Category: Jack Choros

Why Carey Price Is A Hart Trophy Candidate

The Hart Memorial Trophy goes to the player considered to be the most valuable to his team. Even though it’s been around for 90 years, it’s only been awarded to 54 players, so if you’re one of the guys fortunate enough to receive it, it goes without saying that you had a special season.

While goaltenders are often the most valuable players on their teams, history shows that it’s really difficult to win the Hart Memorial Trophy playing in between the pipes. Only six goaltenders have ever won the award including: Roy Worters, Chuck Rayner, Al Rollins, Jacques Plante, Dominik Hasek (two years in a row) and Jose Theodore.

Although it’s been more than a decade since a tender claimed the award, Montreal Canadiens net minder Carey Price has a shot at it, and if he wins it, he would be the second net minder in a row from the Habs organization to accomplish the feat. To really break it down a little bit, let’s compare some of the numbers that the two goaltenders managed to put up during their spectacular respective campaigns.

First we look at Carey Price. Through 49 games so far this season he has a goals against average of 2.03 and a sparkling save percentage of 932. If both numbers stand up for the rest of the year, they would be career highs for Price. Granted there are still a lot of games to go, but it’s clear that he’s the biggest reason for the team’s success this season, helping Montreal currently maintain the number two spot in the Eastern Conference.

There’s a good chance that he surpasses his career high of 38 wins, given that he already has 29 at the moment, and if not for an injury suffered against the New York Rangers in the playoffs last spring, Price could have easily led the Canadiens to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Now let’s look at Jose Theodore. He never managed to win more than six playoff games in a given postseason run, but during the 2001-2002 regular season, he was unbeatable in the crease. Theodore’s save percentage that year was .931 and his goals against average stood at 2.11. Those stats are quite impressive, but in comparison to Price, Theodore managed only 30 wins that season, a mark the Habs’ present day goalie will no doubt crush given that we’re only a short time removed from the All-Star game in Columbus.

Whether or not Carey Price becomes the seventh goalie in NHL history to win the award remains to be seen, but if Jose Theodore’s 2001-02 season is the measuring stick for what a Hart Memorial Trophy winning goaltender needs to do in order to claim it, it looks like Mr. Price is on the right track. 

The one man who could get in his way is Pekka Rinne whose GAA is 0.01 better and he also has one more win but Price currently has the edge by 0.003 when it comes to save percentage. If the Hart Memorial Trophy was given out today, it’s safe to say that one of these two men would be the seventh goaltender to win the trophy, but there’s still about 30 games to go and things could change.

Why Fans Love The NHL Trade Deadline

This year’s NHL trade deadline day is March 2nd, and unlike the trade deadline day in the NBA, NFL and MLB, hockey’s version provides fans a reason to call in sick. While it doesn’t receive nearly as much coverage in the United States as it probably should, trade deadline day is like Christmas in March for hockey fans in Canada. Although the introduction of a hard salary cap following the 2012-2013 lockout makes it harder for big and complex contracts to be moved on the last day trades can be made, there seems to be no sign of the television ratings or the transactions slowing down any time soon.

Perhaps the biggest reason for that is that die hard sports fans dream of being their favourite team’s general manager someday, and trade deadline coverage gives us some insight into what it’s actually like without ever being in our team’s boardroom as the deadline approaches. Especially in this day and age with the latest breaking news being posted on Twitter almost immediately, allowing fans to keep track of rumours and break into debates in an instant. Debate fuels adrenaline in the average sports fan more than anything else.

The curiosity and intrigue also stems from what one’s favourite team will do next. Are they buyers or are they sellers? Will they be the big winner in this year’s blockbuster deal for the latest disgruntled or impending free-agent superstar? With questions like that left to be answered as the deadline approaches, it’s easy to see why the media coverage associated with it is basically a man’s version of an afternoon soap opera with the added kick being that it’s actually based on reality and not a dramatic, fictional script.

It seems that no matter what prognosticators and analysts predict as far as how much activity is expected on trade deadline day, things pick up at the last minute and when all the math is done, hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts have changed hands and the future of a fan’s favourite franchise has been changed forever, though seldom in the ways that most experts and fans expected once a few months or even a few years have passed.

For every skilled superstar winger like Marian Gaborik that gets traded on deadline day and helps his new team win the Stanley Cup, the way he did last year with the Los Angeles Kings, there are a handful of stars that get moved and never produce a championship. That reality might not be appealing to fans of contenders, but at the end of the day it’s what makes the trade deadline such a big day for the NHL and so compelling to follow.

The good news is, whether your favourite players and teams are contenders or pretenders this year, you’ll be able to sport their new jersey after all the trades are complete thanks to the gear available here at Sports Jerseys Canada.

