Last night, in between dreams of violent hover bike races against the krauts and zombie board games, I dreamt something weird. I was a child again, watching the Stanley Cup playoffs. Moreover, I was enjoying myself. Now I'm not usually one to analyze my dreams. I just like to enjoy them as they come. But lying awake in the oppressive heat, I realized that I missed the playoffs.

Ever since the lockout, I haven't paid much attention to the post-season. Oh, I'll watch the West Coast Canadian teams if they make the Finals and I'll watch the cup clincher, but other than that, I  rely on the barilkosphere to keep me up to date. I'd always thought my growing apathy  was due to the absence of the Leafs. But that isn't the case. Last night, I realized that the playoffs are just plain boring. Parity has turned them into a mockery of what they were.

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5. Neighbourly Love

Growing up in the early 90s, parents weren't as afraid of random creepers preying on their children. It was the time before the age of the internet kiddie stalker. My sister and I would roam our apartment building in Windsor meeting everyone there was to meet (except for boa constrictor guy). One day when I was 8 years old our middle-aged neighbour invited me in to watch hockey with her. I'd never paid much attention to hockey before. Her favourite team was the Toronto Maple Leafs. I remember we played the Oilers to a tie that night. I loved it. Thereafter, my neighbour recorded every game on TV and always invited me to watch them with her when I had the time. My neighbour, whose name I don't remember, is why I love hockey.

4. Hockey Cards

I put my neighbour last, not because I consider her to be the least of the reasons, but because she is also involved in my love of hockey cards. My neighbour was a collector of sorts. Oh, she wasn't into expensive things but she had magazine clippings and pictures of all her favourite players players and a number of hockey cards too. She'd always show them to me and gave me a number of them. Needless to say, I soon became obsessed with collecting hockey cards. I would spend my entire allowance buying packs at the local convenience store, not even waiting to get home before ripping them open. I loved the crinkle as the wrapper tore open. I loved the smell of fresh cards. I loved the pictures and the names. I loved the stats, poring over them, trying to figure out who was a better player than who. But most especially, I loved trading. I remember trading five red wing cards to a classmate for a silver dollar. I then conveniently had "lost" that silver dollar the next day when he declared "tradebacks". I was an ass. But I'm an ass with a silver dollar.

3. Anger Management

Are you a controlled individual? Do you bottle your feelings inside? If so, floor hockey is the perfect sport . Floor hockey, the only time in grade school that you were allowed to shove people, check people, whack people with a stick, all without getting sent to the principal's office. I was a beast. My classmates were afraid of me. They called me cheap. They called me violent. But they always picked me to be on their team. Sometimes I stood in front of the net whacking away at rebounds, sometimes I played defense. But I always played with an edge.  Slashing, Hooking, Brawls...we did it all. I remember getting slashed one time, whacking the player back hard and then angrily whipping my stick at the other player like a boomerang. I only got a brief timeout. Have some anger to let out? Don't want to get in to trouble? Floor hockey is a great release and that is one more reason I love it. Good times. Good memories.

2. Dick Irvin Jr., Bob Cole, Harry Neale, Ron MacLean, Don Cherry

I have very little to say here. Anyone who is at all familiar with those names will understand how they might come to symbolize an integral part of the hockey experience to a child growing up who religiously watched Hockey Night in Canada. Hockey just isn't the same without some of them and won't be the same when they're all gone. Great announcer, commentators and personalities are why I love hockey.

1. Imagination

I remember watching hockey games as a kid and I'd watch the game and dream of being one of the players. I was 9 years old. There weren't enough kids to play hockey with in my area. So I improvised. The bottom of the couch was the net. I was the goalie. My right hand was my catching mitt. My left hand, the shooter and a tennis ball was the puck. Ever tried to deke yourself? It was amazing. I wore out the knees in so many pairs of pants pretending I was a goalie. Eventually I decided to combine my love of couch hockey with my love of the Leafs. I'd watch Toronto games and every time someone would take a shot on "The Cat", I would take a shot on myself. Every time we'd score, I'd be the other goalie and score an amazing goal on myself. We won and lost together.

Today, I'm 25. And today I still dream. Every day for ten minutes, I'm 19, breaking into the league with the Maple Leafs (with required levels of pugnacity, belligerence, testosterone and truculence of course). And though I won't go into my fantasies for fear of making a mockery of myself, the simple fact is that some dreams never die. And that, primarily, is why I love hockey.

Well ESPN decided to ask 50 random NHL players some questions. Fifty isn't a very large sample size, but the results still make for an interesting read.

I would have fanshotted this with a link but ESPN clearly has no clue how to design a web page. So to spare you guys the hassle of having to click on a question, get the answer, go back, and click on another question, I've reproduced their questions and answers below. Hope you find some of them interesting, or mildly amusing.

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The 6-foot, 188-pounder said he didn’t feel he deserved a penalty, especially after the Latvian player ducked.

“I caught him around the back of the net with his head down,” he said. “He was in a vulnerable position and I took advantage of it.

I know a few people (me included) have been wondering about Kadri's weight and whether he had put any more onto his previous 177 pounds. I did a quick search of the Puppetosphere, but couldn't find anything.

But, according to Scott Fisher (QMI Agency), Kadri stuffed himself at Christmas (I presume) and managed to gain 11 pounds to now weigh in at a nearly NHL-appropriate 188 pounds.

