SB Nation User Blog: mjthor

Feeds/beer for 10/10

mjthor — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:03:19 -0000

Well, kids, I won't be around for the game tonight. I'll be in a hotel downtown, going to bed at 8 and waking up at 4:30 for the marathon tomorrow morning. Since I am a responsible individual, I wanted to provide my usual services to the blog before I leave.

Feeds:
There are actually a couple of feeds already. Here they are:
http://bit.ly/78LhL
http://bit.ly/PDAgR

Beer:

Three Floyds Moloko Milk Stout
Limited-release Three Floyds milk stout. Do I really need to continue? This is extremely creamy and smooth, and if you can still find a bottle, GRAB IT. Very, very yummy, it'll be a perfect companion on this cold October night (along with some Blackhawks hockey). Oh, and I'll be drinking Dark Lord tomorrow night after the marathon. Just thought I'd rub that in.

Go Hawks!

Grade Brent Sopel's season! (Plus: Bonus nightmare fuel)

mjthor — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:32:26 -0000

Our illustrious triforce of blog overlords, in their most heedless misstep to date, have denied us, their valued and loyal readers and commenters, the right to grade Brent Sopel's season. Because the masses (okay, so it's just one guy who humorously wanted to grade Sopel's season) are protesting this injustice like an angry mob of Iranians -- too soon? -- I will provide that opportunity here. Please, in the effort of making this poll as accurate and informative as possible, leave a comment explaining your choice for his grade. And by all means, make as many Aaron Johnson dick jokes as possible.

And for your nightmare fuel, here's a ~~photoshop~~ police file photo of what the son of Brent Sopel and Chris Pronger ~~would look~~ looks like (borrowed from Sens Army Blog):

Poll

Grade Brent Sopel's season:

"F"

9 votes

F-

8 votes

Where are the 'A' and 'B' options? And why is "F" in quotations?

5 votes

He was injured for the limited amount of games in which he played, therefore I will reserve judgment on his performance.

8 votes

Nickelback

27 votes

57 votes | Poll has closed

The Chicago Blackhawks have signed left wing Rob Klinkhammer, defensemen Jonathan Carlsson and...

mjthor — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:02:35 -0000

The Chicago Blackhawks have signed left wing Rob Klinkhammer, defensemen Jonathan Carlsson and Brian Connelly and goaltender Alec Richards to entry-level contracts.

Blackhawks Ink Four Prospects -- NHL.com

Gametime video feed(s) and beer for tomorrow

mjthor — Sun, 24 May 2009 04:29:57 -0000

http://www.viewpoints.com/images/review/2008/141/4/1211277191-51206_full.jpg

While I know this is suicide on this site -- and you'd be more than justified in crucifying me for this -- I'll be missing the game tomorrow. I had previous plans with my brother and both of our girlfriends to go to Starved Rock State Park, which is apparently really awesome. However, I'm only going tomorrow on the condition that my girlfriend DVRs the game and I can watch it on the 65" plasma at her house, so at least I've got that going for me.

I'm going to avoid all news of the game, and will most likely be turning my phone off. Because we're leaving at 7am tomorrow, and I don't expect a single one of the three assholes that run this site to be awake at that time, let alone post a gamethread, I'll do the feed/beer here.

Feeds:
Because the sites where I get feeds aren't updated for Sunday yet, I'll just post the links here. These are my secrets -- the source of all my knowledge and power. The first one is pretty obvious and well-known: http://www.atdhe.net/
The next one requires a bit of work, but not much. Go to this link and click on the first thread. There will be multiple links for feeds in there.

Beer:

Josephs Brau Dunkelweizen
This is another Trader Joe's brew -- I posted the hefeweizen a few weeks ago, and it's delicious. Well, this one is good too, and for $6 for a sixer, you can't really go wrong. Plus I included a really fucking goofy picture with it, so how can you resist? Sunday afternoon games are usually an excuse to take it easy and rehydrate, but fuck that. You don't have work Monday, and it's the Western Conference Finals. Drink up, assholes.

Go Hawks!

