Free Republic

Lindsey Graham is the de facto representative in the Senate for the largest NGO in the U.S. today — Boeing Corp.

Nothing wrong with the Edmonton example. And the Winnipeg one includes multiple levels of artistry.

The overall level of skill in the NHL has definitely improved dramatically over the years. You see it with magnificent passing plays more than anywhere else:

NHL Greatest Assists of All Time

It's no coincidence that Gretzky shows up a lot in videos like this -- along with McDavid and Crosby. My personal favorite from this video starts around the 5:14 mark. Nicklas Backstrom -- arguably the best passer of his generation -- threads the puck in the air past two opponents in the passing lane, and it lands flat on the ice right in Ovechkin's wheelhouse for a one-timer.

True. But the first step for Congress would have to be to strip the President of all these broad and arbitrary powers.

To be honest, I'm surprised any of those laws granting the President such "emergency powers" to impose tariffs ever stood up to constitutional scrutiny in the first place. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is very explicit in this regard:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises ...

I am a proponent of tariffs as both a source of revenue and a mechanism for protecting domestic industries. But one of the great ironies here is that Trump’s tariff policies aren’t directly going to accomplish much in either regard. They’re too haphazard and arbitrary to do anything.

It might actually be WORSE if Trump ultimately wins these legal challenges, because trading partners have no major incentive to enter trade deals if they can be undone without any warning in the future — by either this President or another one.

Kerik always came across to me as a complicated guy. Extremely effective at his job in many ways, but a cheap grifter behind the scenes.

A former client of mine in NYC real estate had to deal with the FBI prying into his business for a time back in the mid-2000s. Nothing came of it and they never told him what they were looking for, but after Kerik’s indictment he put some of the pieces of the story together and figured out that this is what their investigation was all about. He never had any dealings with Kerik even indirectly, so nothing came of it from his end.

There you go again — cite the exception player with statistics that are outliers, and complain that the game sucks now because nobody can match them today. That’s like saying that professional baseball players are terrible today because nobody can hit .366 for his career like Ty Cobb did.

Dude -- Beliveau was one of the all-time greats, but he won most of his Stanley Cups when there were only six teams in the NHL, and Montreal was far and away the most dominant team.

I thought Gretzky was THE greatest NHL player of all time. But he only has four Stanley Cup rings -- behind dozens of other players on the all-time list.

well, i played on a line with Wayne Gretzky in Edmonton in the 1980’s...yes, i am Jari Kurri....

Can I get your autograph? I always loved that guy. I think he's one of the most underrated NHL players of all time. LOL.

ahahahaa..you are one thise “ppg” guys

Actually, I'm not. YOU are the one who mentioned that Gretzky had 47 points in only 18 games.

Wayne Gretzky scores five goals in a game to reach 50 in 39 games in 1981:

Oilers vs. Flyers, 12/30/81

I don't who is playing in goal for the Flyers, but just look at that dude. The goaltending is awful, and goalies on high school girls teams cover more net in goal these days. I could have scored a goal in that game against him.

Oh, yeah -- the goalies back then were spectacular. LOL.

First of all, I never said McDavid was the greatest player ever. I don't know where you got that from.

Secondly, take a look at the NHL career leaders in playoff points per game. Gretzky is #1 at 1.837. And yet SEVEN of the top 20 and FOUR of the top 10 are active players.

McDavid is #3.

Mikko Rantanen -- who is playing on his third team THIS SEASON -- is #9 of all time ...

Ahead of Jean Beliveau.
Ahead of Bobby Hull.
Ahead of Joe Sakic.
Ahead of Peter Forsberg.
Ahead of Jari Kurri.
Ahead of Mike Bossy.

You have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

I'll say it again, dude: I played hockey for 15 years. How long did you play? And how many deflection goals did you score as a player (deliberate ones, not just a puck fired on net that accidentally went in off your stick or body)? How many did you even SEE as a player in the ice?

And I coached for five years after I retired, too. How many years as a hockey coach do you have on your resume?

When you're down to the final four teams you've got four deep rosters with players who can score up and down the lineup. These are not typical of regular-season play by any stretch.

Let's look at the goaltending through yesterday among the starting goalies for the conference final teams: Bobrovsky (.912), Oettinger (.908), Andersen (.906) and Skinner (.910). Skinner is an odd case because he's supposed to be the #1 goalie for Edmonton, but he lost his starting job to Calvin Pickard who only had a .888 save percentage but went 6-0 in his starts before he was injured in the last round.

P.S. — There’s another issue lurking out there that is likely to have serious implications for the structure of the NHL and its competitive balance in the future. The way the league’s salary cap rules are set up, you are basically going to see six NHL teams with a structural advantage over all the others: Florida, Tampa Bay, Nashville, Dallas, Vegas and Seattle. These are the teams located in states with no income tax, which gives them a big advantage when signing top free agents. It’s no coincidence that at least one of these teams has made the Stanley Cup finals in each of the last six seasons and nine out of the last eleven.

