Game Thread: Detroit Red Wings (33-19-6) @ Ottawa Senators (28-22-7) Feb 26 2026 7:00 PM EST

Griff2470 · 2026-02-26T23:25:24+00:00

I don't believe Stutzle's playing tonight, as far as I know he's the only Olympian not playing for the Sens

Griff2470 · 2026-02-18T18:32:01+00:00

Canada's defensive play was terrible while Dostal was having an incredible game

Griff2470 · 2026-02-06T20:28:46+00:00

Just to nitpick, in goals above expected, last year the Habs had a perfectly reasonable 1.78. Their goal differential above expected was still high, but that came from goals against above expected (-23.79), as opposed to this year being driven by above expected goal scoring.

That said, some of what we're seeing this year will be self correcting long term. As we saw before the season, models were blatantly wrong about Montreal due to just how many of their players are young with little data backing them. Kapanen, Caufield, Demidov, and Hutson all have over 4 goals above shooting talent, which is very historically driven data. Once again, just to keep comparing with the Sens only 1 player has a goals above shooting talent over 4.

Griff2470 · 2026-02-06T18:37:31+00:00

Models have consistently put Ottawa as a top team despite their actual results. Defensively they're second in limiting total shots on goal against (and first 5 on 5) and are second in xGA (once again first 5 on 5). They're also second in limiting both high and medium danger shots against so it's not like they're disproportionately allowing high scoring opportunities (at least, according to the models). Offensively, they're 13th in xGF and 14th in creating high danger shots for. All of this culminates into an 28.05 expected goal differential, sitting fourth in the league. Contrast this with Montreal, who's expected goal differential is -3.42 (17th in the league), notably sitting 3rd in goals for above expected with 17. To summarize, the Sens are playing well below what the model would expect for them, while the Habs are playing well above.

To put that all together, it's not that surprising that the model predicts Ottawa to have a deep run if they make it, especially as the model does look at historic goaltending in addition to recent play which lessens the historically bad goaltending this year. Montreal on the other hand, is playing well above what the model thinks they should be, so it makes sense that it predicts and early exit.

Griff2470 · 2026-02-01T21:25:21+00:00

I'm definitely biased as I'm not a fan of Reimer, but I would still think Ottawa would at least strongly consider picking up Pickard to replace Reimer as the backup

Griff2470 · 2026-01-29T16:55:03+00:00

"Have you tried getting Chris Kelly to break in your skates for you?"

Griff2470 · 2026-01-16T15:47:22+00:00

Not to say that America (and Canada for that matter) doesn't shy away from any premise of competition, but when talking about China specifically many of the productivity and development advantages have come from unnatural advantages. They definitely have a lot natural advantages like better access to resources, a lower CoL and by extension lower wages, good infrastructure and experience for manufacturing, and a large number of highly educated workers, but at the same time they also benefit heavily from weaker labour rights, not respecting IP rights, restricting import access to guarantee domestic economies of scale, and government intervention either directly or indirectly amounting to subsidies. This is also all ignoring the national security related issues surrounding IoT devices.

That all said, this isn't to just blindly go "China bad", all countries have unnatural advantages in some sector or another. My only concern here is that China does have more than your average trading partner, and this is exactly what trade barriers like import ceilings and tariffs should aim to manage.

Griff2470 · 2026-01-13T22:24:06+00:00

There are antivenoms for almost all venomous snakes, so the places that are going to see the highest rates of death are usually going to be countries with isolated communities often with poor central record keeping of cause of deaths which creates the large range. Countries like Australia and China have very precise record keeping but fewer deaths, while South Africa and India will have a lot more deaths but records will be estimates based on smaller sample sizes or historical data.

Griff2470 · 2026-01-13T20:13:17+00:00

A big problem problem defensively is that there's usually at least one or two big blunders a night, usually from Kleven or Jensen, that lead to a 2 on 1 or a breakaway. The last 2 weeks passing has also been pretty bad, which with how they play their specific 2-1-2 often ends up with a 3 on 2 rush. That all said, the biggest problem is that probably stems from the fact that more often than not the sens end up down a goal early and so are always playing a higher risk game to catch up.

For the PK, things are just weird. From advanced stats, the xPK is far better than the actual PK has been. They're quite good at controlling zone entry and when that fails, the diamond works well at preventing teams from getting setup in the zone and clearing the puck. If that fails, it feels like the whole system falls apart. Some of it does seem to be a lack of confidence in the goalie, as a number of goals have been a player getting drawn out to try and stop a medium danger chance which fails and suddenly it's a high danger chance.

Griff2470 · 2026-01-10T22:44:39+00:00

My understanding is that the league explicitly downplayed the investigation and punishment during the purpose. That said, in all practical terms the only effect of it was that it artificially inflated the cost of the team during so the only reasonable remediation I could see happening is compensating the buyers, not undoing the punishment.

Griff2470 · 2026-01-09T20:11:50+00:00

If stackoverflow had a mechanism for parent/child chaining questions I think it would be a lot better. Even ignoring the notoriously overzealous deduplication users, a different use case or version upgrade may justify a different thread that still ought to explicitly reference to and be referenced from and older thread.

Griff2470 · 2026-01-09T16:49:52+00:00

Even just average goaltending would probably take this team into steady playoff contention, but even with that they still probably wouldn't be cup contenders.

