Snowman On Fire

Patrik Elias had a goal and an assist for the Czech Republic as it became the first team to beat Switzerland in the World Championships. It’s amazing how productive Elias can be when you move him back to wing, and pair him up with a center who feeds him the puck like warm kolac.

Meanwhile, Team USA lost its captain and big center Jeff Halpern. Halpern banged up his right knee, and is back in DC for surgery to repair a ruptered ACL. It’s repeat knee rebuilding for Halpern, something he last had done six pre-cap summers ago as a Cap player.

The IIHF ranking system probably has some algorithmic basis that could only be explained in an xkcd comic and a 2nd year graduate text in topology. And the rules for deciding team and country affiliations are very loose; it’s possible for Scott Gomez to skate for Mexico and quite reasonable for me — or Halpern — to be eligible for the Israeli national team. Don’t laugh about the Israeli team, now ranked ahead of Iceland but behind powerhouse Estonia; they’ve been moving up slowly. Given their one rink in Metulla and lack of booster clubs, they’re probably 3 Olympics and half a dozen Russian olim away from Olympic contention. But what a team they could assemble under IIHF rules: Halpern, Mathieu Schneider, Mike Cammalleri, up-coming Preds goalie Dov Grumet-Morris (former standout at Hah-vahd) and the first-ever Israeli drafted into the NHL, former Devils prospect Max Birbraer.

Today I experienced the delight ususally reserved for watching Duke basketball lose to North Carolina. The Rangers were out-gunned, out-hit and out-hustled for all but about 3 minutes of today’s Game 5, and they got bounced by the Penguins. It’s becoming increasingly easy to cheer for the Penguins, as they generate excitement rather than controversy. Who wants to hear about Jagr’s future in the NHL, Gomez’s monster contract that took the Rangers no further than he took the Devils, Sean Avery’s spleen venting, or listen to the Rangers whine about penalties? Another trade deadline deal - the one that brought Hossa from Atlanta to Pittsburgh - looks briliant, as Hossa gets the game and series-winning goal. Shades of Patrik Elias with that one. The Monday morning question is just how much the New York media will pick this series apart, looking to lay blame in which the guy supposedly in his career twilight (Jagr) outshone the recent imports (Gomez and Drury) when it counted.

I’m cheering for the Penguins in the Battle of Pennsylvania, and they could take either Dallas or Detroit.

I check the logs on this blog every few days just to get a sense of what kind of topics generate traffic, and how people find my blog amidst the millions of voices on the net. I’ve discovered some interesting and perhaps perturbing truths:

Google AdSense is really self-referential. Before rebuilding this site, I had an ad click-through rate of small fraction of a percent, but I defniitely had click-throughs. And those clicks shaped the types of ads that appeared under each entry: some NJ Devils related things, ticket broker ads, occasionally pointers to eBay auctions. Once I rebuilt the site, I’ve been getting somewhat moronic ads based on the “snowman” keyword and the “on fire” modifier, including fire equipment, Frosty the snowman related electronic kitsch, and other things that register somewhat above oral surgery in terms of interest to the average snowman reader (all two dozen of you). I’m not asking anyone to click, because (a) that violates Google Adense’s terms of service (it’s a blatant form of click fraud) and (b) I do not want more stupid ads like these littering the site, and clicking on them only makes Google think that “they’re working”. I’ll point this out to my Google friends; if you are displaying 400 ads a month and not getting any click throughs, maybe it’s time to change the sort algorithm?

In response to a promotion from the hosting company that keeps the snowman chill, I signed up for a Google Adwords account. This is the flip side of AdSense — Adsense displays the ads; AdWords lets you pick keywords and phrases to which to attach your ads. My one-liner advertising the Snowman On Fire blog has been shown about 50 times this week, without a single click — so I haven’t paid for any of those displays, but at the same time, the net effect has been exactly what I paid for. Just for chuckles, I sponsor some of the popular mis-spellings that would take people to a Devils related blog, like “Patrick Elias”, and I get more displays there than on the normalized keywords. But the opacity of the process bothers me: Google decides what each click is worth, and one good click might exhaust my whopping advertising budget (best described as “a Hamilton per month”). With a small budget, I’m precluded from ever displaying in a high-click value market, like someone searching for “Stanley Cup,” because any click would exceed my ability to pay for it. But this seems to point at the converse of my click-through problem in AdSense — why not let market forces determine the value of clicks, so that the overall value of click-throughs increases, rather than assigning some known only to the Googleplex value that makes the market slightly more murky that NHL caponomics?