Now you're just making crap up for the sake of complaining, dude. You have repeatedly posted historical statistics that are either anomalies or have nothing to do with what you're complaining about ... and then claim that these things are the causes of everything that is wrong with the NHL.

1. I will repeat what I said before: Teams have been playing "trap" defense for decades before the mid-1990s. The neutral-zone trap was invented in Europe as a way to defend on an enormous ice surface, for heaven's sake -- and that is a much more wide-open game even to this day.

2. Go back to 1995 and track another statistic that had a far bigger impact on declining offense than "trapping defense" -- GOALTENDING. Your average NHL goaltender consistently had a sub-.900 save percentage every year from 1972-73 through 1993-94. During the heyday of the high-scoring period of the early to mid-1980s, this average got down into the putrid .870-.880 range. The goaltending was simply awful by today's standards. THIS was a much bigger factor in declining NHL scoring than anything you've mentioned.

3. None of this should be news to anyone who knows hockey. I'd say at least 90% of the rules adopted by the NHL over the last 100 years have been aimed at increasing scoring. Go back to the period before WW2 if you REALLY want to see what low-scoring games were like.

4. You think a "trapping defense" is what brought the Las Vegas expansion team to the Stanley Cup finals in 2018? They were 5th in the NHL in scoring that year, dude. And they had such a successful first season for one simple reason: They had ridiculously favorable expansion draft rules that weren't originally supposed to work out the way they did. For one thing, the NHL was planning to bring TWO new teams into the league (Las Vegas and Quebec). So the expansion rules were set up to have more players available for selection than prior expansion years. But the NHL kept the expanded pool of players available for Vegas even after the Quebec expansion was postponed indefinitely. Secondly, the 2017 expansion draft was the first one since the NHL salary cap was adopted in 2005, which meant that for the first time in history, teams were actually willing to make deals with the expansion team to REMOVE older players with high salaries from their rosters. This is how Vegas went into their inaugural season with a legitimate Hall of Fame candidate as their starting goaltender (Marc-Andre Fleury). Pittsburgh was so desperate to offload expensive players from their roster that they gave Vegas a second-round draft pick in exchange for Vegas selecting Fleury in the expansion draft. Think about how ludicrous a deal like that is by pre-cap standards. With deals like this in addition to the regular expansion picks, Vegas was able to finish the expansion draft day with a bunch of players who would become their top stars for years -- including Shea Theodore, William Karlsson, Jonathan Marchessault and Reilly Smith.

What “buzzard” rule changes? Eliminating the center red line for two-line passes? That put the NHL on par with IIHF rules that had been in place for years.

Look at those videos closely, dude.

The first one isn't just a deflection. It's a deflection out of mid-air on a puck that was deliberately passed to him 18 inches off the ice ... and he redirected the puck into the net exactly where he wanted it to go.

The second one is a pass that is threaded through the air past two defenders who are positioned well to defend the play ... and was made precisely where it needed to go to land on the ice right where his teammate's stick blade would redirect it on net.

I PLAYED hockey for 15 years -- and I'm telling you that these are exceptional plays that have become ordinary in today's NHL. I challenge you to find similar video clips from Gretzky's heyday in the 1980s.

I believe Wayne Gretzky was the greatest athlete in the history of North American sports -- and it's not even close.

But you're posting his outlandish statistics as if they were some kind of norm. They're not. They're outlandish. And he'd be the first to admit that he posted those remarkable numbers because he had the good fortune of playing under perfect conditions -- at a time when offensive numbers were generally through the roof in the aftermath of the NHL-WHA merger, with subpar goaltending across the board, and on a team loaded with talent that played an aggressive offensive game. His first season in Los Angeles was the last time he reached the 50-goal mark, and his third season was the last time he reached 40. Ovechkin passed Gretzky's career total because he was able to be a dominant scorer long after the age when Gretzky tailed off dramatically.

Leave Gretzky's numbers aside, and look at the players whose career totals are just BELOW his. There are lots of players from the 1980s and 1990s among them, but you're seeing more recent players creeping into that elite group. Ovechkin has already passed Gretzky for all-time goals. Crosby is #10 all-time for assists and will end up in the top five if he gets 100 more in his career (certainly achievable). Crosby is #9 on the all-time scoring list and can pass Mark Messier at #3 with 200 more points. Auston Matthews is actually on a higher goal-per-game pace than Ovechkin, and neither one of them has even scored 70 in a season.

It's the goaltending records that have been broken with boring regularity since 1990s -- and that's one of the biggest factors in the decline of scoring in the 1990s and early 2000s.

He’s talking about casualty rates, not total numbers. I have no idea how accurate his estimates are.

I have said for years that fuel prices are the strongest indicator of consumer confidence. People simply notice that they have more disposable income when they are paying low variable prices for something that has a pretty stable demand in their budgets.