Monday Mailbag: Happy Thanksgiving

It’s Turkey Day! Today, we’re thankful for every single one of you who comes back and makes us feel like our insanity placed in the form of paragraphs is worth something. We’re also thankful that we had no expectations for this team to do great things this year, because if we did, we might be spending this weekend in an institution. This is going to be a weird six or so months..

Anyway, we have a bunch of questions this week, as we usually do. Let’s get started!

Former TLN writer and current Toronto Maple Leafs analyst Cam Charron wrote a good piece two years ago about the concept of playing the “hot hand”. It was more so pointed towards winning the game (possibly the worst goaltender metric other than GAA), but the idea applies to any strong performance. Being good on Tuesday doesn’t imply that you’ll be good on Thursday. The smartest thing for Mike Babcock to do would be, as Cam suggests for Carlyle at the time, to have a schedule set in advance and stick to it, adjusting only in the long term as performance trends become more apparent (or one of these two has their inevitable annual injury).

Excitement is obviously high for the teenaged phenom. People put heavy expectations on his AHL season before it started, and the first weekend hinted that he should be able to meet the hype.

Anyway, to take 600 shots in a 76 game season, you have to average 7.9 per game. So far, Nylander has a 9 shot game and a 3 shot game. Obviously, it’s easy to get excited, but I’d be thrilled with half your hoped-for total; especially on a team that’s full of players that like to fire the puck as well.

I, like the rest of the country, am literally this guy:

Jim Benning is a lot of things, but it’s going to take a long time to top this. (Shoutout to @3rdPeriodSuits)

I’m not saying that he definitely is, but I can’t necessarily say that he isn’t. Just kidding! He’s very clearly hum0101010100101