Enjoy tonight's 7 pm start time as Vancouver is in town. The mid-week games are all late starts as the Leafs head west, and I would not expect a lot of practices until after this week is over.

Yesterday, Team Canada women announced their Olympic team.

Lots of Sceptres and a few former Sceptres, and no big surprises but some delightful choices.

Sophie Jaques is one of those players you see play once for the other team and you want her on your team. She's on our team.

Someone more in the know than me:

While Hockey Canada was doing the most boring speech-filled announcement of this team, this was posted:

And a non-paywalled video take:

- TSN
There has been so much speculation and reporting about the venues which will host the ice hockey competitions at the Olympics and the state of the ice itself. TSN Hockey Insider Chris Johnston travelled to Italy to view the progress and conditions himself, and shares the latest from his observations.
TSN

In case you missed it Jacob Quillan was sent back to the Marlies.

He wasted no time in making his mark. William Nylander may play tonight, and this move seems to make that a strong possibility.

This cheered me up:

Eight thoughts on the NHL at mid-season
At the midway mark of the NHL season, Justin Bourne shares his thoughts on parity, emerging superstars, the upcoming Olympics, and more.
Sportsnet.caJustin Bourne

It's a hockey man on the hockey mainstream site explaining randomness and touching on how we perceive it, the fallacy of "what you see is all there is" and while he's not using those words or describing it how I would, he is describing accurately how the universe works. This is now a radical act to just talk about reality. And maybe it always was in sports.

On the topic of parity in the NHL, there's a bit of a cart before the horse type of reasoning going on, I've noticed. Yes, there are more close games, and more tie games, so more points. But that's the result of parity not a cause. The loser point is causal to some unknowable extent because it will change how teams play in close games. But the real driver of the parity bus can be found in the good old Corsi tables at five-on-five.

There are so many teams hovering around 50% this year, and if they aren't there in Corsi, they are in Expected Goals. And this means that despite the branding of teams as "bottom feeders" based on some pretty damn insignificant difference in points or other measures, you really are in a fight for every win. Every team is (offer not valid in Denver).

Some of this, maybe a huge part of this, is the rising salary cap which drove teams to keep players instead of trading them, to accept what are in one sense overpayments for older players to keep their skill around until is dries up. I think there's something going on with goaltending too. Either the cap is allowing some teams to hang on to two good goalies or it's just a random happenstance that the best goalies on each team cover a wide array of talent.

The rapidly increasing salary cap is changing the league, and everyone who has ever said, "yeah but every team has more cap space to spend," are the people who understood this before we saw it in action.

All Gary Bettman has done is pare down the teams that don't want to spend cash dollars to the cap to a very small number. Now imagine if the poorest teams in the NHL – Columbus, Winnipeg and perhaps the Sharks – started really spending, or transformed geographically, so they could. There'd be even less light between teams.

No one is out of the playoff race in the east, not even Columbus. In the west, well, maybe those bottom few teams are. Like Vancouver. But they had to really work at it to be worse than Calgary.

Now have this PBS show from 2018 in Carolina.

Science!

Have a great day.

From The Branches