Vlad Tarasenko, Fandom, Ads on Jerseys, and Defense

Random, informal and honest, this is and will be 500 words.

-The majority of hockey talk usually revolves around how bad things are. "This team is terrible," "This team is great but their success is unsustainable," "This coach needs to be fired immediately." My Twitter and Facebook feeds are full of hockey negativity which is why I'm thankful when something happens that is so extraordinarily positive that everyone is forced to talk about. Vladimir Tarasenko is on another planet right now and his play over the past few weeks has been so good that is has enabled to curmudgeons of the world to take their heads out of the sand and appreciate some hockey.

Come on.

Thank you Vlad.

- It's easy to get disheartened when you watch your favourite team play poorly. I don't think anybody is immune from that, that's sports. When I watch the games I get totally sucked in. If the Habs are playing poorly I'm instantly in a bad mood and make kneejerk comments that I regret seconds later. I'm a pretty emotional fan and I participate in the negativity mentioned above but I try to stay as positive as I can when I get over the initial emotion.

For me, it's a combination of 2 things: 1. The big picture: It's a long season, every team peaks, every team valleys and hopefully your team is good enough to be better than their opponent when they're playing their average hockey. When it comes to the Habs, their analytics are pretty piss poor. They actually suggest that the Habs are doomed to continue on in this tailspin of mediocrity...but where is the fun in that?

2. Every game is in a vacuum. Habs pasted by the Flames? So what? That was yesterday, they'll win the next one.

-Apparently ads on NHL jerseys is an inevitability. The old-school fan in me hates the idea but I had to think on it to find out why I hate it. I hate it because I think that in the eyes of the average American fan it would delegitimize hockey. The most popular sport on the planet runs ads on their jerseys and nobody outside of North America gives a crap. People resist the idea of ads on hockey jerseys because there aren't ads on football, baseball or basketball jerseys. That's the bar. This is 100% a "please like my sport" reaction for me...besides how bad could they be?

-In Friedman's 30 Thoughts he mentioned that Marc Bergevin was looking for a defenseman. This opens up a serious can of worms. Does he mean a D for D swap or a straight up addidtion? If it's the former, who goes? If it's the latter he is clearly not impressed with the quality of his starting 7. If it were me I would look into replacing Emelin with a true top 4 defenseman and rotate Weaver, Beaulieu and Tinordi as needed for the bottom pairing.

That was 500 words.

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