Joe Flacco is sticking up for his go-to receiver, telling USA Today Sports that Anquan Boldin shouldn’t accept a pay cut from the Baltimore Ravens.

Boldin told USA Today on Saturday he’s unwilling to slash his salary in order to stay with the team, citing “principles.”

“At no point, no matter how well I played, would I come back to the table and say, ‘I need more money.’ The contract that I signed was the contract that I intended to play out,” he told USA Today.

Flacco said he supported Boldin’s stance.

“Without him, we don’t win the Super Bowl. He’s a huge part of this team and someone I want to see back,” Flacco, who signed a six-year, $120.6 million contract this offseason, told USA Today on Saturday. “Obviously, when you’re a player of his caliber, you believe you’re worth a number and that’s what you should get. He’s going to stick to his guns, and that’s the way it should be.”

Boldin is scheduled to earn $6 million in the coming season. He carries a $7.531 million salary-cap figure.

Fox Sports reported earlier Saturday that Baltimore gave Boldin an ultimatum: Take a pay cut or get cut on Tuesday. USA Today later reported that Boldin had rejected Baltimore’s offer but that the sides were still discussing the matter, and that Boldin is prepared to test free agency if Baltimore releases him.

Boldin declined to confirm to USA Today that he had rejected a pay cut.

Boldin, 32, said last month that he would retire if he was cut by the Ravens. However, on Saturday, he changed that stance, saying he would discuss his options with his family if he were to be released.

In the playoffs, Boldin caught 22 passes for 380 yards receiving (95 yards per game) and four touchdowns. He has led Baltimore in receiving yards in each of the past three seasons since being traded from Arizona.

Boldin and Flacco made their comments to USA Today in Arizona, where they were participating in a charity function hosted by former quarterback Kurt Warner.

Information from ESPN.com AFC North blogger Jamison Hensley was used in this report.

NEW YORK — Jakob Silfverberg broke a tie with 4:41 left, and the Ottawa Senators snapped a four-game losing streak by beating the New York Rangers 3-2 on Friday night.

Silfverberg got a rebound of defenceman Eric Gryba‘s shot and put it past Henrik Lundqvist for his fourth goal of the season. Zack Smith and Patrick Wiercioch scored in the first period, defenceman Sergei Gonchar had two assists, and Robin Lehner made 33 saves for the Senators.

Ottawa broke an 0-2-2 skid and won on the road for only the fourth time (4-7-2). Ottawa had been 1-7-2 in its previous 10 road games, but the Senators improved to 12-1-1 in their past 14 visits to Madison Square Garden.

Rick Nash and Brad Richards, in his first game back following a two-game injury absence, scored in the opening period, but the Rangers had a season-best, four-game winning streak broken.

Lundqvist stopped 36 shots.

The Senators dominated the first half of the opening period, but their 2-0 lead was gone before the intermission.

Just 13 seconds after Wiercioch doubled Ottawa’s advantage, Nash cut the Rangers’ deficit in half with his ninth goal of the season and first not scored in the third period.

Nash took a pass from defenceman Michael Del Zotto in the slot and snapped a shot that beat Lehner at 11:03. Since Nash missed four games in February — all Rangers losses (0-3-1) — the star forward has been on a tear upon his return.

Nash has six goals in five games, along with three assists, and he has a nine-game point streak that predates his injury.

Richards tied it with 2:21 left in the first off a feed from Carl Hagelin. Following a defensive zone faceoff, Hagelin raced the puck up left wing and dropped it back to Richards, who heeded the chants of the home crowd and fired a one-timer from the top edge of the circle that beat Lehner to the glove side.

It was Richards’ third goal of the season and first in 16 games, dating to Jan. 26 against Toronto.

Up until then, New York was chasing Ottawa all over the ice.

Smith started the scoring with his second of the season — and in two games. Gonchar let go a shot from inside the blue line that was deflected in the slot by Smith. The puck then bounced off the ice in front of Lundqvist and slipped past him.

Wiercioch made it 2-0 with a long drive that got through a maze of legs and sticks and beat Lundqvist for a power-play goal.

The Senators held a 6-1 lead in shots after Smith’s goal, but the tide turned enough that Ottawa was ahead only 14-13 at the end of the period.

