Alumni in the Pros - April 2009

KeithK

ftyuv
Maybe the Bruins can put Bitz in goalie pads and have him play out the last couple minutes of the third period of the last game if we're ahead?

Put him in goalie pads and then pull the old "swap the goalies twice to get a time out" play. Preferrably when there's a faceoff at the other end.

Should the bruins make it that far, I think it is far more likely that Bitz would get back into the line-up due to someone suffering from a "lower body injury".

Rita

KeithK

ftyuv
Maybe the Bruins can put Bitz in goalie pads and have him play out the last couple minutes of the third period of the last game if we're ahead?

Put him in goalie pads and then pull the old "swap the goalies twice to get a time out" play. Preferrably when there's a faceoff at the other end.

Should the bruins make it that far, I think it is far more likely that Bitz would get back into the line-up due to someone suffering from a "lower body injury".

[Insert pun about knocking on wood]

JasonN95

Trotsky
Murray v Parros (Princeton) in the final minute of the first period. Apparently they go all the way back to HS.

I'd call it a draw.

I got a chuckle out of the announcer, after noting that Murray was from Cornell and Parros from Princeton, exclaiming, "It's an Ivy League dust-up!"

from this article, which has a number of quotes from both Murray and Parros:

[www.latimes.com]

pfibiger

JasonN95

Trotsky
Murray v Parros (Princeton) in the final minute of the first period. Apparently they go all the way back to HS.

I'd call it a draw.

I got a chuckle out of the announcer, after noting that Murray was from Cornell and Parros from Princeton, exclaiming, "It's an Ivy League dust-up!"

46468153.gif

from this article, which has a number of quotes from both Murray and Parros:

[www.latimes.com]

based on the look on his face he must be trying to either pass a kidney stone or take a dump.

Ah, the good ol' dump and chase.

LA Times
If such sweat equity belies their Ivy League pedigree, there is no such incongruity off the ice. Parros ... routinely trounces [his] teammates on the USA Today crossword puzzle.

FAIL

"That's a good question," said the Sharks' Travis Moen, who was traded from Anaheim in March. "Georgie's pretty smart. I probably haven't seen Dougie doing too many crossword puzzles."

Hey, Travis, it's "Douglas."

ugarte

LA Times
If such sweat equity belies their Ivy League pedigree, there is no such incongruity off the ice. Parros ... routinely trounces [his] teammates on the USA Today crossword puzzle.

FAIL

Yeah, exactly what I thought. But then again, it is the most prestigious paper that arrives at my hotel room every day.

And actually, if I may go all billhoward for a sec, considering how that article went out of its way to try to impress us with Parros's intellectual accomplishments and then followed up with a 'Murray studied hotels! Which is good there! And he sells beer taps!' (here's a ball. Maybe you can bounce it.), I was half-expecting them to tell us that Douglas enjoys the TV Guide crossword or the Junior Jumble. But no, it ends by basically quoting a teammate saying "yeah, I don't think he does crosswords."

RichH

ugarte

LA Times
If such sweat equity belies their Ivy League pedigree, there is no such incongruity off the ice. Parros ... routinely trounces [his] teammates on the USA Today crossword puzzle.

FAIL

Yeah, exactly what I thought. But then again, it is the most prestigious paper that arrives at my hotel room every day.

And actually, if I may go all billhoward for a sec, considering how that article went out of its way to try to impress us with Parros's intellectual accomplishments and then followed up with a 'Murray studied hotels! Which is good there! And he sells beer taps!' (here's a ball. Maybe you can bounce it.), I was half-expecting them to tell us that Douglas enjoys the TV Guide crossword or the Junior Jumble. But no, it ends by basically quoting a teammate saying "yeah, I don't think he does crosswords."

I thought the same thing but didn't want to start a flame war. The Hotel School is Real Cornell, after all and I'm just a muggle

salacious? mark messier was a great player but a cheap shot artist like current ranger sean avery (except with more talent and without the appreciation for a good purse). now denis potvin, there was a guy who played clean and hard.

