Mike Grier retired today. A fine Oiler winger over several seasons, we could use four like him today. Sail on Mike Grier. We didn't forget you, never will.
old 25 is a special player to me because he was part of a new breed of Oilers that made the playoffs year year and helped me forget those terrible mid 90's years.
in fact, I gave up on the club after the 93 season and it was only once CuJo ended his holdout that I came back; grier of course was also part of that deal.
so you had him and all the others and those were my guys; I haven't missed more than 10 games in a season since '97 so these were the fellows that brought me back into the fold.
My favourite Grier memory is G5 at Col in '98 when he beat Krupp in a footrace and tucked in an ENG to seal the victory.
My favourite Grier memory is G5 at Col in '98 when he beat Krupp in a footrace and tucked in an ENG to seal the victory.
i remember that too - and the season he was constantly popping his shoulder out (and getting it put back into place on the bench). One tough hombre and one of the good guys.
Oh, man. Mike Grier. God, my dad and I loved him, wonky 20-8-20-8-goal seasons and all. As I recall, good positionally, hit like a Mack truck, played through the pain. Hockey player for any era (Racist Old Days notwithstanding). I'd take a 10-years-younger version of him any day.
You know, they're selling old CCM replicas at Jersey City for something like $65 right now. Some days, I feel like picking one up and getting an old '90s Oiler on there, just for the hell of it; Grier would be a definite candidate.
Misfit: Grier's problem (and Moreau's, and Hemsky's) was shoulder dislocations. You get it once, you get it a hundred times, because the glenohumeral joint is not what one would call stable, especially once the ligaments become lax with imperfectly-healed damage. Hall's was an acromioclavicular sprain, the most benign of the shoulder-separation class of injuries. The AC joint is tons more stable, thus making it a lot harder to re-aggravate the injury (beyond the risks incurred by style of play etc.). I just wrote a thing on C&B about it, if you're interested.
Would love today to have a 3rd line of 25 year old Grier, Moreau and Marchant. 2 big bodies and a real good defensive center.
Grier had an incredibly powerful accelertion but man was he mediocre on his edges.If only hockey was played on a long narrow sheet of ice with few turns
In those Dallas playoff series, it was often a race whether it ended Griered or geared. By game five or six, if the commentators were starting to talk about Modano finding "that extra gear" or Hitchcock "tweaking" the end was nigh. Yet never a series passed where a few of those Dallas guys went looking for the extra gear and found it bent perpendicular courtesy of the hard-boned hell hound. After the series, Dallas would bend those extra gears straight again then inevitably they snapped in the 2nd round due to metal fatigue.
Equipment managers sometimes have the best stories. I bet the Dallas equipment manager curses Grier to this day for giving him a hernia from lugging the jumbo trunk of Grier-inflicted injury splints.
Paraphrasing Adam Smith:
He is a bold equipment manager, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he splints a hernia upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct.
Grier is one guy you know for certain suffered more from the deformities of his person than deformities of conduct. Well played.
About the new blog
First of all, my visual appreciation is largely confined to the eye-magnets of evolution, so I won't comment on the site layout. Seriously, I was once given a birthday card with a picture of a gormless dude with a giant pocket protector sitting on the couch wearing an impossibly large set of googles with the big shit-eating grin of a 40-year-old virgin. The caption read: "We got you these VR goggles so you could find out what it feels like to be cool." Fortunately, some chicks dig the fifty pound forehead--so long as you can cook.
Back to the new site. Personally I find the teaser captions a little short. Who put this ellipsis in center ice? Head first into the boards again.
Speaking as a Border Collie, the mouse-wheel scrolling is chunky slow on my beefy Linux box under FF and Chrome. I've seen this before on sites with large background images, so I used one of my special FF extensions to "block this item" on the master background image. Wheel scrolling performance instantly tripled.
The design might have a bit of alpha-blend going between the static master background and the scrollable background, which could trigger the client to redraw the master background, resulting in the poor performance. It's been a long time since I've done serious web development.
I have another FF plugin (NoSquint) which allows me to expand the font size without expanding the layout zoom (I like BIG text). This causes hard breaks that shouldn't be there in the blog text to look really ugly (orphan words spill to the next line). The embedded hard breaks are also evident with standard settings, but far less obvious.
The first paragraph is OK, but the second paragraph has these extra hard breaks:
but<br/>long the<br/>likely Colorado<br/>waiting
And every other para has more. I looked at the delivered page source, it actually does contain those breaks as I've transcribed them.