As much as I’m aggravated by Google AdSense, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Project Wonderful. PW is the ad engine that powers most of the online comics I frequent, helping the authors pay for, well, electricity and beer, I think. I put a footer with three buttons at the bottom of the page, and it turns out that my few page views a day are generating a steady stream of revenue. Not much - a few cents a day, but more than I’m seeing from displaying irrelevant and irreverant Google ads in the same context. The big difference is that PW charges by the day, and sets a market price for display ads using a public auction. You can make your own decisions about the value of having an ad show up for particular content, because you see the style, shape and sequence of the content. There’s full transparency, and that makes the advertising process both wonderful and a self-directed fulfillment.

And for the cosmic coincidence of the day: I love seeing readers arrive here through some tortuous, circuitous path. Earlier this week, someone searched for the phrase “I will praise him the rest of my days,” a phrase usually reserved in our household for Marty Brodeur or Patrik Elias. However, there was a typo in the search, and the phrase “I will parise him the rest of my days” landed the searcher at the snowman’s feet. I only see actual page loads, so I know that the person who went in search of praise found a praised Parise here — something made the person click, and for that action, I’m happy for the rest of the day.

I finally did something I swore I would do weeks ago: I finished putting up all of the posts that were eaten or lost when I upgraded my blog site, and then decided that I was going to tackle the problem of cached links to the old site. When I first started using WordPress, I used the numerical indices for blogs, so links to entries had the form
http://agrosnowman.com/snowman/?p=34.
Not at all indicative of the content or potential puns included in the title. Upon re-install, I chose the compacted title as a permalink for each entry, which seemed like a good idea at 1:00 AM on a Saturday night when my wife was annoyed that I was typing rather than doing something more, well, productive.

After spending a few hours looking at PHP books, searching a bit, and some trial and error, I actually wrote a piece of code for the first time in about five years, and more miraculously, it works! If you go to one of the “old” entries via a cached link from any search engine, the little code snipped I put up will map that “p=##” mess into a proper blog title, and then redirect you. Writing code has never been my strong suit, and I still find it somewhat surprising that my prose writing has far outpaced my code writing when 25 years ago I couldn’t conceive of that ordering under any circumstances.

In any order, approach, or way, I’m pronouncing the Snowman back to full strength, with all previous content once again available, and in theory I shouldn’t drop anyone on the cold hard floor of the Internet. Now if only the Yankees’ bullpen could manage the same.

While all eyes are focused on the NFL draft in New York’s Radio City Music Hall today, I’m looking forward to the NHL draft in Ottawa that’s a few weeks out.

Of the thirty expected first-round picks, half of them are defensemen. Last year everyone marveled at the selection of Americans at the top of the draft order, this year it’s clear the emphasis is on blueliners who can skate in the “new NHL.” Question is: will the Devils make a trade to pick up another high pick, and will they expend those picks on play-making centers, blueliners, or another European born winger who languishes in Lowell?

I find it’s good to live life with the same 24-hour rule we ask parents to obey in youth hockey: if something upsets you, give it 24 hours to settle before reacting publicly, loudly and permanently to it. This season upset me, not because the Devils didn’t make a serious run at the Cup but because there was so much potential left on the table. The season began and ended the same way, with half-hearted hockey amidst serious fan involvement. A bad combination. But here are my fully formed day-old thoughts:

The Rock: A for form, but you can’t dance to it. It’s a wonderful building for hockey. Great sight lines, good acoustics, awesome food in terms of variety, speed and price, a good experience. I love the high school and youth hockey jerseys on the walls, and the displays near the towers. But for some reason, it still doesn’t feel like the fans’ building. Maybe this is part of the game experience, maybe it’s just what we associate between on-ice and in-stands events. But I think every player, every member of the Devils management team, every Power Player, and every fan should walk around to Section 1, and look over the goal that the Devils defend twice. Up on the second level, to the left of the Taste of Newark, are a set of youth hockey jerseys. They’re the only non-player jersey displays you can see from the ice; the others are in the concourse and face away from the playing surface. Accidentally or not, the youth jerseys look onto the ice, and the ice looks up to them. That’s where the future fan base is; it’s not in people my age but in our kids’ generation. We grew up with the Rangers and then the Islanders, and if you were geographically confused perhaps the Flyers as well. No Devils until 1982, long past the high school salad days of sports allegiances. But the Devils have a chance to reach the Millenial Generation, to make them life-long fans, and to build a base that will fill the rock with the kids who used to fill those jerseys, and their kids a generation after that. That’s what will make the Rock a fans’ building.

Game Experience: B- at best. And I can’t put my finger on one thing, but seeing a game at the Rock still feels like every other arena, with the silly between-whistle games, XM-sponsored music, and video sequences. What about text messages from the fans? Mobile phone photos? And I’m sorry, but the Power Players are just another silver pom-pom, bare midriff team that doesn’t dance, sing, or skate. The Knicks City Dancers, the Nets Dancers, even the Panthers Ice Cats do something. I’m not just suffering remaindered upset that I wasn’t called back when I filed an application to be Power Player; I think the Power Players need to include more of the fan base. Let’s all channel Baumann in his swamp-ish glory. Tie the Devils Legion marketing into the in-game experience, for once. The game, the prelude to the game, the postscript to the game, the days between games, and what you’re thinking of while standing in line for another Carvel sundae should be shared. It’s Facebook mashed with the Jumbotron.

Broadcast Team: A, D, and incomplete. I’m not going to jump on the “Chico is a homer” bandwagon. I happen to like Chico Resch, I think he’s funny, I think Chico Eats made it worth the electricity to keep the television on through the intermissions, and I’ll go as far as to say that Chico is the Don Cherry of New Jersey. But: I’d like to be able to find games, on cable, at a consistent place. MSG, MSG Alternate, FSNY, VS, and the Estonian sub-titled Home and Juniper Tree Network (except where blackout restrictions apply) make it a bit confusing. The radio situation is just as bad, with games moving around more than Nathan Detroit’s oldest established permanent floating craps game. And to top it off, I find Sherry Ross to be the anti-Velischek. Randy was a homer, but I loved his accent, and deep down, you could hear in his voice how he was pained by failure on the ice; he wished he was out there helping instead of in the broadcast booth. Sherry Ross comes off like Suzan Waldman but without the authenticity. If I could listen to radio broadcasts with the sound off, and just have the play by play etched into my brain via Bluetooth, I would. Gentle readers, you can assign grades. I want consistency, the voice of experience (why I like Chico and Dano) and commentary that makes me laugh.

Team Performance: I take the F. I’d like to say that I made my early season predictions - a 100 goal scoring line, a miserable year for Gomez, Rafalski churning on Detroit’s blue line - on Opposite Day, but I didn’t. I was equal parts wrong and myopic. This was the first year in six that Elias didn’t lead the Devils in scoring, and the top four goal scorers combined didn’t hit the century mark (94 to be exact). The entire team’s plus/minus rating looks like a Montreal thermocline map in January. There were a few bright spots, like Oduya and Mottau coming into their own as defensive forces who can move the puck. It was good to see Parise not only step up in scoring but step up when the going got tough and his teeth got going. Everybody’s wondering what went wrong, but I think it comes down to a lack of simplicity: At times it looked like every player was worried about or doing some part of another’s role. Elias at center. Multiple guys behind the net in the defensive zone. Slow motion in the neutral zone, or failure to hold at the blue line so that the defense is back quickly. What that speaks to, then, is the need for one or two really solid position players so everyone else can get into the zone, literally, and focus on one role at a time. A serious #1 center, a serious #1 or 2 defenseman, and the team is in good shape. And they don’t have to be big ticket guys — just hungry guys.

