The Two-Line Pass

Uh ohs.

Adam Proteau of the Hockey News says Sens defenseman Andrej Meszaros has signed an offer sheet with an unidentified team just two days after TSN said he and the Senators were “not close” to a new deal.

Hours after Ottawa GM Bryan Murray held a news conference to announce the team was at a contractual impasse with restricted free agent defenseman Andrej Meszaros, The Hockey News has learned from an NHL source that Meszaros has agreed to a multi-year offer sheet with an average salary in excess of $5 million per season.

The team that has agreed to terms with the 22-year-old has yet to be confirmed.

When contacted by The Hockey News, Murray denied the report.

“I’ve heard rumors that that’s happening, but there’s no confirmation of that at this point,” said Murray.

Initially, the reports were that it was Tampa Bay that signed Meszaros, and that made enough sense. The Bolts’ defense is suspect and Meszaros would help them as they rebuild the entire blue line down there. But then came the revelations of the obvious: 1) Tampa is only about $3 million short of the salary cap (NHLNumbers.com says they’re at $53.445m), and 2) The compensation for an offer sheet in the neighborhood of and under $5,231,249 is a first-, second- and third-round pick in the ensuing year’s draft. Tampa traded their third-rounder to Pittsburgh for the rights to negotiate with Ryan Malone (success!).

So who signed Meszaros? The following is a list of teams that have all the picks necessary to sign him:

• Pittsburgh
• New Jersey
• New York Rangers
• New York Islanders
• Carolina
• Washington
• Atlanta
• Florida
• Detroit
• Columbus
• St. Louis
• Nashville
• Edmonton
• Vancouver
• Colorado
• Dallas
• Phoenix

Of those, only the Islanders, Caps, Panthers, Blue Jackets, Blues, Canucks, Avs and Coyotes have the cap space or room on their self-imposed spending limits to have signed Meszaros to a deal of this kind.

This part is me throwing crap at the wall, but I really think this is a move Phoenix would and probably should make. Their blue line is thin at the top (Ed Jovanovski, Derek Morris, Kurt Sauer and Zbynek Michalek make up the top four) and Morris is coming off the books after this season. Phoenix could also make a big step forward in the West this year and maybe, if they perform to their massive potential and things break as expected in the depths of the East’s basement, even have the pick fall lower than the 10-12 range.

The Coyotes also need to get someone to run the point on the power play and find a suitable replacement for traded-away Keith Ballard (not that I wouldn’t do that Jokinen deal again in a heartbeat).

Plus, the Coyotes are still below the cap floor of $40.3 million (at $39.067 million). Would it surprise me that it was someone other than the Coyotes? No. Most of the listed teams could use him (that Avs’ second pairing is hurting), but I think it’s the best fit.

AND ANOTHER THING:

“I think Mez is a potentially good young defenseman who had a bit of an off-year this past year, and we’ve asked their camp to entertain that in what we’re trying to do with him,” Murray said.

So that’s worth exploring. It would be tough to match the lofty expectations Meszaros set for himself with his 10-29-39 rookie campaign that featured him finishing +34(!) and certainly Murray is right to point out that the 2007-08 season wasn’t at that standard.

However, Meszaros was still the Sens’ best blue line threat with the man advantage (16 points was tied for the team lead with the likewise departed Wade Redden). A quick peak at a few stats sites show that Meszaros’ point totals have gone 39, 35, 36 with goal totals of 10, 7, 9. Pretty consistent there, no? So maybe it was his hits and blocked shots that declined? Not especially. His 101 hits and 100 blocked shots were both down from 124 and 143, respectively, in 2006-07, and 128 and 124 in his rookie season. Not a huge dropoff. Turnover ratios, you say? In 2005-06: -22, 2006-07: -47, 2007-08: -15. And while I don’t put much stock in plus-minus, he went from -15 last season to +5.

Basically, I don’t see Murray’s argument. From the look of things he seems to have become a smarter hockey player if nothing else, while holding more or less the same stat lines across the board. If Jeff Finger’s worth $3.5 million and Ron Hainsey’s worth $4.5 million, Meszaros is worth $5 million. Maybe not to the Sens, but to someone, and it’s disingenuous of Murray to say otherwise.

We’re now something like 40 days out from the start of the NHL season so I figure this is as good a time as any to start doing the season previews. This is mainly for two reasons: 1) I am lazy and there’s no way I’ll do one of these every day, and 2) This is early enough that if I just stop doing them entirely you’ll have forgotten by October anyway. Oh and I guess also to show off my near-infinite knowledge of the National Hockey League. I’ll be previewing the teams in reverse order of finish in the 2007-08 season. Please note, though, that this is the opinion of one man, however smart and handsome he may be.

