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How 'bout themChicago Blackhawks? Blackhawks top Red Wings 2-1 in SO, extend streak ...And the beat goes on.....
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Goaltender Corey Crawford stopped 32 shots for Chicago (19-0-3).
Tomas Tatar scored for Detroit (10-9-1) and Jimmy Howard had 32 saves.
Kane's power-play goal tied the score with 2:04 left in the third period. He put in a shot from the bottom of the right circle after Detroit defenseman Kyle Quincey fanned on a clearing attempt from in front of the net. Jonathan Ericsson was in the penalty box for delay of game after he cleared the puck over the glass from his defensive zone with 2:25 remaining in the third.
Howard stopped Kane from the right circle on a two-on-one as the five-minute overtime came to an end.
Detroit's Johan Franzen hit the post with a little less than 1:30 left in regulation.
Tatar broke the scoreless tie 2:43 into the third period with a one-timer from just off the crease to Crawford's left. Tatar's fourth goal of the season came off a pass from Joakim Andersson, who was behind the net.
Howard made a glove save on Nick Leddy's slap shot from the top inside edge of the left circle with 7:56 left.
Crawford made a save on Henrik Zetterberg's shot from the slot 9:28 into the third period.
Crawford stopped Franzen's tip attempt from just outside the crease with a little more than 8:30 left in the second period.
Howard made several outstanding stops during a 90-second span a little over six minutes into the second period, including a point-blank save on Brendan Saad when the Blackhawks had sustained pressure in the Red Wings' zone.
Chicago outshot Detroit 9-3 in the first period.
NOTES: Crawford returned after Thursday night's first-period exit with an upper-body injury. ... Blackhawks center Dave Bolland sat out his fifth game with an upper-body injury. ... Detroit forward Valtteri Filppula missed his third game with a sore shoulder. ... Chicago right winger Marian Hossa played his 1,000th game. ... Red Wings defenseman Ian White was a healthy scratch for the third consecutive game. ... Detroit center Darren Helm, who has been limited to one game this season because of a sore back, saw a back specialist recently who found that Helm has a small tear in a disk. It is not known when Helm will return.
Blitz hammers commish Roger Goodell in state of NFL address while NOLA carries bounty grudge.
By Les Carpenter
And on Friday, Roger Goodell emerged from hiding. For a week, the NFL's commissioner has been exiled from his Super Bowl, ducking into dark cars and riding behind a line of wailing police motorcycles. His meetings in the city that hates him have been with safe subjects – team owners, union officials and the people with whom he worked to rebuild the Superdome.
When he emerged for his grand media conference at week's end it was less a celebration of his imperial power and more the appearance of a dictator in the throes of revolution. Outside the Ernest Morial Convention Center, New Orleans rages, still upset over the bounty scandal. His name is no good in the city's restaurants. He's been pinned to dartboards, put in compromising positions on Mardi Gras floats and even ordered to eternal damnation on a banner that has danged from the side of the Superdome he helped save. His players mock him. His suspensions have been overturned. Six and one half years into his regime he is a leader besieged.
"Do you feel like you are behind enemy lines?" a television reporter asked him on Friday.
Goodell forced a smile. It didn't seem convincing.
The questions came in an all-out assault for him the way they never did for former commissioner Paul Tagliabue. When Tagliabue stood at the lectern with the league's logo, the media conference meandered from queries about stadium financing to replay issues to the NFL's long-held dream of placing teams in European cities. On Friday, Goodell went nearly half an hour before taking a question about anything other than the violent game over which he presides.
And it's easy to see how little Goodell has ever had a chance. He did this to himself.
His instinct when problems arise is to create a public relations Band-Aid. This might work once, but after a time the Band-Aid on top of another Band-Aid on top of another creates a wad of adhesive that doesn't stick. This has happened with player conduct and player safety, and every other issue that has come along. The response has been an instant policy without clearly planned solutions.
But Goodell, who probably thought he was stepping into the sunny world of Tagliabue, never saw the firestorm racing over the hills. None of them did around the NFL. By the time it hit, they were powerless to do anything. Now football's very existence dangles on the brink.
You can't blame Goodell for missing the signs. They grew in tiny tao protein deposits in the brains of players. Maybe they never would have been found if not for a curious medical examiner from Nigeria who was on duty in Pittsburgh when the body of former Steelers center Mike Webster appeared in his office. The doctor sliced open Webster's brain, found the telltale signs of head trauma that would come to paralyze the league.
Those microscopic deposits hit Goodell in his first few months on the job as commissioner. They are still chasing him, growing in the brains of all those former players who stutter while talking, forget grocery lists and wonder if they too are marked for dementia. The tao protein deposits stick, link-by-link, in a string of lawsuits that clatter at the door of the league's vast financial reserve.
