What really helped me from the article was the info about hash joins vs nested loop joins.  I wound up doing some more research and I was able to put some hints on a few of our key joins and it sped up the procedure from 7 seconds to 3.  During testing I found that the hash joins were slower than the nested loop joins so I tried merge joins and voila! 

Here's a good link on joins

http://blogs.msdn.com/craigfr/archive/2006/08/16/702828.aspx