Win or lose, Hossa was still wrong
“It was a really tough decision for me to make. When I compared the two teams, I felt like I would have a little better of a chance to win the Cup in Detroit.” - Marian Hossa, July 2, 2008.
Regardless of whether or not the Red Wings beat the Penguins later tonight, Hossa was pretty much wrong. If Detroit pulls out the victory on its home ice, Hossa will happily lift the Cup, but that won’t have made him any more correct that Detroit gave him “a little better of a chance.”
Hossa, though you might not know it from his play in this series (0-3-3, plus-1) or indeed the whole playoffs (6-9-15, plus-6 in 22 games), is a game-changing player. That he took the smaller paycheck to have a better shot at the Cup might seem like some sort of magnanimous “I’m not in it for the money” type gesture, and certainly I don’t begrudge him that. It’s just kind of a dick move.
But that’s old news, obviously. So here we are more than 11 months later, and it all comes down to one game between the one he chose and the one he snubbed to see which team wins the Cup. All things considered, it’s more or less a 50-50 chance that everything works out in what he’d consider to be his favor.
But what this point ignores is that the Red Wings now have just as good of a shot of winning the grandest prize in all athletic competition as do the Penguins, and that’s with the whole “We have Marian Hossa on our team” affect. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings were more or less a dominant force, even when saddled with some of the worst goaltending in the NHL for the entirety of the regular season. WITH Hossa, the Red Wings rolled through Columbus in four games, struggled to down Anaheim in seven, dispatched Chicago in five and now stand on the brink against Pittsburgh.
Meanwhile, WITHOUT Hossa, the Penguins struggled mightily before they dumped Michel Therrien. And without Hossa, they became inarguably the best team in the NHL under Dan Bylsma (I mean, they’ve lost 10 games in regulation since Bylsma took over on Feb. 16). And without Hossa, they snuck by Philadelphia in six games, struggled to down Washington in seven, dispatched Carolina in four and now stand on the brink against Detroit.
Clearly, Pittsburgh and Detroit are two very even teams, but imagine where the former would be if it were plus-Hossa and where the latter would be if it were minus-Hossa. Pretty easy to imagine that Pittsburgh would have been a better team if Hossa, who scored 40 goals this year, was the one getting one-timer feeds from Crosby or Malkin instead of, say, Petr Sykora (25), Ruslan Fedotenko (16) or Miroslav Satan (17).
Obviously there are some mitigating factors here: Might the Pens have fired Therrien had their record been slightly better? Might they have had the cap room to trade for Chris Kunitz and Bill Guerin? Might they never have discovered the power of a barbecue pork burrito? Tough to say, obviously. But Marian Hossa makes Pittsburgh, like any other team he happens to be on, better, and conversely a Hossaless Detroit worse.
A better Penguins team would have beaten a worse Detroit and Hossa would have already lifted the Cup by now. Just sayin’.
June 12th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Yes the Pens would be better and the Wings worse if Hossa had gone the other way; but how much playoff production would the Wings have gotten had they spent that 7m in cap-space on someone else? Especially considering how much of a bust Hossa has been in the playoffs.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Hossa played TWELVE GAMES for Pittsburgh! TWELVE! Plus the playoffs. He was a deadline pickup that decided not to re-sign there. Biggest non-story ever.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
You can’t just say “The current Pens team + Hossa.” The cap doesn’t work like that. If Hossa was on the team, they probably can’t acquire Kunitz, Fedotenko, and Guerin, 3 pretty key late acquisitions. It’s a completely different season just by moving one player because of the effect of the cap.
You can’t blame a guy and call him wrong for wanting to do something with his career. He wasn’t some lifelong Pens player who skipped town for a Cup like Ray Borque. What Borque did was worse, and he’s still a hero? there’s no right or wrong with Hossa, just hockey.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Nice idea but you’re missing one key element of the Hossa deal - his 40 goals in the regular season are a huge part of why tonight’s game is being played in Detroit. Without Hossa, the Wings would have pulled Darren Helm up from Grand Rapids - and still had $7m in cap space to sign more help. You could almost argue that signing Hossa made them worse… I don’t necessarily buy that suggestion, but the argument has merit.