Everything Goodell must do now is designed to hold off the marching lawsuits. There's no running now.
The way out is impossible to see. Goodell kept talking about the need for players to be honest with doctors when they get a concussion, but when confronted with the case of 49ers quarterback Alex Smith who was upfront about his concussions, missed a game and lost his job, the commissioner didn't have a good answer. There isn't one. Football safety and football culture will forever butt heads.
"It's very important to maintain our integrity and our brand," he said at one point Friday.
This is, of course, the lone mandate of the NFL – save its name at any cost. The Saints paid dearly when their bounty program was unearthed at the same time of the lawsuits explosion. Obstruction made the punishment worse but the hammer was coming down no matter what.
The commissioner talked tough Friday. He talked about safety as if it was something the league can legislate. He even suggested stronger penalties for hard hits. "A suspension gets through to them," he said of the players.
But the tao protein deposits keep growing, just as they have been probably growing since the first leather helmets were strapped on players' heads. Maybe it was the fortune of men like Tagliabue, Pete Rozelle and Bert Bell that a medical examiner from Nigeria wasn't working the slow shift in Pittsburgh on the eve of their tenures.
The lawsuits are massing now. Too many to count. Such dumb luck for Roger Goodell to come along just as they were being discovered.
It's like he never had a chance.
Nate Silver stars at MIT sports stats conference.
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And he was in the crowd.
On Friday, the New York Times election blogger, fresh off his success in predicting the 2012 presidential race, was center stage in a packed convention center ballroom, the star attraction of an event that drew 2,700 team and league officials and the students and job-seekers looking to work for them.
''It's pretty astonishing,'' Silver said as he stepped out of the building, escaping the autograph hounds and other fans of his political predictions who kept him on-stage for about 30 minutes following his panel. ''It's very strange. I feel like I'm in some 1 percent likelihood outcome that came through.''
What started as a gathering of sports statistics aficionados in MIT classrooms has turned into a major event in the sports business, drawing not just statistical stars like Silver but also diverse names from sports like Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, ''Moneyball'' author Michael Lewis and former Indianapolis Colts general manager Bill Polian.
Officials from almost 100 teams in every major U.S. sport mingled with more than 800 students from more than 100 schools and attended panels with titles such as ''It's not you, it's me: Break-ups in sports'' and ''Breaking down the fights: MMA Analytics.'' Business panels looked at ways to sell tickets better, and start-ups made presentations to judges in a ''trade blitz'' for a $4,000 prize and a potential boost in visibility.
The conference continues on Saturday with talks on statistical analysis of injuries, ownership, labor negotiations and hall of fame candidacies.
Event co-chair Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, said organizers cut off sales early a year after 2,200 attended so the crowds wouldn't get too large. In the conference's seven years, it has grown from one day and about 175 attendees in an MIT building to take over the ballroom at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
''The intimate feel is something I value,'' Morey said while shuttling between the three panels he participated in on the first day of the two-day event. ''But it's hard as we get larger.''
It was still possible to wander the halls and bump into major league general managers, ex-coaches and owners like Cuban, a regular attendee.
This year, the big star was Silver.
The author of the book ''The Signal and the Noise,'' Silver appeared in a session-opening panel, ''Revenge of the Nerds,'' that discussed the rise of analytics in sports. Later in the day, he discussed randomness with Morey, blackjack savant Kevin Ma, and Cleveland Browns president Alex Scheiner.
In smaller rooms, researchers presented papers that showed, for example, Red Sox salary dump throw-in Nick Punto ''provides the most defensive value in the game.'' Another team attempted to establish a hockey stat comparable to baseball's now-popular WAR - wins above replacement - called Total Hockey Rating, or ''THoR''; according to their data, the best players add about five wins per season to a team.
And then there was the research that showed that getting back on defense is more productive than going for an offensive rebound in the NBA.
Not every idea was a winner, but Morey said the research is more likely to get a fair hearing now than when the conference started and statistical analysts were still seen as outsiders in the sports world. Silver's popularity at this year's event showed that skills developed in sports can be brought to other businesses, too.
''I do think people are trying to take advantage (of analytics) and apply it to new fields,'' Morey said. ''(Sports are) a clean way to try things out. You've got a set of rules, raw data and smart people.
''People are getting smarter, so it's getting hard to get an edge.''
Two and a half weeks until the start of the “CS&T 2013 March Madness NCAA Basketball Tournament” Pool.
A quick Q & A with Arnold Palmer.
By Shane Bacon
Arnold Palmer is the most entertaining golfer to ever walk any hallowed links. He's won majors, changed the game into what we see now, had a drink named after him and now, at the young age of 82, has joined EA Sports to be a part of Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 14. We got a quick minute to chat with Mr. Palmer about some of the things going on with the PGA Tour and what he thought of the new game, which comes out on March 26. Here we go.
