The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

The fans chanted for it. The radio talk show hosts blathered over it. The newspaper reporters wrote about it. The bloggers tweeted about it. The players surely discussed it. Everyone ravened for it.

Revenge.

Bloody, swift revenge. Matt Cooke had to pay for his transgressions against Marc Savard. After all, you don’t rattle another team’s best player’s brain around in his skull without paying for it. Certainly not the way Cooke did it: an unprovoked, deliberate ambush designed to do exactly what it ended up doing.

So no sooner did Cooke hop over the boards for his first shift to a chorus of boos from every corner of the arena than Boston’s resident tough-guy Shawn Thornton asked him to answer for his dastardly deed as though this brand of justice ripped straight from the last 10 pages of every awful black-hat-bad-guy Western would somehow lift the fog that crept into Savard’s brain cavity in the immediate aftermath of last Sunday’s blatant headshot du jour.

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The Lead

We were given a whole slew of reasons to think the Ducks are the most revolting franchise in the NHL tonight.

As though we needed more.

Tonight, of course, saw James Wisniewski up and run Brent Seabrook, a former teammate, in retaliation for an innocuous hit on Corey Perry who, let’s face it, deserves any hit he takes.

Now, before all you Ducks fans start crying about it being a headshot and boo hoo Corey Perry’s just playin hard out there, let’s keep two things in mind. First, it could only technically a headshot because Perry put his head down around crossbar height (and even then, his arm got in the way of the Seabrook hit) and second, Seabrook had already committed to the hit but Perry turned at the last second and it otherwise would have just been your standard shoulder-to-shoulder check.

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The Lead

Ah the tantalizing mystery of the Orient.

It’s been a long time since even hardcore hockey fans here in North America have seen Jaromir Jagr play. Two years ago, he took his ball and went home — well, “home” — to the KHL and has literally spent those seasons playing in freaking Siberia for Avangard Omsk.

How far away from his last NHL team, the New York Rangers, is Omsk? Well, to give you an idea of how remote it is, the nearest semi-major Russian city appears to be Kurgan (pop. 345,000 or roughly the size of Santa Ana, California), a 325-mile drive down M-51. Whatever that is.

So I figured it’d be interesting to see how this once-great superstar was playing in what must be the dying years of his career. If his skills had deteriorated in the intervening time since his last NHL season, in which he scored 71 points in 82 games, how bad was that erosion? By the look of things, it had to be considerable, right? I mean, he hasn’t yet scored at a point-a-game pace in a league that plays on that offense-increasing, 200-by-100, international-sized sheet of ice in a league that unironically considers Kevin Dallman to be its best defenseman. He had to be crap at this point, which would be understandable since his NHL debut came when Sid Crosby was three years old.

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The Lead

See, there are three kinds of Leafs fans right now and all of them are intolerable and stupid.

The first kind is the one that is ironically going, “LOL LET’S PLAN THE PARADE.”

These people are annoying because everyone on the planet knows the Maple Leafs are still going to finish with a lottery pick. How do they know that, those of you who have been furiously F5ing Lost fansites all week for the latest theory on the smoke monster (he’s a dinosaur made of smoke what’s not to get?) might be asking? Because their second-line center tonight was like John Mitchell or something stupid like that. Have you heard of John Mitchell? I have. He’s the crippled old dude from Lost that is the boss of The Island or something. I don’t know. I barely watch that show. Anywho, yes, the team is crap so you’re calling attention to how crap it is by acting like it’s not crap. We got it.

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The Lead

I can’t define what it is that unsettles me about this Capitals offense, but I know it when I see it.

Every year, EA’s NHL game has some kind of buggy little hole in its AI programming where as long as you can replicate the way you shoot the puck every time, you can pile up goals at a pace that would make Wayne Gretzky circa 1982 cry like a little baby girl. You remember. Carry it down the wing, cut across the slot at the faceoff circles, backhander. Goal City. Beat your friends 27-1 on five-minute periods. No problem.

Well I don’t know if the rest of the league has figured it out yet, but the Caps have found the way to do it in the actual NHL ‘10.

It’s not that the Capitals shouldn’t be a good team or anything. They should be just about as good as they are from a won-lost perspective. But the way they’re winning these games is just starting to become absurd.

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The Lead

I remember like two weeks ago or something the Sens fired Eli Wilson, their goalie coach for the previous two seasons. The Sens had just lost five straight and allowed 26 goals in their previous six games, which is of course a crazy-ass number. But people still snickered.

“Fire the goalie coach?!” they scoffed. “Fire the goalies!”

The move was most often compared to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic in such a way that they are all precariously stacked on top of each other before being dropped directly off the back of the ship. A real who-cares move from a floundering franchise desperate to scapegoat someone in no real position of authority.

I get that sentiment.

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It’s tough being an NHL player, we all know that.

The business is cutthroat, and where one day you can be the toast of the town, the next day you can be out on your ass in a matter of half an ineffective season.

Georges Laraque found that out the hard way today, as the Canadiens, clearly tired of his being of Haitian descent and not the fact that he’s a tough guy that doesn’t fight or hit anyone any more, sent him home for the remainder of the season with an eye toward being bought out once the Habs are able to do so.

Wait.. what? That Haitian thing seems out of place. Well, I mean, not if you’re Laraque. The money quote (emphasis obviously mine):

“Classless,” Laraque said angrily. “To do this in the midst of all I’m dealing with in Haiti, the timing is awful. I’m not going to sugar coat anything.”

Yes, all he’s dealing with.

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The Lead

A couple years ago I apparently signed up for something through the Calgary Flames’ official website because they clearly have my email address on file. Occasionally I’ll get emails about special tickets being put on sale just for people like me a few hours before game day.

I don’t mark them as spam, I don’t look for a link to unsubscribe myself from this list. I sit there and I say, “Oh look another email from the Flames about tickets what a nice organization they sure do care about me even if I’m probably their only sworn American fan within 1,500 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. ” Not that I read these emails beyond the subject line. Again, I’m about 2,200 miles from the Saddledome. These on-sales literally couldn’t matter less to me.

But I guess my point is that I’m a hell of a goddamn Flames fan. I’m such a good fan that I will let them try to sell me crap I don’t want just out of my desire to support them in any way possible.

So fanatical for this team am I that I have, in the past three weeks, watched every single one of their uniformly hideous games.

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The Lead

And you thought the circus wouldn’t be showing up at GM Place for another few weeks when the Olympics came to town and “circus” had the word “media” in front of it.

Saturday night brought us Lasergate, which sounds like some sort of bad Jean-Claude Van Damme straight-to-DVD sci-fi movie, but it was, instead, some Canucks fan attempting to shine a laser pointer into Miikka Kiprusoff’s eyes during play and generally making everyone upset.

It continued tonight, only nobody used any Nikola Tesla-type inventions. Instead, it was the referees who performed in Ring 2 of this particular three-ring fiasco. The entire third period of what had been a good, hard-fought game between the Canucks and Predators, was turned into a joke by Stephane Auger and Dennis LaRuse, who, you may remember, screwed the Red Wings earlier this year.

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The Lead

Let me tell you about my new favorite sight of all time.

That sight was the American flag being raised to the rafters of some podunk rink in some backwater city in some unimportant province in quite literally the most worthless country in the world.

The United States may have needed overtime to beat Canada (and the officials), but by God, they did it, and I’m pretty sure George Washington is somewhere grinning a big, goofy wooden grin right in John A. MacDonald’s smug little stupid face.

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