't a new philosophy. I realize that virtually any team that plays "puck-possession hockey" tends to get plaudits, but that's a useless proposition because virtually every team tries to play puck-possession hockey. It's a nebulous term. Hockey isn't soccer but on ice; you can't play behind the puck and try to attack on counters as a base method for offensive success; the variables are far too different. Some teams are able to play "puck-possession hockey" on the basis that their players collective talent level is better than their opponents. Some are able to do so because they're able to win puck battles; the Kings won two Stanley Cups as a high-possession but "dump-and-chase" team because they were able to win the puck back thanks to their physical advantage over most opponents. It's funny to think that there are multiple methods to success; these methods also have inherent weaknesses, and of course they do, because if any single method were flawless, everybody would be doing it. It's also, of course, quite dumb to overlook the Cam Ward aspect in all of this. Whether a team is very good or very bad with their possession metrics, goaltending is always the great equalizer. This is how Montreal had success a couple years back despite awful metrics; Carey Price isn't human (Montreal's possession metrics are actually really good this year, for a change). That's how the Rangers have had success in recent years and this year, despite being #21 in terms of Fenwick. Minnesota's #25 in the league; have we even noticed? Goaltending can play up mediocre possession teams and play down strong possession teams. Carolina has all those draft picks at their disposal? I don't think much of Brian Elliott (probably underrate him, frankly), but he was there to be had an off-season ago and would've been a much better option than Cam Ward; can pretty much guarantee that. Not all those draft picks are gonna work out anyway; might as well allow yourself to use some of them as capital for actual NHL talent. Alex Nedeljkovic is still a few years off from being a viable option if he ever becomes one at all; can pretty much guarantee that. EDIT - had some bad recollection on Aho's draft status. He was #35 overall in his class. Mea culpa.

Well, there's this:

Honestly, I was never even aware of this one. Maybe something was said about it when they met back in 2009 (Week 2, IIRC) but that was seven years ago now and a long-forgotten memory if it ever was one. And, of course, for all the Bills' Super Bowl heart-break, their biggest heart-break came in Tampa as well in SB XXV. That's definitely a strange one. Can't figure out why that ever happened. As is, the Bucs are scheduled to return to Buffalo in 2017.

The Giants and Dolphins had a quirk like that last year too that ended when they met for Monday Night Football around Week 13 or 14. I think the Giants hadn't come to Miami since 1993; they, too, had a would-be meeting in Miami in 2007 that was at Wembley instead. I'm sure there are a few other quirks like that; quirks that pre-date the post-2002 scheduling alignment. I don't have the interest in digging into it ATM, but just a quick look at the London games, which were originally inter-conference but that has kinda softened in recent years, could probably unearth a few 15+ year gaps of one team visiting the other's stadium, I imagine.

To date, that is the only time that the Patriots have been to Raymond James Stadium; the last four times the Bucs and Pats have met, three of them were in Foxboro (2000, 2005, 2013), and the meeting that would have been in Tampa (2009) was in London instead. The Patriots finally figure to come to Tampa again in 2017. EDIT: Scratch that - 1997 was the last year at Tampa Stadium, so the Pats have never played a regular season game at Raymond James. So 2017 would be the first time for that.

DST usually ends in early November and begins again in mid-March; that leaves two very narrow windows on either end of the season where Arizona home games are 10:00 starts, standard. Probably a net of 1.5 months of the season, so upwards to 10 Coyotes games a season, probably fewer.

I mean, Avs too, but maybe I just have a perception looking back to where the top Western teams were better than the top Eastern teams? I dunno. There's obviously a ton that I love about that final season before Lockout II, but I tend to think if Detroit hadn't slipped up to Calgary, that they would've beaten Tampa in the Final (same goes to Ottawa if they had met Tampa, too; for several years, the Sens had the Lightning's number and always won those games, and they won all four meetings that year as well). The Devils were the only Eastern team to win a Cup between 1995-2003; of course, they did it three times. All the other Cups went to the West. And, of course, the Cup has been largely West-dominated post-Lockout II as well. I mean, maybe you're right! I play NHL 2004 with decent regularity and am reminded that the West had a lot of crap teams in it during that time. Maybe I'm just a bit more of the mindset that the NHL in general had a lot of crap teams back then, because there was no salary cap and so the talent wasn't nearly as distributed across the league as you would find today.

In the not-so-distant past, sports teams in Charlotte and Atlanta (x2) played in divisions labeled "West division" in their leagues. As such, I almost kinda want to see the two Florida teams thrown in the Western Conference. It's not like they aren't already isolated to some extent from the rest of the Atlantic Division as it is, anyway. Besides, maybe I'm the only one, but I love 10:00 start times in California/Western Canada and would be ok with twice as many of them. The downside, of course, is that the West has a lot more really good teams and the road for the Lightning to accomplish anything would get a hell of a lot steeper. And, really, come to think of it, when was the last time the Eastern Conference was the better conference in the league? Back when the Penguins won back-to-back Cups, I guess, but that's a solid quarter century ago now.

One of the few, maybe, but I'll join that war with you, which is something I never would've said a few years ago about Joe Buck. Somewhere along the line (not really sure when it happened, exactly), he allowed his inner snark monster to become part of his on-air persona and he's been much better for it. I mean, at least it sure seems that way. Maybe he's always been that way and I only began to notice it when I realized my own real life personality was similar to what Joe was doing on the air. I'm not really sure. Yeah, these days, Buck gets my A+ stamp of approval. The jury can be out about whether he does good work, but he certainly does entertaining work, and for a TV play-by-play where I can already see what's happening anyway, that's good enough for me.

We'll always have that one night where the chatroom was alive. *1/19/2016*

Lightning went to OT in their first game against the Flyers. Since I can't be bothered very well with pre-season hockey, it was my first exposure to inorganic 3-on-3 hockey. Oh sure, it was exciting, but good grief was it ludicrous in its application. If I wanted to watch non-structured, open ice hockey, I'd find my way up to Canada for the winter (...what's the opposite of a snowbird?) and have my pick for wherever I wanted to watch some rec hockey being played by locals (watch, because Lord knows I can't skate). Jason Garrison scored the game winner on a breakaway. Jason Garrison. Because...NHL hockey works out so well that Jason effin' Garrison just generates breakaway opportunities, doesn't it? And these still count equal to regulation wins, too! 3-on-3 is just as meaningful to win under as a shootout is. Should just separate regulation results from non-regulation results at this point in terms of weight placed on wins.

^ I remember this and it had to be the Preds and it had to be in the 2011-12 season. This does sometimes happen in MLB too, however, so I'm not sure we should be so quick to pin this a fledgling-NHL-market sort of thing, as much fun as it is. There was an A's-Royals game this year (no, not that one!) where there was no TV broadcast; I watched it on MLB.tv with the Royals radio call. I think the on-screen graphics were courtesy MLB.com itself. And this was in August in the middle of a pennant race, too.

As someone who played a whole lot of Madden 2004 with Seahawks and Bengals franchises, lets just say I came across that matchup quite frequently. That photo was from a game in 2003.

<3 Jeff Vinik.

I feel like (transforming into) Hyper Knuckles is shrinking every time I look at my sig. Mind you, I'm not complaining about that, but I am curious as to why this seems to be the case.

Per the profile, not even a visit to CCSLC since the minute that post was submitted. Weird. I have my doubts to that being a permanent "leaving" but, jeez, he's stuck to his guns for the first 15 days since.

So you're basically saying that the Broward County community is Del Boca Vista. Cool. At least that gives me a better idea of how things work down there.

woo-hoo