I do love what George Parros has done with his facial hair.

(There needs to be a smiley with a handlebar mustache.)

tretiak
salacious? mark messier was a great player but a cheap shot artist like current ranger sean avery (except with more talent and without the appreciation for a good purse). now denis potvin, there was a guy who played clean and hard.

That was sarcasm, right? I can only assume so.

tretiak
i like how they casually ignore the most infamous place the cup has gone...a nyc strip club. mark messier is an absolute dinkbag

My dog (Messier) takes offense.........but she (yes, she) is also old and not what she once was.

Josh '99

tretiak
salacious? mark messier was a great player but a cheap shot artist like current ranger sean avery (except with more talent and without the appreciation for a good purse). now denis potvin, there was a guy who played clean and hard.

That was sarcasm, right? I can only assume so.

Parros has got Douglas in terms of 'stache quality. Douglas has him in terms of hockey game (and contract value by a long-shot). I watched about 50 Ducks games this year and Parros isn't awful, he's a better than average goon in terms of being able to play a little hockey and create a few chances without being a huge defensive liability out there. Maybe it's just the 'stache, I dunno (don't know for you Ivy types).

RatushnyFan
Parros has got Douglas in terms of 'stache quality. Douglas has him in terms of hockey game (and contract value by a long-shot). I watched about 50 Ducks games this year and Parros isn't awful, he's a better than average goon in terms of being able to play a little hockey and create a few chances without being a huge defensive liability out there. Maybe it's just the 'stache, I dunno (don't know for you Ivy types).

The Chicago School would tell you Douglas is the more valuable player. The value of Parros's 3-year contract is around the same as each year of Murray's four year contract extension.

RatushnyFan
Parros has got Douglas in terms of 'stache quality.

Yeah, Dougie sort of looks like Leo DiCaprio.

jtwcornell91

Yeah, Dougie sort of looks like Leo DiCaprio.

...on steroids.

Murray starts the game with Erhoff. Hiller makes three incredible saves in a 10 second span on the Sharks' 1st pp.

Cartoonist Darby Conley invokes Ken Dryden as a metaphor for perfection in today's Get Fuzzy.

David Harding
Cartoonist Darby Conley invokes Ken Dryden as a metaphor for perfection in today's Get Fuzzy.

Darby must be old.

I thought this one was somewhat appropriate for the forum a few weeks ago:

Get Fuzzy 2

Al DeFlorio

David Harding
Cartoonist Darby Conley invokes Ken Dryden as a metaphor for perfection in today's Get Fuzzy.

Darby must be old.

Wikipedia says Darby was born in 1970 and grew up in Knoxville and attended Amherst.

See:

[comics.com]

CK

From the TBRW awards thread:

Jeff Hopkins '82

admin

Larry72
In looking at the eLynah posts since the end of the season, I think there are actually more this year with three former Cornell players with teams in the Stanley Cup playoff hunt.
Douglas Murray - San Jose
Byron Bitz - Boston
Ryan O'Byrne - Montreal

FYP

LOL!

Wow. Sometimes the emphasis to have the best record is over-rated. I think there is something to be said about having to scratch and claw your way in and being the "underdog".

Should be an interesting off-season in SJ. They ousted Ron Wilson because he could get the team to the finals. Lots of questions, maybe I'll post some in the JSID hockey thread.

Good thing about Sharks being eliminated, Randy Hahn (TV pbp guy) will lose the "beard".

Rita
From the TBRW awards thread:

Jeff Hopkins '82

admin

Larry72
In looking at the eLynah posts since the end of the season, I think there are actually more this year with three former Cornell players with teams in the Stanley Cup playoff hunt.
Douglas Murray - San Jose
Byron Bitz - Boston
Ryan O'Byrne - Montreal

FYP

LOL!

Wow. Sometimes the emphasis to have the best record is over-rated. I think there is something to be said about having to scratch and claw your way in and being the "underdog".

