I was a bit bored tonight, so I decided I would go through the score sheets from Leafs' games this season to create some stats to show why I think Kaberle is such a great player. Here's what I came up with!
Although much ado has been made so far this season about Bryan McCabe—-and rightly so—-Tomas Kaberle has been left largely underappreciated. Well, by the media and fans, at any rate. McCabe, for one, certainly hasn’t taken Kaberle for granted:
McCabe credited defensive partner Tomas Kaberle with “making my life easy.” [. . .] “. . . but I can tell you Tommy (Kaberle) is one of the best defencemen in the league,” McCabe said. Kaberle has been paired with McCabe for much of the past three seasons, a fact McCabe underlines as part of the reason for his mounting success. “I think we had a year apart when Robert Svehla came in . . . and I suffered, I definitely had an off year,” McCabe said. “Then last year, we got Brian Leetch in and we were split up again. But when you play with Tomas, he’s unbelievable, you just know he’s going to get the puck down the ice’” (Toronto Star, Oct. 19, 2005, E4).
Out of Kaberle’s 25 assists this season, 9 (that’s 36%) have directly resulted in McCabe getting a goal. In fact, when Kaberle gets an assist on a goal, it usually is the first assist. A full 68% (or 17 out of 25) of his assists directly result in goals. And of those 17 assists, 5 have resulted in a first goal for the Leafs, 2 had led to (final) game-tying goals, and another 5 have ended as game-winning goals. When Kaberle passes, he does some pretty important stuff!!
And a fact that may have gone unnoticed by NHL-centric North American fans is that Kaberle had a stellar season playing for Kladno, his home team in the Czech Republic during the lockout last year: in 49 games he had 39 points, and was awarded the Czech League regular season MVP, Best Defenseman, and Top Player (as voted by the fans) honours!
Ah!! It's been so long since I've posted here!! Many apologies!! The past couple of weeks have bene so busy I haven't even really been watching hockey!
Anyway, went to Buffalo last Sat. (Dec. 17) to watch the Pens play the Sabres. There were supposed to be six of us going, but three people bailed, so it was just me, Alan and Liz. Still, it was a lot of fun! It was nice that the game started early too, so we got home in good time.
Heh, and we learned a bit about selling tickets. We ended up selling the tickets to the first scalper we saw. At first we thought we got a pretty good price for them, but when we asked the guys who bought our tickets how much they had paid for the tickets, we found out that the scalper made a 300% profit on each ticket! So yeah, we realized that we should have asked how much it would cost to buy tickets in the same level as ours first, and THEN offered to sell them. =P It also turned out that that particular game was only the third sellout for the Sabres of the season, so the scalper probably felt that he really lucked out when we sold him three 100-level seats. (AMAZING seats, by the way.)
So let's see, so far this season I have watched four games with five different people:
- Wings-Leafs with Andre (pre-season) - Habs-Sabres with Ben - Capitals-Leafs with Anna - Pens-Sabres with Alan and Liz
That's what I really missed with no hockey--hanging out with different people while watching games! Unfortunately this year the HNIC nights at my place haven't really worked out. After the first couple of times when I invited people and got no takers, I guess I kind of gave up asking--that and things got pretty busy with school so I didn't have time to organize.
Anyway, that's it for the season so far. Coming up I've got a bunch of games I'll be watching in B.C. ^_________^ Steph is awesome! She got me tickets for the Predators-Canucks game, and two World Juniors games--USA-Swiss and one relegation game. ^_^ VERY exciting!
Back home I've got a Flyers-Sabres game in Feb., Leafs-Sabres in Mar., and Panthers-Leafs and Leafs-Sabres in Apr. I wanted to try to get tickets to the Colorado-Detroit game, but then I realized that it's on the same day as Kaberle's signing at the Frozen Pond, and I can NOT miss the chance to see Kaberle in person. ^^;;
Don't know how the heck I'm going to keep up with Olympic hockey either, but I'll do my best (and probably be a zombie at school for a while!)
Steph sent me the link to this article, and it was so great, I had to share: "Mullet Wish." (This isn't the actual title of the article, it's Steph's! But I liked her title better, and thought it would intrigue more people into reading the article! =P)
