Wednesday, December 30, 2009

:: Putting it in writing; a follow-up ::

Well, Canada announced its men's hockey roster for the 2010 Olympics this morning, and though I don't like to brag, my predictions from yesterday were nearly spot on. I mean, I only missed three players on the whole team – that's an 87% success rate, for those of you scoring at home.

Now, I know many of the roster spots were easy to predict – all three goalies, Iginla, Crosby, Pronger, and the like – but the only three I missed were Patrice Bergeron, Mike Richards and Brendan Morrow. In their place I had Martin St. Louis, Steven Stamkos and Shane Doan.

Morrow is essentially Shane Doan, so that's a wash, and to tell you the truth, the reason I had St. Louis on the team – aside from the fact that he's having a good year – was because I heard on TSN that he was gaining momentum with Yzerman's crew. If you read my predictions, you'll see that I had him as a possible replaceable player.

That said, I still picked him and was wrong. But 87% right, with all that talent potentially making the cut? That's pretty good. I'm especially impressed that I got a 100% perfect score when choosing the seven defencemen. I kept all three Calgary blue-liners off my team, even Bouwmeester, and it proved to be right.

I do really like the team that was chosen, although I'm a little bit bummed that Doan isn't there, and that Stamkos isn't the 13th forward. I mean, with scoring at a premium in the '06 disaster, you'd think they'd add an pure sniper as insurance. Instead, we've got more grit with Toews, Richards and Morrow, et al.

Might come back to bite 'em. Hopefully not.

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