Phightins

Pretty neat! http://video.nhl.com/videocenter/console?catid=0&id=137090

Don't tell Andy where the plane is. Just leave him in Seattle. I am also officially off the DeSean Jackson bandwagon. I have always defended him, but I give up. Dude is absolutely pathetic when things don't go his way. Good riddance, go get your money elsewhere.

Reported lines from practice yesterday (with Schenn and Jagr added to the mix) Hartnell-Giroux-Jagr Read-Briere-Simmonds Schenn-Talbot-Voracek Rinaldo-Couturier-Shelley Assuming that when JvR gets healthy, he slides onto that third line, Schenn goes to the middle, and Talbot drops to the 4th line (replacing Shelley). Ideally, they will find a way to get Cooter onto one of the top three lines at some point. He deserves it.

I am actually hoping they get Terry Francona. I was super impressed with him when he filled in for McCarver in the ALCS.

Great news, I can watch Sunday Night Baseball un-muted again.

Do it Flyers!! A Cherry Hill native on the Flyers would be all kinds of awesome.

Andreas Nodl claimed by Carolina. I was OK with him being waived yesterday, because I figured the Flyers had done their homework on this. But now it is clear that they hadn't, and I am annoyed. Carolina was 4th on waiver priority, so he was grabbed pretty quickly. So, he obviously has a bit of value around the league. I figured that if the Flyers were waiving him, they had surveyed the league and attempted to gauge interest, and figured there was a good chance he'd slide through waivers and be able to go to the Phantoms. That was an epic fail. Now, a player with value (albeit not a huge amount) is gone for absolutely nothing. The Flyers do this a lot and it really bugs me (losing the rights to decent prospects such as Tomas Hyka and Joacim Eriksson in the past year to name a few examples). Even if they shopped Nodl around and turned him into a 6th or 7th round pick, that is better than getting nothing. I realized his role has been fazed out here with the emergences of guys like Zac Rinaldo, Harry Zolnierczyk, and to some degree Sean Couturier. So I am fine with the Flyers wanting to move on. But they are really blowing their assets here when they lose guys of value for absolutely nothing. There's a good chance this was just an honest misjudgment of the market, but since they do this a lot I am not going to give them the benefit of the doubt here. Anyway, so long Andreas. I liked him a lot for a non-impact player. I think he will have a reasonably long and effective NHL career as a 3rd/4th line guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Eoz_MUsAM&feature=youtu.be Heh

Chris Pronger out at least a month with a knee issue. Andreas Nodl waived. Brayden Schenn back up from Adirondack. Pronger news obviously sucks, no other way to say it. I like Nodl a lot, but he has regressed to the point where you can't justify having him on an NHL roster while Brayden Schenn sits in the AHL. Had to be done. Interested to see what happens with the forwards now.

They even released a French version of the Pacioretty suspension video!

Bruce Boudreau and Paul Maurice both canned this morning.

Worst case scenario is they win 3 of those, finish at 7-9, get a shitty pick, and then try to convince us that "they are just a small tweak away". And I am fully expecting this to happen.

This is so awesome. The best player on the team is barely involved. Vince Young sucks, Andy Reid sucks even more. Season from hell continues. The Giants and Cowboys wins were cool, but at the end of the day all they will accomplish is getting us a lower draft pick.

Cannot wait. Official filming began yesterday. I am sure the HBO cameras were thrilled when Rinaldo and Prust dropped the gloves right at the opening faceoff.

Haha, come to America and flip on ESPN. They will maybe dedicate a minute and a half of SportsCenter to hockey, and you'd think Sidney Crosby was the only player in the entire league. I get why they do it, but for people who like the entire league it gets kind of old.

