Hockey New's Costello weighs in on Flames

[thymebalm]

Originally Posted by flameswin

What's up with Metronome from CP? He's Kent Wilson and writes for Flamesnation, right? How does he feel about Ryan Lambert totally ruining that website with his clickbait goofyness? Gotta be annoyed, I'd imagine?

Edit: Or am I thinking of two different places? Everytime someone links to Lambert's stuff the link is starred out so I don't know where to actually go.

I think it's www.#########.com that gets censored, not www.flamesnation.ca

Actually our resident Freeway is the managing editor of Flamesnation these days, so you'd have to ask him.

The once poster, Metrognome, is Wilson, but I haven't seen him around in a long time.

[Dion]

No one else is in their ballpark in terms of generating offense (because the Flames have no one else to do it) and playing top competition on a nightly basis and significantly outperforming their garbage teammates, of which they have many.

Lambert needs to put down what he is smoking. What a dbag!

[Resolute 14]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Lambert has been beating the clickbait horse for months. He's had probably 7 or 8 over the top negative stories about the flames over the past few months. It's worked so far for him as they certainly catch attention. Little of substance though

Literally everything he writes is over the top and is designed to piss you off. Angry people make a dozen consecutive posts like we've seen in this thread, and that causes people to go read to find out what the hubbub is about. Eyeballs end up on Yahoo's ads, and everyone on his side is happy. Same style as Thomas Drance. Same style as Bruce Dowbiggin.

[N-E-B]

Ryan Lambert is a hack living in his basement. I don't read his material, it's garbage 100% of the time.

Don't read it anymore, it keeps him in business.

[Yrebmi]

So I'm not going to click on the Lambert link, but thanks to the posters quoting anyway. I like to know who to laugh at while the Flames keep keeping on.

[Coach]

Yeah I'm happy for the CPers who helped me to not click that.

[Enoch Root]

Guys: Bingo posted a good article from the Hockey News. How about we talk about that instead of talking about the hack that you don't want to talk about?

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

How about we talk about that instead of talking about the hack that you don't want to talk about?

That won’t happen, because the hack is a nuisance and Costello isn’t.

92.7% of all the bitching in the world (this number has been verified by Science!™) is done by people who are suffering pain between 4 and 6 on the Tsoris scale. Below 4, it doesn’t hurt enough to complain, so you keep quiet. Above 6, it hurts enough that you actually go and do something to make it stop. In between, it hurts too much not to complain, and not enough to do anything else but complain.

Lambert is certified 5.1 on the Tsoris scale. Science!™ has proved that 5.0 is the exact perfect pain level for clickbait. Lambert is a skosh over the perfect level, because as we see here, he inflicts enough pain to make sensible people avoid it by not reading his damfool articles. If he were a perfect 5, we would still click through out of morbid curiosity.

[taxbuster]

Is "Tsoris" an advanced stat?

[Stay Golden]

Originally Posted by Bingo

says heart and Hartley instead of smoke and mirrors ...

Hockey News

This was the most complimentary Flames article outside of Calgary written about this roster so far this season.
Great read, Bingo thanks for posting.

[-TC-]

I've known Ryan Lambert for 12 years, he's always been a pissy little bitch, even when he was 'writing' about pro wrestling.

Don't waste your time reading him.

Costello on the other hand is quite good

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by taxbuster

Is "Tsoris" an advanced stat?

No, but ‘advanced’ stats are a good source of tsoris.

[Flashpoint]

and three others rookies – Josh Jooris, Markus Granlund and Michael Ferland – are making significant contributions. They were forced into the lineup when injuries to Matt Stajan, Joe Colborne, Mason Raymond and Mikael Backlund hit the team in late October.

This is where I think it gets interesting. Prior to the season I had no idea what Jooris, Granlund, or Ferland could bring to the lineup. I'd imagine most out of market writers were the same, and while Stajan, Colborne, Raymond, and Backlund all are legit NHLers, few would argue they are players with big roles on winning teams.

