Tonight’s 6-0 loss by Anaheim to the mighty Boston Bruins featured just about every reason to possibly hate the Ducks that you could come up with.
They were taking cheapshots at Boston players, there were two boring-ass fights (if you stayed awake during that George Parros/Shawn Thornton tilt, you were either Shawn Thornton or George Parros), Corey Perry spent much of the night diving all over the place, they took a ton of penalties (two guys had over 10 minutes each), and people acted like they were a good team despite their lack of anything resembling solid play.
The good news, of course, is that the Bruins f’n steamrolled them. A six-goal shutout win is always nice, but it’s even better when the Ducks drastically outshoot their opponent and get outscored by a multiple of INFINITY. Plus, the turdiest troika in all of hockey — Perry, Ryan Getzlaf and Chris Pronger — were a combined minus-6.
If only Zdeno Chara had checked Perry in such a way that he landed in the third row of the premium seats, this would have been a perfect game for someone that hates the Ducks.
As we all know by now, the Capitals, in a desperate bid to get anyone in the Beltway area to go out with Jeff Schultz (owner of the NHL’s least proportional ears), have started have started Club Scarlet, a club for female Capitals fans only.
Tom Renney had to go, obviously. Glen Sather’s gotta cover his own ass for all those terrible free agent and personnel moves, so scapegoating Renney (who did himself no favors with his insane line-juggling) was bound to happen.
New theory: John Tortorella’s job isn’t to get the Rangers anywhere worth going this year, it’s keeping the ship on a straight course for the Port of Noplayoffs. Think about it. The Rangers are 10th in the league, but five points and a couple games in hand out of 18th. They’re a horribly incomplete team with loads of bad contracts and they’re going nowhere. Why bother to change that at this late juncture?
Glen Sather is not a stupid man (well…), and he may have learned from the lessons of the past.
A certain general manager of the Atlanta Thrashers once inexplicably saved his job, squeaking appallingly mediocre awful team into the playoffs by making a few trades that badly damaged his franchise’s future. The Thrashers, a mere two years later, are a few months away from back-to-back bottom-three finishes in the league. If Don Waddell still has a job come Draft day, it will either be through a miracle or indifference.
Sather does not want this to happen to him. So he now gets to have this team coast farther and father down in the standings until they crash out of the playoffs in a spectacular blaze of glory — maybe they squeeze out a few trades by the deadline, even! — and, at the end of the season, he can just throw his hands up and go, “F’n Renney, man. Ruined the goddamn team!”
That said, it looks like Tortorella’s off to a great start on Broadway with this 2-1 shootout loss.
Somewhere in Montreal, Bob Gainey is wringing his hands with great relish.
As anyone who’s read HFBoards over the past two or three can tell you, Jaroslav Halak has been on the auction block for what seems like decades. It was always “(Excellent second-line center/puckrushing defenseman) for Halak + a 2nd in (following year’s draft).” And despite literally hundreds of such rumors circulating amongst the internetizens, no such trade has ever come about because, well, no one would be stupid enough to trade anything of that value for a mediocre backup goalie.
QUI EST-IL BIEN QUE RIRE EST MAINTENANT?
Including tonight’s 34-save shutout over the Canucks, Halak has allowed 15 goals in his last five games. I know that doesn’t sound impressive, but he has also faced 203 shots in that time. TWO HUNDRED AND THREE, ALRIGHT? That’s a save percentage of .926! He’s also 3-2-0 in those games which, given how bad Montreal has been for the last… oh, I don’t know… season, is fairly impressive. He’s winning 60 percent of his games! Wow!
In addition to these stats, the above picture makes me suspect Halak has gained some sort of ability to manipulate pucks with his mind1
So Gainey can now pick up the phone and answer with confidence that yes, Halak is available, yes, he has psychic powers not unlike Professor X, and yes, he will take that puckrushing defenseman you enquired about. You’ll just have to add in Sid Crosby and a couple of firsts.
For 52-plus minutes, we got some scoreless hockey that would make the Devils of the late 1990s and early 2000s green with envy.
No real high-quality chances until Devin Setoguchi’s goal and only 54 total shots.
