Ahh, the preseason: fantasies & fears.

Welcome back to the wild and wonderful world of NHL hockey, where fans rev up the hype machine right from the start of the preseason and other fans slam them on Twitter for being too excited. So much to discuss: all the possibilities of forward line combinations, the gray hole that is our defence, how Paul MacLean will perform relative to his Jack Adams-standard and whether this site will actually stick with its current theme for at least the first forty-one games. The preseason is built for speculation. What with training camp providing almost hourly fodder in regards to roster updates and line combinations, it's a breeding ground for a hockey fan's fervent fantasies and sprouting hopes that this next season will be the one to take their team to the top.

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Back from the Olympics: an EK update.

As items on a how-to-have-a-good-time checklist, "Hang out with Daniel Alfredsson twenty-four-seven" and "Play with a defence partner who isn't Cowen-calibre" do very nicely. Erik Karlsson seemed entirely jubilant during the length of his Sochi sojourn, and even his eBay comment on his silver medal could be taken in a potentially joking interpretation. Almost in tandem with that, he was named best defenceman of the tournament. If there was ever a tangible way to measure whether predictions of EK soaring on the big ice came true, this would be good enough.

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Playing the rookies and the Sens' line combos

Even though Ottawa’s been one of the luckiest teams this season in regards to injuries, it still feels as though we’re playing too many rookies every game. This is mostly true on the back end, where only two players out of six any game are older than twenty-five years of age; among the forwards, the invasion of Rookie Noobness varies widely depending on how high Paul MacLean has set his blender on, along with the degree of blindness to which he’s turned to certain With Or Without You statistics for certain forwards.

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To think about: age & experience in the D-corps

The seven active Sens defencemen can be classified into three general categories: the young’uns whose hallmark is inconsistency (Wiercioch, Gryba, Borowiecki, Cowen and, yes, even Karlsson), the middle-aged, prime-of-their-career solids (Methot… and that’s it) and the aging veterans (Phillips, Corvo). If there was any true way to quantify quality of play, the graph across those three categories would start low at the first, peak at the second and dip back down at the third.

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