So for all those those worried about Kadri's waistline instead of their own...there you go.

(A confirming link here. Huzzah for Team Canada weigh-ins.)

Cheers

EDIT: My apologies. I accidentally made this a fanpost instead of a fanshot. And right now, I'm too tired  to figure out how I can put both a quotation and a descriptive block of text in the quote feature of fanshots instead of just a quotation and link. So if one of the puppet gods knows how and can do so, I'd be much obliged. Night night!

...and they mean less than an Alfredsson guarantee (For Wysh's blog, see here: Wyshynski).

Now, this normally wouldn't be worthy of comment, except for the inordinate number of people across the web on various forums who:

a) Seem to believe they mean something.

b) Seem to believe the oddsmakers are trying to accurately predict a team's final tally of points.

 So arm yourselves fellows. This is why Wyshynski and anyone else who believes Las Vegas is predicting playoff teams, or even worse, a team's point total is loonier than Eric Lindros after a Scott Stevens hit (Is that possible?).

The Over/Under is a very basic betting system. The oddsmakers sets a projected total. The better bets that the real total will be over or under the projected total. Usually the odds for over and under are identical or nearly identical. Ideally, the oddsmakers want to set a projected total whereby 50% of the betters will vote over and 50% will vote under. If this is not the case (e.g. more people betting over), the projected total will move up or down (e.g. up) so more people bet on the other side to compensate (e.g. under). The way Vegas makes money is by giving you less than 2 to 1 on your money.

So for instance, if they give you 1.91 for every dollar you bet and 100 people bet 1 dollar with 50% betting over and 50% betting under, then Vegas makes:

$100 (the bets) - $95.5 (the payouts) = $4.5

So you see Vegas doesn't care what the actual result is. All they care about is that 50% of the people will believe the team will do better and 50% will believe it will do worse. Because that for them, is guaranteed money.

But sure you say...maybe they're not trying to predict the standings. But maybe their over/under totals actually do predict point totals.

Well for that, let's examine the Eastern Conference last year.

Vegas's Over/Under (Points) for the 2008/2009 NHL Season

EASTERN CONFERENCE

1. Montreal 99.5
2. Pittsburgh 98.5
3. Devils 97.5
4. Ottawa 94.5
5. Philadelphia 94.5
6. Washington 93.5
7. Rangers 93.5
8. Sabres 91.5
9. Boston 91.5
10. Lightning 91.5
11. Carolina 89.5
12. Florida 82.5
13. Atlanta 79.5
14. Toronto 76.5
15. Islanders 74.5


How did the point totals really turn out?

1. Boston 116 (+25.5)
2. Washington 108 (+14.5)
3. New Jersey 106 (+8.5)
4. Pittsburgh 99 (+0.5)
5. Philadelphia 99 (+4.5)
6. Carolina 97 (+8.5)
7. NY Rangers 95 (+1.5)
8. Montreal 93 (-5.5)
9. Florida 93 (+10.5)
10. Buffalo 91 (-0.5)
11. Ottawa 83 (-11.5)
12. Toronto 81 (+4.5)
13. Atlanta 76 (-3.5)
14. Tampa Bay 66 (-25.5)
15. NY Islanders 61 (+13.5)

 I thought about doing the Western Conference in detail but saw that Vegas' top 4 were:

109.5 DET (112)
102.5 SJS (117)
100.5 ANA (91)
99.5 DAL (83)

and I mean...why bother.

 In short...Vegas' lines aren't predictive at all. They were only within 4 points (+2 or -2 wins) 4 times (in the East). Their point totals had no consistency......a full 40% were over 10 points more or less than they predicted. From a statistical point of view, it's just brutal.

Granted, I did only look at one year. However I'm fairly certain that if you went back to past years, it'd be much the same.

To prove how poorly Vegas' predictive values were, I ran a thought exercise. I challenged Vegas to see who could predict the most teams with 10 points of their actual point totals (e.g. an over/under of 70.5 would mean 61-81). (Note: 10 points is a large margin, but given Vegas' lack of accuracy, I figured it was fair)

I took my mind back to the beginning of last year. And I thought:

"I know San Jose and Detroit are going to tear it up. They have for the past 4 years (Detroit for longer). So I'm going to predict that they'll top 100 points easily. My over/under will be 109.5 points."

"The Islanders and Thrashers are brutal. I doubt either will top 80 points. So I'll set their over/under at 70.5."

Everyone else...no clue. But what I do know is that most teams finish with between 70 and 100 points. So I'll set everyone else's over/under somewhere in the middle at 85.5 points.

So...who won?

Vegas: They were within 10 points of a team's actual standings for 19 out of 30 teams. A pretty shoddy performance if they're actually trying to predict actual point totals. But again, they're not. They're just interested in getting the homers to bet one way, the haters to bet another and the sweet, sweet sound of profit and their over/under numbers will reflect the public perception of the team instead of it's actual potential.

Me: I was within 10 points of a team's final standings for 20 out of 30 teams. My results, were a fairly unimpressive 66% given that most teams finish within such a limited range

But that's right, I got one more right...and I didn't even really try.

So if you read Wysh's blog, or see someone mention this elsewhere and you see people taking it seriously...have a hearty laugh at their expense (HaHa).