devilsrule33

This year will mark the 10-year anniversary of the week that two of the most famous Those Games played out within days of each other. You don’t even need to describe the games. You just need a pair of names: Aaron Boone and Steve Bartman.

 

Red Sox fans and Cubs fans used to sit at the head table of the club. The Cubs are still there. The Red Sox got out, and they won’t be coming back for a generation or two, if ever.

And that’s the beauty of all this, the one saving grace that gives you the will to go on. There is a ticket out of this club, and we all know what it is: When your team wins a championship, you get to take a torch to your team’s pile of Those Games.

 

That’s where the hope comes in. It’s knowing that sometimes you get the Bartman game, a kick in the groin that serves no purpose beyond reminding you that you’re in the club and that sports will never make you happy. But sometimes you get the Boone game, that one last failure to toss on the pile before the big bonfire. Redemption might be coming, even if you don’t know it yet.

 

This Boston Bruins team had their own Boone game. In 2010, they blew a 3-0 series lead to the Flyers. The decisive loss came in Game 7, in Boston, when they coughed up a three-goal lead, which all sounds strangely familiar. It was a collapse for the ages, maybe the greatest in hockey history, destined to be talked about forever. And then the Bruins went out and won the Stanley Cup in 2011. Nobody talks about 2010 anymore.

 

That’s the only positive thing a sports fan can hold on to after a game like Monday night's. When you watch your team lose one of Those Games, you’re never sure if it's going to be a Boone game or a Bartman game.

http://www.grantland...ame-7-gut-punch

There haven’t been many times in franchise history where going into a game, you knew this could be a Devils player’s final home game, and there wasn’t something bigger at stake like trying to keep the season alive. Well tonight, there isn’t much to play for and it very well could be Patrik Elias’ last home game as a Devil. Hopefully it won’t be (and I don’t think it will be), but if it gets to July 1^st, there might be some offers that blow him and the Devils away.

Patty has always been an underrated quiet star around the league and even on this team. But in the end, he owns pretty much every offensive record on this team, he’s led the team in scoring 7 times and been part of 2 Stanley Cup winning teams and 2 other Cup finalists. He continues to chug along quietly…playing great two way hockey. When the Devils brought Kovalchuk in, it was Elias leading the team in scoring during that first full-year. When Kovy was getting all the accolades with the team and around the league last season, it was Elias there right behind him and 10^th in league scoring. Elias is a guy who has taken a back seat to players here be it Kovy or Parise, but he’s always right there.

There haven’t been many individual nights for him either. When he broke John MacLean’s franchise points’ record, it was unfortunately overshadowed on the same night by Martin Brodeur becoming the winningest goalie in NHL history. When he broke the franchise goal record, it happened on the road and most of his teammates had no clue about it at all. He’s often been disrespected by his own coaches nonetheless. He never had the best relationship with Pat Burns for some reason and the Brent Sutter situation was a black eye for the franchise in my opinion. Sutter, having never coached in the NHL, stripped the captaincy away from a veteran and gave it to a player that wasn’t even with the team throughout training camp and the beginning of the season.  It seems like he is finally back with a coach that truly respects Elias for the leader he is and the incredible hockey player he is.

Tonight, hopefully, Devils fans can vocally do the same. If you are going to the game or know someone who is, or know of anyone to spread the word to, let’s give Elias the proper due he deserves and remind him how much he means to the franchise and the fans. Let’s get some chants going throughout the night to honour the greatest Devils forward of all-time. Maybe we can get something going to other forums or through social media.  He’s a quiet unassuming guy, but I am sure it would mean the world to him as well. He certainly deserves it, regardless if it his last game or not. 

A fantastic article today on some really impressive technology that is being used in the NBA by a number of teams. And it looks like it could fit for NHL use very soon. Not for everyone, but I thought a few people here might find it interesting. 

New technology and statistics will change the way we understand basketball, even if they also create friction between coaches and front-office personnel trying to integrate new concepts into on-court play. The most important innovation in the NBA in recent years is a camera-tracking system, known as SportVU, that records every movement on the floor and spits it back at its front-office keepers as a byzantine series of geometric coordinates. Fifteen NBA teams have purchased the cameras, which cost about $100,000 per year, from STATS LLC; turning those X-Y coordinates into useful data is the main challenge those teams face.¹

Some teams are just starting with the cameras, while others that bought them right away are far ahead and asking very interesting questions. Those 15 teams have been very secretive in revealing how they've used the data, but one team that has made serious progress — the Toronto Raptors — opened up the black box in a series of meetings this month with Grantland.

The future of the NBA, at least in one place, looks like this:

That's Jason Kidd hitting a 3-pointer off a Carmelo Anthony pick-and-roll in the first quarter of Toronto's February 22 home win over the Knicks; the Knicks are in blue, passing the little yellow ball around, and the Toronto players are colored white. It looks simple, but the process of getting there took a bunch of people, including three Toronto front-office employees, more than a half-decade of work. In simple terms: The Raptors' analytics team wrote insanely complex code that turned all those X-Y coordinates from every second of every recorded game into playable video files. The code can recognize everything — when a pick-and-roll occurred, where it occurred, whether the pick actually hit a defender, and the position of all 10 players on the floor as the play unfolded. The team also factored in the individual skill set of every NBA player, so the program understands that Chris Paul is much more dangerous from midrange than Rajon Rondo, and that Roy Hibbert is taller than Al Horford.²

That last bit — the ability to recognize individual player skills — is crucial for the juiciest bit of what the Raptors have accomplished: those clear circles that sort of follow the Toronto players around and have the same jersey numbers. Those are ghost players, and they are doing what Toronto's coaching staff and analytics team believe the players should have done on this play — and on every other Toronto play the cameras have recorded.³ The system has factored in Toronto's actual scheme and the expected point value of every possession as play evolves.⁴ The team could use that expected value system to build an "ideal" NBA defense irrespective of the Toronto scheme, but doing so today would be pointless, since part of the team's job is to sell a sometimes skeptical coaching staff on the value of all these new numbers and computer programs, says Alex Rucker, the Raptors' director of analytics.

"You need that coaching perspective," Rucker says. "But we are still looking for where the rules are wrong — areas where there are systemic things that are wrong with what we do on the court. But any system needs to comply with what the coaches want, and what the players can do."

http://www.grantland...ical-revolution

NHL next?
Thanks in part to the large amount of overlap with NBA and NHL buildings in the same city, the Toronto situation may change soon
if SportVU gets into the hockey world as Kopp expects.

"We were hoping to start this year, but because of the lockout we didn't. We did some initial testing, and the players themselves aren't very hard to track. There's a lot you can do with player
movement and positioning, and I know hockey is at least opening their eyes to analytics," Kopp said. "I know there's been this thought, 'Well how can you analyze it when it's so fluid?'

"But if you can actually measure the fluidity, then you're getting somewhere. Of all the sports that are going to be next, I think hockey would be up there."

http://www.cbc.ca/sp...tvu-system.html