@Tretyal: Hossa has 15 points in the playoffs - hardly bad productivity. For a marquee player, I’d like to see it closer to the 26 he had in last year’s playoffs, but great players always post lower offensive numbers while playing for Detroit. This might be a result of the number of highly skilled forwards, I don’t know. But it isn’t a coincidence that Detroit, despite all of the exceptional talent that they’ve had over the past two decades, only produced one Hart Trophy winner (Fedorov in ‘94) in the past 45 years.
June 12th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Kid Canada - The story isn’t “Long-time Penguin must face former team.” It’s that Hossa had a simple choice between the two teams, and he basically said that he didn’t think the Pens could win the Cup. (The fact that he took less money shows his conviction.) As a Pens fan, it’s not like we can call him a traitor, but it’s a slap in the face nonetheless. Same as the Pens trying to prove Melrose or Cherry wrong if they were vocal about the Pens lack of Cup-worthiness, but this comes from someone who test-drove the team and instead signed with their (somewhat) rival.
Looking at it another way: It’s as if a high-profile person wagered several million that either 1) Detroit would win the Stanley Cup or 2) Pittsburgh would not win the Cup. On top of that, this is a person who has had experience playing for one of the teams and against the other just last year. The fact that this could blow up in his face in the most spectacular of fashions is intriguing to me…at least on the schadenfreude level.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:18 pm
AND HE WAS WRONG!!!!!! PENS ARE AWESOME!!!!!!
June 13th, 2009 at 7:36 am
What you have to look at is that Marian Hossa is a regular season player NOT a playoff player. He puts up really good numbers in the regular season and is barely noticed in the playoffs. The red wings weren’t any better with him because they already succeed at gaining a playoff berth every year, he didn’t change that, but now they had an expensive dud on their roster come playoff time. He didn’t perform in the playoffs for Ottawa, Pittsburg or Detroit. If you’re trying to get into the playoffs he can help, but if you want to win the cup then he’s a waist of space on the bench. He felt he had a better chance at winning the cup in Detroit but he didn’t help them any along the way in the playoffs and that’s why he had to see his former teammates from Pittsburg, that he snubbed, raise the stanley cup while he pretended to still have some pride left.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:49 am
hossa is a coward im so happy he lost, he was part of something nice last year but left cuz he got beat, where did he go? to the team that beat him. and ask urself this would he have stayed if pens would have won cup? they were 2 wins short and he got greedy, hope he signs a 1 year with pens lol dies slow u karl malone like coward
June 13th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Hossa Da Man Now??
June 13th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Id like to say M. Hossa is very good player and man. He deserves to lift the Stanley cup. Pittsburgh: Congratulation for winning…and M. Hossa I hope you will have more luck the next time.
June 13th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Poor Hossa. Way to be douchebags about it after, as Kid Canada put it so well, Hossa played 12 games for the God damn Pens.
June 14th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Hey, geniuses: it’s not about the number of games he played. If he’d just signed elsewhere, THEN it would be a non-story. It’s the “I left because I have a better chance to win here” swipe while leaving that made it a story. This isn’t hard to understand.
June 14th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
you forgot the part about him wanting out of atlanta so bad he nancied out on almost every shift just so he wouldn’t hurt himself or his trade value. whether or not he should have wanted out of atlanta is an entirely different point - any guy that tanks to save his own value is gonna be a problem in the dressing room in some way or another. if detroit locks him up with a multi-year deal, my prediction is that we’ll see the real hossa, not the relative “honeymooner” we saw this year, assuring himself that he’s on the fast track to winning a cup. we’ll see how he really fits into detroit’s “team first” concept.
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:38 pm
you know the real story? Hossa’s a jinx, he plays for pens against redwings, the pens lose. he plays for redwings against pens, redwings lose. hes a jinks lol. And he said previous to losing it wasnt about winning a cup, it was about learning how to win from the only team that really has shown they can be one of the best every single year.. although the cup would have been nice for hossa its wasn’t even the main reason he went wo the wings. because no one can honestly say the red wings are not the best team in the league, If the redwingsdont make the cup every year its a supprise, no other team is consistently expected to go to the finals year in year out as the wings are