St. Louis Blues, you’re on the clock.

Just like in this picture, E.J. has very little help around him this year.

Take a quick look at the St. Louis Blues website and you’ll notice something. There’s not a lot of content about being prepared to win again, or about a big-time free agent being excited to be on the team. Instead, it’s a lot of kids’ stuff.

“PROSPECTS HAVE SOMETHING TO PROVE,” screams the first headline. Clicking on “Learning the ropes,” brings you to a story about David Perron’s rookie season. Click on either of those and you’ll find a story on the right side of the page about T.J. Oshie being a leading Calder Candidate. Four stories in, there’s finally a story on a veteran, in this case new captain Eric Brewer.

The subtle point of this, of course, is to prepare Blues fans for a tough season. How tough? Their big free agent signing this summer was Andy Wozniewski. That’s how tough. And it’s not as though they didn’t have money to spend. Pending the contracts for Matt Foy and Brad Winchester, they’re still going to be about $7.5 million below the salary cap.

Not that it wasn’t tough last year. Fourth-worst record in the league and only 79 points last year. Brad Boyes and Paul Kariya were the team’s leading scorers, potting just 65 points each. Had Boyes, who popped in 43 goals last year to finish tied for fifth with Henrik Zetterberg (lofty company, that) in league goalscoring, had any type of help on his line, he would have recorded far more than 22 assists. As a result of this, the Blues were 26th in the NHL in goals per game at just 2.46 a night.

Their answer to help the offense this summer was apparently Foy, who had eight points in 28 games for Minnesota last year. He is apparently going to fill the vacuum left by the trade that sent Jamal Mayers to Toronto for a 2008 third-round pick (and boy are they hoping James Livingston works out with that pick). Not that incoming rookies T.J. Oshie or Lars Eller aren’t going to be very good players. They are, and we all saw what a pair of good rookies can do for a team in Chicago last year. But Oshie isn’t his University of North Dakota teammate Jonathan Toews, and Eller for sure isn’t Pat Kane.

Eller may have lit up the Swedish junior league his draft year (55 points in 39 games) and his skills are very, very good, but he only scored two points, both assists, last year playing up with the men of the SEL. How he’ll react to the NHL is up in the air, but my guess is that it won’t be jaw-dropping.

Oshie’s a different story. In the largely defensive world of American college hockey, The Oshie, as UND fans call him, scored 142 points in 128 games. That’s insane.

It doesn’t look like the team’s ability to keep the puck out of the net will improve much either. The Blues traded for former Nashville netminder Chris Mason, but his numbers (2.90, .898) last year were more or less in line with St. Louis’ goalie average last year, if not slightly worse (2.71, .900). Manny Legace, meanwhile, is one year slower. The only other netminder they have that’s anywhere near pro-ready, let alone NHL-ready, is 6-foot-7 rookie Ben Bishop, who had a lackluster final season at the University of Maine. Believe me when I tell you that Bishop needs a lot of AHL seasoning. He’d get lit up like Times Square by some of the scorers in the Central division (Zetterberg and Datsyuk, Kane and Toews, Nash, Radulov).

The defense, apart from adding 20-year-old T.J. Fast (that’s a lot of T.J.s!) from the Kings, is more or less unchanged from last year, and it’s still fairly young for an NHL defense. Its seven current players are an average of 25.4 years old.

None of this, mind you, is meant as a means of passing judgment. I know what they are, the Blues know what they are, and you probably do too. I’m just saying, they improved not-at-all in the course of their rebuilding, apart from whatever growth and improvement their rookies and sophomores make. The future is brightish for St. Louis, but it’s not blinding, and it’s pretty far off as well.

For an only occasionally entertaining club last year that had trouble drawing fans (just 83.9 percent of tickets sold last year, 24th in the league) isn’t going to be much more entertaining this year

More after the jump.

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If you're like me or every NHL player, you know someone that knows Mike Sillinger.

Mike Sillinger is the ultimate journeyman. A thread on HFBoards confirms this.

Since he began his career in the 1990-91 season with Detroit, he has only been on one team for an entire year eight times. He has been traded 12 times and played for 12 different teams. In the course of those journeys, he played with a lot of people. HFBoards poster “Axel” cooked up a list of everyone currently on an NHL roster Sillinger has ever played with, and it tops out at 561 players. FIVE HUNDRED SIXTY-ONE!

