The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

The Sharks are an astonishingly good team, the Red Wings are very good as well. The Blackhawks have a great deal going for them. And all of them pale in comparison with the Boston Bruins, who just two seasons ago finished 23rd in the league.

Tonight, Boston, playing its third road game in four days, dismantled Pittsburgh on the way to a 5-2 victory that came with surgical precision. Every mistake the Penguins made was paid for in blood.

Boston’s first goal came on a second-period power play when the Bruins overloaded the right side of the ice and, after PJ Axelsson mishandled a pass, he faked toward the corner and with the help of a forward down low, drew both Pittsburgh defenders below the faceoff circle and to the left of Marc-Andre Fleury. What every Penguin on the ice missed was Zdeno Chara sneaking onto the backdoor like a shifty forward half his size, that is until he shoveled home a seeing-eye pass from Axelsson to pull the Bruins even. Marc Savard sniped another power play goal a few minutes later to put the Bruins up 2-1.

Soon after, Pascal Dupuis put a slapshot into Mach 5 to beat Tim Thomas high to the glove side and tie the game again, but like using conventional weapons on Godzilla, it only made the Bruins angry. Phil Kessel scored on a tap-in 1:30 later and Martin St. Pierre and Dennis Wideman added third-period insurance goals to ice the game. And it all looked so incredibly easy. Tonight, they SILENCED Sid Crosby and Evgeni Malkin. The former had an assist on the Dupuis goal that was an individual effort, the latter had dick, and they combined for a nice minus-3 rating.

They now have the same number of points (60) as league-leading San Jose, which only leads the league on the formality of its one game in hand, but it’s not too far into the hazy past where San Jose looked all but uncatchable. The reason, of course, is that Boston is now undoubtedly the best team in hockey. In November and December, they lost an incredible TWO games in regulation, and this is a team that got off to a 2-2-3 start. In its last 30 games, Boston is 26-3-1, a winning percentage of .883(!).

The Bruins have scored the most goals (137, five ahead of Detroit and 11 ahead of San Jose), the and allowed the fewest (82, two ahead of San Jose and six ahead of Chicago, both of which have played fewer games).

They have the best goaltending tandem in hockey — Tim Thomas has a line of 2.04/.935 in 22 games and Manny Fernandez has a 2.02/.930 in 16.

They’re arguably as deep at forward as Detroit or San Jose and while they don’t have the singular star power provided by your Crolkins and Semvechkins and Datsutterbergs, you have to feel like the contributions of Marc Savard (12-34-46), David Krejci (13-27-40) and Phil Kessel (23-16-39) are pretty outstanding from any point of view from which you choose to view them. Blake Wheeler and Milan Lucic are playing pretty well too. And that’s not even counting the man-games they’ve lost to injury. Patrice Bergeron’s a guy any GM in the league would take in a heartbeat, and he’s missed the last few games of this nifty little nine-game winning streak the Bruins are on. Chuck Kobasew’s missed 12 games, Marco Sturm’s missed 19, and they’re both worth about .65 points a game. Not that the Bruins need it.

And the Bruins blue line is stacked as well. Zdeno Chara’s reputation speaks for itself. The guy was a Norris finalist last year, he eats big minutes and he’s a phenomenal leader on and off the ice. Dennis Wideman is the most underrated No. 2 defenseman in the National Hockey League, and he has more points than Chara. Aaron Ward has played well when he’s been healthy, Mark Stuart’s developing into a very nice stay-at-home defenseman in his own right, and the rotating collection of youngsters filling in for whichever defenseman is injured on a given night has never looked entirely out of place.

The Bruins have won nine in a row, and all but three of those have been at home. Six of those have been on back-to-back nights. They’ve lost five games in regulation all year. All despite a rash of injuries to several important players. And let’s hear the arguments that someone’s better.

The Bruins played Detroit already and beat them 4-1. No problem. They played Chicago too, controlled the entire game and won in a shootout, 2-1. The result was slightly better than Chicago deserved. They won’t play San Jose until Tuesday Feb. 10 in Boston, but with the way the Sharks are playing lately, they might not even be in this discussion by the time Big Joe Thornton and Co. rumble back into town.

In the calendar year of 2008, the Bruins went 50-18-12 in the regular season, winning 112 points from 80 games. What Claude Julien has done on Causeway St. is truly amazing.