I pretty much agree. I do think Bryz is very good (although honestly not better than Bobrovsky), and if money were no object, I'd be more than happy to have him on my team. But this contract is absolutely crippling and is sure to look even worse in the coming years. Chris Pronger is sure to be pretty useless at least 2-3 seasons before his contract is up as well. So that's a ton of wasted cap space. Adding Bryz's $7 mil cap hit to the mix is not helping anything. Just blows my mind when I try to figure out what was going through their head as they signed him. He's good, but he's not an improvement over what they had. That one signing forced them to trade two of their top three forwards. Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled with the return in both of those deals (especially the Carter trade), but they should not have been forced to make them.

Such as? Hitchcock is already off the board, not sure who else is out there that would fit the bill/would be willing to coach again. Similarly, I am not sure the Caps have the personnel to make that kind of system work.

Didn't take long, but Bobrovsky has (temporarily?) unseated Bryzgalov as #1 goalie. "Oh hey lets go drop $51 million on a goalie when we already have a very talented 23 year old with loads of potential! This is sure to work out just fine"

The Phillies offered arbitration to Raul Ibanez, Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Madson. Guarantees two high picks as compensation for Madson, and is a nice insurance policy on Rollins in case he leaves. I am pretty surprised they offered ARB to Ibanez. Wouldn't shock me at all if he takes it, and chances are he will be awarded way more than he deserves. Also, no arbitration offered to Oswalt. I am guessing they feared he'd accept it and be awarded an ungodly salary.

Ryan Braun is NL MVP. He had an awesome year, but was not better than Matt Kemp. Kemp gets screwed because his team sucked. Shame.

Yeah, understand those arguments BFT and Fish. Personally, I think there should be separate awards for pitchers and hitters. Over the years, the MVP award has sort of become a hitter only award, so that's how we view it now. But in the voting instructions, there is nothing stating that pitchers shouldn't be included. It just says that it should go to the player with the most "value". And today, since we have advanced stats and metrics that specifically show value as a concrete number, it should be a much easier process. I think we can all agree that the biggest issue with MVP selection is the idiot writers who get to vote. Somebody gave Michael Young a first place vote. Someone else had Jacoby Ellsbury ranked 10th. Seriously.

Actually, starting pitchers impact basically the same amount of plays as a position player in the course of a season (obviously this varies...a first baseman will be involved in more plays than an outfielder, for example). In a given game, a position player will likely have 4-5 plate appearances, plus a handful of defensive opportunities. In a given game, a starting pitcher may face upwards of 30-35 batters. They are involved in each of their team's defensive plays. They obviously appear in just 1/5 of their team's games, but the workload they put forth in each start is usually 5x more than that of a position player (sometimes more, sometimes less). As a case study, I will compare Jacoby Ellsbury with Justin Verlander. I chose Ellsbury because he was one of the leading MVP candidates, and he appeared in basically every Red Sox game (158 of them), so he matches up pretty well with Verlander, who didn't miss any time due to injuries or whatnot. Ellsbury in 2011: 729 plate appearances, 394 defensive chances in CF. A total of 1123 "plays" Verlander in 2011: 969 plate-appearances-against (as a pitcher), 50 defensive chances, 4 plate appearances as a batter. A total of 1023 "plays". Obviously, this isn't an exact science and it doesn't take certain things into account, such as base running and position value. Obviously, an outfielder like Ellsbury will see way fewer defensive chances than a first baseman (Ryan Howard played 152 games this season and had almost 1400 chances). But hopefully this sort of debunks that myth that a pitcher isn't deserving of this award because they only appear in 30 games. Position players do indeed impact a higher percentage of total team plays, but it is really quite close, and in this case I think the MVP votes for Verlander were certainly warranted

Yeah. He shouldn't have done it since there was a very good chance it was going to get called. Speaking of which, the offsetting penalties there was kind of silly. I am not upset with how they called it, since this is how it is written in the rule book. Just seems kind of odd that if the Giants don't get called for holding (or whatever they got called for there, I forget), then the catch would have stood (minus the 15 yards for taunting).

He is very immature, I get that. I just didn't see the huge deal with that particular incident.

You know you're my BFF and I love you dearly, but I think you are nitpicking a bit. The Rolle celebration was so badass!