It’s my Parting Shot for a pet peeve rant…..
Two things that you should know by now – after over 30 years of doing these daily commentaries. One, baseball is my favourite sport – mostly because it was the one I had the most success at and played at the highest level in my long ago athletic days – followed closely by hockey – the sport that has kept me gainfully employed for the last 32 winters! And, secondly, I have an affinity for statistics and analytics!
When it comes to stats, baseball has it all over hockey – in my humble opinion – and that was borne out again back on Sunday during the Saskatoon Blades’ game in Edmonton – a 6-5 Oil Kings victory.
A check of the on-line game sheet from the W-H-L website shows that Miroslav Holinka of Edmonton scored the game-winning goal and that Ethan McCallum of the Bridge City Bunch, who came on in relief of Evan Gardner early in the second period, was the losing goaltender.
In my humble opinion, that is wrong, wrong, WRONG! Holinka gets the game winner because it was the sixth goal and it was into an empty net that McCallum was instructed to vacate as the Blue and Gold were trying to tie the game with an extra attacker. Totally not fair to McCallum!
Baseball would interpret things this way – by using baseball parlance – the game winning run batted in, or goal, was the one scored by Edmonton that put them ahead for good in the game. That was the second period power play goal scored by Ethan MacKenzie that broke a 3-3 tie and the Oil Kings were never caught. The goal was scored on Gardner. So, MacKenzie should get the game winning R-B-I, err goal, and Gardner should be the losing pitcher, err, goaltender!
I’ve had this discussion with many people in hockey and get absolutely nowhere with it, mostly because the closed-minded people in hockey can’t wrap their heads around the notion that a game winning goal can actually be one that isn’t the goal that gives the margin of victory. Late goals when the game is out of reach by the losing team only makes the sound of the score more palatable, but doesn’t tell the real tale of how the game went down – again, in my humble opinion!
Hockey people are also worried about the effect a change in the G-W-G and goaltender record columns. Hey, since I’ll be retiring in the not-too-distant future, I would be thrilled to take on the job of making the changes to the record books! Boy, they would look different, too!!
That’s my Parting Shot. I’m Les Lazaruk…and it turned out nice again!
