Smoke Break

Don't worry. I haven't stopped writing.

Over at On Tap Sports Net, we migrated to a new hosting service. There was a two-day content freeze, and I took that opportunity to either focus on personal writing or create some super nerdy hockey shit (more on that below).

On the hockey front, most of what I want to write, or end up writing, goes over to On Tap. Because of that, a lot of the hockey-type content you see here is more of a testing ground than anything. For example, the recent Stanley Cup series has kinda been put on pause. Mostly because I'll be focusing on breaking down each NHL team's outlook for the 2025-26 season.

And I don't want to write about things for the sake of writing about things.

The Afghan stuff, I've been writing a lot about it. There's a decent amount of stories that are sitting in the drafts. They'll require some polishing before I publish them to the website. But they're coming.

Of note is 1/3's deployment to Marjah. I'm working on doing a day-by-day account of their role during Operation Mosh-Tarak. What I'm trying to avoid is "pumping out content."

Look, I'm not shitting on people in the content creation game. Hell, I'm a part of it. But what I want to say is that it's easy to get lost in the details and lose sight of why you're creating stuff. I found myself almost rushing to meet an imagined deadline. As if "the people" were waiting for my Marjah stuff to come out.

So, I reminded myself why I created this website and IG in addition to my hockey stuff. And that's just to write.

Just fuckin' write, dude.

Also, that's something I really want to make sure I do people right by. I don't want to publish something and have it be inaccurate or discredit what someone else did.

Oh, and the nerdy hockey shit.

Over at On Tap, when I write articles, there's a set of analytics that I like to use. Instead of having a billion tabs open, I wanted to create stat cards specific to the Blackhawks. Below is a sneak peek of what it'll look like.

I'll have an article out explaining what those numbers mean. Essentially, the big boxes are percentile rankings for a specific stat (Goals Above Replacement). Below that are my favorite fancy stats. To the right are heat maps that update with the corresponding player.

Yes, it's interactive. There's a drop-down, and it updates all of the information that's there. Need to do the defensemen next and update some of the information. But that's what I'm working on.

Thought I'd do a little update since I haven't posted here in a minute.

— Steve