Now that our "meh" guys are getting healthy, do the kids who brought us to where we are now see their roles diminished? Do we turn back into the sad sack Flames?

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by Sylvanfan

The thing to me though is that the Flames goaltending this year has been better than it was in the past three seasons. More importantly, it's been pretty consistent. If your goaltending is wildly variable, than I think it will carry over to your results. Reto Berra could be all world one night, and awful the next. Not many games where he was above average.

For the most part the Flames goaltending doesn't seem to vary as much from one night to the next as it has in past years, and I think that is a big reason why they haven't endured any losing streaks of more than a game yet.

I am a big believer that team confidence builds from the net out. When you have confident goalies that are performing well, the rest of the team feels OK taking the necessary risks to focus more on offense. I think this is one of the reasons that the team always had trouble scoring when back-ups would play. This is also why I would be reluctant to trade either goalie if we continue a playoff pace. I think it helps both goalies to know that the fate of the world doesn't rest on one of them solely. That brings a certain calmness to their game. I think it especially helped calm down Ramo to know that Hiller can take the pressure off.

What’s more impressive about Hartley’s evolution is the way he designed Calgary’s game plan this season. He identified the team’s biggest strength – skill, speed and smarts on the blueline – and focused the attack around a charging defense corps.

Not a lot of teams built like that these days. It must throw off some of the competition. I think Hartley deserves a lot of credit for playing players to their strengths like that.

[Jay Random]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

Not a lot of teams built like that these days. It must throw off some of the competition. I think Hartley deserves a lot of credit for playing players to their strengths like that.

In fact, that’s the point that most people miss about the hockey they played in the 80s.

Yes, the goalies were inferior. Yes, the players’ conditioning was worse, and every team had a goon or two, and the variation between the average player and the worst players in the league was greater than it is now. But these things alone do not account for the difference in offence between then and now.

One of the hallmarks of the 80s’ game was that defencemen were expected to be offensive producers. They were supposed to jump into the play. A stay-at-home defenceman was somebody who failed to get 30 points. This was only natural: the players of that era were mostly guys who had been kids when Bobby Orr broke into the league, and every young defenceman wanted to be Orr when he grew up. (Just as, in the 1990s and 2000s, the league was full of goalies who wanted to be Patrick Roy.)

But that generation passed. Potvin, Robinson, Coffey, Bourque, MacInnis, Suter, Leetch – I don’t need to repeat the rest of the names. Those players retired and were not replaced. The league moved into an era where a top offensive Dman might score 50 points in a season, because the expectations and the roles had changed. The new ‘offensive’ defenceman was not the heir of Orr or Coffey; he was the heir of players like Ramage, Howe, Iafrate – the second-tier defencemen of the 80s. (Better defensively, of course, because that was how his job was defined and how he had been trained.) And because there were no more Coffeys to feed the forwards, there were no more Gretzkys or Kurris, either – not in terms of scoring numbers.

It’s no surprise that a team where the defencemen are expected to contribute offensively will outscore a team where they are supposed to hang back and defend. It’s easier to defend against a 3-man attack than a 5-man attack.

By the way, this may also help to account for the Flames’ lights-out play 4-on-4. Playing 5-on-5, 40% of the skaters on the ice are defencemen. 4-on-4, that number goes up to 50%. If your D is full of stay-at-home players, you will be in a poor position to take advantage of the extra room and creative potential that a 4-on-4 situation offers. This year’s Flames can always put out four offensively skilled guys on any 4-on-4.

As a certified old geezer, I get a kick out of watching this year’s Flames, because their top 4 D really do remind me of the way teams played in the 80s: not the gooning, not the defensive sloppiness, but the way that everyone gets in on the rush and all five players are a threat to score. It makes the opposing defence’s job much more complicated, and the game more fun for the fans. I hope this becomes a trend.