The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Okay, I took like 100 allergy medicines a few hours ago and they’re reaaaally starting to sink in here, so I need to make sure what I saw earlier tonight was correct…

It was Game 7. The third-seeded Devils. At home. Up 3-2. Just 80 seconds to go. Best goalie ever. Best defensive team ever.

And they LOSE? To CAROLINA? On a goal by ERIC STAAL?

Look, I understand the Hurricanes played New Jersey real tight all year, but this is terrible. There are no words for how embarrassing this is. These goals that beat Marty Brodeur were both from bad angles and really, I don’t know how either went in.

The good news was that both teams brought it tonight, I guess. Excellent hockey game. But the way the Devils lost is seriously unconscionable.

I honestly don’t even know what to say, really. And this allergy medicine isn’t helping me think with any great degree of lucidity (although I was able to use the word “lucidity” properly so who knows what goes on?). I honestly just don’t get it. I like Killa Cam Ward and everything, but how does he outduel Marty freaking Brodeur?

Here’s some more bad news, by the way. You’ve got two days without hockey with which to deal. Regular season baseball or the NBA playoffs are our fallbacks.

That, like the Devils loss, is totally unacceptable.

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The Lead

So.

Your team pretty much never wins playoff series and never lives up to the hype it always gets. Your best player by far has a reputation for being more or less Casper the Friendly Ghost come April. You have a rookie coach.

And you thought winning the President’s Trophy was going to help?

Nope, it didn’t. You’re still the San Jose Sharks. And you always will be.

Because in an era of massive roster turnover, the Sharks have remained shockingly static. Of the 19 players wearing a San Jose uniform tonight, nine appeared for them the 2005-06 season, and another three matriculated into the NHL with the franchise.

This is a Sharks team with an identity. And that identity is “lovable losers.” Because no matter how well they did in the regular season and how many morons (including myself) had them going deep in the playoffs, there was always that doubt that, well, they were still gonna crap all over themselves. I just didn’t think it would be this early.

The aforementioned best player, Joe Thornton? Yeah, he was exactly who you expect Joe Thornton to be in the playoffs: one shot, no points. Same goes for team captain Patrick Marleau. And Evgeni Nabokov never put the team in a position to win.

Know whose fault this is? Doug Wilson’s. He thought all he needed to make his team not-suck in the postseason was firing Ronnie Wilson? Sorry, that’s not enough to scrub five postseasons’ worth of Loser Stink™ off Marleau and Nabby. Blow it up, buddy. This ain’t workin’.

So that’ll do it for the President’s Trophy-winning San Jose Sharks, the Chicago Cubs of the National Hockey League.

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The Lead

And thus the 100th (well, 99th) season of Les Glorieux ends not with a bang befitting the Best Team in Hockey History, but rather a soft, impotent whimper befitting the team that so spectacularly crapped the bed for more or less an entire season.

And how poetic, too, that it was the mighty Bruins of Boston, Kings of the East and Conquerer of All, who put the Bleu et Blanc et Rouge out of its pitiable misery with yet another 4-1 win that was, perhaps, even easier than the lopsided scoreline belies.

I mean, you would have thought that a team with the Habs’ amount of talent, that took the East with so little effort just one year ago, would have at least put up a fight. It was, after all, the season of wonderful memories of Cup Champions past. It seemed like any time anyone turned over to a Habs game, they were trotting out a fourth-line guy that won 14 Cups in 12 years to drop the first puck while the current-day Canadiens stood around wearing ridiculous uniforms before losing 3-1 on Hockey Night in Canada to, like, the Thrashers or someone.

It seems like the mere aura of all those warm memories — broadcast countless times on RDS in all their fuzzy, buzzy black-and-white glory, no doubt — would have at least transfered to the 100th iteration of Les Habitants through osmosis. I bet if you added it all up, the number of Cups won by former Canadiens that were honored this season stretched well into the thousands. You’d think the spirits of Rocket Richard and Toe Blake and Jacques Plante would have worked some form of other-worldly magic to at least have one of the games in Montreal, the celebrated hockey city of old, not be a total blowout.

