1. popcorn

6. Mary Hollywood's first season in the Actual Real Life SHL was pretty dope and cool. For a good part of the year, our dear friend Mar Bear was a point per game player. That's pretty good in my humble opinion, especially when one takes into consideration the fact that the TPE available available to ol' Mary wasn't necessarily one of the premier TPE numbers among players in her draft class. One is left only to hypothesize that the extremely one-dimensional nature of her game was helpful in this circumstance. She finished the campaign with 21 goals and 40 assists for a grand total of 61 points in her 66 games played. She did get some time on the power play right away as a rookie, which certainly helps. 7 of those goals came with the man advantage -- exactly half of her five on five total. It's not entirely surprising that her offensive gifts made her a power play weapon out the gate, but this did not come without drawbacks. Mary has always been notorious for Ignoring Defensive Responsibilities, but she could kind of get away with it in the J, especially in her final year or two down there. Not anymore. Mary got put in a blender on defense and posted a truly despicable -40 +/- number. Optimists would call that room for improvement, realists would say that she's never going to be much of a difference maker on her own end of the ice. Oh well.

246 wurdz

10. I was disappointed by New Orleans' season, to be frank. I expected them to have a far better season -- indeed, with seven players topping 50 points and five 25+ goal scorers, I think they were unlucky not to finish higher. It's not as if they were leaking goals left and right, either -- they actually conceded the eighth fewest goals in the league. However, their offensive production beyond that aforementioned seven wasn't particularly explosive, and their power play was sub-20%. It wasn't far below 20% (it's actually exactly at 19%), but it was not a huge advantage for them. Combine that with a penalty kill below 80% (again, not far below, only half a percentage point for a 79.5% result!) and you're not getting a ton of game-breaking plays from your special teams units. None of these issues will kill a team on their own. If they were blowing people out of the water on the power play, you'd look the other way at the penalty kill number, and vice versa. If their goaltending was the best in the league, you wouldn't seek out more scoring from their depth forwards and their defense. This seems to my untrained eye like a death by a thousand cuts type situation.

207 wurdz