Sergei Brylin. I hope, seriously, totally hope, he’s back next season. I love Sarge because it’s so much fun to yell “Freakin’ Brylin!” while running through the house, or a hotel room, in my underwear (don’t ask; several Boston area hotels now have policies against this). He’s a genuinely good guy who gives of his time, autographs and listening skills as much as anyone in hockey. In some ways, he may be the Jim McKenzie of this team. After the Devils won the Cup in 2003, and McKenzie took off for Nashville, both Gomez and Langebrunner said (to me, on a golf course) that they were sad to see Jim leave — even though he was a fourth liner and a banger, McKenzie was a leader on and off the ice; he got respect in the locker room; he set a strong work ethic. I think Brylin catalyzes the same chemistry — add a few more reactive players, and let Brylin buffer the reactions.

Coaching. For once, I’d like to see the Devils have the same coach two seasons in a row. I think it takes time to mold a team, to build something with the talent you’re given (Sutter arrived once the players were signed; he had zero input). However, I’d seriously argue for sending Albelin and/or Larry Robinson off to Lowell for next season and swinging Kurt Kleinendorst onto the defensive end of the bench. KK never played pro, and more important, never played pre-lockout pro hockey, so he’s more of a student of the current game. Let’s see what he mades of the defense in the first third of the season, and then return the coaching pieces to their places if needed.

But hey, I’m the guy who got everything else wrong this season, and I’m merely a fan with a keyboard.

The hockey off-season brings a surfeit of warm-weather activities: golf, baseball, rollerblading, and my favorite, reading. I don’t find it at all incongrous to read hockey books when it’s 90 degrees and humid. To help share the warmth, I collected my list of favorite hockey books in a sidebar page, and I’ll get around to updating it in the next few weeks.

Just finished Jack Falla’s Home Ice and Saved. I think you have to read them in that order; Home Ice is about the joys of owning a backyard rink and is a collection of his essays and stories, all true. Saved is a work of fiction, but like all good fiction, a little bit of the author makes a celebrity cameo appearance. It’s especially appropriate for this playoff season, but I won’t spoil the ending.

Several years ago, the NHL decided to make a push for “non traditional media” coverage, given that it was barely registering fifth in a four-sport nation (NFL, MLB, NBA and the NHL being the “top four”, although NASCAR generates more of an audience in the top four spots). Since then, the use of video and the YouTube deal, encouragement of bloggers and even a zero-cost blogging infrastructure and fan page system on nhl.com have helped move this idea along. The basis for the non-print, non-television coverage push was that NHL fans tend to be more technologically literate, more affluent, and more inclined to consume multiple media sources than other fans. Which is another way of saying that if you can afford tickets at the Rock or the Garden, you probably own a computer and high speed internet connection.

During this rather tortuous season, I found myself reading Tom Guilitti’s Fire & Ice nearly every day, more for his insights into practices, post-game reports and press conferences that made me feel like I was there. Tom is the Pat St. John (in his WNEW-FM prime) of the sports blogging world — when he’s on, you feel like you’re talking hockey with your best friend, even though you’re talking to a screen and nobody is listening (sounds like a Linkin Park song, sorry).

I also began regular consumption of John Fischer’s In Lou We Trust blog, and John was kind enough to send props the Snowman’s way. Unlike the real sports journalism world, bloggers tend to nod to each other except when we’re stealing content and themes. John writes like the guy who sits down low on the glass and cheers as much for good defensive plays as flashy goals. Rounding out my four corners of Devils dailies were the five-man 2-Man Advantage show and the iconoclastic, self-deprecating, and vocabulary-creating duo at Interchangeable Parts. Along with my morning dose of comics, these became my sports pages, editorial columns, and entertainment.

Now if only Lou & Jeff would figure out that there are quite a few readers and writers out here who are willing to make up for what constitutes marketing in the Mulberry Street Gang by promoting the team, the arena and the entire league. Why not have a “Blog with the Devils skate”, or a regular, weekly e-mail Q&A between bloggers and players (and management, if they actually use the web)? Invite the bloggers in for a virtual press conference, held with a webcam, a conference call line and some links off of the team website.

