The Two-Line Pass

Is Carolina kidding? They fire Peter Laviolette after the Canes jump out to a 12-11-2 start. Am I missing something here? They’re THREE POINTS back of the division lead! THREE! In THAT division! Do you realize how easy it is to make up three points when you’re playing the Panthers, Lightning and Thrashers 18 times a year?

The fact that the ‘Canes are underperforming this year is hardly Laviolette’s fault. There are the injuries to Justin Williams and David Tanabe that have kept them out since the end of September, there’s Eric Staal’s hideous performance so far this season (he’s had exactly two multiple-goal games this season), there’s the fact that the team, on paper, is pretty goddamn bad. I mean, look at that roster. What’s anyone supposed to do with that? And yet they’re still a game above .500 because Laviolette is a damn good coach.

And the replacement is Paul Maurice? The guy that wasn’t good enough to get a Maple Leafs team like the one they had two years ago into the playoffs? The guy that Carolina already FIRED? He isn’t a good coach. He just isn’t. He’s had losing seasons in seven of his 10 in the NHL. You don’t call a guy like that and offer him a job, regardless of the fact that he helped take your team to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2001-02. It’s ridiculous. What, was Jacques Demers not available?

In the hopes that it’s not too late to squeeze Maurice out, I have composed a list of five better candidates for the job.

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The Lead

If Sean Avery really wants to help his team, he could get suspended before every game.

Despite Calgary having a large advantage in time of possession, shots and bulletin board material, the Stars improbably cobbled together their second consecutive win for the first time all year and handed Calgary just its fourth loss at home, 3-1.

In the first period especially, Calgary controlled much of the game’s tempo and flow, and Mike Cammalleri was making phenomenal passes every shift. But Flames forwards seemingly had no interest in putting their stick on the ice while in the slot and all the heroics went for nought. Shots after one period read 9-5 for Calgary, but it could’ve easily been 15 had the Flames not been so careless. Consequently, the 1-0 scoreline for Dallas, courtesy of a goal from Toby Petersen of all people, was more than a little frustrating.

The Flames did, however, capitalize on the only power play Dallas gave them all night, with David Moss scoring one second after Stephane Robidas finished serving a penalty (he hadn’t even gotten both feet out of the box yet) to level the game at 1:44 of the second period.

Marty Turco eventually turned aside 27 more shots over the final two periods, many from in close but none particularly threatening, and finished the night stopping 36 of 37. Fabian Brunnstrom’s goal at 7:53 of the second proved the eventual game-winner. Loui Eriksson added an empty netter.

Here’s why this was SUCH an impressive performance from the Stars: with the Sean Avery suspension, Dallas had just enough bodies to dress 18 skaters, 11 forwards and seven defensemen. That the Stars outworked the Flames in such a situation was a small miracle, that they won was a big one. They took one penalty all game, and while it cost them, it’s pretty impressive considering they came in averaging 17.6 penalty minutes per game, sixth most in the league.

The goals came from Petersen, who had just one coming into the game, and Brunnstrom, who had played just 1:16 in the Stars’ previous game. Dave Tippet has to be happy with the way the team responded to such adversity. The Suspension, injuries, a season of poor play and worse special teams numbers could have had the Stars hanging their heads and ready to get steamrolled. But they ground out an unlikely win at Calgary, and that has to feel great.

Now then, a word on the real headline from the Calgary/Dallas game: Sean Avery and the “sloppy seconds” comment.

Who cares?

Okay that was two words, but it’s pretty hard to condense it from there. Perhaps “So?” would have worked. Here’s why it’s ludicrous. Avery is suspended INDEFINITELY for a comment to the press, while Chris Pronger is free to elbow and stomp on whomever he likes with, y’know, general impunity. Sometimes he doesn’t even get suspended for it.

It reminds me of an old Avery interview I read from Player Magazine, wherein Avery is asked what is off limits in his voluminous trashtalking.

PLAYER: A lot of that is trash talking?

SA: Yeah. I guess I know how to hit certain guys’ sore spots.

PLAYER: Are there any rules to that?

SA: Kids are pretty much the only thing that’s off limits for me. Everything else is fair game. Especially wives and girlfriends.

So do you think this is something Avery hasn’t brought up to Dion Phaneuf before, or Mike Komisarek, or Jarret Stoll? You don’t think Avery hasn’t mentioned to each of them, in passing, that he has, in fact, slept with their puckbunny girlfriends? It’s never come up? Please. And I bet they can take it. EVERYONE takes EVERYTHING Avery says with a grain of salt. It’s been that way forever. Why care now?