After some intensive studying at the end of last season, it was determined that almost every team in the league had someone on the roster that had played on the same team as Sillinger. The only exceptions were a few rookies on Dallas and Montreal. That’s three players in the whole league, the Habs’ Carey Price, and the Stars’ Mark Fistric and Matt Niskanen.

But now the circle is complete. The Stars recently signed Landon Wilson, who played with Sillinger in Phoenix in 2003, and the Habs signed Marc Denis, who played on Sillinger’s team in Columbus for two years.

Literally everyone in the NHL is two degrees from Mike Sillinger. Kevin Bacon, meanwhile, is insanely jealous.

For fun, here is Mike Sillinger’s hockey-reference page. It is insanely long.

Tie Domi is finally doing some good for the world. He’s helping to endorse a charity called Spread the Net, which helps buy mosquito nets for African families so that kids don’t get malaria. Seems like a good cause.

But here’s a commercial(?) for Spread the Net featuring Domi and Cuba Gooding, Jr. that’s just… surreal. Domi calls his commercial co-star “Q-ba,” which is not how you pronounce his name, Gooding calls himself Domi’s “photo negative” and then they go on a strange tangent about the amount of children they each have before closing with Gooding’s “classic” line from Jerry Maguire, slightly (and hilariously!) modified to be more appropriate to their current situation.

Oh it’s just a hoot.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u3FLfsbzns]

Get it?

The Sharks made one of the shrewder moves of their offseason today, locking up promising young defenseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic to a four-year, $12.4 million deal that kicks in after this season.

While some of the moves the Sharks have made at the blueline this offseason — signing Rob Blake, and trading for Brad Lukowich and Dan Boyle — have been questionable given the franchise’s strong depth at the back, especially in kids like Vlasic and the now-traded Matt Carle and Ty Wishart. They’ve gotten older without necessarily getting better throughout the defensive corps (Rob Blake has to be pushing 50 at this point, right?) and it seems like a pretty short-sighted plan from GM Doug Wilson, but this Vlasic signing is a very good move.

Vlasic, whom the Sharks selected with the second-round pick they got in the deal that sent Miikka Kiprusoff to Calgary, may not put up big offensive numbers (two goals, 14 points last year), but he eats minutes like someone who is not just 21 years old, and he blocks shots.

“We think he’s one of the best young defensemen in the game and he plays in all situations,” General Manager Doug Wilson said Wednesday. “And we think he’ll only get better playing with some of the players we’ve added this summer.”

Conventional wisdom out west has San Jose pairing him with Blake, and Vlasic likes the area and team and wanted to stay long-term. Makes sense for both sides.

In two years, we’ll all be grumbling about what a great deal Vlasic, at just $3.1 million a season, is for the Sharks.

"How did I get myself into this?"

Due to some unforseen delays (that EA promises is an issue on Microsoft’s end rather than their own), the NHL09 demo that was supposed to have been released this week is going to remain under wraps for a little while longer.

But fear not, video game hockey nerds! The fine folks over at 2k have released the demo for NHL2k9. For lack of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon when I should have been at work, I gave it a whirl for four or five periods.

Here’s my protracted hands-on thoughts on it:

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Handsy, Dono. Real handsy.

With NHLers in the Ottawa area looking for goalies to help them prepare for the upcoming season, sometimes things can get a little desperate. That’s why Chris Kelly, Chris Neil, Chris Phillips, Shean Donovan, Anton Volchenkov and Jason Smith and several other National Hockey League players ended up ripping shots at some eighth grader.

When a scheduled goalie didn’t show up on time to the training session, Chris Neil started scrambling. He stuck his head in the first locker room he could find, and asked the first available goalie with pads on if he would mind getting out on the ice with them. It just so happened that goalie was 13-year-old Christian Rusu.

Was it a step up from anything he had ever experienced before?
“More like a big leap,” he said as he removed his goalie mask, revealing his braces and the beginnings of a moustache.
“At first, I didn’t know what was going on in the drills because they were going so fast. It’s nothing like I have ever seen before. I came out to the top of my (goal crease), and, all of a sudden, I looked one way, then the other, and the puck was behind me and I was thinking, ‘Where did that come from?’”

Good to see they went easy on him.

As the session went on, Rusu got more comfortable and made a few saves (better than Dan Cloutier would have done). He even stopped Shean Donovan on a breakaway, which has to be the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever read in my life.

“He was really good,” Kelly said. “I’m sure it was fun for him and the boys were trying to get a rise out of him.”

