The Two-Line Pass

Well another Festivus is upon us and since I can’t write a post about a metal pole or a meatloaf dinner (although…), I figure I’ll do what just about every other blog on the planet must be doing today and write a post about the stupidest things that happened in hockey this year, and then call it The Airing of Grievances in a hat tip to both Seinfeld and Glen Rock, New Jersey’s greatest export, scumbag rockers Titus Andronicus, who have an album by the same name that you should definitely buy and are incredible.

In poking around this stupid site just now in preparation for writing this malarkey, I also noticed that I did the exact same thing on this date last year, but due to my being a moron, failed to connect the dots and actually make it more Festivian, which I think is a word I invented just now but oh well.

Anyhow, here is a list of the hockey-related things by which I felt particularly aggrieved this year.

10. Intent to blow

Now that the offsides (or “two-line”) pass has been eliminated, this is the stupidest rule in hockey. This year we’ve seen a number of goals so clear as to be literally transparent waived off by officials who “meant to blow the whistle.” That makes a lot of sense, right? I mean to do a lot of things in my everyday life, but because I don’t do them, they don’t happen. Somehow referees in the National Hockey League are exempt from the basic fact of life that things actually have to have happened for them to have happened. It’s a crazy concept, I know.

Now, I’m not sure if any of these “intent to blow” calls have cost any teams any games in any way but theoretically, but the principle of the thing is beyond insane. If you mean to blow the whistle, just blow the goddamn thing. I don’t see what’s so hard about that.

9. Bob Gainey lost his mind

Every year some GM has an absolute crapload of money come off his payroll and that somehow makes him go insane. We saw it in 2008 when the Tampa Bay Lightning knocked on Ryan Malone’s door and, despite his having just 51 points while on a line with Sid Crosby. This year it was Bob Gainey, who not only gave Hal Gill and Brian Gionta laughable amounts of money, but actually traded for one of the worst contracts in the NHL today, giving up reasonably valuable players (D prospect Ryan McDonagh chief among them) in the process to take on Scott Gomez’s hysterical deal.

Caveat: Mike Cammalleri is worth every cent they gave him.

8. The Rangers are a fundamentally broken hockey team whose problems start with the general manager

Not that anyone’s going to address that. This beef is along the same lines as the Bob Gainey one, but the difference is that Gainey has, in the past, shown that he has some sort of idea what he’s doing. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen that from Sather, who I believe is physically incapable of losing his job.

Sather has overseen the Rangers since 2000, which means he has spent ridiculous sums of money to field teams that have gone 336-286-26-64 (viva la four-column records!) in 712 games since the beginning of the 2000-01. That is a) well below .500 and b) inexcusable.

And so what Sather do in 2009? He fired Tom Renney, the only coach to get the Rangers, who were never that good a team to begin with, to the playoffs. That coach also won 40-plus games in three straight years and would have done so last season had he not been fired with a 31-23-7 record. His replacement, John Tortorella, has been a lot of things, but a good coach ain’t one of them.

7. HEADSHOTS and the moral outrage that follows

We live in a culture of fear. I understand that. So yes, everything you eat and drink will give you cancer, every new person that moves into your neighborhood is either a terrorist or a pedophile or both, and every check in the general area of someone’s head is intended to literally kill the person being hit.

I get the concept of wanting to protect the players. Obviously. But this season has seen an explosion in the number of people that get morally indignant at any check in which the hitter makes contact with the cabeza of the hittee. “SOMEONE’S GONNA DIE OUT THERE,” they scream, and that’s almost certainly not true. In fact, with the exception of all hits delivered by people on the Philadelphia Flyers, I’d say almost none of them are intended to do anything but separate puck from puck carrier.

So calm down and keep your head up.

6. People still actually think Gary Bettman is an incompetent

Ask any hockey fan for a list of good things Bettman has done as commissioner of the National Hockey League, and they will stare at you blankly for a moment before picking up a nearby rock and bludgeoning you over the head with it. But the fact is that Bettman, who certainly has his faults (I’ll get to two of them in a minute), is a hell of a commissioner.

He basically saved the NHL and hockey as we know it by taking a hardline stance against the PA during the lockout, getting the owners pretty much everything they wanted and giving the players seemingly-minor concessions. He kind of co-invented the Winter Classic, at least insofar as making it a big-time event to which ESPN actually pays some amount of attention.