And yet here we are. Can the Canadiens really have just been handed their marching orders by the Bruins? Can it really have been just four games that decided the series? Can they have really given up four goals a night? Can they have really scored just two themselves? The ghosts of 100 years of hockey excellence surely looked on tonight, etherial arms folded in consternation, ghostly heads buried in embarrassment, vaporous mouths agape in shock. Their brilliant past, so exalted for close to eight months, spat upon by a bunch of no-trying layabouts who surely wouldn’t have even been good enough to lace Yvonne Cournoyer’s skates.

So shameful. So hilarious.

What’s French for “sweep?”

(…And you thought I’d go on and on about the Flames.)

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The Lead

Would that we were all as outstanding as Alex Burrows was tonight.

In the Canucks’ extremely fun, outstanding 3-2 overtime win to complete a sweep of the St. Louis Blues, Burrows stood as a man among boys. He scored the Canucks’ second goal, as well as the overtime winner with just 19 seconds remaining in the period, plus did just about everything else you’d want a second-line pest to do.

In addition to the goals, he also dished out a few hits, blocked a few shots and even drew a penalty in overtime. Big night outta the kid, and not bad for a guy making less than $500k this year.

Actually, the entire game was pretty excellent, and even though it didn’t have quite the same amount of bad blood as last night’s Calgary/Chicago game (a 3-0 series deficit for the home team will do that to ya), it did have enough end-to-end action to keep Gary Bettman satisfied even though neither team is Florida- or California-based, and the game didn’t end 9-8.

A lot of that had to do with Chris Mason and Roberto Luongo standing on their heads though. The Blues should’ve won it about 12 times in OT, but Luongo made 18 saves in the extra period and 47 overall. At the other end of the ice, Mason made several ridiculous stops and finished the hard-luck loser with 33 saves.

So much for the hottest team in the NHL. Out in four games. And the Canucks, instead, are through to the next round, and they did it not because of the Sedins and obviously not because of Mats Sundin. They did it because of a guy that does hilarious impressions of Marc Crawford and spent three seasons in the ECHL.

And that, like Burrows, is pretty goddamn awesome.

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The Lead

(I know, I know. You guys don’t like it when I talk about the Flames (or Bruins, for that matter). I did it too often at the beginning of the season and got enough e-mail about it that I pretty much stopped doing it entirely. But tonight, my boys kinda forced my hand. I hope you’ll appreciate my lack of choice in this matter.)

Imagine the perfect postseason game, if you will. Lots of physicality? Nice, close, exciting game? A bit of nastiness? Yeah, that sounds about right.

And that was exactly what everyone who watched Game 3 of the Calgary/Chicago series got, and Calgary pulled the series back within a game thanks to an impressive 4-2 victory. The game was back-and-forth, the tensions high, the boardwork consistently more like a near-brawl. Frankly, I have to admit that I gave the Flames no chance in this series coming in, and certainly not after the first two games last week, in which the Flames cranked out maybe 30 combined minutes of attentive, hardnosed hockey and suffered a pair of well-deserved losses because of it.

Not tonight. The Flames, no doubt fueled by an electrifying Saddledome crowd, played maaaybe five minutes of the type of hockey that typified the first two losses of the series, and that led directly to Chicago’s opening salvo, a Patrick Sharp goal on a power play caused by an Olli Jokinen roughing call that is actually in the dictionary next to “Rockhead penalty” (It is, I checked).

But after that, it was pretty much 55 straight minutes of Calgary doing the ony thing that was going to make it successful against a team that had so harangued it in the two showdowns in Chicago: hit everything. It was interesting to note that, in the first period on Saturday, Calgary dished out 21 hits and entered the dressing room up 2-0 as a result, but then saw the game slip away as, over the next 40 minutes, it only mustered 16 checks and pretty much let Chicago go where it pleased.

No such luck for the Blackhawks tonight. Calgary had 15 hits in the first period, 17 in the second, and 13 in the third. That’s 45 hits in 60 minutes, and the Flames were never more than plus or minus two on the overall average in any period. That indicates that the Flames, instead of playing wild, emotional hockey and having that flatline in the later stages, they kept everything at a steady level, just below the point of boiling over into something more volatile.

Things got nasty at the end, of course. No team likes getting pounded physically AND losing. And so all the childish trash talk to Jarome Iginla (which Pierre McGuire said is some of the worst he’s ever seen) and the near-fights and the crosschecks and the facewashing is understandable. And it’s going to make for some badass hockey on Wednesday.