My gift to Second City Hockey

mjthor — Sat, 23 May 2009 18:19:11 -0000

My gift to Second City Hockey

I've gotten quite a few comments on the stupid (and sometimes funny) Photoshopped pictures I've made for the site, and I'm not always around for game threads when a Rally Mullet is absolutely essential. So, I present to you, Second City Hockey, my folder of Blackhawks photoshops. This folder will probably grow in the future when more pictures are necessary (and when I get more ideas, which are mostly stolen from other comments)... plus you can creep on my other Flickr sets too.

Use them wisely.

SCH Community Stat Project Proposal

mjthor — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:33:18 -0000

This is going to be more of a brainstorming ramble than anything, but I'd like to get some feedback on this idea. Obviously we have more pertinent issues to worry about than collecting stats for next season, but I want to get this idea down while the words are flowing out of me -- crazy what writing dozens of lesson plans will do to a man.

Stemming from this discussion, I began to think about the contributions of players that aren't typically quantifiable, such as screening the goalie and staying out of the penalty box. This is also inspired by this article from Puck Prospectus, which lays out the framework for a new-and-improved +/- system, which takes into positive contributions of drawing a penalty and negative contributions of committing a penalty, with the end result looking like this:

Player		Contribution		    GF	Modified plus/minus

Andrew Ladd	 Drew penalty		   0.20		1.0
Patrick Kane	 On ice for PPG (scored)   0.16		0.8
Jonathan Toews   On ice for PPG (assisted) 0.16		0.8
Cam Barker	 On ice for PPG (assisted) 0.16		0.8
Troy Brouwer	 On ice for PPG		   0.16		0.8
Brian Campbell	 On ice for PPG		   0.16		0.8
Mike Commodore   Took penalty		  -0.20	       -1.0
Jan Hejda	 On ice for PPGA	  -0.20	       -1.0
R.J. Umberger	 On ice for PPGA	  -0.20	       -1.0
Aaron Rome	 On ice for PPGA	  -0.20	       -1.0
Antoine Vermette On ice for PPGA	  -0.20	       -1.0

Total					      0		  0

Now, it'd be fairly easy to keep track of something like this, but it's the attribution of the Goals For (GF) and modified +/- that would take a little bit of work. Still a fairly simple community project -- one that could be easily accomplished by even just a couple people with very minimal effort.

What I'm proposing, on top of keeping track of this modified +/-, is extending this stat accumulating to other aspects of the game as well. Goalie screens were the topic of discussion in the conversation I linked to earlier in this post, and I proposed that they'd be a fairly easy stat to keep track of; much like Errors in baseball. I don't want to limit this to PPG and goalie screens, though; there are other unquantified contributions that we could keep track of too.

One very cool idea I had, when thinking about the contributions of the Eager-Burish-Fraser line in the regular season, was keeping track of how much time the puck is in each of the three zones of the ice. Anyone who watched this team regularly knows that the EBF line had high-energy shift after high-energy shift, but these contributions were mostly only represented in the Hits column. Imagine having a stat database and being able to go back and say "Wow, that was a great shift; they had the puck in the offensive zone for 46 out of the 60 seconds they were on the ice." This is kind of problematic, though, unless we'd have a volunteer to watch every game with a stopwatch.

I'll stop my rambling there. You guys get the picture. What I'm asking of you is for ideas and feedback -- what do you think of these ideas? Would you be willing to participate?

What other unquantified contributions would you like to quantify? Do you have any suggestions for new methods of keeping track of existing stats (such as the various +/- systems at Behind The Net)?

Obviously this will become an off-season project, but I wanted to throw the idea out there while it was fresh in my mind.

Image FanShot

mjthor — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:50:30 -0000

Image FanShot

mjthor — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:03:08 -0000

Sharp update -- Tim Sassone

mjthor — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:56:20 -0000

Sharp update -- Tim Sassone

According to Sassone, Sharp will be back for Game 1 of the playoffs. Let's hope his sources are good...

Patrick Kane Wikipedia -- Listed as 2'4" tall

mjthor — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:28:20 -0000

Patrick Kane Wikipedia -- Listed as 2'4" tall

My brother and I were discussing Patrick Kane and just how tiny he is, and I speculated that I am probably bigger than him (I'm not that big -- about 5'9", 165ish). So, I went over to his Wikipedia page, and someone decided to mess with it, listing him as 2'4" tall.

We had a good laugh, then I edited back.

That said, is there any possible fucking way that Kane is actually 5'10", 175?