This is such a ridiculous reputation call that has been snowballing for months, between criticizing individual members of the media, basically calling Bettman an idiot (rightly so, in some cases), flipping off cameras and generally being kind of a dick — all as per his job title, by the way — has finally caught up to him in the league’s eyes. Plus, there’s no precedent for this, so the “throw the book at him!” attitude seems a bit of an overreaction.

Avery’s suspended indefinitely. Meanwhile, Ryan Hollweg played for the Leafs tonight. Who’s worse for the league?

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A lot is being made of tonight’s Dallas/Calgary game because it will be the first time the two teams face eachother since Sean Avery called Jarome Iginla boring.

TSN, obviously, has been banging the drum on this for a few days now. What everyone, from Flames fans to the mainstream hockey media, has done is take Sean Avery’s quote out of context to make it seem as though Iginla was somehow boring.

Our commissioner hasn’t realized that he needs to probably do a better job of marketing the game and certainly some of the players in it.  Nobody cares about Jarome Iginla and guys like that. They’re just not exciting enough. They don’t bring enough to the game.

Obviously, out of context, that doesn’t look so good. “Nobody cares about Jarome Iginla!?” cries the media. “BUT HE SCORED 50 GOALS TWICE!!!” And that’s certainly true. But of course, the video of the interview is “no longer available,” so proper context is difficult to ascertain. However, I’m one of those Flames fans that’s always eager to play the insult card (a “no one hits my brother but me” type of thing), and in watching the clip originally, I just didn’t see the big deal. My feeling was that he was saying that Iginla deserved to be marketed better and that everyone AT THE NHL thought Iginla was boring.

And really, that depends on how you define “not exciting.” Does Iginla score flashy, highlight-reel goals every night like Ovechkin or Toews? No. Does he go through four guys and make a perfect pass to a waiting teammate for a tap-in goal like Crosby or Kane? No. Does he even demolish people like Phaneuf? Not really. What Iginla does is simple: quietly go about being excellent. As a Flames fan, Iginla could murder a child right in front of me and I’d just go, “Oh, you!” He’s a great leader, great player and a great guy. Classiest guy in the league, by all accounts. Google it. But is he really THAT exciting? Quick, name five exciting things Jarome Iginla has done this year. Apart from being awesome at hockey, I’m coming up with nothin’. As far as I’m concerned, he’s diplomatic to a fault.

“He can say whatever he wants,” Iginla said. “I think the NHL has done a better job, especially since the lockout, with the players - of getting the players out there.

That, of course, isn’t especially true. Still, everyone on the planet would take boring ol’ Jarome Iginla on their team any day of the week because of his skill and that attitude.

That being said, Avery didn’t mean it like that. Not that we’d know. In all the fervent quote-gathering TSN has done for this story, no one bothered to give Avery a jingle and say, “You really mean that?” Of course not. He’s the guy that dated actresses and interned at Vogue. What a dick! If TSN was going to bother to dredge up out-of-context quotes from two months ago for this game and get everyone to comment on them again, the fact that Avery’s take all this time later isn’t being discussed seems awful dubious.

Instead, TSN just wants to take a dump on Avery, which is what this is really about. To wit, Iginla said, “We haven’t even talked about it for weeks,” which shows that it’s a non-issue. TSN did helpfully add these facts:

Iginla is enjoying another typically excellent season, leading the Flames in goals, assists and points while his team continues to battle the surprising Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Wild for the Northwest Division lead.

Meanwhile Avery leads the NHL in penalty minutes …  In addition Avery was called out by teammate Mike Modano for his selfish play and embarrassing antics after a loss to the Bruins in early November.

“Tonight, it was idiotic and stupid,” Modano told reporters after Avery and teammate Steve Ott argued with referees and fans. “It was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve seen. If that’s what we’re going for, then they need to find me an office job.”

“It was dumb penalties, dumb situations, that’s kind of been the trend all season,” Modano said. “There’s no mental toughness. We’re allowing the refs to get involved in the game with and spending more energy on them than the details of winning the game.”

Because that’s important to this non-story.

We all know Sean Avery is an agitator on and off the ice and says WACKY things that piss people off. If Iginla had gotten over it already, shouldn’t everyone else?

The Lead

Maybe Brian Burke was just what the Leafs needed.

I mean, obviously he’s not going to have to great an impact on the on-ice product and he just started Saturday, but it’s difficult to argue with results. Two days after beating up on the Flyers pretty bad, the Leafs went to California, possibly with an achin’ in their heart, and mounted an acceptably solid, hard-working comeback to win 3-1.