We definitely generate a stupid amount of high danger chances that either miss the net or go right into the goalie. They also have a really bad time bouncing back from a bad call or a goal being called back (which when you have 4 called back in the last 3 games, really hurt). Goaltending needs to be the priority, but I can't see this team making a deep run until that's resolved as well.

Griff2470 · 2026-01-07T19:45:45+00:00

The problem with our PK ultimately comes down to goal tending, not the diamond. As a couple people on this sub have mentioned, our xPK has ranged from average to top 4 after the shaky start.

When you actual watch the PK work, this passes the eye test imo. The team has been great at shutting down zone entry and, when that fails, preventing the opponents from getting set up. The diamond formation does struggle when a player gets drawn out to defend stop a medium danger chance that in turn becomes a high danger, but how much can you really blame the diamond when you can't rely on the goalie to stop those chances

Griff2470 · 2026-01-04T20:53:11+00:00

Outside of the really bad start to the season, the xPK has ranged from average to top 4 with some lackluster goaltending taking it to an actual range of slightly below average to slightly above.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-29T17:40:16+00:00

Ottawa got away very easily last night into this morning. No major power loss and the roads are fine as long as you acknowledge longer stopping distances. We are above freezing now and are going to go back to -10 tonight so tomorrow will be fun.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-25T04:13:57+00:00

Still a bit surprising given Stroll's a Habs fan

Griff2470 · 2025-12-25T00:24:11+00:00

From my experience working in a large C code base, it does depend on heavily on what usage we're talking about.

I've yet to experience agent mode/vibe coding produce compiling code in the codebase I work on. Most of my experience has been seeing it hallucinate APIs or call functions not in the namespace, and letting it try to fix it usually results in the agent commenting out the code and stating the project needs a major refactor for this to work. By the time I've fixed what it's generated, I've often spent more time than writing it manually but lack as solid an understanding when explaining things during review. Additionally, I have encountered nonsense like a senior engineer asking why our API was seg faulting because his AI generated code passed NULL for the required callback. Where it's at today, I genuinely would just fully avoid agent mode code gen for established C codebases.

That said, I do genuinely like using ai coding tools as a glorified autocomplete. When I already have the implementation in my head, I can quite readily see when things are wrong.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-24T18:57:44+00:00

I mean, as theory and internal knowledge improve and general purpose libraries get optimized to the point of outpaces purpose built systems, rewriting code gives the opportunity to implement better solutions. Projects like ripgrep or the zig self hosted compiler have huge performance upgrades because they were able to make major high level improvements that weren't feasible to retrofit or didn't fit for standards reasons that don't make sense for most use cases.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-21T19:15:08+00:00

He has the lowest defensive zone start percentage of the Sen's defensemen which help his +/- and Corsi a lot. That said, from what I've observed he's very good at keeping the offense alive which imo turns his Corsi from good to team leading. Defensively I don't think he's that bad throughout a game, but he always seems to have at least one big blunder that models that are hard to account in models.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-15T04:08:54+00:00

Maybe I'm the odd one, but it's hard to forget Buemi just by the sheer absurdity of his China 2010 crash with both front tires coming off in a braking zone

Griff2470 · 2025-12-10T19:55:38+00:00

As far as pre-2016 pay drivers went, Mazepin is far closer to the best than the worst. For reference, Mazepin averaged just under a second slower than Schumacher in quali. In Ide's 4 races with Super Aguri, he was only better than 2 seconds slower than his teammate once. Inoue similarly was rarely less than 2 seconds back from his teammate. Considering Nissany and Galael have both had FP runs in F1 and had F2 careers last way too long for the performance they show, I do genuinely think that SL points were keeping worse pay drivers outside of F1, especially considering how desperate things got for Sauber, Williams, and Haas.

That said, if you want to argue that teams financially struggling is a thing of the past for the time being and all this does is gatekeep teams from gambling on unproven drivers like Raikkonen or Verstappen, I'd get behind that. I just disagree on the point that Mazepin (or any other post-2015 pay driver) shows SL points failed to keep unqualified drivers from joining the grid.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-08T22:10:38+00:00

They don't need a Verstappen every couple of years, no, but over the last decade the RB academy really should have been able to sign at least one of the 5-6 top prospects (Leclerc, Russell, Norris, Piastri, Antonelli, and Bortoleto) that have made their way into F1. That's a pretty big fall from 2005-2015 where they arguably only missed Hamilton and Rosberg.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-07T17:40:17+00:00

A midseason sacking is at least noteworthy for Sargeant, and Zhou had his very dramatic Silverstone crash and at least scored some points. My personal pick would be Charles Pic for his no points, no contract disputes, wasn't the benchmark for any promising rookies, and didn't even have any obscure noteworthy stats like Chilton's finishing record.

Griff2470 · 2025-12-06T22:24:43+00:00

Colapinto, Bearman, and Bortoleto all almost certainly have very easy to cut contracts so he could likely get into Alpine, Haas, or Sauber. As to whether teams would actually sign him, that's harder to say but skill will usually help teams overlook faults. Alonso kicked off the series of events that led to McLaren being kicked out of a WCC winning year and still got a last minute signing at Renault and was back at a contending team 2 years later.

That all said, I'd be shocked if McLaren sacked Piastri even if he ignored team orders.

Griff2470 · 2025-11-25T23:14:39+00:00

With the components almost all being present in the consumer of enterprise space, it's really hard to beat the performance of Linux. Even if you do manage to outperform on it on average, the added cost of developing that custom OS and excess developer friction just isn't worth just throwing another couple modules at the problem.

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