NOTES: Brian Boyle took part in the pregame warm-up but was scratched to make room in the lineup for Richards. … Senators defenceman Chris Phillips was given 19 minutes in penalties after he came to the defence of teammate Jim O’Brien in the first period. Phillips charged at Micheal Haley after he flattened O’Brien at the side of the net with a hit. Phillips still had his gloves on when Haley started punching. Phillips was given a minor penalty for instigating and another for instigating a fight while wearing a visor. He also received a major for fighting and a misconduct. Haley was called for charging in addition to his fighting major. … Wiercioch has scored his two goals this season in the past three games.

While there are many short books to be written about hockey — Breaking Down Every Shift of Scott Cullen’s Pro Hockey Career or An Anthology of Toronto Maple Leafs Playoff Games Between Lockouts — there may be a new contender: The Hockey Panel at the 2013 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Okay, that may be tad dramatic but, after what seemed to be successful panels in the past two years (Hockey recap 2011 and 2012 Recap), there was no hockey panel at this year’s conference, bringing disappointment to the stick-and-puck crowd.

The only panel I attended that included former Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke, Break-Ups in Sports, wasn’t very hockey-oriented and Burke re-iterated some of his tried-and-true anti-stats soundbytes from the year before.

Considering that the hockey panels had been well-attended the last two years, it was disheartening, but there were still some fascinating hockey subjects discussed. (You can see, from this year’s overall conference review, that I felt there were valuable discussions anyway.)

For example, Eric Tulsky presented a research poster (worked on by Eric with Geoffrey Detweiler, Robert Spencer and Corey Sznajder) on zone entries that revealed how valuable it is to enter the offensive zone in control of the puck, as opposed to employing a dump-and-chase technique.

Certainly, there are times (eg. outnumbered by defenders, line change etc.) when dumping the puck into the offensive zone may be the most reasonable play but, circumstances being equal, teams were about twice as likely to generate a shot on goal when they carried the puck into the zone and that didn’t vary much based on the skill of the players involved. As Eric wrote about previously, Jaromir Jagr and Zac Rinaldo generated shots at the same rate for the Philadelphia Flyers last season when they entered the offensive zone with possession. Since there is a rather wide talent gap between the two, it then becomes relevant to note that the frequency with which they entered the offensive zone in possession of the puck was vastly different.

While some advanced stats might appear counter-intuitive, the zone entries paper totally fits with expectations of the logical hockey observer. The odds of keeping possession of the puck, when you already have it, is of course higher than it would be to retrieve a dumped-in puck that, effectively, becomes up-for-grabs.

Tracking these movements requires a signficant commitment, so kudos to those who did the work and while I joked with Eric that I tried to track zone entries while watching the Bruins and Senators last Thursday, this information can change the viewing experience.

When you become increasingly conscious of who is driving the play into the offensive zone, and holding possession of the puck, it enhances appreciation for the players that do it well (in that particular Bruins game, Patrice Bergeron was notably strong in this regard).

I know the guys at the Cult of Hockey, in Edmonton, have been tracking zone exits for the Oilers and, again, this seems to be useful information.

Getting this data on a league-wide basis, of course, would be fantastic.

TOTAL HOCKEY RATING (THoR)

The one other official conference hockey contribution was Michael Schuckers’ Total Hockey Rating (THoR), presented by Michael Schuckers, an Associate Professor of Statistics at St. Lawrence University who is the Co-Founder of Statistical Sports Consulting and presented a Defense Independent Goaltender Rating at the conference a couple of years ago.

The premise behind the Total Hockey Rating was to assign a value for every stat on the NHL’s Real-Time feed, and its location on the ice, to identify its correlation with goals being scored.

In theory, it seems like a sound approach and when someone respected in the stats community like Tom Tango weighs in with some cautious optimism about the process, that’s all the more reason to consider it.

That said, THoR came under immediate fire online because it revealed that the third-best 5-on-5 player over the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 seasons was…Pittsburgh’s Tyler Kennedy, a fine third-line winger who has been generally unremarkable to the general public in his five-plus years in the NHL.

By no means would I rank Kennedy in that spot, but I can see some of the forces that were at play.

For one thing, the process, removing the variability of shooting percentage, focuses on shots (and locations) and that helps Kennedy, who scored on a meagre 7.5% of his shots over those two seasons, ranking 227th among 230 forwards (Brian Rolston, Darren Helm and Nathan Gerbe were the only ones worse) that scored at least 20 goals over those two years.

