jimdahl

Remains to be seen how many goalies advance, but losing your goalie in the first round is a big advantage. If you think of a great goalie as making it though a round with ~8 GA, it's entirely conceivable to let in something more like 15. That's worth something like 2-3 star forwards. I had hoped that Ottawa could advance while scoring a minimal number of goals. My other thought was that if Price were to advance, it would be with a decent GAA (so far true). But even if you think of a great goalie as making it through a round with ~8 GAA, that Probably should've just gone with the favorite to be eliminated (Fleury).

I was just thinking about how the game will soon transform into who's still playing instead of who's scoring, so made my own spreadsheet (so far not with scores like Ray's, but just to track who picked whom). A couple interesting things so far are: The only unanimous choice was Nash (Ovie was picked up by everyone but Ray77) The only goalie with more than one pick is Dubnyk with 3 With Ottawa and Winnipeg facing elimination tonight, the biggest effects would be that a lot of people have Byfuglein (WPG) and my goalie (Price-MTL) would be the first goalie advanced to the 2d round.

That's what makes it fun! I'm just two Islanders' wins away from finding myself in the consolation round. And don't even get me started on the disappointing Senators (they may not be knocking Montreal out, but at least they're not scoring many goals on the way).

Even I can answer this... no subs, of course Only half the game is picking who's going to score, the more important half is figuring out who's actually going to play. It's all going to come down to which teams get eliminated.

There seems to be a lot of controversy about whether this is real. We weren't sure either so let it go for the day. I think everyone has said what there is to say on the topic. If someone wants to petition that we should have left it open, send me a PM.

I need some scoring from the Caps. Edit - looking over others' picks, it's the Chicago and Anaheim love around here that's killing me. Crazy Western teams.

I knew Subban was going to be good for penalties, didn't know he was going to get ejected.

Here's my 5-minute effort (hope all these guys are playing, I narrowly avoided putting Letang in!) I only picked two Caps Ovie (WAS) Backstrom (WAS) Nash (NYR) Tarasenko (StL) Stamkos (TBL) Hudler (CGY) Byf (WPG) Subban (MTL) Karlsson (OTT) Weber (NSH) Price (MTL)

Yeah, I got that far in pondering the scoring scheme and decided I was in over my head

Being a Caps fan, I'm used to high expectations and unhappy exits. I thought this article on some of the intangibles a coach can bring was interesting. Are the Capitals ready to 'raise their flag'? While the "here's how this year is different from all those that we lost" aspect is reminiscent of articles we see about UND pre-Frozen Four each year, it's different in that it gets to focus on differences in coaching (because the situation is somewhat reversed from UND's--the Caps have some stability in the players but have been cycling through coaches at a rapid pace).

That's exactly what I was hoping for -- slashdot style community moderation where posts are hidden if they're too downvoted or highlighted if upvoted. Alas, this software doesn't do that as of now.

There's some discussion of this effort over in Indian nicknames in the news

The timing was not a complete accident We'll see how it goes over the summer.

Not to mention the different match-ups in the East -- someone would play TB instead of the Rangers, and my Caps would be guests of Montreal instead of hosts to the Islanders, huge changes.

I've been chatting with Mafiaman about reputation / post evaluation systems, and looking back it's been a long time since we've tried this so. So, I'm going to make a slight change. I've enabled both positive and negative post reps. (I'm not turning per-user rep back on because there's not yet a solution to the problems described above.)

I loved the (Leno?) joke from the time -- "The Washington Bullets are concerned that they're name is associated with criminals, so from now on they'll just be called the Bullets".

It's official, by picking Providence, WiSioux is your 2015 bracket challenge champion. http://siouxsports.com/hockey/bracketleaders.php http://siouxsports.com/hockey/bracketuser.php?username=WiSioux

Next to their Frozen Four appearance banners? (too soon?) If BU wins, siouxfan1956 wins. If Providence wins,

As you know, I like to consider the offending post vs the posters' entire body of work (much as you might look at the entire waddle or flock instead of an individual penguin). Visitors who post only to aggravate are trolls, but a similar post by someone who regularly contributes could be ok. If someone is just here to aggravate, we'll take care of them (just like an Albertan hunter would take care of a bruin).

I cleaned up most of the inappropriate language....

Sorry, that's definitely one of my more neglected projects. I think the confusion is that the site looks more like it wants to be a news site than a blog. As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be a link that leads to a specific blog of yours, instead the link is a feed of the articles by a particular author (you). The feed didn't appear to be a blog and doesn't have a blog title, so never got spidered. Restated, I think of the stuff on that site as news articles (and they're often posted here as such), in contrast to Goon's World which is treated as a blog. That's consistent with how other authors/sites are treated (gfherald articles go in news, but schlossman's blog goes in blogs). Perhaps the distinction is becoming antiquated, but for now there is one.

At this point, we're probably just talking about fame and glory (your name permanently on the list of previous winners in future years' threads) this year. We've done prizes in the past, but I'd want to announce them up front. Open to any suggestions for next year

Yeah, despite it clinching for Washington, I was really hoping Ottawa would win last night and make things interesting.

Even though 60% picked UND to win it all and 21% picked BU, the only wild cards are the 5% who picked Omaha to win a semifinal and the 1% who picked Providence. Of the three people currently at 13, only one controls his own destiny to stay in front -- bissioux if UND and Omaha advance and UND wins it all will win. Otherwise, we've just gotta wait for the games