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The Lead
It has been four months and one day since the 2008-09 NHL season wrapped up with Sid Crosby raising the Stanley Cup above his head and while Gary Bettman wept with unbridled joy, wiping away his tears with $100 bills that would later be earmarked for use in the purchase of the Phoenix Coyotes.
But with tonight’s tape-delayed game between the Islanders and Canucks from some inland backwater in Northern British Columbia — there was SNOW on the ground! — NHL hockey began its 103rd “official” season.
It felt like a hell of a lot longer than four months and one day though, didn’t it? What with all the controversy about Jim Balsillie and Dany Heatley and everything else that dominated these long, hot summer months, it was easy to forget what a simple game this really is at its core.
The game’s biggest NHL stars for their respective teams were Kyle Wellwood and Andrew Raycroft (with apologies to the Preseason Gretzky, Jon Sim). NHL.com literally has no stats or even rosters available for this game. I don’t have a shot chart in front of me. I’m devoid of plus-minus stats. The AP recap is just 123 words. Not one photo came in to the site from which I usually get source images (hence the above drawing). If it were February, I’d be upset.
But what the hell, it was just a bunch of guys fighting for jobs (in some cases literally) and trying to entertain a small handful of fans, 1,100 to be exact, out in the middle of nowhere. That’s what it’s all about, right?
And they actually did get an entertaining game. The hometownish Canucks won 2-1 on a pair of goals from highly-touted Russian import Sergei Shirokov and there were at least four fights, all of which I think involved the Islanders’ Jeremy Reich and the Canucks’ Rick Rypien (his dad was a boxer!) in some capacity. Whoppers of fights too. If either team is actively looking for an enforcer, and I believe they both are, then these two thugs turned in a pair of rather convincing auditions, not that Alain Vigneault wouldn’t have had Rypien penciled in from the start of training camp, of course, but he proved his point nonetheless.
But back to Shirokov, who acquitted himself well enough on the left wing that it convinced the Vancouver-based broadcast crew he had a shout to make the Canucks’ top six: he doesn’t. But he’s a first-line guy in Manitoba for sure. He did a lot of things well, but his deficiencies made it plain that he’s not NHL-ready despite his several good seasons with CSKA Moscow. He did score a couple of shifty goals, the first early in the first period on a big point-shot rebound during a power play, and the second through traffic midway through the third. He also doled out a couple of convincing hits and skated effortlessly around and through the Islanders during several man-up opportunities. But where he was lacking was size (he is, from the look of things on TV, generously listed as 5-foot-10 and 176 pounds on the Vancouver website) and speed. He’s plenty handsy and could turn into a perfectly useful NHL player, but his two goals came against the Islanders. In September. So it’s best not to overstep things at this juncture.
The Islanders goalscorer? Who else: Jon Sim. I don’t know what it is about the preseason that brings out the best in this guy, but his goals per game before the season starts has to be comparable to Alex Ovechkin’s career numbers. (In fact, after I typed that I looked it up and, while I could only go as far back as the 2007-08 preseason, Jon Sim has scored six goals in 11 games, including tonight. That’s .55 goals per game, just .13 off Ovie’s career number and tied with Ilya Kovalchuk for the second-highest total among active NHL players.) Any competent GM, and I actually consider Garth Snow one, would sign him to a week-to-week tryout contract and make him fight for his job every night; he’d win an MVP award.
Here’s the craziest part of the night: Raycroft didn’t look out of his depth playing against an AHL-heavy mix of minor- and major-leaguers. Really. He even made a somewhat nice glove save on Jeff Tambellini in the second period that the announcers, out of pity I’m sure, played up as much better than it was. It was really the cherry on the sundae that was Tambellini’s night, which, again, included not scoring a gimme on Andrew freaking Raycroft.
The point of the game, I think, was this: We can put all our troubles behind us now. All the fretting about the business aspects of the game, and its viability and everything else that’s bad about this sport can take a bit of a backseat now, can’t it? This game in Terrace, British Columbia showed us that it is, after all, the good ol’ hockey game. The best game you can name.