Obviously the Leafs have worked hard all year — they’ve been among the hardest workers I’ve seen so far this season — but they’ve had little to show for it, and, given the talent up and down that roster, they’ve probably gotten what they deserve from a personnel standpoint.

But it was interesting to me that during LeafsTV’s extensive interview with Brian Burke, he brought up an interesting concept while discussing his being in charge of Team USA’s 2010 Olympic roster. Herb Brooks, who of course was in charge of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team and all that, was a master motivator and got everything he could out of a group of college players. You know the story. But what Burke said was that Brooks didn’t have the best players. Far from it. But he had the best team, and Burke, by implication, seems committed to letting his current team take a whack at succeeding without any big player movements or shakeups. That’s certainly admirable.

But if Burke’s looking to fire up another miracle and somehow get this clattering hodgepodge of mediocre players anywhere near a playoff spot, his team is going to have to work just as hard as it did tonight to even have a chance. Maybe even harder.

Not giving up goals like the one Alex Frolov scored to open the scoring 57 seconds into the game is a good place to start. (Pro tip: You can’t let a guy like Frolov get behind your defense.) The Leafs are very lucky indeed that the Kings are still as young as they are and that Anze Kopitar hasn’t looked himself of late, because if you give up a goal that early to most NHL teams, especially those in the Western Conference, there’s a damn good chance that you never come back from it. The Leafs, to their credit, did immediately settle down and didn’t give up another goal for the rest of the night, though they did allow another couple breakaways that, had it not been for Vesa Toskala standing on his head, might’ve cost them.

On the other end, Jason LaBarbera, of all people, was also playing remarkably well. He stopped a couple Leafs rushes in the first period (one on Mikhail Grabovski and one on Matt Stajan and Nik Antropov) and kept the Kings up for two full periods, but the Leafs were working too hard and doing a surprising amount of little things right. Except, of course, for when Wayne Simmonds helped put both Tomas Kaberle and Pavel Kubina in the box at the same time for unsportsmanlike conduct (a penalty shared by Simmonds) and hooking, respectively. Ron Wilson had to have been a little perturbed that his top defensive pairing was sitting in the box because of something a fourth-line agitator did, especially when it results in a 4-on-3 power play for LA near the end of the second period. But the Leafs killed it, and used that to shift the momentum headed into the third.

It was Stajan that finally broke through the Los Angeles defense 10 seconds into a 5-on-3 that was the result of tripping calls to Sean O’Donnell and Dustin Brown. The goal came with three seconds remaining in O’Donnell’s infraction, and Brown could only watch from the box as Grabovski converted on the remainder of that power play. That was pretty much it. Jeff Finger, who had a shockingly great night, added an empty netter.

But this was the blue print for how the Leafs have to win hockey games, minus the whole giving-up-a-goal-less-than-a-minute-in thing. Work their asses off for 60 minutes and grind one out. Had this been an LA team that was playing a little better at the moment, or had Toskala not been outstanding in making 32 saves, it might’ve been a different result. But the Leafs, and Burke, have to be happy with four points from two games regardless of opponent or circumstance. Work hard and keep the game simple. Herbie would’ve liked that.

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I was watching this fight between Zach Stortini and Krys Barch from yesterday’s Stars/Oilers game, and it wasn’t bad. Never mind the post-Thanksgiving miracle that is Stortini not trying to bearhug his opponent to death like King Kong Bundy.

What makes it an all-time classic is the line the announcers get out right as the fight ends. In explaining that Barch’s job — sticking up for teammates who are more or less indefensible — was one of the toughest in sports, the color commentator says, “Krys Barch’s first job was working something called ‘the anus vaccuum’ on the killfloor of a slaughterhouse.’”

I don’t think I even want to know what that means, but one suspects David Frost is involved in some way.

By the way, Krys Barch is to be known as The Anus Vacuum henceforth, obviously.

Because I tend to not blog on the weekends (or in this case, almost a week), 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 that played. 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 read an article today from the Canadian Press about the NHL’s responsibility to the youth of Canada to protect them from getting concussed.

I was, as you can imagine, pretty fucking shocked. More of that bullshit about how video games and bands are a bad influence on kids and if they see the guy from GTA4 rape and murder a prostitute, they, too, will rape and murder a prostitute in real life just as soon as they get the chance. It’s a stupid, buck-passing argument. We can all agree on this.

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