Should be an interesting off-season in SJ. They ousted Ron Wilson because he could get the team to the finals. Lots of questions, maybe I'll post some in the JSID hockey thread.

Good thing about Sharks being eliminated, Randy Hahn (TV pbp guy) will lose the "beard".

The real story is Anaheim's disappointing regular season. SJ caught a bad break with the Ducks dropping to 8.

You need to be able to beat the Ducks if you expect to win the Cup. The Ducks are better with Jonas Hiller in net and the late season tinkering seems to have worked. I like Getzlaf and Bobby Ryan a lot, they both skate hard all the time. Defensively they've improved as well, even though they dumped Montador (I thought he was a solid contributor). Despite all their improvements, shame on the Sharks for not dispatching the Ducks in 6 games!

P.S. Note that the Sharks did better when Douglas played more minutes (they won 2 of 3 games when he played 18+ minutes and lost all 3 games when he played less). Hardly the causal factor but an interesting aside. Just play the kid

RatushnyFan
You need to be able to beat the Ducks if you expect to win the Cup. The Ducks are better with Jonas Hiller in net and the late season tinkering seems to have worked. I like Getzlaf and Bobby Ryan a lot, they both skate hard all the time. Defensively they've improved as well, even though they dumped Montador (I thought he was a solid contributor). Despite all their improvements, shame on the Sharks for not dispatching the Ducks in 6 games!

P.S. Note that the Sharks did better when Douglas played more minutes (they won 2 of 3 games when he played 18+ minutes and lost all 3 games when he played less). Hardly the causal factor but an interesting aside. Just play the kid

And Rob Blake logged well over 20+ minutes a game and was a net -5 for the series. Murray was a net -1, and that was in one game where he was a -1, the rest of the time he was even. I know +/- is a not a perfect measurement, but it does say something about one's ability to take care of the defensive zone.

RatushnyFan
You need to be able to beat the Ducks if you expect to win the Cup. The Ducks are better with Jonas Hiller in net and the late season tinkering seems to have worked. I like Getzlaf and Bobby Ryan a lot, they both skate hard all the time. Defensively they've improved as well, even though they dumped Montador (I thought he was a solid contributor). Despite all their improvements, shame on the Sharks for not dispatching the Ducks in 6 games!

P.S. Note that the Sharks did better when Douglas played more minutes (they won 2 of 3 games when he played 18+ minutes and lost all 3 games when he played less). Hardly the causal factor but an interesting aside. Just play the kid

While there certainly may be something to Murray's stronger presence in the wins, I fear it is probably more closely related to the awful NFL cliche, "X team wins Y amount of times when they run the ball 25 times a game!" Well yeah, they can play a running style if they're winning! An NHL team can play its best defensive defensivemen (and rotate their entire units) in games that it is winning as well.

BCrespi

RatushnyFan
You need to be able to beat the Ducks if you expect to win the Cup. The Ducks are better with Jonas Hiller in net and the late season tinkering seems to have worked. I like Getzlaf and Bobby Ryan a lot, they both skate hard all the time. Defensively they've improved as well, even though they dumped Montador (I thought he was a solid contributor). Despite all their improvements, shame on the Sharks for not dispatching the Ducks in 6 games!

P.S. Note that the Sharks did better when Douglas played more minutes (they won 2 of 3 games when he played 18+ minutes and lost all 3 games when he played less). Hardly the causal factor but an interesting aside. Just play the kid

While there certainly may be something to Murray's stronger presence in the wins, I fear it is probably more closely related to the awful NFL cliche, "X team wins Y amount of times when they run the ball 25 times a game!" Well yeah, they can play a running style if they're winning! An NHL team can play its best defensive defensivemen (and rotate their entire units) in games that it is winning as well.

On the Sharks radio broadcast jamie baker pointed out (after game 3) that the Sharks switched to having Murray and Ehrhoff covering the Ducks top line and how they were matching up much better than Vlassic and Blake had early on the series. So in this case there may be some causation to the correlation between Murray's playing time and the team results.