So, by removing shooting percentage (or goals) from the equation, a shot from Tyler Kennedy is considered the same as a shot from Steven Stamkos, even though Stamkos had scored on 18.3% of his shots through those two seasons.

(By the way, I recognize that I’m using overall shooting percentage as opposed to 5-on-5, but the point essentially, much like the song, remains the same.)

This is particularly important in Kennedy’s case because he generated a lot of shots. He ranked 28th in the league in shots on goal per game over those two seasons (3.06 per game) and that’s impressive enough, but he also did so in a fraction of the time that other leaders played.

Over those two seasons, Kennedy played 2025 minutes. Of the 58 players to record at least 400 shots on goal, though, only one — Evgeni Malkin — recorded more on a per-60-minutes basis and Kennedy didn’t have the benefit of significant power play time to increase his offensive numbers.

Here are the leaders in shots/60 minutes for forwards with at least 400 shots on goal in 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 combined:

Kennedy sticks out like sore thumb in this group, too, so I see how his ability to generate shots on goal could have sent his ranking to a level that no one would have anticipated.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the idea behind the rating system isn’t a good one. Refining, and including power play and penalty-killing values, could eventually present a list that seems more representative of player values and, at that point, can be utilized to help find assets that may be undervalued. I’m a sucker for player rankings, having provided them on TSN.ca for more than a decade, so I will readily keep tabs on further developments in this field.

Of course, my frustration from the get-go with the Sloan Conference is that NHL teams don’t seem to be as accepting of analytics as I am. I’m numbers-oriented, pretty much always have been, so I get that I’m more open to some of the analysis presented, but I’m always hoping for some sign that NHL teams are taking analytics as seriously as teams in MLB and NBA, two sports that seem to be most accepting.

Even if Gabe Desjardins, of Behind the Net fame, says that the number of teams hiring a blogger to provide consulting services is growing, that pales in comparison to MLB and NBA teams, at the very least, in which most not only have someone working full-time on analytics but, in more and more cases, have actual analytics teams, so that they might have half a dozen people working on numbers, salaries and player evaluation, trying to find an edge.

Eric Tulsky went through NHL team pages and found four teams that employ someone in an official analytics capacity. There are certainly others, with job titles that don’t necessarily include analytics, but it’s not like it’s the industry standard for an NHL team to have a full-time analystics staff. By my count, there were five teams (Dallas, Edmonton, Tampa Bay, Vancouver and Washington) represented at this year’s conference by someone in hockey operations, so I’m left feeling like there’s a lot of room for growth, both in the conference’s hockey content and in NHL teams’ willingness to consider analytics as part of their everyday operations. 

I don’t know if the cost makes sense to have six or seven analysts, but it remains unfathomable to me that teams don’t, as standard business practice, pay $100,000 or $200,000 a year to a couple of people who can help them make better decisions on payrolls that are between $50-million and $70-million a year.

While there weren’t any official hockey panels convened at Sloan, there were several informal gatherings both Friday and Saturday night. Schuckers and Brian Macdonald have been trying to push hockey analytics at the conference in the three years I’ve attended, so I enjoy discussing their analysis. It was good to meet Tulsky, a chemist in the real world, who sees how much room for improvement there is when it comes to the use of analytics in the NHL.

NHL statheads can dare to dream, right?

Scott Cullen can be reached at Scott.Cullen@bellmedia.ca and followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tsnscottcullen. For more, check out TSN Fantasy on Facebook.

Celtic goalkeeper Fraser Forster has said he fears some of the club’s big-name players could be on their way out in the summer.

GettyImagesFraser Forster and Celtic impressed in the Champions League

The runaway Scottish Premier League leaders were knocked out of the Champions League by Juventus on Wednesday, losing 2-0 in Turin to go out 5-0 on aggregate after a memorable campaign including a 2-1 victory over Barcelona.

Their run has brought both praise for and interest in several players and manager Neil Lennon, who has expressed concerns over keeping some of his star players this summer.

Forster said: “There have been some fantastic performances – various performances will have caught the eye throughout the competition.

“We’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the summer. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two faces leave, but no doubt we’ll bring in a few as well.”

The goalkeeper said Celtic’s players had had their appetites whetted by the Champions League campaign and that the home defeat of Barca had been “something special with the atmosphere, and something that might only happen once in a lifetime”.

And he added: “We’re a very ambitious squad, and we’re all hoping for more nights like that.”