New numbers for Gazdic, Hathaway, and Hrivik

[Toonage]

Hathaway is a great pest with good size, but I don't think of him as a fighter.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by 868904

This is always going to be the case with the Oilers. For whatever reason, the media and league loves them and they will be favoured over the Flames for the next little while. Probably has something to do with them being losers for so long, like the Cubs and everyone just wants to see them have some success now.

There is no mystery here. It is all about McDavid.

[Love]

Originally Posted by 868904

Hathaway is going to need to be ten times as tough, because if he tries to tangle with Lucic, Kassian, or Maroon, he's going to be eating a lot of punches.

I think that Glass has a better chance of filling that 13 forward role than Gazdic. Glass has always been a decent skater and 4th line role player. Glass played 20 games in the Canucks playoff run in 2011 and that team was stacked. He's not just a goon and in recent years, he's tangled with some pretty tough customers in the higher weight classes and done well.

It wouldn't shock me to see Glass win a spot over a Gazdic and Freddie Hamilton and if Hathaway does't hit everything he sees in the pre-season, Glass might even play over Hathaway.

Glass has always been a much better player than Gazdic and still is.

Maroon isn't all that of a fighter.

[GreenLantern2814]

Originally Posted by Love

Revisionist history. We were let down by poor goaltending and horrendous gaffs like that Grossman ones and phantom calls like McDavid's penalty shot call for a Wideman tap, when the Referees turned into Stevie Wonder on the other end when Larsson and Nugent Hopkins almost hacked the ribs off of Gaudreau

skip to 57:07 even in the commentators own words: "hooked from behind, no penalty called)


Even the Puljujarvi goal was weak. Questionable turnover under pressure by Engelland and laughable weak shot to allow by Elliott (a continuing theme that we'd see for the rest of the season)

So that's three out of seven goals allowed that were suspect, and then an empty netter to intensify the score even more.

We dominated them on the shot chart (41 to 28) and the faceoff dot (60% to 40%). Hits, blocked shots and giveaways were nearly identical. And they had 7 powerplays to our 4 (not counting that weak penalty shot call). It was a night where the refs wanted to be the stars of the show and we couldn't get the adequate goaltending or defending to do anything about it.

I'll agree that I may be misremembering how bad everyone else was in 7-4 and 5-3 losses, but it's also fair to say that nobody was really earning their contracts in the first couple nights of the season. Which is fine. We still would have lost at least one of those games, even without Niklas Grossman.

Unless we went 3-0 in the Grossman games, we couldn't have impacted our season. Our place in the standings is the same whether or not he ever suits up. Grossman didn't impact our cap, at all. He was an embarrassing footnote. That's all he was.