Glass Bangers, CBA Pre-Lockout edition

THE LAZY, CRAZY DAYS OF SUMMER

The mind wanders as we ramble through the nether-regions of the NHL's late-offseason.  At least Blue Jackets fans have CannonFest to talk about, seeing as the National Hockey League is giving us bupkus.

I mean, all that we have to talk about is the projections for the upcoming season (The Hockey News' season preview yearbook arrived this past week), and the question of the day vis a vis the CBJ appears to be whether or not the team can avoid landing in the NHL sub-basement again.  Forget the "Are they improved?" or "Can the CBJ return to the playoffs?" queries.  It's "Can they avoid being as bad as they were last season...which was really bad?"  Not exactly inspiring stuff and, as I'll discuss in my forthcoming Season Preview post, a rather silly discussion to have.

Wait, what's that? Commissioner Bettman finally fessed up that the NHL is planning to lock out the players if they do not get a new collective bargaining agreement by September 15th?  OK, now we have something substantial to talk about.

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PLEASE TELL ME YOU ARE NOT SURPRISED BY THIS

If anyone is legitimately shocked or surprised at the notion that the NHL owners had a hyper-aggressive bargaining position up their sleeves, go to the back of the room and stand in the corner.  Were you not paying attention?  I mean, seriously:

1. The National Football League locked out their players for 18 weeks (pretty much all offseason) prior to the 2011-12 season while trying to extract a host of concessions from the players - not the least of which was an 18 percent, across-the-board salary cap cut.
2. The National Basketball Association locked out their players for 161 days (essentially the second half of 2011) while trying to extract a host of concessions from the players - not the least of which was a 40 percent, across-the-board salary cap cut.

CannonFest: No arena pricing here!

CannonFest: Go where the pros go

I'm DBJ, and I approved this message

A CannonFest apology

Fun with Goal Tending

Future Goal Tender Anton Forsberg

You may think from the picture at the right that this post is about our stable of young goal tenders and their potential.  Nope.  They are young goal tenders.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring?  For now they need to ply their trade and gain experience.

This post is about vacation.  Ahhh.  Vacation.  At the beach.  The one where Mrs. Gallos goes out before the vacation and rummages through the bargain pile at Half Price Book Store and comes home with a couple of hockey books.  So I'm reading this book, I get to one point, and my jaw kind of drops, and I think 'this will make a good post!'  So here we are.

I'm going to talk about three goal tenders.  I am going to call them A, B, and C.  And it is very interesting to compare their statistics for a particular season.  The abbreviations are save percentage (SV%) and Goals Against Average (GAA).

Goalie A SV% .899, GAA 3.02
Goalie B SV% .899, GAA 3.02
Goalie C SV% .894, GAA 3.39

If you had to choose, which goalie would you want?

CannonFest: Helping fans compensate since 2010

Rick Nash puts an ad in today's paper...

...and it's a really nice gesture to the fans.

Oh jeez, wrong ad.  Sorry.  Let's see, rummage through the Nash ad file...

Quick thoughts on "Before The Battle"

As I've mentioned over at the Dark Blue Jacket Plus at Fox Sports Ohio, I'm a big fan of behind the scenes/"documentary" shows related to the issues I care about - and the sports teams I enjoy following.  I've had fun watching HBO's 24/7 "Road to the Winter Classic" and the Canadian "Oil Change" shows, but they weren't about my team - the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Tonight, "Before the Battle" changed that.  We got some behind the scenes Blue Jackets footage, largely focused on the days leading up to the NHL entry draft.  Frustratingly, the audio in the pre-draft interviews with a pimp-a-liciously dressed Griffin Reinhart and Ryan Murray left to be desired...and that's the only spot in the show where we were privy to more than a context-absent audio clip.  (Blame the air conditioner in the hotel room, I've been told.)  That being said, Murray's interview and post-draft parade left me with the indelible impression that the kid is totally unflappable.

As for the rest of the draft coverage, I suppose my bar is probably too high but I felt that it could have told us more.  I enjoy hearing CBJ GM Scott Howson tell people on the other end of the line that he's holding his draft pick, but I'd be interested to know WHO it was that he was talking to.  I want to know which players the scouts were talking about.  I appreciate the delicate nature of putting such information in the public dialogue, but it's still worthwhile to put that out there.

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