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I was reading the Calgary Sun this afternoon when I stumbled upon this story about the contents of the basement of Brent Burns’ house. While the subject struck me as odd, the basement’s inhabitants are even odder.

He’s got birds, huskies, cats and a big saltwater fish tank that includes a shark and poisonous lionfish — the only venomous creature in his house. The snakes are locked away safely in an escape-proof basement at the 9,100-sq.-ft. home in which the 23-year-old has lived for more than a year.

Creepy as hell. If you want to see someone else who had an escape-proof basement, pick up a copy of Silence of the Lamb or read a book about a certain Chicago-based clown.

Up to 40 snakes were in his basement last spring, but he’s also breeding his pets.

After a little bit of digging, I found out that it gets even weirder.

“I love being in there,” Burns said. “I could be in there all day. [Susan] yells at me. On days off, I’m down there like eight, 10 hours just feeding them, cleaning their cages.

I guarantee that Brent Burns becomes the snake-owning male equivalent of a crazy cat lady before he turns 30, and one day 30 or 40 years down the line we’ll hear about how he was eaten whole by a boa constrictor while trying to force it to have sex with a Burmese python.

The Lead

It should be noted that I’m a fan of defense-first hockey. I don’t think the trap was detrimental to the health of the sport, I don’t find the style pioneered by New Jersey to be upsetting in any way, and I would certainly prefer to see a 1-0 game than a 5-4 game any night of the week.

That said, there isn’t a team as eye-bleedingly boring, as rage-inducing or as generally unpleasant to watch as the Minnesota Wild have been for pretty much the entire month of December.

Their 2-1 loss to Calgary tonight wasn’t so much a defensive struggle as it was a study in attacking ineptitude by Minnesota and a spectacular goaltending performance from Wild backup Josh Harding. While Calgary only put 29 shots on net (not the most jaw-dropping of shot totals, admittedly), Harding made several point-blank saves including one flurry on a late Calgary power play when it was still 1-1 where he stopped four or five shots right on the doorstep while the Minnesota defense simply stood around, seemingly asking, “Oh should we have picked that guy up? And him too?” while Harding sprawled from one side of the crease to the other.

The problem, though, started as a symptomless affliction in October after Minnesota opened at 7-2-1 in their first 10 despite winning by two or more just twice and averaging just 2.5 goals in those games. In their next 10, a slight sniffled appeared; they were 5-5-0 with a pair of shootout wins and scored three goals or more just four times.

And now whatever problem the Wild have is settling into the lungs. In Games 21-30, the Wild went 3-6-1 and, while they scored four, six, five and four in the first four games of that stretch, they netted a total of seven in the following six. In Games 31-35 (No. 35 being tonight’s loss), the Wild are 2-3-0 and just playing dreadfully unwatchable hockey. No attacking flair whatsoever, even by Minnesotan standards, and it wasn’t as though Calgary played especially good shutdown hockey. The Wild simply have no one that can put the puck in the net. In fact, aside from the Islanders, no one in the NHL has a worse record than Minnesota’s since Dec. 1.

They’re playing so badly that even though they’re a team for which I have no great dislike, I firmly believe they deserve to be right where they are: dead last in the Northwest. I no longer even feel bad that they’re going to trade Gaborik for peanuts. Their defensive style is just that offensive.

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Yeah, pretty fuckin' much.

Because I tend to not blog on the weekends, here is a feature that will run through the entire season. It aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact about each team. And hell, there’s a ton of other crap for me to blather on about too. And yes, I’m totally ripping off just about every other blogger ever’s weekly column, but that’s something you’ll have to deal with on your own time.

Danger: This post contains language that some people might not like. This will be the only thing on the site that regularly does so.

I don’t get why World Juniors is so entertaining. On paper, you wouldn’t watch these hockey games with a nail gun to your temple. Yeah, great, one-sided blowouts for a week straight, then good hockey starts. Know what? Come get me in a week.

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With the year finally winding down, we can now look back on the prior 350-something days and start to put together some conclusive feelings about them. It seems, to me at least, that this has been literally the stupidest calendar year of hockey in maybe a decade.

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The Lead

Forget all the dickpunching and whining and diving for which Sidney Crosby’s been called out lately. It’s become quite clear that the guy plays with a different rulebook than most other NHL players, and that’s just one of those things you have to accept as a fact of life. It’s the same reason elite pitchers get strike zones you could drive a truck through and NBA defenses couldn’t properly cover Michael Jordan.