And finally about the text rendering: on my (highly tweaked) FF which is displaying text in a serif font, the leading from baseline to x-height has decreased relative to the old blog from about 1.5 x-heights to about 1.2 x-heights (squinting a bit). In combination with the change to white on black, it makes the text run together and a bit harder to read. White on black suffers from a bloom effect on many displays, which changes the apparent stroke weight.
On Chrome I'm seeing the same page in a sans-serif font and leading of less than a full x-height. Effect is quite different, but also a tiny bit cramped to my taste.
Nice summary Doogie. You're dead on regarding AC injury, often called "shoulder separation" and glenohumeral injury often called "shoulder dislocation". The latter tends to recur. I would hasten to add that Hemsky's injury is neither of these. It would seem he has never had a shoulder dislocation per se (although I may have missed it somewhere over the years), but rather had a labral tear in each shoulder which he had repaired. While the labrum is part of the joint capsule it does not necessarily portend recurrent shoulder problems like a shoulder dislocation does. That is not to say all shoulder dislocations are destined to a lifetime of shoulder problems. Sometimes you get one, and never again. Sometimes you get a few, but surgery does the trick and then never again.
While I can't mention any NHL'ers names, I have seen more than a few with these injuries. NHL'ers do surprisingly well with shoulders. Some of these guys have shoulders that look worse than your average 90 year old, but still play hockey at the highest level. They're cautioned to avoid the windmill fist pump goal celebration though. Compare that to many other sports like baseball, basketball, hockey, and some football positions where the injury can be career threatening. Overall, the shoulder compensates pretty well. Knees and hips are also good for compensating after serious injuries that alter the biomechanics of the joint. It's when you get further down the limb like the wrist/hand or foot/ankle where serious injuries that heal with only subtle change in the biomechanics of the limb/joint can be devastating to a player's function at the pro level. Peter Forsberg is a famous example. Doug Lynch a less famous example.
They should be sending Eberle out there with fiberglass protecting his hands and wrists. Nothing turns "great hands" into "bad hands" like a serious wrist injury.
100% recovery from an AC separation is not something to only hope for, it is expected.
The first Oiler I remeber with serious recurring shoulder injuries was Grant Fuhr, but I can't remember for the life of me how he originally injured it. There was a couple of years there where he was constantly out of the line-up for re-dislocating the shoulder. IIRC, he was one of the first to have an operation where they did something fancy like double up the ligament that held the arm in its socket. Prevented the shoulder from popping out again or some such. Actually, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure Grier ended up having the same procedure.
Deadmanwaking said: Speaking as a Border Collie, the mouse-wheel scrolling is chunky slow on my beefy Linux box under FF and Chrome. I've seen this before on sites with large background images
Want to chime in here and say that bg image is murder on load times and bandwidth. Considering it is 90% hidden behind content windows, I'd strongly suggest ditching it. Love the new site, but that background is an interface design no-no. And a guarantee that most of your mobile visitors will be one-time-only visitors.
Some of these guys have shoulders that look worse than your average 90 year old, but still play hockey at the highest level. They're cautioned to avoid the windmill fist pump goal celebration though.
Ashley, you are the most badass commenter on Lowetide. Thanks again for the info. Plus, the air of expertise here is making me open to suggestion, such as mailing Eberle some fiberglass wrist guards.
All this talk about the new site... it looks pretty much the same as the website from a week or two ago. It's not clear to me what's new. Does it only appear new to mobile users?
Ah, thanks! The new website is pretty intense. It feels a little like sitting in front of the beam control panel at CERN. If you can, I'd try to simplify the appearance a bit, give it more of the homey prairie sparseness. The rightmost column could be deleted and all that stuff moved to the bottom of the page, that's one way to get there.
The only problem I have with the new site is the disproportions with the image on the headline article. Well, that and that it reminds of me of MC79 but that's not necessarily a bad thing... Good job, LT. Keep the pictures from getting translated/stretched/compressed/reflected and you have a good site imho.
He may have left us years ago, but he seems to have passed his shoulders down through Hemsky and potentially to Hall.
ReplyDeleteMike Grier worked hard all of the time - Yay Mike Grier!
ReplyDelete@ misfit - I had the exact same first thought... Don't forget thecaptainethanmoreau and the Dirty Russian in the wonky-shoulder lineage.
ReplyDeleteI'll always remember how the Edmonton media loved to put "Mike Greer" and "potentially score 20 goals" together in the same sentence a lot.
Rosie was always a guy I loved to watch play. A great leader and a sad day when he was no longer with the organisation.
ReplyDeleteYou mean like the two years he didn't potentially score 20 goals for us but actually did?
ReplyDeleteDrafted Round 9, 219 overall.
ReplyDeleteI'd say he covered his draft bet, hey LT?