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The Lead

Here is how terrible my life is: Midway through the Flames game I was invited out to enjoy a few beverages with some friends of mine. This was acceptable to me as the Flames game was on Versus and not just Center Ice, and thus I was assured that more or less any sports bar I went to would have the game. When I left, it was 1-1.

While driving there, I was informed via phone call that Mike Cammalleri had put Calgary up 2-1 with about 16 minutes remaining. By the time I arrived at my destination though, it was tied again, and I watched the remainder of regulation with bated breath hoping that my dear Flames would somehow pull out a miracle victory in hostile territory against a team to which they had lost 11-3 on aggregate in Chicago.

But then the Blackhawks won on a Marty Havlat goal just 12 seconds into overtime. Except I didn’t see it. The reason for this is that each table at this bar had its own individual television, and my friend insisted we change the station because he had bought a lottery ticket and he wanted to see if he won any money.

He obviously did not.

What happened instead was I was teased into believing that the Calgary Flames, who have been playing abysmal hockey since the trade deadline, had the slightest bit of a chance to win *a* game in this stupid series. They had, to that point, dictated flow and pace through sheer force of will and physicality, but because my stupid retard friend can’t get even one out of six numbers to match the lottery draw, I missed the Flames reassurance that my complete lack of faith in them was entirely justified.

My friend, who is not a hockey fan, did not quite understand just why I was so incensed. And I told him I wished that only lottery he won was derivative of a Shirley Jackson short story.

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The Lead

The Penguins absolutely rolled over the Flyers tonight.

If you’re not going to pick up coverage on Evgeni Malkin for the rest of this series like you did tonight, you can call it a season in three more games.

Geno set up the Pens’ first goal and scored the third as Pittsburgh almost literally danced to a 4-1 at home over the Flyers in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference first-round series (I saw Sid Crosby practicing the foxtrot in the tunnel, thus “literally”).

Malkin’s biggest contribution, of course, was on an own-zone breakdown from the Flyers that allowed the SECOND-BEST PLAYER ALIVE to find a few acres of open space and skate around Martin Biron like he wasn’t even there to bury a backhander and put the game firmly out of reach at 3-0. I mean, how do you lose a guy like Evgeni freakin’ Malkin? How do you give him any amount of space in what was, at the time, a relatively close game? If this was the Flyers’ gameplan (and I have no reason to suspect it wasn’t, given how the rest of the night shook out), this is going to turn ugly in a jiffy.

Apart from the final five minutes or so of the second period, the Flyers seemed to be playing back on their heels, unsure what to make of the Penguins’ surprisingly aggressive forecheck and physical game. Pittsburgh sure brought its lunchpails to the game tonight and worked the boards like a bunch of blue-collar day laborers instead of the higher-seeded team that was nigh-untouchable after Danny Bylsma took over. And if that’s going to be their attitude for the remainder of the series and, indeed, the playoffs, then the rest of the remaining 15 teams better stand up and take notice.

The Penguins came to play tonight and that should be a rather alarming turn of events for their opponents down the stretch. Their intensity was unmatched by any of the other seven teams that played tonight.

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For the next two months, you won’t want to talk to anyone — coworkers, friends, and family can all take a hike. You won’t want to do anything — things like going to work, running errands, making waste in the toilet seems like a terrible misappropration of valuable time. You won’t want to pay attention to personal hygiene — shaving, changing or washing your clothes are all out of the question.

And that’s because it is, at long last, playoff time.

The wheat has been separated from 14 teams worth of useless chaff with poor goaltending and now we settle things like gentlemen.

This being my first NHL playoffs as a blog writer, I will break things down for you thusly:

1. Why the team will win a Stanley Cup.
2. Why you’re an idiot for believing in the team in which you’ve invested so much time and love.
3. What my prediction is, for better or worse (and likely the latter).

Here goes:

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The Lead

Few men try for best ever, and Colin Wilson is one of those.

He is one game, and perhaps one award, from carving his name alongside those of Chris Drury, Mike Eruzione and Jay Pandolfo in the pantheon of Terrier ice hockey’s all-time greats, a heady and lofty class of player indeed. His two goals and an assist tonight in BU’s sure-thing, had-it-all-the-way 5-4 win over Hockey East rival Vermont in the NCAA semifinals will, should the Terriers prevail over Miami on Saturday, become the stuff of legend.