Rusu goes back to class next week, where absolutely no one will believe his story, and he will surely be shunned by his peers.

REMEMBER 1994 EVERYONE?

For a long time, the only two red, white, and blue banner in the rafters at Madison Square Garden bore the number 1, that of goaltender Ed Giacomin, Rod Gilbert’s No. 7.

Giacomin was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989. The Blueshirts retired his number on March 15 of the same year. He was often spectacular for the New York Rangers in the late 1960s and early ’70s. He was a six-time All-Star and won the Vezina in 1971.

Gilbert’s number was retired in 1979 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame three years later. He scored almost a point a game in his 1,065-game career and never played for anyone else.

For 15 years, Giacomin and Gilbert stood alone. In 2004, they were joined by another Ranger great, Mike Richter. Then in 2006 came Mark Messier’s No. 11. Earlier this year, it was Brian Leetch’s No. 2. Legitimate Hall of Famers, all.

And now, the Rangers have announced, they will retire the numbers of three more Broadway Blue greats beginning in February. No. 9, which belonged to both Adam Graves and Andy Bathgate, and Harry Howell’s No. 3.

Adam Graves, really? The guy who had 616 points in 1152 career games? The guy who broke .75 points per game just twice in his career? The guy who’s only 10th all-time on the Rangers’ points list behind STEVE VICKERS? They’re REALLY stretching their definition of “great” if it includes Adam Graves.

At this point, the Rangers might as well retire the number of everyone who played on the 1994 team. That’d be fine with Bettman, too, as the NHL seems to have an inexplicable love affair with everything about that team. Try watching the NHL Network for an hour and see how many times Messier is doing his best Michael J Fox impression waiting for Bettman to say, “Captain Mark Messier, somethingsomethingsomething!”

Hint: Not less than five.

Meanwhile, the Rangers can retire all the numbers they want. I’m holding out for Jeff Beukeboom Night.

"And when Jeremy's not onscreen, everyone should be asking, 'WHERE'S JEREMY?'"

Jeremy Roenick has always felt that there’s one thing the hockey-loving public doesn’t get enough of: Jeremy Roenick.

As a result, he is more than happy to let everyone know he will be in the pilot of the new TNT show “Leverage,” which permiers this December.

Roenick already had done some on-camera work, listing previous appearances with “Hack” and “Ghost Whisperer,” and this week he will begin shooting a scene in “Leverage”, a new TNT production.

The show stars Oscar winner Timothy Hutton (pfft, for Ordinary People. Raging Bull got screwed.) as, and this is an actual plot to an actual television program on an actual network, “he leads a highly-skilled team of thieves, hackers and grifters who act as modern-day Robin Hoods.”

That doesn’t sound unwatchable at all. But what role will JR, an NHL thespian if there ever was one, have on the show?

“I’m pretty proud that’s the first scene of the series opener,” Roenick said. “I play a security guard who gets duped by a woman. I have five, six or seven lines.”

…

“The tricky part is finding the right roles and to look natural. You’ve got to get the mannerisms and facial expressions down. If you’re too stiff, you’re not believable. The best actors are the most believable. They completely change their personality. My role is smaller, but it’s still difficult.”

Truth be told, JR is really looking forward to an acting career once he’s done with hockey, because any time spent away from the precious, precious glow of the limelight makes his innards slowly rot.

“I’m good friends with producer-director Paul Bernard and he wants to turn me into an actor when I’m done with hockey,” Roenick said. “He and his brother Tom are big producers in Los Angeles.”

Wow, THE Paul Bernard! Best of luck, JR. And if you ever need acting advice, Teemu Selanne’s just a phone call away.

A few weeks ago, the Canucks announced a contest to design backup goalie Curtis Sanford’s new mask.

And now the first batch is available for the public to view. There are some doozies.

First is this one, which recalls great Canucks goaltenders of the past, like Dan Cloutier:

Then there’s this, which.. I don’t know. It’s something.

This next one didn’t actually make the contest, but HPL over at Something Awful cooked up possibly the best mask for a Canucks’ backup ever.

My favorite, though, is this one, submitted by “Bobby.” I have so many questions about it. First, what’s with the flames at the top? Second, is that eagle holding a branch that isn’t attached to a tree, or a miscolored and genetically mutated salmon? Third, will the mask itself have to be done in colored pencil? Finally, and most importantly, what is that lumberjack doing to that bear?

I am officially BEGGING Curtis Sanford to select this last one. It’s perfect in every way.