Hopefully a few of the OKC prospects can leave the shoulders part and get the beast along the boards thing instead.
ReplyDeleteWord Verification: torcie - what Oilers keep doing to their joints.
Fun guy to watch.
ReplyDeleteI respect hard work and effort above all and this guy had it in spades.
*tear*
Last Oil Player to break someone through glass I believe, I love that man (kisses signed picture of him)
ReplyDeleteold 25 is a special player to me because he was part of a new breed of Oilers that made the playoffs year year and helped me forget those terrible mid 90's years.
ReplyDeletein fact, I gave up on the club after the 93 season and it was only once CuJo ended his holdout that I came back; grier of course was also part of that deal.
so you had him and all the others and those were my guys; I haven't missed more than 10 games in a season since '97 so these were the fellows that brought me back into the fold.
My favourite Grier memory is G5 at Col in '98 when he beat Krupp in a footrace and tucked in an ENG to seal the victory.
My favourite Grier memory is G5 at Col in '98 when he beat Krupp in a footrace and tucked in an ENG to seal the victory.
ReplyDeletei remember that too - and the season he was constantly popping his shoulder out (and getting it put back into place on the bench). One tough hombre and one of the good guys.
Oh, man. Mike Grier. God, my dad and I loved him, wonky 20-8-20-8-goal seasons and all. As I recall, good positionally, hit like a Mack truck, played through the pain. Hockey player for any era (Racist Old Days notwithstanding). I'd take a 10-years-younger version of him any day.
ReplyDeleteYou know, they're selling old CCM replicas at Jersey City for something like $65 right now. Some days, I feel like picking one up and getting an old '90s Oiler on there, just for the hell of it; Grier would be a definite candidate.
Misfit: Grier's problem (and Moreau's, and Hemsky's) was shoulder dislocations. You get it once, you get it a hundred times, because the glenohumeral joint is not what one would call stable, especially once the ligaments become lax with imperfectly-healed damage. Hall's was an acromioclavicular sprain, the most benign of the shoulder-separation class of injuries. The AC joint is tons more stable, thus making it a lot harder to re-aggravate the injury (beyond the risks incurred by style of play etc.). I just wrote a thing on C&B about it, if you're interested.
Would love today to have a 3rd line of 25 year old Grier, Moreau and Marchant. 2 big bodies and a real good defensive center.
ReplyDeleteGrier had an incredibly powerful accelertion but man was he mediocre on his edges.If only hockey was played on a long narrow sheet of ice with few turns
A real honest player that respected the game!
In those Dallas playoff series, it was often a race whether it ended Griered or geared. By game five or six, if the commentators were starting to talk about Modano finding "that extra gear" or Hitchcock "tweaking" the end was nigh. Yet never a series passed where a few of those Dallas guys went looking for the extra gear and found it bent perpendicular courtesy of the hard-boned hell hound. After the series, Dallas would bend those extra gears straight again then inevitably they snapped in the 2nd round due to metal fatigue.
ReplyDeleteEquipment managers sometimes have the best stories. I bet the Dallas equipment manager curses Grier to this day for giving him a hernia from lugging the jumbo trunk of Grier-inflicted injury splints.
Paraphrasing Adam Smith:
He is a bold equipment manager, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he splints a hernia upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct.
Grier is one guy you know for certain suffered more from the deformities of his person than deformities of conduct. Well played.
About the new blog
First of all, my visual appreciation is largely confined to the eye-magnets of evolution, so I won't comment on the site layout. Seriously, I was once given a birthday card with a picture of a gormless dude with a giant pocket protector sitting on the couch wearing an impossibly large set of googles with the big shit-eating grin of a 40-year-old virgin. The caption read: "We got you these VR goggles so you could find out what it feels like to be cool." Fortunately, some chicks dig the fifty pound forehead--so long as you can cook.
Back to the new site. Personally I find the teaser captions a little short. Who put this ellipsis in center ice? Head first into the boards again.
Speaking as a Border Collie, the mouse-wheel scrolling is chunky slow on my beefy Linux box under FF and Chrome. I've seen this before on sites with large background images, so I used one of my special FF extensions to "block this item" on the master background image. Wheel scrolling performance instantly tripled.
The design might have a bit of alpha-blend going between the static master background and the scrollable background, which could trigger the client to redraw the master background, resulting in the poor performance. It's been a long time since I've done serious web development.
I have another FF plugin (NoSquint) which allows me to expand the font size without expanding the layout zoom (I like BIG text). This causes hard breaks that shouldn't be there in the blog text to look really ugly (orphan words spill to the next line). The embedded hard breaks are also evident with standard settings, but far less obvious.
