The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

See, there are three kinds of Leafs fans right now and all of them are intolerable and stupid.

The first kind is the one that is ironically going, “LOL LET’S PLAN THE PARADE.”

These people are annoying because everyone on the planet knows the Maple Leafs are still going to finish with a lottery pick. How do they know that, those of you who have been furiously F5ing Lost fansites all week for the latest theory on the smoke monster (he’s a dinosaur made of smoke what’s not to get?) might be asking? Because their second-line center tonight was like John Mitchell or something stupid like that. Have you heard of John Mitchell? I have. He’s the crippled old dude from Lost that is the boss of The Island or something. I don’t know. I barely watch that show. Anywho, yes, the team is crap so you’re calling attention to how crap it is by acting like it’s not crap. We got it.

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The Lead

I can’t define what it is that unsettles me about this Capitals offense, but I know it when I see it.

Every year, EA’s NHL game has some kind of buggy little hole in its AI programming where as long as you can replicate the way you shoot the puck every time, you can pile up goals at a pace that would make Wayne Gretzky circa 1982 cry like a little baby girl. You remember. Carry it down the wing, cut across the slot at the faceoff circles, backhander. Goal City. Beat your friends 27-1 on five-minute periods. No problem.

Well I don’t know if the rest of the league has figured it out yet, but the Caps have found the way to do it in the actual NHL ‘10.

It’s not that the Capitals shouldn’t be a good team or anything. They should be just about as good as they are from a won-lost perspective. But the way they’re winning these games is just starting to become absurd.

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The Lead

I remember like two weeks ago or something the Sens fired Eli Wilson, their goalie coach for the previous two seasons. The Sens had just lost five straight and allowed 26 goals in their previous six games, which is of course a crazy-ass number. But people still snickered.

“Fire the goalie coach?!” they scoffed. “Fire the goalies!”

The move was most often compared to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic in such a way that they are all precariously stacked on top of each other before being dropped directly off the back of the ship. A real who-cares move from a floundering franchise desperate to scapegoat someone in no real position of authority.

I get that sentiment.

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The Lead

A couple years ago I apparently signed up for something through the Calgary Flames’ official website because they clearly have my email address on file. Occasionally I’ll get emails about special tickets being put on sale just for people like me a few hours before game day.

I don’t mark them as spam, I don’t look for a link to unsubscribe myself from this list. I sit there and I say, “Oh look another email from the Flames about tickets what a nice organization they sure do care about me even if I’m probably their only sworn American fan within 1,500 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. ” Not that I read these emails beyond the subject line. Again, I’m about 2,200 miles from the Saddledome. These on-sales literally couldn’t matter less to me.

But I guess my point is that I’m a hell of a goddamn Flames fan. I’m such a good fan that I will let them try to sell me crap I don’t want just out of my desire to support them in any way possible.

So fanatical for this team am I that I have, in the past three weeks, watched every single one of their uniformly hideous games.

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The Lead

And you thought the circus wouldn’t be showing up at GM Place for another few weeks when the Olympics came to town and “circus” had the word “media” in front of it.

Saturday night brought us Lasergate, which sounds like some sort of bad Jean-Claude Van Damme straight-to-DVD sci-fi movie, but it was, instead, some Canucks fan attempting to shine a laser pointer into Miikka Kiprusoff’s eyes during play and generally making everyone upset.

It continued tonight, only nobody used any Nikola Tesla-type inventions. Instead, it was the referees who performed in Ring 2 of this particular three-ring fiasco. The entire third period of what had been a good, hard-fought game between the Canucks and Predators, was turned into a joke by Stephane Auger and Dennis LaRuse, who, you may remember, screwed the Red Wings earlier this year.

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The Lead

Let me tell you about my new favorite sight of all time.

That sight was the American flag being raised to the rafters of some podunk rink in some backwater city in some unimportant province in quite literally the most worthless country in the world.

The United States may have needed overtime to beat Canada (and the officials), but by God, they did it, and I’m pretty sure George Washington is somewhere grinning a big, goofy wooden grin right in John A. MacDonald’s smug little stupid face.

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The Lead

In the past I have been dismissive of the Kings’ success. I’ve said that their offense doesn’t exactly fill me with wonder, that their defense is a mishmash of mediocre-at-best veterans and Drew Doughty, and that the goaltending provided by Jon Quick — ahem, “Olympian Jon Quick,” as the Kings broadcast was so eager to remind us tonight — hasn’t left me optimistic about The Future of American Goaltending.

It’s games like tonight that highlight why.

Oh yes, on the scoreboard the stomped the everliving crap out of the Sharks. No way to candycoat a 6-2 thrashing like that. Not from a Sharks point of view, at least. You could even go so far as to say that Quick was under heavy fire tonight, facing 47 shots and somehow standing up to all but two of them.

But you could also make the argument that the Kings, as they have so many other times this year, backed into what appears to be a convincing win that should have been anything but.

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The Lead

Martin Brodeur, like the team with which he has spent every single game of his career, has his critics.

They say the Devils, thanks to their mastery of defensive hockey, are boring. They say their approach robs the game of its fast-moving, free-flowing charm. They say that along with stifling their opponents’ offensive chances, they also strangle out any enjoyment to be derived from the sport. They say they’re responsible for the decline in the sport’s popularity and therefore the 2004-05 lockout.

He did it all behind a dull team, so it somehow only kind of counts. Makes perfect sense.

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The Lead

Tonight provides a wonderful example of the reason John Tortorella is perfect for the New York market.

After watching his Rangers, who seem intent to play with an ever-increasing lack of passion or skill or even basic competence and understanding of the game, get embarrassed by the sorta-crosstown rival Islanders, he kinda went off in the postgame presser.

He dropped f-bombs. He dropped s-bombs. He even used one of my favorite terms: “horsesh*t.” (Christ I feel like such a dink using that asterisk, but I have to feign respectability apparently.)

I will now intentionally violate my “Don’t use quotes in Good Night” policy because just wait until you read these kneeslappers.

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The Lead

Rick Tocchet had had just about enough of the crap outta his team. He benched Jeff Halpern. He benched Alex Tanguay. He was going to dress eight defensemen against the Predators. He was sending a message.

The message, from what I could glean from their allowing Nashville to pop in seven tonight, was that Rick Tocchet is coaching a team that has managed itself into such a terrible situation that they couldn’t beat anyone no matter who he benched or how many defensemen he dressed. Even with eight freaking defensemen on the line chart tonight, the problem was that these were eight defensemen that play for the Tampa Bay Lightning, which immediately puts anyone behind the eight ball.

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