Not that he doesn’t come off as a smug know-it-all, but his good contributions have outweighed the bad ones.

5. “The lack of respect hurts the second-most”

This might shock some of you, but me and Red Wing fans be beefin’. And really, it’s over nothing. You see, I do not believe there is some vast Dan-Brownian conspiracy against the Red Wings that goes all the way to the President and involves at least three of the following organizations: the Catholic Church, the Rothschild family, the World Bank/G10, the New World Order and the reverse Vampires. They see things differently, and as such, I am Public Enemy No. 1 in Detroit Rock City.

To be honest, I like the team just fine (except Chris Osgood is terrible and it would be nice if Red Wing fans shed their intellectual dishonesty and admitted that for once). But I also happen to like the Penguins, Blackhawks and Sharks just fine, which is where, I think, the problems start. So I said something to that effect on Puck Daddy once, and have had feces hurled in my general direction by these morons ever since.

I don’t want to call out names of bloggers and Twitterers, lest I give them any amount of traffic they so richly do not deserve, but all I’m saying is I’ve studied Michigan’s state laws on the subject and it turns out it’s not technically illegal to be reasonable about the state of your hockey team. It isn’t deserving of anything in the way of additional respect, and you are in no way due kudos just for jumping on a hockey team’s bandwagon in the mid-90s.

The Penguins were better than the Red Wings last year and this year, and Chris Osgood sucks. These are irrefutable facts. Get over it.

4. Versus

There is nothing about this network I do not loathe. It has never in the history of its Monday broadcasts shown a game I actually wanted to watch. Bill Patrick, Brian Engblom, Keith Jones and whoever else they usually get in the studio are typically idiots. Doc Emerick is an incredibly overrated and irritating announcer. I don’t care about the Atlantic Division 1/10th as much as it thinks I should. No one gets it. It’s done nothing to endear itself to hockey fans except say, “Where else are you gonna watch this crap? Stay tuned for Sports Soup.”

What a disaster.

3. Calgary lost a regular-season game that literally almost made me cry

There was a game earlier this year in which Calgary led the Chicago Blackhawks, a team which it had not beaten in its last 1,873 regular-season games, 5-0 something like 10 minutes into the game. The Flames went on to lose 6-5 in overtime and while my Good Night post on the subject generated lots of traffic, I would have much preferred that I had not been alive to witness this terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad game.

I’d prefer not to get into it further.

2. “Wheel of Justice, turn turn turn. Tells us the lesson that we should learn.”

The NHL is nothing if not inconsistent. Talk negatively about a guy’s girlfriend, get suspended for six games. Put someone in the hospital for a week, see ya next game.

This year has brought us a series of stunning examples that the NHL’s disciplinary review protocol needs a serious overhaul, as there is no rhyme or reason to anyone getting suspended for anything. A few weeks ago, Danny Carcillo was rightly suspended four games for dimming Matt Bradley’s lights with a no-warning punch to the jaw. The problem is that, in the playoffs last season, Aaron Ward was victimized by a remarkably similar haymaker from Scott Walker and Walker was only fined $2,500, then scored the Game 7 OT-winning goal that eliminated the Bruins from the playoffs. That’s just a recent fer-instance.

There has been no explanation as to why this is allowed to happen. It makes me wonder if the NHL is aware just how much it is ridiculed on a twice-weekly basis for its adorable inconsistency and bullheadedness in the face of ever-mounting evidence that it is bullheadedly inconsistent.

1. The NHL finds someone stupid enough to buy the Coyotes, tells him to take a hike

Say there’s a guy who, for some reason, would want to buy a financially-desperate, league-operated hockey team that no one cares about for more than market value. Sold, right? No. Because that terrible, terrible man also wants to move the team from its apathetic market into one in which there is a great interest in hockey where both the team and league can make money hand over fist.

The ostensible explanation for the lack of sale to Balsillie that would have saved the league tens of millions of dollars and headaches is that he wanted to move the team to his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Bettman countered that the league didn’t give up on markets, but what he meant was that it did not give up on markets into which Bettman had helped to expand the league in the mid-90s because that would make him look bad personally, because the league certainly gave up on Minneapolis and Quebec City and Winnipeg at the first sign of trouble.

Jim Balsillie probably has a giant Scrooge McDuck vault full of money that he swims in daily, but Bettman wouldn’t sell him a team because he wasn’t a good dude. He actually said that (though admittedly not in those exact words).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.