Monday, March 28, 2016

Hockey Fights Do Have Their Place In The Game

What analytics can tell us about the role of fighting in hockey

 What’s clear from the research is that if any league were to try to take fighting out of the game and make no other changes, it would mean that we should expect the game to be rougher, and perhaps more dangerous, as Smith suggests. However, it should be possible to offset this change by having referees call games more tightly, at least with regards to these “egregious” penalties. If referees can resist the urge to “put their whistles away and let the players decide the game”, especially when the play starts getting “chippy”, then players won’t have to resort to fighting.

While this will undoubtedly have the effect of more penalties being called, which some might not like, it would also reduce the need for players to police the game themselves. Of course, the extent to which the referees are able to do this depends in large part on whether players can hide their bad behavior from the sightlines of the refs.

(SI.com)

The Tour Could Benefit From A New Leader

Tim Finchem says he's likely to step down at end of 2016

[I]n the last year of a four-year contract extension, the 68-year-old commissioner surprised observers by announcing a new one-year deal through June 2017 that he said he does not expect to complete.

“The length of the contract is really a placeholder,” Finchem said Sunday while visiting the WGC-Dell Match Play in Austin. “I wouldn’t anticipate staying that long. My plan would be—and that assumes I can make progress on my projects—to step aside at the end of this year.”

(GolfDigest.com)  

Did You Know - The Masters Tournament Edition

18 Things You Didn't Know About Augusta National and the Masters

4. There's a natural spring between the 13th and 14th fairways that spouts gold dust when it rains.

Complete list (Golf.com) 

How The Hell Did A Human Being Consume All Of This In 1 Sitting?

A Dude Who Weighed 400 Pounds Posted His Daily Taco Bell Order And How The Hell Can Someone Do That To Their Body??

2 7-Layer Burritos
  • 860 calories
  • 32 grams of fat
  • 2,030mg of sodium
2 Beef Grilled Stuffed Burritos
  • 1,440 calories
  • 64 grams of fat
  • 4,280mg of sodium
Nachos Bell Grande
  • 760 calories
  • 38 grams of fat
  • 1,300mg of sodium
Chicken Quesadilla
  • 510 calories
  • 27 grams of fat
  • 1,200mg of sodium
Cheesy Potato Burrito
  • 490 calories
  • 22 grams of fat
  • 1,300mg of sodium
Carmel Apple Empanada
  • 310 calories
  • 15 grams of fat
  • 310mg of sodium
Total
  • 4,370 calories
  • 196 grams of fat
  • 10,420mg of sodium
He even says he sometimes put that back twice in a day. FUCKING TWICE.

(BroBible.com)

You Gotta Admit, It's A Clever Name


(Bits&Pieces.us)

Dedication & Preserverance Paid Off

The Quinnipiac Way: How a college hockey power was born

HAMDEN, CT — Rand Pecknold took the job as men's hockey coach at the school that’s hard to pronounce (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) because it meant $6,700 and a position in the sport.

"I easily could’ve quit," he says. "Nobody would’ve blamed me. We had nothing. I couldn’t feed the guys when we went on the road. We didn’t have a budget to play a full schedule. This was about as Mickey Mouse as it gets."

So he slogged through midnight practices at the town rink in Northford, CT. He got home at 2:30 a.m., slept until 6 a.m., woke up, taught at a local high school and came home for a three-hour nap. At 6 p.m. he'd drive 71 miles to the Quinnipiac University campus to recruit players and try to figure out how to bolster his team. Then he started it all over again with practice at midnight.

“It was one of the hardest years of my life,” Pecknold told SI.com while sitting in his office at the TD Bank Sports Center, under a whiteboard with not-quite-erased diagrams. “And there we were with one win, and I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’”

Now, 22 years later, Pecknold has taken his team from the bowels of a public rink that had a curtain separating the home and visiting locker rooms to the top of the NCAA rankings, the number one seed heading into this weekend’s national tournament. It’s been the turnaround of a lifetime, from 1-12-1 in his first 14 games as coach to 29-3-7 this season and the cusp of the national championship. But this is not just about the boys. It turns out the program that started in the town rink now has something else: a pretty damn good women’s team.

(SI.com)

Power Rankings: Threats to the Capitals are surfacing - ESPN.com

5. Los Angeles Kings
  • Clinched a playoff berth. The Kings have seven games remaining and next face the Sharks on Monday. They are 6-3-1 in the past 10 games. On Saturday, the Kings snapped a three-game losing skid with a 6-4 win over the Oilers. Tyler Toffoli had two goals and two assists in the win. 
9. Anaheim Ducks
  • Clinched a playoff berth. The Ducks have eight games remaining and next face the Oilers on Monday. Forward Rickard Rakell has reached the 20-goal plateau for the first time in his NHL career.
14. San Jose Sharks
  • On the verge of clinching a postseason berth. Have seven games remaining and will face the Kings Monday night.  
Complete list (ESPN.com)