So when Crosby reached out and poked at an Evgeni Malkin knuckleball that was dangerously close to being a high stick and scored the against Buffalo in overtime to win 4-3, was there any doubt whatsoever that the goal would stand?

It was a marginal call to be sure. One of those ones where Penguins fans would likely see it as close but clearly a legal play while Sabres fans broke down the footage like the Zapruder Film. It would, of course, be very difficult to make a proper judgment given the available angles. But because of the Crosby factor, what the hell, let’s call it a goal and hit the bar. The officials could huddle around monitors or get the war room in Toronto breaking everything down, but the eventual result, regardless of whether or not it was a high stick, was so plain. It’s not like this was Ryan Stone tipping a puck home. Crosby hadn’t scored in nine games and why not, right? The Pens needed the win anyways.

I’m not even saying it wasn’t a goal or, even if he had played it with a high stick, there was sufficient evidence to overrule the call on the ice. I like Crosby just fine and I have no love for either the Sabres or Penguins. But this is the kind of thing that stokes the ever-burning fires of deep-seated Crosby hatred among NHL fans, particularly those in the Eastern Conference. The calls always go the Kid’s way and they always will. Everyone just needs to accept that. We’ll all be better people for it.

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Because I tend to not blog on the weekends, here is a feature that will run through the entire season. It aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact about each team. And hell, there’s a ton of other crap for me to blather on about too. And yes, I’m totally ripping off just about every other blogger ever’s weekly column, but that’s something you’ll have to deal with on your own time.

Danger: This post contains language that some people might not like. This will be the only thing on the site that regularly does so.

I’ve been sick of Mats Sundin since July or so, and now that he’s signed with Vancouver I wish everyone would just shut up about him.

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The Lead

At the risk of angering both people who bother to read Good Night on a nightly basis, I have a confession. I only watched the Bruins game tonight because I went to an art show — I start my internship at Vogue next summer haw haw! — and at some point I have to just wash my hands of every, “Boy these Bruins sure are a top-notch team,” post I am backed into making.. at least for a while.

Yeah, they’re a hell of a goddamn hockey club and even when they suck they score eight goals and win anyways. David Krejci had a hat trick and I think he’s like the fifth Bruin to have one this year (I know for sure Kessel, Lucic and Wheeler had one each but I feel like I’m forgetting someone and don’t care to look it up). Not that the game wasn’t fun to watch and featured 13 goals and a couple fights, but there’s just no other way to say, “They’ll beat you any way they want!” that no one else has said. At some point you have to stop looking at your computer screen and going “I have to write like 600 words on these guys winning AGAIN,” and tell yourself no.

Watching a good team gets pretty damn boring sometimes. That picture’s pretty funny though, right?

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The Lead

Earlier tonight, I was trying to compose my thoughts about Trevor Linden for this thing here and, I dunno, it made me feel kind of conflicted. I mean, the guy played for the Canucks for like 17 years, and as a Flames fan, especially one that still remembers the first round in ‘94, it’s not easy to line up with him on that.

As such, and because I’m not a fan of the Canucks, it feels more than a little strange (and frankly a bit inappropriate) that I’m going to say what I’m about to say.

As a hockey fan, how can you not love and respect Trevor Linden? A good kid outta Medicine Hat that only ever wanted to play the game and help the community. You’ll never hear anyone say a bad word about Linden, who gave so freely of his time and energy. Not from the fiercest of opponents, not from a fan on the street, not from anybody. Trevor Linden always exuded genuine, honest class. He is the perfect ambassador for not only the sport of hockey, but sport in general. All professional athletes should aspire to be what Trevor Linden always was, is and will be.

He never scored 50 goals and he never sniffed 100 points. He didn’t play his entire career in Vancouver. That doesn’t matter, though. Trevor Linden will always be the greatest Canuck to pull on the sweater.

This video, which ran tonight ahead of the Canucks’ fitting 4-1 win over Edmonton, says more about what he means to Vancouver — both the franchise and the city, as a player and a person — than I ever could:

Thanks for everything, No. 16. You earned it all and more.

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Last night I mentioned Iginla’s awesome goal that went off the inside of his glove and in. Well, reader/YouTube hockey legend DayWalk3r sent along this video of TSN’s top 10 goals scored off body parts. Pretty outstanding stuff.