Sunday Notes

Who knew? When I drafted Marty Turco in my hockey pool this year, I was supremely confident that I had at least snagged one of the top 5 goalies in the NHL. Dallas was supposed to finally put it all together this year and challenge Detroit in the West.

Now my fantasy team lies in absolute ruins. So do the Dallas Stars. As it stands Sunday morning (and after he let in another 5 goals against Boston last night) Turco ranks 38th out of 38 goaltenders in save percentage with a brutal .837 stat. (I also drafted Chris Osgood and he's barely above Turco in 33rd place with a .879 SP).

Turks is also dead last in goals against average by a wide margin. He's the only NHL goalie above four goals a game with a 4.34 GAA. The next worse guy is Marty Biron with a 3.58 GAA. That's almost a goal-a-game less than the superstar Dallas netminder.

I did the once unthinkable and dropped Turco for nothing but Dallas has a lot more to be concerned with than my personal fantasy pool hell.

Mike Modano was quoted after the Boston game saying this:

"Tonight, it was idiotic and stupid. It was one of the most embarrassing things I've seen. If that's what we're going for, then they need to find me an office job.''

- Dallas News

Geez, Mike, take it easy bro.

There was talk this week about Alfie getting an office job in the Senators organization after his playing days but that's hopefully four years from now and not Monday morning like Modano is sarcastically implying.

With all that being said, the Stars are still tied with Ottawa in the overall standings with 10 points. Strange how the atmosphere around both teams couldn't be more different. Ottawa's star players are saying positive things about a road trip that saw them get 5 out of 8 possible points and emerge with a new number one goaltender out of it all.

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Speaking of the Senators, a once reviled pay-per-view game would have been welcomed with open arms last night because the game in Tampa wasn't on TV anywhere in the world, including Centre Ice. The Senators dropped the glitch-ridden PPV's this year but it's hard to please everybody because a lot of folks are griping about getting the blackout on a traditional Saturday night. Hockey Night In Canada opted for the Leafs-Rangers game (hardly a shocker) and Don Cherry used the majority of his Coach's Corner segment talking about the Leafs (in particular his strange yet entertaining feud with Leafs coach Ron Wilson.) Business as usual.

It probably didn't help that the two previous games on the road trip were only on the NHL Network, a digital channel that some people still don't have access to. The rabbit-ear holdouts were out of luck.

I'd be interested to hear what fans think of the NHL Network itself. The nightly highlight show is really comprehensive and shows much more footage than TSN and Sportsnet but the hosts are a little on the bland side. No offense to Gary Green, Larry Murphy and Dave Reid but it's not exactly scintillating television when compared to the big hitters at TSN. Once they show the highlight package of a particular game, they spend an eternity dissecting it in the studio without really saying much of interest. It's strictly non-controversial and makes for boring TV. You can only take Green saying how hard a team works for so long without losing consciousness.

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Just saying: The Islanders are nuts for not wearing these uniforms all season long. If these throwbacks were permanent, they'd be among the nicest sweaters in the league. Let's hope that by next year, the Islanders, the Oilers and the Sabres make the switch to their classic colours and uniforms.

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Is it just me or is NHL.Com impossibly slow all the time? I have high-speed like the next guy but I can only wait so long for a page that's 95 percent flash advertising to load. The one good thing the web site did this year is install a "Career" statistics section which is searchable by team. This means that you can get daily updated stats on all-time Senators scoring and find out things like:

- Alex Auld is one win away from tying Darrin Madely for 12th in franchise wins with 4.

- Simon Lajeunesse is the only Senator (out of 23 goalies in total) to have a perfect 1.000 save percentage. He played a total of 23 minutes and 30 seconds of shutout hockey.

- Dany Heatley is one point away from tying Shawn McEachern for 7th all-time in points with 304.

- Wade Redden has the best Plus/Minus in Senators history +159. The worst? Alexandre Daigle at -137.