Looking through the statistics for this blog — which are minimal and very short-term, as I don’t pay for anything other than hosting space — most of the traffic comes from searches, and some of that from image searches. Pictures I’ve taken at practice, or at the Rock, show up in Google image search and result in traffic to the site. This is the new marketing — it’s not about reaching the people who already know where to find the Devils web site, nhl.com or can navigate the side roads around Newark’s Broad Street — it’s about finding the folks who were looking for something else and happened upon something Devilishly interesting. There are so many low-cost, high-return activities in which we — bloggers, aspiring writers, or just general Devils hangers-on — would participate. Just open the door to the bench, guys.

I’m going to ruminate more about this season, think about my wish list for new blood to be squeezed from this Rock, comment on the playoffs, the state of hockey, the post-season antics of my own NJ Ice Dragons HNA team, and whatever joy I can find in the Mets, Yankees and Olympics this summer. After all, I want to see how the Kathryn Bertine story ends.

My streak of Devils wins at games I’ve attended ground to a halt tonight, as the season ended with a bang, a whimper, and fans mumbling about the free agency season on the way to their cars. There’s no word for what happened on the ice tonight — and indeed, for good stretches of the season — other than “unwatchable.” As a fan, as someone who has shelled out thousands of dollars for slices of season tickets every year for the past nine seasons, the Devils have become a team that generates more disappointment than excitement. Sorry, but I just can’t watch night after night of defensive breakdowns and missed scoring chances, interspersed with shots from the point that are blocked by wingers ten feet above the face off circles.

I’ll recap my thoughts on the first season in the Rock and the whole of 07-08 once the sausage and peppers mixed with Carvel sundae settles down and I’m no longer nauseated by what happened on the ice rather than at the concession stands. The sole bright spots of he playoffs (for me) were that the Devils didn’t get shut out in any games, Elias had a point in every game, and they didn’t get swept, maintaining at least one playoff tradition. But two out of three of those spots are negatives; hardly a way to remember 87 games of hockey.

As for tonight’s game: defensive breakdowns, too much dump and chase (which means not enough speed, or no support for the puck carrier), and way too many shots that went all of three stick lengths before hitting a Ranger, and not the one in net. How else do you explain the complete lack of offensive momentum, the failure to pick up rebounds, and the number of times the puck came into the Rangers’ end only to be squirted back out again without so much as a single play set up? The game is best summarized by what turned out to be the game-breaking goal: an odd man rush in, Brodeur makes a great save, and instead of (a) the defense getting the puck wide, or out of the zone (b) a winger backchecking Gomez who was standing — standing — off the play looking for the puck or (c) not turning the puck over in the first place, Gomez has an uncontested shot off of the rebound. Three Rangers goals came when there was no defensive pressure within two stick lengths of the shooter - Dubinsky’s goal on the power play, Gomez’ goal and Rosival’s game-tying goal in the first. Rosival dropped in from the point - who was watching him?

This one will be dissected, analyzed and harped upon by Rangers fans until October. I don’t think Brodeur looked tired; I think this came down to lack of hustle and finishing on offense and lack of play control on defense. The story of the entire season, and a story that completes the canon of Devils hockey for the season: it ends the way it started. Badly.

How man times do the Devils fail to clear the puck, turning the puck over, and allow the Rangers to score? I’m boggled by the number of times the puck is along the half boards, and instead of finding neutral ice it’s held along the blue line, or pushed toward center instead of out of the zone. With so much momentum and so many chances to put this one away, the Devils just let themselves get buried. No need to get on the bikes, or work on the power play, just take out the squirt coaching book and work on breaking the puck out.

For each sign of hope, there’s a sign of disaster. Elias has two goals but is minus three on the night. Mottau scores a nice goal after a complete dangle in from the point, but minutes later another failure to clear results in Staal being able to put the puck right past him and Brodeur.

Madden winning the face off past Elias into his own net kind of sums up tonight. And they credited the goal to Gomez, because maybe he sniffed the puck during the face off. I’m not giving up hope, as I witnessed, first-hand, a 3-1 series deficit turn into a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals in May 2000, but anything short of perfect hockey now ends the season. There’s no more room for failure - failure to hit the net, failure to pick up checking assignments, failure to get the puck out of the zone, failure to stay out of the penalty box, failure to avoid embarassment.