-As the Jared Cowen wait continues we have a flood of opinion pieces and in one of them Chris wonders which Sens prospect will surprise this year and suggests one of ten possibilities (so half of Binghamton’s upcoming roster–why stop there I wonder?). Chris favours Mark Stone. His list includes no off-the-radar names, but excludes Matt Puempel (first round pick), Buddy Robinson (the big NCAA free agent), and Andre Petersson among others. Also not included is Eric Gryba who (let us recall) is on a two-way contract. To me the main conclusion of this kind of speculation is that none of the players in his article are likely to make a big impact on the team.
–The Sports Forecaster magazine (which I haven’t picked up yet) is predicting the Sens will win the Stanley Cup. I don’t want to say too much about it until I’ve read their reasoning, but the Sens wouldn’t be my pick as things stand.
–NHL.com is also talking Senators and Corey Masisak believes Craig Anderson is undervalued (!); he has Cory Conacher as overvalued and Patrick Wiercioch as his sleeper. I guess Anderson didn’t do enough last year to accrue value for Masisak….
-In a turn for the funny, check out Ryan Classic and Bonk’s Mullet trip through memory lane for the Sens.
–Travis Yost writes a long article about being a better hockey blogger. Most of it is solid advice and a number of things stuck out to me: quality is not inherently tied to view counts–the platform is much more important (so an indifferent blogger on a well-established site will do much better than an unknown on their own); I largely agree with Travis that opinion-based blogs perform better, but good, hard team-related news is much harder to find;
Remember, simply saying something does not make it so
If only bloggers were punished for not following this truism (alas), many successful bloggers ignore this advice so I don’t believe it’s required for success; he’s right that traditional journalism is failing because it has become a shill for ownership (very much as actual news has become for governments and corporations); my favourite piece of advice:
you need to watch the games
Word to the wise, but as funny as it seems there are bloggers who will offer an opinion on a game they only saw some or a part of.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
eyeonthesens 