So dominant was his performance, and that of the mighty BU backline, that it rescued the Terriers from the woeful goaltending of Kieran Millan.

The Nashville Predators draft pick, who tomorrow could be given the Hobey Baker award as the nation’s most outstanding college hockey player, and his linemates, Jason Lawrence and Chris Higgins, keyed BU to a sublime first period in which their Terriers outshot Vermont 14-7 despite affording their opponents three power plays, and outscored them 2-0 on goals from Wilson and Lawrence. Coach Jack Parker could not have asked for a better period from his troops.

In the second, though, things began to swing in Vermont’s direction thanks to a pair of ugly goals surrendered by Millan, a freshman whose stats are so good as to nudge a toe to the line of absurdity. He was simply dreadful, allowing soft goal after soft goal as Vermont mounted its sturdy, persistent comeback. He allowed a goal to Wahs Stacey less than four minutes in, then two more in 40 seconds before the 10-minute mark. To be fair, though, the team in front of him did a fairly convincing impression of a Robert Louis Stevenson novella in the middle frame to let Vermont back into the game and, indeed, take the lead.

But the game was dead and buried at 17:06 of the period when Patrick Cullity took an interference penalty to give BU a power play. Something to know about these teams’ respective special teams units: BU’s power play was second in the country coming into this game, running at 22.1 percent, and Vermont’s penalty kill was 42nd in the country, running at 81.1 percent. So when I tell you that the power play goal from Vinny Saponari on a feed from Nick Bonino so picturesque as to make Monet weep was a fait accompli, you will agree.

But Vermont, ever persistent, edged ahead again on another emollient power play goal (the Catamounts were 2 for 7 on the night and neither should have gotten past Millan) before being violently thrust aside by an ardent Terrier onslaught like a butterfly in the blitz. In the critical third period, Vermont may have gotten the first goal, but so overwhelmed were its defensemen that the end result could never have been anything but a crushing defeat.

First came a goal from Chris Higgins, who ended the night with four points, at 13:06. Then just 70 seconds later, BU won a draw to the right of UVM netminder Rob Madore, and Wilson, a huge and impressive physical specimen at 6-foot-2 and 215, leaned in against Dean Strong, who is generously listed at 5-foot-9, 173.

Cometh the moment, cometh the man.

Wilson won the draw back to Higgins, who fired from the top of the circle, and rotated down toward Madore. Higgins’ shot hit the post, and bounced fortuitously to Wilson’s stick. But players like him, the special ones, make their own luck, and, somehow unmarked despite being the most lethal player in college hockey, found himself looking at 24 square feet of wide open net. That was all that stood between Wilson and a chance at immortality.

He didn’t miss. The great ones never do.

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The Lead

There were a ton of really interesting, cool, fun, exciting games last night. A full 13, to be exact. That’s 26 teams. All playing on the same night. A good number of those teams were either fighting for a playoff spot or jockeying for position within the playoffs.

Tonight.. not so much. Apart from the Blue Jackets, who won 4-3 in a shootout over Chicago, there wasn’t really anyone playing that had an actual glimmer of hope that they would, in fact, do anything of note (sorry Buffalo).

So yeah, two whole games tonight. Think the NHL’s Schedulebot 2000 XD (the XD stands for “extra dumb”) could’ve worked it out so instead of 15 games over two nights, we had say seven last night and eight tonight, or the other way around? Because last night I was up until 1:30 watching NHL games and missed about four that I would like to have seen. Tonight I was done by 10:30, having watched parts of two games I had no great interest in (and sorry Columbus), then had to watch the first 30 minutes of Lost on DVR while it was still on. Like some sort of an animal.

!SPOILER ALERT! Some crazy crap goes down and some flashbacks happen and then additional crazy crap goes down. Also John Locke is really Jacob.*

Fedor Tyutin, who’s pictured above (well, not really, but that picture of Pat Kane doing a split while Mike Commodore makes dirt in his hockey pants — or whatever’s going on there — is much funnier than Tyutin scoring the shootout winner), scored the shootout winner.

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