KeithK

BCrespi

RatushnyFan
You need to be able to beat the Ducks if you expect to win the Cup. The Ducks are better with Jonas Hiller in net and the late season tinkering seems to have worked. I like Getzlaf and Bobby Ryan a lot, they both skate hard all the time. Defensively they've improved as well, even though they dumped Montador (I thought he was a solid contributor). Despite all their improvements, shame on the Sharks for not dispatching the Ducks in 6 games!

P.S. Note that the Sharks did better when Douglas played more minutes (they won 2 of 3 games when he played 18+ minutes and lost all 3 games when he played less). Hardly the causal factor but an interesting aside. Just play the kid

While there certainly may be something to Murray's stronger presence in the wins, I fear it is probably more closely related to the awful NFL cliche, "X team wins Y amount of times when they run the ball 25 times a game!" Well yeah, they can play a running style if they're winning! An NHL team can play its best defensive defensivemen (and rotate their entire units) in games that it is winning as well.

On the Sharks radio broadcast jamie baker pointed out (after game 3) that the Sharks switched to having Murray and Ehrhoff covering the Ducks top line and how they were matching up much better than Vlassic and Blake had early on the series. So in this case there may be some causation to the correlation between Murray's playing time and the team results.

I could definitely see this being the case, but that doesn't really change the fact that Murray can't play as many minutes when his team is behind later in the game as he's not exactly Brian Leetch with the puck on his stick. Nevertheless, I certainly would have loved to see more Murray on the ice, selfishly.

Haven't read this anywhere yet, but the Caps' Simeon Varlamov has a chance to equal Ken Dryden's 1971 feat of winning the Cup after having played in only six NHL regular season games. Not real likely to happen, but we've seen a lot of unusual endings lately.

Damn, gets a big picture, but he's gonna be a healthy scratch:

[www.boston.com]

RatushnyFan
You need to be able to beat the Ducks if you expect to win the Cup.

True, but tautological. To win the championship you have to beat everyone else. Some paths are harder than others, though, and I don't want to front-load the challenges. I'd rather have the Red Wings playing the Sharks in the conference finals than the Ducks in the second round.

Not that Chicago or Vancouver would be cakewalks. The West is deep this year.

ugarte

RatushnyFan
You need to be able to beat the Ducks if you expect to win the Cup.

True, but tautological. To win the championship you have to beat everyone else. Some paths are harder than others, though, and I don't want to front-load the challenges. I'd rather have the Red Wings playing the Sharks in the conference finals than the Ducks in the second round.

Not that Chicago or Vancouver would be cakewalks. The West is deep this year.

That's not true at all. Style of play, psychology, etc are all factors. You can have a situation where A beat B, and C beats A, but B beats C. In other words, one could imagine a team that is generally dominant but for whatever reason just doesn't match well against the Ducks. That team would stand a much better chance if some other team knocks the Ducks out for them.

Think, for instance, about how the mediocre Dolphins always seem to beat the Pats, who are better overall. At least, that's what I'm told; I have trouble caring enough to follow a sport where plays are 8 seconds long and have two minutes between them.

ftyuv
That's not true at all. Style of play, psychology, etc are all factors. You can have a situation where A beat B, and C beats A, but B beats C. In other words, one could imagine a team that is generally dominant but for whatever reason just doesn't match well against the Ducks. That team would stand a much better chance if some other team knocks the Ducks out for them.

While matchups do matter, I don't think you get very many circular comparisons in practice (by abstract measure of ability, not limited sample size results). Maybe if you're comparing the top three teams in the league who are close to even. But not when you're comparing a middle of the road team to top teams.

ftyuv
Think, for instance, about how the mediocre Dolphins always seem to beat the Pats, who are better overall. At least, that's what I'm told; I have trouble caring enough to follow a sport where plays are 8 seconds long and have two minutes between them.

Considering that you can't even follow Cornell hockey without video, I am not surprised.

At least I know how to use the quote tags! SNAP!

ftyuv
At least I know how to use the quote tags! SNAP!