At G 25 Wild at Oilers
The first paragraph is OK, but the second paragraph has these extra hard breaks:
but<br/>long
the<br/>likely
Colorado<br/>waiting
And every other para has more. I looked at the delivered page source, it actually does contain those breaks as I've transcribed them.
And finally about the text rendering: on my (highly tweaked) FF which is displaying text in a serif font, the leading from baseline to x-height has decreased relative to the old blog from about 1.5 x-heights to about 1.2 x-heights (squinting a bit). In combination with the change to white on black, it makes the text run together and a bit harder to read. White on black suffers from a bloom effect on many displays, which changes the apparent stroke weight.
On Chrome I'm seeing the same page in a sans-serif font and leading of less than a full x-height. Effect is quite different, but also a tiny bit cramped to my taste.
Nice summary Doogie. You're dead on regarding AC injury, often called "shoulder separation" and glenohumeral injury often called "shoulder dislocation". The latter tends to recur. I would hasten to add that Hemsky's injury is neither of these. It would seem he has never had a shoulder dislocation per se (although I may have missed it somewhere over the years), but rather had a labral tear in each shoulder which he had repaired. While the labrum is part of the joint capsule it does not necessarily portend recurrent shoulder problems like a shoulder dislocation does. That is not to say all shoulder dislocations are destined to a lifetime of shoulder problems. Sometimes you get one, and never again. Sometimes you get a few, but surgery does the trick and then never again.
ReplyDeleteWhile I can't mention any NHL'ers names, I have seen more than a few with these injuries. NHL'ers do surprisingly well with shoulders. Some of these guys have shoulders that look worse than your average 90 year old, but still play hockey at the highest level. They're cautioned to avoid the windmill fist pump goal celebration though. Compare that to many other sports like baseball, basketball, hockey, and some football positions where the injury can be career threatening. Overall, the shoulder compensates pretty well. Knees and hips are also good for compensating after serious injuries that alter the biomechanics of the joint. It's when you get further down the limb like the wrist/hand or foot/ankle where serious injuries that heal with only subtle change in the biomechanics of the limb/joint can be devastating to a player's function at the pro level. Peter Forsberg is a famous example. Doug Lynch a less famous example.
They should be sending Eberle out there with fiberglass protecting his hands and wrists. Nothing turns "great hands" into "bad hands" like a serious wrist injury.
100% recovery from an AC separation is not something to only hope for, it is expected.
The first Oiler I remeber with serious recurring shoulder injuries was Grant Fuhr, but I can't
ReplyDeleteremember for the life of me how he originally injured it. There was a couple of years there where he was constantly out of the line-up for re-dislocating the shoulder. IIRC, he was one of the first to have an operation where they did something fancy like double up the ligament that held the arm in its socket. Prevented the shoulder from popping out again or some such. Actually, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure Grier ended up having the same procedure.
Deadmanwaking said: Speaking as a Border Collie, the mouse-wheel scrolling is chunky slow on my beefy Linux box under FF and Chrome. I've seen this before on sites with large background images
ReplyDeleteWant to chime in here and say that bg image is murder on load times and bandwidth. Considering it is 90% hidden behind content windows, I'd strongly suggest ditching it. Love the new site, but that background is an interface design no-no. And a guarantee that most of your mobile visitors will be one-time-only visitors.
@Ashley
ReplyDeleteYikes Whitney
I believe Ashley's comments on Whitney have been much more bearish than bullish, during his tenure here.
ReplyDeleteSome of these guys have shoulders that look worse than your average 90 year old, but still play hockey at the highest level. They're cautioned to avoid the windmill fist pump goal celebration though.
ReplyDeleteAshley, you are the most badass commenter on Lowetide. Thanks again for the info. Plus, the air of expertise here is making me open to suggestion, such as mailing Eberle some fiberglass wrist guards.
All this talk about the new site... it looks pretty much the same as the website from a week or two ago. It's not clear to me what's new. Does it only appear new to mobile users?
ReplyDelete@ delooper:
ReplyDeleteThey are talking about this site.
Ah, thanks! The new website is pretty intense. It feels a little like sitting in front of the beam control panel at CERN. If you can, I'd try to simplify the appearance a bit, give it more of the homey prairie sparseness. The rightmost column could be deleted and all that stuff moved to the bottom of the page, that's one way to get there.
ReplyDeleteThe only problem I have with the new site is the disproportions with the image on the headline article. Well, that and that it reminds of me of MC79 but that's not necessarily a bad thing... Good job, LT. Keep the pictures from getting translated/stretched/compressed/reflected and you have a good site imho.
ReplyDeleteI can't take any credit for the design or look of the new blog. That's Danny, the whole shebang.
ReplyDelete