Bacon: Mr. Palmer, I wanted to get your thoughts of the banning of the anchored putters and hear what you had to think about all that's going on?
Palmer: Well, I'm opposed to it. I think anything that in a golf swing that's attached to your body should be disallowed. If they did what they did with Sam Snead or that part years ago, I think that the anchored putter should be gone too.
Bacon: It seems on tour everyone is playing slower and slower. Is there something the pros could do to speed up the game on tour and eliminate the long rounds of golf?
Palmer: Well, there's no question about the fact that the game is too slow, and it's professional golf that should be speeded up and I think that's up to the USGA and to the PGA and the PGA Tour to start setting up timings and systems which would we should be playing and make it speed up.
Bacon: Can you give us your thoughts on the new EA Sports Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 14 game and what you've got going on with it?
Palmer: I think it's a wonderful thing. With modern media, what they've done, and how this game is something that people can really get into and play, it's going to really capture a lot of the imagination of the golfers, the young people, the older people.
Magic offers $1 million if James does dunk contest.
Magic Johnson is giving LeBron James a million reasons to consider the slam dunk contest.
The Hall of Famer says Friday during ESPN's pregame show that he will put up $1 million if James finally enters the marquee event of All-Star Saturday night.
James has always refused to enter the contest, but he's recently been putting on a dunking show before Miami's games, reigniting interest in seeing him take part.
Johnson says: ''Please LeBron, get in the dunk contest. I'm going to put up a million dollars. A million dollars to LeBron. Please get in the dunk contest. I go every year. I want to see you out there. A million to the winner.''The Hall of Famer says Friday during ESPN's pregame show that he will put up $1 million if James finally enters the marquee event of All-Star Saturday night.
James has always refused to enter the contest, but he's recently been putting on a dunking show before Miami's games, reigniting interest in seeing him take part.
The NBA currently pays $100,000 to the winner and $50,000 to the runner-up.
Bud Selig calls for tougher drug penalties.
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Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig called for tougher penalties for major leaguers who violate the sport's drug agreement, a move the union is willing to consider but not for the 2013 season.
Speaking at a news conference Saturday at the Arizona Diamondbacks' spring training ballpark, Selig said last year's positive drug test for All-Star game MVP Melky Cabrera and allegations players received banned substances from a now-closed Florida anti-aging clinic helped lead him to seek stiffer penalties as quickly as possible.
He declined to give specifics, saying MLB Executive Vice President Rob Manfred and players' union head Michael Weiner will meet.
Weiner said Monday that some players have expressed support for tougher penalties. Selig said he was encouraged by Weiner's comments."The players have been discussing whether changes in the penalties are warranted since the offseason,'' Weiner said Saturday during a telephone interview. ''As I've said throughout spring training, there's a variety of player views on this subject. In fact, during the offseason we suggested to the commissioner's office the possibility of differential penalties, namely advanced penalties for certain intentional violations but reduced penalties for negligent violations."
''That format was not of interest to MLB at that time. We look forward to ongoing negotiations over the drug program, but any change in the penalties would be a 2014 issue. It would be unfair to change the drug-testing rules now that the 2013 program has begun to be implemented.''
MLB and the union started urine testing with an anonymous survey in 2003 and added penalties in 2004, when a first offense resulted in counseling. A 10-day suspension for a first offense was instituted for 2005, and the current discipline structure has been in place since the 2006 season: 50 games for an initial PEDs infraction, 100 games for a second and a lifetime ban for a third. No player has reached the third level.
The initial penalty for a stimulants offense is follow-up testing, with a 25-game penalty for a second violation, 80 games for a third and the discipline for additional offenses to be determined by the commissioner under a ''just cause'' standard.
Selig wants a tougher penalty for first-time offenders.
''There's no question about that,'' he said.
Twelve players were given 10-day suspensions in 2005. Thirty suspensions have been announced from 2006 on, including just two 100-game bans - to pitcher Guillermo Mota and catcher Eliezer Alfonzo. The penalty for Alfonzo was cut to 48 games because of procedural issues similar to the ones that led an arbitrator last year to overturn Ryan Braun's positive test for elevated testosterone before a suspension was announced.
Suspensions for positive urine samples announced in 2012 increased to eight, when Cabrera, Bartolo Colon and Yasmani Grandal all tested positive for testosterone.
''We've made meaningful adjustments to our testing, and the time has come to make meaningful adjustments to our penalties,'' Selig said. ''There is no question that there have been enough events that say to me the program is good, but apparently the penalties haven't deterred some people.''
Players and management added spring training blood testing for human growth hormone last year and in January announced a deal expanding it to the regular season. Also in January, they said the World Anti-Doping Agency laboratory in Laval, Quebec, will keep records of each player, including his baseline ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. The lab will conduct Carbon Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS) tests of any urine specimens that ''vary materially.''