In my day we didn't have these WYSIWYG editors for the web. You had to type the HTML by hand and sometimes the bit patterns too. It was garbled and unformatted and unreadable. And that's the way it was and we liked it!

KeithK
While matchups do matter, I don't think you get very many circular comparisons in practice (by abstract measure of ability, not limited sample size results). Maybe if you're comparing the top three teams in the league who are close to even. But not when you're comparing a middle of the road team to top teams.

Depends. When I was on the Cornell fencing team, there was another guy I could beat fairly consistently, and we had success against others pretty commensurate with what you'd expect. However, Penn had a guy who had just come off a gold medal win at the junior olympics and was rated #3 or #4 for all North American epee fencers, and my friend would absolutely dominate him in competitions - really bizarre. He did it on multiple occasions, even winning by a combined 20-5 or 20-6 score in a best 2-of-3 to 10 in the Eastern Regionals one year. For whatever reason, this guy who could dominate nearly all college fencers just could not beat my friend - he really would have benefited if some else knocked my friend out first.

There's probably more variability of style in a one-on-one sport like fencing (we had several A>B>C>A loops just within the Cornell team), but I do believe matchups matter in hockey, too.

I'd like to see Bitz and the Bruins match up against Tech's Willie Mitchell and the Canucks in the Cup finals.

Your "favorite" former Clarkson player has become one of the best shut down D-men in the NHL.

Boston has a better shot of getting there unless Luongo can carry Van to the finals. Interesting next series, last night got VAN off to a good start.

KeithK

ftyuv
At least I know how to use the quote tags! SNAP!

In my day we didn't have these WYSIWYG editors for the web. You had to type the HTML by hand and sometimes the bit patterns too. It was garbled and unformatted and unreadable. And that's the way it was and we liked it!

In my day, we had to write the HTML out on HTML coding forms, drop them off to be key punched, pick up the cards and a printout the next day, debug the HTML, and take psychedelic drugs to imagine what the way it would look on the web if we had one. And we liked it!

Swampy

KeithK

ftyuv
At least I know how to use the quote tags! SNAP!

In my day we didn't have these WYSIWYG editors for the web. You had to type the HTML by hand and sometimes the bit patterns too. It was garbled and unformatted and unreadable. And that's the way it was and we liked it!

In my day, we had to write the HTML out on HTML coding forms, drop them off to be key punched, pick up the cards and a printout the next day, debug the HTML, and take psychedelic drugs to imagine what the way it would look on the web if we had one. And we liked it!

You'd have liked it just as much if you had skipped all that nerd shit and just taken the drugs.

ugarte

Swampy

KeithK

ftyuv
At least I know how to use the quote tags! SNAP!

In my day we didn't have these WYSIWYG editors for the web. You had to type the HTML by hand and sometimes the bit patterns too. It was garbled and unformatted and unreadable. And that's the way it was and we liked it!

In my day, we had to write the HTML out on HTML coding forms, drop them off to be key punched, pick up the cards and a printout the next day, debug the HTML, and take psychedelic drugs to imagine what the way it would look on the web if we had one. And we liked it!

You'd have liked it just as much if you had skipped all that nerd shit and just taken the drugs.

In my day, we decriminalized pot in Massachusetts!!

PARTY ON!!!

ugarte

Swampy

KeithK

ftyuv
At least I know how to use the quote tags! SNAP!

In my day we didn't have these WYSIWYG editors for the web. You had to type the HTML by hand and sometimes the bit patterns too. It was garbled and unformatted and unreadable. And that's the way it was and we liked it!

In my day, we had to write the HTML out on HTML coding forms, drop them off to be key punched, pick up the cards and a printout the next day, debug the HTML, and take psychedelic drugs to imagine what the way it would look on the web if we had one. And we liked it!

You'd have liked it just as much if you had skipped all that nerd shit and just taken the drugs.

Yeah, you're right. But I didn't discover that until I was a senior.

Nice mention of bitz playing well in tonights game. Unfortunately for his team Carolina just scored to go up 3-1.