3 Reasons The NHL’s All-Star Weekend Is Always Going To Be Boring

The 2015 Honda NHL All-Star Game In Columbus saw Team Toews top Team Foligno by a score of 17-12.That’s right… we saw a total of 29 goals, an NHL record for an All-Star game. And yet, the All-Star game and the entire weekend for that matter seems to always carry with it a certain sense of malaise and boredom to it, much like the NBA’s version of the festivities, or any league’s version for that matter.

There are a few key reasons for that and one of them is that the players simply don’t take it seriously and they probably never will. Yes the winning team gets more money for winning the game and the MVP of the game gets a brand-new car, but NHL All-Stars don’t exactly need extra money in their wallets or an extra SUV or pickup truck.

Another big reason for the boredom is that more goals don’t necessarily mean more excitement… just means more stoppages in play. Couple that with the fact that the game itself lacks any sort of intensity at all, and the event becomes more of a glorified scrimmage rather than a display of the best in the world performing at their best. Any hockey fan that wants to see the NHL at its best knows that the best hockey occurs during the Stanley Cup Playoffs and no matter what the league does to try to make the All-Star game more exciting, that’s always going to be the case.

And then of course there is the rest of the All-Star weekend, the skills competition. Again much like the NBA, it seems these days that most fans would rather watch the skills competition than the All-Star game, simply because you get to see players compete in various facets of the game that don’t often get displayed outside of practice, which makes it a little bit more intriguing to take in.

It also seems like there’s a lot more opportunity to joke around, have fun and pump the crowd up during the event. Blue Jackets forward Ryan Johansen skating down the ice with an Ohio State Buckeyes jersey on comes to mind, and so does Jakub Voracek using Johnny Gudreau as a prop to score a goal.

But even with the best effort of the players to bring creativity to the event, the bottom line is there’s only so much you can do with a hockey puck on ice that will continue to wow the crowd every year. The NBA’s slam dunk contest is often seen as the marquee event of the whole weekend, yet there is a discussion every so often about whether it should be put on hiatus for awhile because a slam dunk can only be reinvented in so many ways.

Nevertheless the NHL’s version will continue to be a part of All-Star Weekend along with the rest of the festivities that take place. But rather than try to make the weekend better, perhaps fans should just take the event for what is… a break from the everyday grind of the NHL regular-season schedule and a showcase of cool tricks, gimmicks, and futuristic looking All-Stars jerseys that you would never get to see otherwise.

Why Fans Should Be Allowed To Throw Jerseys On The Ice When Their Favourite Team Loses

          
          This past Monday, three hockey fans who presumably root for the Toronto Maple Leafs (or once rooted for them) were fined by police, escorted out of the Air Canada Centre and banned from all events that take place in the building for a year because they decided to throw their Leafs jerseys on the ice with the team down by a score of 4-1 to the last place Carolina Hurricanes. One of those tossed jerseys actually hit the ice during the play and could have potentially caused injury to players.
          As concerning as that might be, fans in Toronto aren’t the only ones throwing jerseys. Just ask the former coach of the Edmonton Oilers (and formerly a product of the Leafs’ AHL affiliate Toronto Marlies) Dallas Eakins, who witnessed Oilers fans doing the same thing repeatedly before he was fired a little while ago.
Location, team affiliation or team record aside, while it’s unfortunate to witness the stoppages in play and the incredible disgust with which these jerseys get tossed, the fact of the matter is that fans should be able to do as they please. No, it’s not very smart to do this while the play is going on but to some extent it’s understandable.
The most obvious reason why comes down to dollars and cents. Fans in hockey’s biggest markets, especially the Canadian markets, couldn’t get into the building to watch a regular season game for less than $100 if they wanted to. Add to the fact they spend $20 for parking, $10 on a hot dog, and of course pay for the jersey they throw on the ice, and it’s no wonder they feel frustrated enough to disrupt play and part ways with their hockey sweater.
These are the same fans who’ve witnessed years of futility (especially in Toronto and Edmonton), don’t get any of the cost savings passed down from owners who benefit from locking out players every few years, and who can be easily replaced by the corporate audience who will gladly write off the cost of their tickets as a business expense whether the product on the ice is good or not.
Now that fans have been fined and the public knows about it, the voicing of any further displeasure via the jersey toss is going to die down without a doubt, but the anger will remain…that’s true no matter who is behind the bench, as long as your favourite team is in the dumps.

The good news is, if you indeed have had the opportunity to toss your jersey at a Leafs or Oilers game, you can always jump onboard a new team’s bandwagon. And if you like the idea of sporting the sweater of a winning team, you can find it at Sports Jerseys Canada….of course if you really want to buy a Leafs or Oilers sweater, we won’t hold it against you.