MLB was the first major sports league in North America to test for HGH.
Selig said those who have violated the anti-drug rules are ''a very small percentage'' of players.
''A great majority really, really have been terrific,'' Selig said, ''and I give the players' association a lot of credit. We had lots of problems two decades ago, 10 years ago, but I'm confident that Michael and Rob will sit down, because I feel very strongly about this.''
Cabrera, who was leading the NL in hitting for the San Francisco Giants, was suspended for 50 games last year. After asking for a rules change that prevented him from winning the NL batting title, he signed a $16 million, two-year contract with Toronto during the offseason.
Selig would not comment on the now-defunct Biogenesis of America clinic in Coral Gables, Fla., other than to say it is the subject of a ''very thorough investigation'' by MLB.
The facility was alleged in media reports to have provided performance-enhancing substances to several players, including Cabrera, Alex Rodriguez and Nelson Cruz. The players have denied they obtained banned drugs from the clinic. MLB has been trying to obtain purported records of the clinic posted online by The Miami New Times, which initially revealed the allegations.
''The program is working fine,'' Selig said, ''but I've come to the conclusion the more I've thought about this that obviously there are some people, small in number, who need to be given a tougher lesson.''
In the year ending with the 2012 World Series, there were seven positives for performance-enhancing substances and 11 for stimulants among 3,955 urine tests and 1,181 blood tests, according to a report issued in November by baseball's independent program administrator, Dr. Jeffrey M. Anderson.
''We're way ahead of what anybody could have thought, but my father used to tell me life is nothing but a series of adjustments,'' Selig said, ''and this is an adjustment that you have to make based on what you see.''
Joe Torre and Tony La Russa, retired managers who work for Major League Baseball, both voiced support for the tougher penalties at Selig's news conference.
Torre, the former New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers skipper who will manage the United States in the World Baseball Classic, said it is important to remove questions fans may have about whether players are clean.
''Until we can gain the total respect back from fans and have them trust us again, we've got work to do,'' he said.
La Russa, longtime manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, said although the punishment already is severe, it apparently isn't enough.
''Just make that risk so punishing that we can eliminate this,'' he said.
Selig said stiffer penalties are in the best interest of baseball.
''Anybody who will be dismayed by this announcement is living in a world that I don't understand,'' he said, ''and in my own feeling frankly doesn't exist.''
Gate placement a concern for NASCAR after crash.
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The crash occurred on the final lap of the Nationwide race the day before the Daytona 500, when leader Regan Smith tried to block Brad Keselowski and triggered a chain reaction. Larson's car went airborne during the wreck and slammed into the fence, sending debris into the stands.
O'Donnell said two injured fans remain at the hospital, but everyone else has been released.
The crash has forced NASCAR to take a closer look at its safety measures, particularly fencing around its tracks.
O'Donnell said NASCAR mostly leaves fencing up to the individual tracks, but may look at being more involved, similar to what it did requiring impact-absorbing SAFER barriers along concrete walls.
''It's important to note that most of the safety elements in that car did their job,'' O'Donnell said. ''The driver, as you saw, walked away. However, the car then got up into the fence. Our focus is going to be if the elements in the car did their job, now what do we need to do in looking at the impact of the fence, what happened when that car impacted the fence with parts getting away.''
O'Donnell also said that the tethers that hold Larson's car together worked, but that the section the tethers were attached to sheared the car, sending pieces flying.
''We've tethered a number of different things as we've learned and added safety aspects to the car, but what do we need to do in addition to that when we look at this aspect specifically?'' O'Donnell said. ''
Instead of bringing Larson's car immediately back to NASCAR's research and development center in Charlotte, N.C., it was left in Daytona so track officials use it in their investigation into what happened with the fencing. The car is in the process of being brought back to the R&D center, where it will be put back together and, with the help of video, hopefully determine what parts of the car came off when.
O'Donnell said NASCAR will bring in Larson's race team, which hasn't seen the car since it was impounded after the wreck, to talk about how the car was constructed and fabricated.
NASCAR also will bring in outside experts, including Dr. Dean Sicking, director of the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska, officials from Indianapolis Motor Speedway and outside engineers to look at the fencing.
Daytona will have its experts work with an outside firm to analyze what was in place and analyze what may need to be done.
''When you talk about safety, I think Jeff Burton said it best: There's no end goal of safety, it's something we work on each and every day,'' O'Donnell said. ''Same with this process. If there's something we can learn today, we'll apply that. If it's two months from now, we'll apply it as well."
O'Donnell said NASCAR will look at the issue of restrictor-plate racing at Daytona and Talladega, where the series stops in May, but he said he's comfortable with plate racing at the two super speedways right now.
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