Gionta's Tears (and other links)

Fuck.

Fuck.

Shit.

Here are your links for today.

Habs News and Analysis

• There's a fair bit of roster news to report and most of it is depressing. Brian Gionta will undergo season ending surgery to repair a torn biceps tendon in his left arm. Yes, the same goddamn injury that threatened his career last season, except this time it's in his other arm. Gio was so distressed that he cried upon hearing the diagnosis. Carey Price suffered what is believed to be a groin injury late in Game 4 and is questionable for Game 5. Brandon Prust and Ryan White will also miss Thursday's tilt. We're going to need duct tape, Bengay, some Mighty Putty, and the hockey gods to smile upon us if we have any hope of winning this series. On the positive side of the ledger, Lars Eller skated individually today.
• Christopher Boucher has Montreal's risk/reward rankings (a statistic that measures successful plays to unsuccessful plays) for the regular season and Games 1-4 of the first round. By this measure, Alex Galchenyuk has improved every game of the postseason. Also noteworthy is that the two best performances of the series by risk/reward have been by P.K. Subban and Ryan White in Game 2.
• Justin Bourne feels that Mika Zibanejad did not kick the puck into the net on Ottawa's first goal in the heartbreaking Game 4. However, he does feel that the video evidence is probably not conclusive enough to overturn a call on the ice and that on a different night the goal could very well have been waived off.

General News and Analysis

• Vancouver also had a clunker of a call go against them in Game 4 of the Sharks-Cancuks WCQF match. Daniel Sedin was given a very questionable boarding penalty for a relatively mild body check. San Jose scored the series winning goal on the ensuing powerplay.
• Speaking of Vancouver, Daniel Sedin, Henrik Sedin, and Alexander Edler will all join host Sweden at the 2013 IIHF World Hockey Championship in the coming days.
• Sergei Bobrovsky, Henrik Lundqvist, and Antti Niemi have been named as the three finalists for the Vezina Trophy.
• Kent Wilson has prepared NHL equivalency (NHLE) scoring statistics for the top 30 prospects heading into the 2013 NHL Entry Draft. NHLE is a method that corrects for league quality relative to the NHL and thus facilitates comparisons of scoring numbers by prospects in different leagues.The top five forwards in order are Jonathan Drouin, Nicolas Petan, Nathan MacKinnon, Aleksandr Barkov, and Elias Lindholm.
• Michael Parkatti over at Boys on the Bus continues his quest to find a statistic that better represents luck (i.e. has no predictive value season to season) than PDO does. By his measure and by using the previous six seasons' worth of data, Parkatti places the Habs as the ninth luckiest team of the last six years. Other interesting things include the 2012 Phoenix Coyotes being even luckier than the 2013 Toronto Maple Leafs and the Ottawa Senators being the fourth unluckiest team over the last six seasons.
• Marc-Andre Fleury was bad, even by his standards, allowing 5 EV goals on 11 scoring chances and 1 powerplay goal on 3 PP chances in Pittsburgh's Game 4 loss to the New York Islanders. Overall, Fluery faced 24 shots and looked like an ECHLer. Not surprisingly,Tomas Vokun will get the start in Game 5.

EOTP News and Archive Material

• Here's an article penned by Robert L, EOTP's former Editor-in-Chief, previewing the last series in which Montreal came back from a 3-1 deficit. Robert had this beauty of a line: "All statistical matter being obvious, the Canadiens would appear to have about as much chance of winning as they would pushing sh*t uphill with a rubber fork."