Monday, June 18, 2007

Pre-Draft Stuff on Patch

A couple of stories about Max Pacioretty from NHL.com and Hockey's Future have come out in the last couple of days. Thanks to the posters at The Wolverine for pointing them out.

The one from NHL.com has a couple of things that I just love hearing. It says that Patch is great in the faceoff circle and that "he models his game after his favorite player, New York Rangers' forward Jed Ortmeyer, 'because he does all the little things right on both ends of the ice.'" Gotta love a kid like that! If you have to model your game after someone, might as well model it after the best captain Michigan has had in a long, long time. Jed was awesome.

Patch sounds like a really good kid. I just hope he doesn't go Trevor Lewis on us and get drafted too high.

Here's the article from Hockey's Future.

A couple other things:
As a follow-up to my vent-session last week about ESPN ruining the IRL race at Texas by putting the results on the Bottom Line, I got an email back from ESPN's Ombudsman:

"I received many complaints like yours and forwarded them to ESPN's Viewer Response team to get an explanation. Here is what they said:

"The result was added to the other Bottom Lines when the race ended, but also mistakenly networked to ESPN2, thereby allowing it to show under the coverage until the mistake was caught. Production has been alerted and addressed the issue to make sure this doesn't happen again."

I sincerely hope that is the last time a race will be ruined in that way.

Le Anne Schreiber"

Pretty much the response I expected. Hopefully they got enough emails this time that it actually will be the last time a race is ruined like that. As I said last week, it's at least the third time in the past two years that it's happened. And there's really no excuse for it. What's the hurry to get the results up on the Bottom Line anyway? It's the fricken IRL. Anyone who cares about it is watching the damn thing. Still, I appreciate the response, and hopefully they're going to be more on the ball in the future.

Charles Woodson came to the last week of the Packers' organized team activities. Packers.com had an article about him and how he gives a lot of the credit for his resurgence to Al Harris, the guy on the other side. I love Chuck, and I love how he's basically shoving it in the face of anyone who hated on him when the Packers signed him. It sounds weird, considering the Packers pass defense wasn't anything to write home about last season, but both of our corners deserved Pro-Bowl berths. Football's coming!

Lastly, Detroit Bad Boys points out that not everyone in the organization is as enthused about Amir Johnson as I am. Dumars and Hammond think that he's going to be a special player, but there are those on the coaching staff that don't think he'll ever be more than an "end of the bench role player".

If there was anything that makes me have less faith in our coaching staff than I already had after that whole "playing Flip Murray and Lindsey Hunter together at the start of the fourth quarter in a tied elimination game" thing, this is it. If you can't find a use for a 6'11" player who is faster than Rip Hamilton (per Dumars on 1270 last week), who can jump out of the gym, block shots, energize the crowd and his teammates with dunks, makes his free throws, and actually shoots the ball better than he's given credit for, then you need to be in another line of work. How can you not find minutes for a guy like that? Hell, one of the worst coaches in the NBA can deploy a no-talent assclown like Anderson Varejao in a strangely effective manner. There's no way he's a better player than Johnson will be. Every time Johnson has gotten significant minutes, he's risen to the occasion. A guy goes for 20-12-3-4 in 37 minutes on 10-14 shooting but you don't think he'll ever be more than an end of the bench role player? He's also gone for 8 and 6 in 13 minutes, 12-10-3-6 in 35 minutes, and was only 18-22 from the field in the preseason when he got to play. Not to mention his performances last year.

Flip, you're a moron.

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