If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I attended my first Princeton Mac User Group meeting on Tuesday night rather than stay home and watch Game 3 of the Flyers – Penguins series.
This is undoubtedly considered a sacrilege in my community, particularly because I am so involved in hockey at lower levels.
I point this out not to take myself to task, but to plug the Philadelphia sports website called the700level.com. I am really impressed with their article Outplayed, which analyzes the Flyers’ performance in that game.
I spent 20 to 30 minutes listening to the Flyers Postgame Show on 610 WIP on the way home from Princeton, and I had little idea after that why the Flyers lost. Yes, the host and a number of callers said that the Flyers were outplayed, but they didn’t give specific enough examples for me to understand why it happened.
Contrast perception of the WIP presentation with this excerpt from the “Outplayed” article:
The biggest problem in this game was again the turnovers. The Penguins ran an efficient trap that slowed the play down and confounded the Flyers’ attempts to gain the zone and maintain it…. There were very few sustained attacks in the Penguins’ zone; if the Flyers gained the line and were lucky enough to get a shot off, the Pens collapsed on it and cleared the rebound…. The neutral zone woes have been a major problem all series, and we have to begrudgingly give credit to the Penguins and coach Michel Therrien for that efficiency.
It’s damn near impossible to win a playoff game in which you only take 18 shots (and about 3 of them were just hard dump-ins that went on goal). Sure, it was frustrating to see how many calls the refs made early in last night’s game. The whistles slowed the play down far worse than some light hooking would, and I increasingly feel like a dinosaur who wants just a little of that old NHL back, so players on both sides could play without worrying about every little stick contact.
It’s abundantly clear to an experienced hockey person why the author feels the Flyers lost, what role he feels the referees played in the game, and why he is not laying the blame for the loss at the feet of the officials. Excellent.
Another thing I really like about this blog is it’s tendency to illustrate key plays with video clips from the game. They are using the service called RedLasso to embed the broadcast video directly into their analysis. I have never seen this done in a sports blog before to the extent that the700Level is doing it.
From what I can tell RedLasso itself is in private beta. I seriously want to know more about how they work and why they haven’t been taken down by a major media company. I think that RedLasso’s concept is excellent, and the way their service is used on the700Level is the epitome of fair use.
In short, I feel like I understand the Flyers – Penguins game far better after reading “Outplayed” than I did after watching the game highlights on NHL.com. That’s a big reason why I will keep looking at the the700Level when I am looking for analysis of Flyers games.
I will have to look at the700Level’s coverage of other Philadelphia professional sports teams to see if they are as useful as they appear to be to the thinking person trying to follow the Flyers.