Well, that’s just about all I can glean from the box score, anyway. I spent most of the game reading Sophocles (not bragging). Aeschylus can hang onto his Oresteia, cuz I’m all set with it. For my money there was no better Greek playwright than Sophocles. The Theban Plays. That’s where it’s at.
Oh, right. Hockey.
Evgeni Nabokov made 29 saves to pick up his fifth shutout of the year and the Setoguchi goal was one that Marty Turco would likely want back. Sure, he stepped around some guys but the shot was nothing special.
Boring game overall though. Not a fight or anything crazy. Straightforward 1-0 game that wasn’t even really a goaltending battle. And I love a goaltending battle, believe you me.
The best part of the game (what I saw of it) was when Jonathan Cheechoo came out after the first intermission and was tricked by Dave Tippet into scoring goals on a bunch of fans that he believed to be the Dallas Stars. Upon realizing his mistake, however, he was so ashamed that he decided to kill himself in the wasteland by throwing himself on a broken stick given to him by Joe Thornton, but not before calling for his death to be avenged against the sons of Mike Modano. The rest of the game was spent with Patrick Marleau and Jere Lehtinen arguing over what to do with Cheechoo’s body.
The whole thing was about the second-line wing’s place in modern society
Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. And, well, 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.
By the time you read this, I think we’ll be something like nine days and change out from the 2009 NHL Trade Deadline. Exciting!
And what a way to kick it off: the Senators traded Dean McAmmond and the San Jose Sharks’ first-round pick (so call it No. 28-30?) for Mike Comrie and Chris Campoli. Woo! Wake the kids and give them the big news. Comrie’s headed back to Ottawa.
Now, this might surprise you, but I am not a National Hockey League executive. Far from it, in fact.
I am, however, a rational human being, and thus find this trade to be, ummm.. ridiculous. The Senators, at the time of the trade, were 13 points out of a playoff spot and had just lost Dany Alfredsson to a fractured jaw (albeit for one game).
So tonight one great team played in a good game and the best player on that team did something amazing.
Congratulations to you, Alex Ovechkin, for saving us all from an otherwise yawn-inducing night of boring drudgery.
Ovechkin scored this goal and it was awesome. His Capitals eventually rallied to beat Montreal in a shootout 4-3.
But other than that and a Marian Hossa fight(!)? Dick.
Rangers/Islanders? Couldn’t think of a worse game. Columbus/St. Louis? I stand corrected. Detroit/Nashville? Who didn’t see that blowout coming. Los Angeles/Anaheim? Eh.
Just an underwhelming night, y’know? No slight against the fine players from any of those teams (and there are more than a few), but really, if you like a team that didn’t play tonight, you have more or less zero reason to turn on the TV.
Thank god for Alex Ovechkin, man. You really can’t say that enough.
Pittsburgh had a nice afternoon date with the dead-last Islanders and you’d've thought they’d come out skating hard and fast and using their copious skill to dominate the often-shaky New York defense. Gotta figure they’d prefer to have done better than a 3-2 overtime loss to the worst team in the NHL.
But, well, uh.. I dunno what happened. They only scored two goals in regulation on 37 shots but still allowed 30. Sid Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, despite having 50-plus minutes of combined ice time, totaled just two points.
All of which is to say that all of Dan Bylsma’s talk of the Penguins using their speed was sadly not taken to heart by his new charges, and it would appear that, even after one game, the team has not been suddenly shocked into playing what you’d call “well.”
Losing to the Islanders is tough to swallow at any point in the season, but when the team seemed so listless and more mediocre than it should have been, for any number of reasons (injuries, coaching, etc.), it’s tough to imagine why they wouldn’t be all fired up to kick the absolute hell out of the poor, unsuspecting Islanders.
But instead they didn’t score early, or even the first goal of the game, and they made Joey MacDonald look like Dominik Hasek. Great start to the new era. And what’s that? Therrien still thinks these clowns are going to make the playoffs?
No wonder they don’t let him coach in the NHL any more.
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 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.
Okay sure, Mike Green had his streak of consecutive games with a goal scored snapped today against the Panthers, but he scored 10 goals in his previous eight games, and one imagines it’s going to be a long time before you see anyone do that again.
3 Comments | 
Good night | 
Permalink
Posted by TLP
Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. And, well, 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.
