BLOG FIGHT!

It's been a long time since there was a good and proper blood-feud in the Thrashers blogosphere. And this time, sadly, your Chronicle isn't involved.

The background: Our buddy Rawhide (who blogs for the AJC under the code name "Bill Tiller") wrote a post about how he expects the Thrashers' goal production to dip a bit next season, what with that Kovalchuk and that Afinogenov just cold Gone Forever. Throughout the post Rawhide is honest enough to say that it's not like he KNOWS this will happen, and a player's performance one year is often NOT a reliable prognosticator of the next year, etc. His point, I think, was that we can't pretend that the loss of Kovalchuk and the presence of several question marks on the roster (not question marks in terms of overall quality, but in terms of goal production) aren't going to effect the Thrashers' ability to score goals. Obviously no one KNOWS what's going to happen, but it's reasonable to be concerned, and so on.

Bird Watchers Anonymous' Timmy F. responded with a sharp rebuke to both Rawhide and his own blogging overlord, the famous Falconer, for even speculating about these things. He argues against their positions a bit, but the gist of the post is "STOP IT. Stop it, dudes; like, don't ever talk about any of this ever again, ever, because there's no reason to."

I paraphrase, of course. He does write, vis-a-vis the Falconer's projection, "I'll give him credit for also admitting that his projection would be wrong, but if we know something will be wrong, why spend the time writing a blog?"

Which is, of course, a question that negates the entire goofy ideal of blogging. The mind reels.

***UPDATE***

Our friend Mr. Speaker makes some excellent points in a secret email exchange with your editor:

...I have a great affinity for useless statistical analysis. Perhaps my conclusion will be something like: "if Nik Antropov can shoot the puck more, he will score 5% more of the time because he has such a consistently accurate shooting % over the years." And you can do some satirical post about how Nik's mystic ferret friend (or whatever the hell he is) Misha can help Nik further develop his keen sense of telepathical power on the ice to feed the puck to his linemates in positions to score more frequently then we may just eclipse 230 goals scored next season!